After Action Report

Posted on Wed Oct 2nd, 2024 @ 3:31pm by Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant Paisley F'Rar

Mission: Mean Green Queen
Location: Main Engineering
Timeline: Mission Day 9 at 0800

[Main Engineering]
[Deck ]
[0800 Hours]

"Ecto Gammat?" Noah mumbled to himself. His face, turned quizzically inward to thought, uttered the line somewhat absently as word fascination had taken hold of him in the shower. Unable to sleep last night, taken over by the realities of sleeping in strange quarters and a shakeup of roommates on the horizon, he'd watched a strange movie from the archives. Sleep hadn't come in his small cubicle until almost 0200. So he was tired and a touch of sleep-bruising were under his brown eyes.

The doors of the turbolift swished open with a hushed sound. He sidled through before they'd been full open and through them was the modest Main Engineering- a sort of short corridor-like room with walls of consoles and a situation table. A pair of engineering crewmen stood their posts- one the environmental control station and one was the sensor and communication suite health station.

Noah tapped the PADD against his slender palm and searched the space. His eyes inevitably went up to the raised platform where the warp core pulsed at warp. No one there. Engineering, for 0800 hours, left rather thin. He tapped the PADD at his palm again. "Has anyone s-seen Lieutenant F'Rar?" He finally asked. One of the crewmen- the woman at Environmental Control- twisted. "Oliveria's old office." She said with a voice that suggested she hadn't had her morning raktajino yet.

Noah nodded, "Thanks," and then eyed the ladder. He took it up to the next level and then righted his t-shirt and badge. Being in Computer Control was a steamy affair- the core had to stay cool and that heat had to be taken somewhere. The computer control room was habitually ten degrees warmer than the rest of the ship. So system engineers in t-shirts wasn't strange- in their space. But Noah had forgotten his uniform jacket in his haste.

He looked about the upper level and took the catwalk around the core to the small office door. He pressed the comm key. It was then that his PADD beeped and gave him a pulse of haptic feedback. His brows knitting confused he looked at it. He read over the data. His mouth gradually rounded along with his eyes. "What?! Ho-hold on... how did I lose the..." His finger stroked the screen to scroll the data. There his name was, with the lowest randomly generated number. Across from his name was another. It was a character name: Leia Organa/Boussh.

Indeed, the inky-haired Carjoran was in the office, but she wasn't behind the desk. She was sat, instead, on the floor, working on one of her personal pet-projects-repairing an old Earth radio. Paisley found the ancient artifacts truly fascinating. Quaint machines, they were, but fascinating nonetheless. Finding parts was the trickiest part. She had searched the deepest sections of every Quadrant known to currently exist and had FINALLY, finally managed to come across an Amplitude Modulator. It had cost her 200 strips, and a date with a skeevy Tellerite, but it was worth it.

She heard the tingle of the door chime. Starfleet really should get a real doorbell, but she simply nodded, and called out "Enter!" She didn't move to stand up, but a quick glance at her chronometer told her it was time to start work. Damn it. She quickly began to move the things aside, and scramble to her feet. She noticed the kid didn't have his tunic on, but he was also sweaty. Must've come from the core room. She smiled.

"Hello!! How can I help you today?" She finished placing the components back into the crate she used, and then wiped a hand on her slacks before offering it to Noah. "Lt. Paisley F'Rar. Sorry about that. Special project," she said.

"Oh, um, good morning Ma'am," Noah greeted. She seemed disarmingly friendly but then Engineering was one of the most egalitarian of departments. People used their expertise in a crunch. Noah smiled, albeit the shy smile of a first encounter. "Um, Systems Lead for the Day. I'm-I'm Noah Balsam. Ensign." He reached up to rub his nonexistent pip as it was on his jacket. "And I have the after-action report on the LCARS update." His fingers drummed on the back of the PADD. His curious gaze did, inevitably, shift to Paisley's pet project.

He took her hand as she extended it. "Um... some kind of retro technology rebuild?" He hadn't seen enough of the parts to know what it had been. But engineers were notorious for their projects like this.

Paisley settled into the desk chair, indicating the visitor's seat for Noah. "Yup!" She said. "Back on ancient Sol, they had these things called "radios". Emitted music with low-frequency radio waves. Interesting, if quaint. I want to see if I can rebuild one," she said. "It'd be fun for parties!" She chuckled. She wasn't much of a partier, but it sounded lame to say "I would like to listen to old Sol music to figure out what the hell Humans are even about". "And I appreciate the updates. Tell me everything," she said, tapping at her PADD to make notes. "Do you want some coffee or tea?" She asked. She needed one, anyway. Already, Balsam had a check mark in her book; she loved a self-starter.

"Have you ever heard of the group the Pre-Three Vault, Ma'am?"

"No," she said. "Tell me," she said.

