Star Trek: Starbase 777 - etd-science-labs

Considering she was graduating in just a few weeks, this would probably be T’Loran’s final away mission as a Cadet. It was a big thing, or so she had heard, and so she wanted to remember this well. The Eventide’s science labs were nice, though much smaller than the ones on 777 she had spent so much time in by now. Still, the blurry view of stars rushing by as they traveled through space was always something T’Loran liked about space travel- though her eyesight always made stargazing without a telescope to be a rather lackluster affair, she still enjoyed the effect of the blurry smears of light she could see as they flew past everything. But for now, she was in the labs, readying herself for whatever might come next- which mostly just entailed obsessively cleaning her glasses until they were as smudge-free as they were ever going to get.

Stepping into the science labs was Lhi! He was dressed in his uniform with his hair pulled back with a fun looking zig-zag wire headband. As per science lab regulations, he needed to have his hair away from his eyes, even if he could 'see' regardless. It was not just to ensure he had a clear view of whatever he was working on, but also to ensure he didn't accidentally snag his hair in a machine or dip it into samples. He had his cable fastned down to his uniform with a velcro strip so he wouldn't get tangled in it! It was a small uniform modification that greatly improved his quality of life. Lhi seemed to be in a good mood, just bouncing with each step he took.

Unfortunately, Lhi caught her with her glasses off- a blurry smudge bouncing into the room was enough to make her jolt a little bit. Putting her glasses back on, she could see that the smudge was actually a person- one of the science officers she had seen around. The Cadet gave him a ta’al and a lil head bow to acknowledge that he had just come in. “I do wonder what is in store for us..” She mused aloud, tucking an errant stand of hair back behind her ear.

T'Lane appeared out from under a console and stood up. Their arms immediately went behind their back crossed. "This is unexpected. An away mission after only two weeks of being here." The VISORed Vulcan scanned around the room looking at everyone present. (edited)

Since Iiani was unfamiliar with the Eventide, it had been borderline pacing the labs, trying to become just a bit more familiar with it’s surroundings. She shifted to scan the faces and ranks around her; more people meant harder work for her. Well, at least her hair was cute. It ran a hand over the braids on its scalp as it repeated reminders for itself on how to act, waiting for something to happen.

Through the windows of the Eventide, the distortion could be viewed, a web of shape and color encasing the ship and threatening to swallow her whole.

“Huh…” She moved to one of the windows, practically pressed her face against the glass. It was very pretty… but it wasn’t the time for that! “I’m going to start taking a look at these scans… any information about them should be helpful.” It turned and moved to the nearest console, pulling up the data at a serious pace.

Well, -now-, shit was going down. She looked out the window- instead of the normal blurry stars, there were so many colors and shapes, whirling around, threatening to consume the ship. T’Loran was completely and utterly fascinated. “Fascinating… we have certainly found ourselves in an anomaly of some sort.”

T'Lane looked outside of a nearby window. They quickly ran a systems check on their VISOR and then checked the console they had just came out from under. "My VISOR is not malfunctioning however the scanners are. Interesting. There appears to be a field of distortion encapsulating the ship." (edited)

The scans showed tachyon particles swirling in beautiful color and light around the ship. The scanners sputtered and died after only a second, rebooting again, and shutting down, and rebooting, and... (edited)

She’d been watching the scans come in, nodding at the no confirmed tachyon particles- she remembered studying them a lot, as they had interested her, but seeing them in person was something both beautiful and scary. But the scanners rebooting over and over again… that was bad. “This interference cannot be a good sign. Is this happening on the rest of the ship too?”

T'Lane appeared out from under a console and stood up again. Their arms immediately went behind their back crossed again. "Mmm.." They looked about the room. Staying silent this time.

T’Loran was in the labs, getting ready for her final away mission before she’d graduate and become a full-blown Ensign. Of course, getting ready meant taking off her glasses, wiping them off, and generally making sure she could actually see what she was doing. However… she felt like she had already cleaned them. Shoving what must be a stupid, illogical emotion aside, she cleaned her glasses and put them back on. No need to be weird in front of her superiors. She stood by her fellow Cadet, standing in a similar stiff posture.

T'Lane turned and looked T'Loran up and down since they were close. Their proximity allowed T'Lane to visualize them better. "I am Cadet T'Lane." They quickly turned and looked away from T'Loran and instead looked down at the console. Their arms moved out from behind their back and began tapping away at the console monitoring the scanners. (edited)

Since Iiani was unfamiliar with the Eventide, it had been borderline pacing the labs, trying to become just a bit more familiar with it’s surroundings. She shifted to scan the faces and ranks around her; more people meant harder work for her. Well, at least her hair was cute. It tried to run a hand over the braids on its scalp as it repeated reminders for itself on how to act, but found itself wincing instead. Her head was aching— typical, she should have seen sickbay about it before she even stepped foot on the Eventide. It contemplated going to see them now, but decided it wasn’t bad enough to bother them with.

