Left Seat/Right Seat

Posted on Fri May 20th, 2011 @ 5:30am by Chief Petty Officer S'ria Candor

Mission: The Ties That Bind
Location: Candor's Quarters

A new dark grey and gold uniform laid across the small, quaint bed. Three chevrons and one pip stood out against the grey field adorning the collar. S'ria stood facing it perplexed and curious. She had been an NCO for a few years already, making her way from crewman to petty officer in record time. But something was odd about this assignment, this rank, this starbase. The rank didn't matter to her, not really. But now it meant her leaving her responsibilities aboard the Berkeley to wear a different hat.

She never have an official pinning ceremony, but the paperwork stated otherwise. She really didn't want to have one. It meant pulling out her dress uniform, which needed a few alterations and a dry cleaning--it still smelt like alcohol and cigars--; coordinating with the commander, which was now someone she didn't know as she barely knew Captain O'Connell; and standing through the actual ceremony. But more than that was on her mind.

Her duty position no longer dealt directly with transporter theory, but energy modulation, spectrum analysis, and energy/matter conversion. It might seem like transporter theory to most due to the intrinsic nature of the two, but now she had to deal with replicators as well as transporters. Replicators were a whole other ballgame played on the same field. S'ria already had field and technical manuals, logs, schematics and diagrams, scientific journal articles, etc. loaded onto her PADD. The last few days meant becoming an expert beyond the crewman under her. Her NCO creed wouldn't allow her to do otherwise.

She stood there thinking of how she would address her crew, how they would react to her exacting nature, where all the Jefferies tubes where about the station just in case she needed manually to readjust convertors and couplings to match an updated matter/energy conversion matrix, how she would react to the new Chief Engineer, would she have to drag him into Sickbay as well. Her mind was a clutter of duties and over-stimulated dendrites.

The uniform still laid in front of her, unmoved and unchanged. She couldn't will it to do anything other than slipping it on like a well-formed glove and getting to work. She took a deep breath, sighed, and dressed, tugging it snugly to body. Soon she was out the door with the her PADD loaded with a duty roster, quick reference guides, and copious amounts Candor comments.

The room lights kept lit on an automatic timer. Her old uniform laid on the bed, unmoved and unchanged, as the lights dimmed to a dark room lit by a backdrop of distant stars.