Noah understood the appeal of taking apart and putting back together things of antiquated and alien fascination very much. And his mind went to the piece of Borg technology still sitting idle in his personal workspace. "Oh uh no thank you Ma'am. I was up late last night so I had some coffee earlier. Any more and-and I might vibrate out of here." At her request, though, Noah's eyes shifted reluctantly from her build. "So the-the deployment was a success considering we're three from a starbase. We had some compatibility issues with some of the older tech we still use aboard. But we have them patched and working. There were two pieces of deep kernel upgrades that we can't do until we put in to Pathfinder or-or go back to the Alpha Quadrant."

Paisley simply shrugged, but encouraged him to continue.

Noah paused. "The major one is a core piece to the Ship-In-Distress automated response. N-normally, when a ship in distress emits its beacon, the nearest detached Federation starship will automatically warp to its location to render aid, right?" Noah was sure this was superfluous data. "A lot of the hardware is built on the Stargazer project and we don't have those components. So we have the software, just not the ability. So we hibernated that." He paused.

"The-the other system we don't have in place are the upcoming Fleet Coordination subroutines. Again we sort of lack the correct components. The software is there but until we get a refit, we are the odd ones out. We won't be able to fall into fleet synergy mode if we are brought into fleet action." Noah tilted his mouth, "Not, um, that that's something we have going for us out here anyway."

"I see," Paisley replied. "That will certainly be challenging," she said. "What can I do to assist you to be successful? I like to help out personally, if I can. I try to be the kind of leader that is in the action. I hate sitting idly, though some of that is required in my job," she said. Icky paperwork and duty rosters and stuff always had to get done, sadly. "I admit that I came from a place that hasn't had any retrofitting, so this newfangled stuff is a bit of a learning curve. I'll need some help," she said. She wasn't perfect, after all.

Noah smiled his too-wide smile and navel gazed. "I-I, well, if you have a spare Pathfinder Station and a Sagan-class to study, we can get this place, uh, right up to fleet cutting edge in a month." He smiled and dark eyes refocused from the floor. "But um, we are as deployed as we can be at this stage. We don't have the, uh, the schematics to build the components from scratch." Me nibbled his lip, "So... yeah. Anyway. You asked what the Pre-Three Archive is. That, uh, I can answer."

She fought an urge to laugh as she considered this man standing in front of her. She was loud and outgoing, and he seemed like the floor would eat him alive if he looked her in the face. Maybe he was...what was it called? Neurodiverse? Something like that. Or maybe SHE was. She never stuck with therapy long enough to figure it out, really. She meant well enough, but there was only so much to talk about without delving into "big feelings" and Paisley liked to pretend those didn't exist. "I did. Feel free to sit down," she said, indicating a chair, and settling in behind the desk.

"Oh, uh thanks. I've been on my feet most of the morning and I guess my legs haven't uh gotten the message." Noah cracked a smile and eyed the nearest chair which he dropped in to with an attentive hunch forward, planted feet and a hand planted on his knee.

Noah blinked and found his words. "So we are a group of people who find and try to restore old Earth media from before World War III and the Eu-eugenics Wars. We lost a lot in those wars but random pieces pop up all the time. Usually on old media archives or data servers. So we take them and try to restore them."

Paisley smiled. "OOOH, that sounds COOOL," she said, stealing a bit of jargon from the Humans. "I'd LOVE to do that sometime," she said, enthusiastically. "Tell me more," she said, turning to the replicator. *One coffee. F'rar's settings.* She turned back to Noah. "Want anything?" Back to the computer. *And a big-ass croissant.* The computer beeped, and Paisley rolled her eyes, sighing. It didn't recognize the command "big-ass" apparently. *Extra large, please.* She'd have to clean up her language a bit-she'd been so mired in Station-type shenanigans that relearning shipboard behaviors would be necessary. "Is it like a club?" She clarified.

Noah shook his head again at the offer. "No I'm okay thanks." The lanky Ensign watched her administer her order to the replicator. His nose wrinkled at the order not in disgust but in an irreverent image of a large croissant coming out butt-shaped. And he'd seen more butts than usual lately, having to live in the Enlisted Dormitories since the mutagenic life form attacked them. Noah even craned his neck some to look at the croissant once she pulled it away from the cubbie. It was, sadly, just large. "That would've been funny. Um." He pivoted to her question.

"Yeah, sort of? Um, you know how we engineers like our pet projects. And-and such. It's a shared database on Ishikawa Station? At the Daystrom? That's where I met the members I knew for the first time. Bu-but I've known about it since I was on Enceladus." He shrugged. "Um, it's pretty open membership. You just need to want to rescue the past."