She gave her fellow Cadet a ta’al, before her hands returned behind her back as she watched what T’Lane was doing. You couldn’t have two people operating the console at once, but T’Loran was watching the screen to search for irregularities. “Hello, I am Cadet T’Loran.”

The scanners revealed nothing out of the ordinary... Though, as they got further along, there were some tachyon particles floating around. Nothing odd about that. Lots of stuff used tachyons.

"Mm.." They raised a brow at the console for a moment. "Nothing abnormal on the scanners." They looked up from the console and crossed their arms behind their back. They gave T'Loran a ta'al in return looking down at them as they did so since T'Lane was considerably taller than T'Loran.

“Mhm, just some tachyon particles.” She said, though it was more along the lines of just verbalizing her thoughts rather than making conversation. “I have not seen you before in the labs, are you new to Starbase 777?” She asked, still keeping her better eye on the console.

"That is correct. I arrived two weeks ago. I have not yet had a chance to visit the labs as my VISOR was damaged and I needed to repair it." T'Lane had stopped looking at the console entirely confident that T'Loran had it covered. Instead they just loomed over T'Loran with social ineptitude.

“Ah.. so you are.. third year? I am fourth year, I will graduate very soon.” She said, not really making eye contact with the Cadet currently looming over her. She didn’t do eye contact anyway, not when most things were blurry anyway, plus, she had screens to look at. But honestly, it wasn’t hard to loom over T’Loran, she was very short for a Vulcan and a strong breeze could probably carry her away. “It is unfortunate that your VISOR was damaged, I hope it was repaired promptly.”

"Unfortunately I am the only one I trust to repair it since I have done so many modifications to it over the years." The teeniest tiniest itsy bitsy little frown appears on T'Lane's face. "Also unfortunately I have to do it blind. So it took a while." T'Lane continued to loom. "Did you experience a paradoxical state-dependent associative phenomenon as well?" (edited)

Blue light spilled through the windows in colorful disorder, threading through the space around them.

“Oh, that seems suboptimal. I would talk to an engineer about it, surely if you explain the modifications, they will be able to repair future damage more efficiently, with their good eyesight.” She thought for a moment. “Yes, I did, I thought I had- oh, that is odd, we should run scans.” She said when the light burst in.. though, she could have sworn she had already seen it.

"It is odd. Peculiar even." T'Lane stared out of the window momentarily distracted by all the pretty colors she could see from the UV spectrum. Eventually they snapped out of it and looked down at the console. "I should not be expecting to see elevated tachyon levels but I do."

“It is strange. T’Lane- actually, is it alright to call you T’Lane- It is illogical to be discussing emotions now where there is work to do, but I feel as if I have seen this light before.” She said, readjusting her glasses so as to keep her hands busy for a moment.

"That would be the paradoxical state-dependent associative phenomenon or deja-vu in human terms. It is my my name. You may refer to me as it." They stated simply as they watched the display.

“Oh, there is a human term for that, I must have forgotten it. Ah, well, it is an emotion, thus we can leave such inconsequential things aside for now. There certainly are high concentrations of tachyon particles around us, I should look more into this type of anomaly when we return.” She said simply, returning her focus to the console.

T'Lane began yapping. "There are several explanations for the rise in tachyon particles. There may be a tachyon eddy here. Though I do not recall any being charted on the way to Risa and they are most common in the Bajoran system. There may be a large cloaked vessel nearby or several cloaked vessels as cloaking devices emit them. Perhaps we have found ourself inside of a tachyon detection grid." T'Lane hesitated for a moment. "They.. are also produced by temporal distortions. Mm.. perhaps a higher up should be alerted." (edited)

Iiani, who had definitely been listening to the entire conversation, decided to speak. “Excess tachyon particles? Good catch you two, we should definitely be keeping an eye on that. Let’s see if we can find precisely where they’re coming from.” She leaned over a console, flipping through various scanner readings.

T'Lane's ears twitched for a moment as the sound of the RED ALERT was heard. They got down on their knees and shuffled underneath the console taking up most of the space underneath it since they were 6ft 3in aka 190.50cm.

“Or… we’ll all brace for impact. We’re bracing for impact now.” It sat down in the seat in front of the console, but continued flipping through it with renewed vigor. If she could just figure out what was going on, she could maybe sort this out.

Not seeing many places where she could hide, she sat at another console seat, firing up the scanners so she could at least be useful instead of panicking like some child- T’Loran was above emotions like that, she reasoned, she could not behave like some scared Cadet when she’d be an Ensign in two weeks.

The anomaly had something to do with all the tachyon particles, that much was clear, given their surroundings. They had to be some sort of effect from the situation they were trapped in. What could possibly produce so many?

T'Lane had a momentary lapse of judgement which made them hide like a coward. Then they had a second which made them stand up and smack their head on the console causing them to lose their VISOR. They began crawling around like Velma helplessly. "If they eject their warp core they will no longer be in warp. How much time do we have until impact?" They asked as they continued to crawl. (edited)

“Respectfully, that idea is extremely ill-advised. Stupid, even.” She said, grabbing T’Lane’s VISOR and handing it back to them.

"Thank you." They said as their VISOR was handed to them. They quickly put it back on. "It would prevent us from colliding which would prevent us from exploding. The only other thing I can think of at this moment is to disable the inertial dampeners and fire torpedoes if we have them. It would propel us unless this anomaly is truly keeping us stuck." (edited)

T’Loran was somewhat apprehensive about her final away mission as a Cadet. Sure, she had liked the other one she went on… but something felt different about this one. A nagging thought in her head that something was deeply wrong. A stupid, illogical emotion that she shouldn’t be feeling. She sat down at one of the consoles, head in her hands as she tried to order her brain into behaving so she could actually think.

Hearing the comms message, her eyes shot bolt open in surprise, head immediately shooting up. A temporal anomaly- they had been stuck in a time loop for who-knows how long, repeating the same actions- no wonder she felt so strange. She could only let out one word as she heard the comms. “Shit.” The next part, though, was more her speed. An order from Evoras was something she could understand. Considering she was at the console, she fired it up with just a press of a button, running scans for both spacial and temporal disturbances.

“Keep it calm, cadet. We’ll figure this out.” Although everything had seemed normal to her, Iiani wasn’t one to doubt the bridge. If they said there was a time loop, there was a time loop— so it sat down at the nearest console and had it feed the data from T’Loran’s scan to Iiani’s console as well. Two heads were better than one, of course, and it seemed like time was of the essence here.

Tachyon particles surrounded the ship as a result of the temporal causality loop they were trapped in. Nothing malicious at play, just one of the many weird things that happened in space— the Enyalios exploding on impact so close to the temporal distortion was likely the culprit. How to break it was another question. Based on the records that could be accessed from past encounters, preventing the explosion was what broke it, but there seemed to be another factor at play here. What it was was the question.

“Likely, the cause of this time loop is the explosion of the Enyalios so close to the temporal disruption.. Our question is, how do we break it. From prior loops that I know of, preventing the explosion will break the loop, but there seems to be something more at play here. Do you know of anything, Lieutenant?” She said, eyes racing across the readouts she was getting.

“Hmm… not off of the top of my head, no. We can trust the bridge to physically prevent the explosion— I’m assuming them turning the ship like a stunt ship was part of that. But…” She lowered her voice, staring at the data. “What are we missing?”

T'Lane came out from underneath the console like before. They didn't address the time loop. "We should patch into the bridge."

19:46

They tap their combadge and send a message.

T'Lane went to a separate console and began compiling the data as best as they could. Along with the data from their own VISOR.

Bird jumpscare. Boo. "Were you all analyzing the temporal anomaly?" Straight to the point, aren't you, sir. "My name is Pav-Ak, the CSO of the USS Enyalios. Or. I was. I suppose."

The sudden noise bade her jolt a lil bit, but she regained her composure quickly. She gave a ta’al and a lil head nod as she got up and walked over, so she could actually see the guy clearly. “Ah, yes, we were. I took several scans of the anomaly, if you like I can get them onto a data drive so you may have a copy when you leave. And it is good to meet you, Sir.”

T'Lane flinches the tiniest amount at the birb jumpscare. "I have also compiled scans as well as the data I collected using my VISOR." They also walked over, with arms crossed behind their back.

20:59

"I am Cadet T'Lane."

He didn't actually make a scary noise, sorry. Pav made his way into the lab. "Would I be able to see? I specialize in temporal anomalies and the like. You could call it an interest of mine."

“Oh, and I am Cadet T’Loran. And yes, of course you may see.” She said, gesturing to her console that still had the scans open.

T'Lane probably still jumped because of the sudden talking. All the nerds into the science lab were probably hyper focused on compiling data with no words spoken between them. T'Lane walked over and transferred the data they collected to that console.

"I do wonder as to how we managed to escape the time loop and stop the ship from crashing into us. This will be an interesting spot in my personal log."

“Nice to meet you, Lieutenant Pav-Ak. You’ll probably be able to make more sense of the data than me, I specialize in biology.” It chuckled, but wasn’t exaggerating— it had never been particularly skilled in astrophysics.