Paisley nodded, biting into the pastry. She chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "Those are my favorite kind," she said. She grabbed the PADD sitting nearby, and brought up some photos. "Have you ever head of a contraption from Sol called a "microwave?" It's kind of like a food replicator, I suppose, but it only heats already prepared food," she said. She pushed the PADD towards Noah. "I rebuilt one last year," she said. "Old Sol tech, jn particular, is fascinating. I love learning about old tech and appliances and such," she said. "I am currently working on rebuilding a radio," she said. "I want in." She nodded. It sounded right up her alley.

"Microwave..." Noah considered that. He thought he'd heard of something like that. He knew what a microwave could do. As he took the PADD to examine the device Paisley spoke of, he tapped through it. "It looks a little bit like the old protein resequencers on the NX and Daedalus classes. But I think I-I know what you're showing me. This was how people around the Eugenics Wars made a lot of their food. They'd um," he did air quotations, "Nuke it." He shrugged with the dissonance, some four hundred years since, about the idea of irradiating one's food. But Humans of that era were deeply peculiar. They ingested poisons and inhaled toxins for the effects to numb out. And modern Humans could acquire such things from groups outside the Federation. But it wasn't so ubiquitous.

"Have you ever tried to use one?" Noah asked.

Paisley just nodded. "Yes, that's what it is," she confirmed. "Quaint little thing, isn't it? Could you imagine using microwaves to reheat food? Imagine the amount of disease they had!" She shook her head. "I have used one briefly, just to ensure I fixed it correctly. You're right, they operate a bit like food resequencers,," she said. "What do you like to tinker with?" She asked. They ALL did-if you were an Engineer, you most likely had at least one side "pet" project going on, tinkering with a machine or project into the early hours of the morning. "Tell me more," she said, breaking the pastry in half with her hand. She bit into the next section quietly, waiting for Noah to continue. Her interest was piqued and she was definitely excited to get involved in after-work activities, if for no other reason than to get to know new people.

Noah shook his head with a tilted smile, "N-no, I can't. It's... odd... that they cooked that way. Though." He tilted his head, "Isn't that how the Ferengi poach their green worms and grubs?" It still seemed an odd method of cooking. But he set it aside when Paisley asked what he tinkered with. "Oh. Well. Mostly old code. But sometimes it's so old that our software can't run it. But when I feel like working with you know, parts," Noah considered that, his face tilting up, "Oh. Old computing devices. Old things that people used to use to make one system talk to another. Before we had intelligent handshake interfaces. I-I studied the Borg a lot back at Ishikawa, since positronics was cut off. But I-I've tinkered with pre-positronic artificial intelligence architecture. You know. Old duotronics and quadritronic systems."

Paisley smiled lightly. "I think it is, for the Ferengi," she said. They were still a quaint people, though. Getting better, but still hadn't caught up to newfangled tech yet. "Anyway. That sounds like fun!! I don't have a lot of experience with coding, I prefer traditional engineering and building but it's still fascinating!" She'd never had a head for numbers. "So...like...robots?" She asked. "We should do that someday. Build robots and have a battle!!"

Noah nodded, "If you know Sheldon? Ensign Parsons? He loves robots too. I-I bet he'd love to be involved too."

Paisley shook her head lightly, the inky braid she wore swishing around as she did. "Nope, haven't met him yet,' she said. "I have yet to meet most of the team," she said. "The Fleet LOVES to do that, don't they? Just throw you into the action without any formalities," she sighed. "But hopefully at the morning huddle!" She said. "Get a team, as many as possible. I'll sign off on any requisitions," she said. She was going to have some fun here!

Noah nodded, "Oh y-yeah, its like being on the high board over the four meter deep pool. Sink or swim." Noah wondered if it had always been that way. "He-he's usually there. If his shift isn't afternoon or night. But I think he's on day shift right now?" Noah tried to remember if Sheldon and Dravor had even stirred before Noah had risen that morning. It had been pretty quiet in their room. He nodded. "Ok, see who I can round up." Noah considered perhaps Frav as well.

Noah shifted. "Is there anything else, Ma'am?"

Paisley shook her head, realizing how late it was. "Nope, go get some work done!" She said. "Thanks for inviting me. We'll touch base again later on," she said. "Feel free to just go, I hate that salute as you leave stuff," she said, with a sigh. Someday, she would be an admiral and overturn that stupid custom. Until then, this was the best she could do. "See you!" She said, with a wave before turning to the computer. Duty rosters were boring as hell, but someone had to do them, and that someone was her.

"Ha-have a good day Ma'am," Noah responded. He ushered himself out of the acting-Chief's office and raised his PADD to check on his next assignment. Sub-Processor repair behind the Bridge. A rare opportunity to poke on to the Bridge and say hello to Irynya. He smiled at that. But in the meantime, he sent a quick note to Sheldon. "New Assistant Chief nice, similar interests. Robot battle?"

A Post By:

Lieutenant Paisley F'Rar
Assistant (Acting) Chief Engineer

&

Ensign Noah Balsam
Systems Specialist