For Want of Coffee

Posted on Sun Dec 14th, 2025 @ 12:39am by Lieutenant Irynya & Ensign Noah Balsam

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Regency Balancar Hotel
Timeline: Mission Day 19 at 0900

[Regency Balancar Hotel]
[Azores Suite]
[Pathfinder Station]
[MD 19 - 0900 Hours]

For a moment, as Irynya's eyes opened to reveal an unfamiliar ceiling limbed in the warmth of soft low lighting, the Risian had to bite back a moment of dissociated panic. Her eyes and brain reported that this was not her room, nor was it her bed, and a sick feeling of dread that tasted like the dry ozone of the Kordra-Lisrit swelled in the back of her mouth.

The feeling crested and fell quickly, though, as recognition took hold. She was in a bed in the Azores Suite at the Balancar Regency Hotel. It was an enormous bed for that matter. Yawning, she spread her arms above her head in a deep stretch, toes pointing downward beneath the sumptuous fluff of the bed’s comforter. Her arms and legs relaxed she let her arms flop to either side. Her finger tips failed to reach either edge of the mattress. A small smile found its way to her lips halted only by the lingering taste of memory-induced ozone.

As wake ups went this one hadn’t been bad. She imagined Counselor Qo encouraging her to recognize progress when it happened. Realistically she had woken up with her heart slamming behind her ribs every morning since they had been rescued save the singular night when Noah had slept over. She knew she shouldn’t assume he was the reason. Exhaustion would have made equally reasonable sense. But a part of her credited that night’s sleep to him anyway.

With a sigh she rolled toward the edge of the bed closest to her bedroom’s door shifting until her feet found the floor. One hand absently went to her hair, running nails up underneath the back to scratch her scalp and neck before fluffing her hair out onto her shoulders in a curtain. Her t-shirt, loose and oversized, slid down one shoulder and she moved to pull it back up as she stood and, yawning again, padded out of her room in search of the bathroom.

---

Closed eyes flexed not in dream, but concentration. "Interface with the Sojourner's computer. Authorization Balsam Iota 71 Charlie Delta Six Ampersand." The computer squealed. Noah, half-hovering in a sit, finally dropped his bottom on to the edge of his bed. Save a pair of Spiderman briefs- red and blue- he wore little and his fair skin was tight to the dry cold he kept for sleeping. He scratched at the semi-deep depression between his chest muscles under his sternum- pectis excavatum. The computer chirped.

"Access granted. Uplink complete." The voice was the unfamiliar one of the hotel. Noah blinked.

"Secure subspace communication. Use Freya 11 Codex, Starfleet priority."

"Transmission is secured. Transferring to Starfleet protocols. Specify recipient and subspace coordinates." The computer stated again in its oddly warm civilian brogue.

Noah laid across his bed and reached for his effects. His lanky arm had to reach its full reach and he pulled a PADD away. It chirped and he pulled it to within view. "Um. Sector 116 carom negative 09, Valt Sector. Deliver to P'shel and Viktiar Tor, Combeltawna Sector. Code 781-Andla-1. Valt Minor." He waited for the computer to squelch at him and when it did he continued. He moved to the provided desk and, rethinking, he grabbed and shirt and pulled it on. He tried to straighten his mussed hair but it was a losing battle. "Open subspace message and record in five seconds."

The holograph display showed a countdown in Linguacode and then sounded a soft, rounded sound. "Hi... um... Mister and Mrs. Tor. Um. My name is... Noah Balsam. I, um..." He rubbed his nose and sighed. "Computer, pause... go back. Start over in five seconds." Noah sighed and, realizing he was slumping, rolled his shoulders. The sound again, echoed. His eyes juttered to the source. Then they squinted. He'd heard... a sound. He assumed it was Irynya, rising? Or out in the common space. He felt torn in two directions. He felt like he had to do this, and not doing it was this weird pull of anxious gravity. But Irynya was lightness and light and... he was supposed to be doing that.

---

With the whispered swish of doors, Noah's head peeked out from his room in to the common space.

Warmth flooded Iry at the sight of Noah, tousled but clearly well awake, peeking out from his door. "Hey," she said, sleep still clinging to the corners of her voice making he tone deeper, more languid. She tilted her head at her friend, one hand absently raking through her hair into her scalp and flexing. A shake of her head followed making the long dark curtain of her hair fan out down her back. One bit caught awkwardly over her ear, leaving an odd loop that she didn't seem to notice.

"How'd you sleep?" she asked. The tickle of slipping fabric caught her attention and she reached across herself to hike the stretched out collar of the tshirt back up her arm.

Noah kept his lower half well inside his room, but smiled. He tried again in vain to fix his hair with a quick pull of his fingers. It did no good. "Oh um. Okay I guess. The whole, uh, sleeping in a strange place thing. I kept rolling over to-to ask Sheldon a question about the repair schedule." He wiggled his nose, "That and my bed is like... twice as big as it-its supposed to be." He gestured out his hypermobile arm to her, "Um, what about you?"

"Funny, I kept rolling over to ask Shelly about the repair schedule too," she quipped back. She tried to manage deadpan, but her eyes gleamed with amusement and her lips twitched against a suppressed teasing smile. Finally she relented, "I slept alright. The bed feels big even to me. I tried laying in the middle and I can't reach the opposite sides with my arms outstretched. She didn't say that it felt odd to be in such a large bed alone. The last time she'd shared a bed like this...

Noah's too wide smile and his laughing eyes rose at that.

"Uhm," it dawned on her that Noah was, still, awkwardly half in and half out of his room. She leaned sideways, eyebrows raised to show she had noticed as she feigned an attempt to peer past the half closed door. Although the room was warm enough goosebumps had started to prick at the bare skin of her legs. She straightened and then ran her hands against the sides of her thighs, chafing them slightly. "Did you get a chance to check out the shower last night?" she asked, trying to decide if that was what she wanted next or if she just needed to pee.

Noah, sensing her move, frumpled his nose and smile at her. "Uh no, not yet. I went straight to bed after we broke," Noah reported. "Fell , um, asleep with some new artificial intelligence architecture from Daystrom I found in Pathfinder's uhh," he flailed an arm at the ceiling, "Pathfinder's engineering files. Did-" His eyes narrowed, "Did you know that Pathfinder has us down for a refit? And refresh?" His nose wrinkled, "Sorry... um... tangent." He blinked and he patted the door frame with the hand that leaned on it. "Did you try the shower?"

Iry chuckled at him, enjoying the normalcy of their exchange. Or, well, the normalcy of the words. She was suddenly very confident that the answer was that she needed to use the facilities, so she moved as she spoke, heading for the bathroom. "I didn't know that," she called over her shoulder, disappearing into the third room, but leaving the door ajar so as not to end the conversation. "One sec," she called. There was the telltale sounds of movement and then settling before she spoke again. "And are you telling me you fell asleep to engineering schematics? That's the type of thing that usually keeps you awake, isn't it?" This was asked with an earnest curiosity.

Noah grimaced, blinking. "It... depends. I guess."

Another series of familiar bathrooming noises underpinned his reply before Iry re-emerged. Once again her shirt was akimbo, one shoulder entirely bare with the hem drooping just low enough to hit the tops of her thighs. She leaned against the doorframe of the bathroom. "I fell asleep listening to that guitar artist you told me about. It's very soothing. But yeah, no shower yet. Though if the hotel's description is anything to be believed though..." She held out her hand, gesturing for him to come join her.

Wait what was happening? Noah's eyebrow rose at the hand, his eyes on it. "Uhhh, where are we going?" He asked, his voice lilted with uncertain questioning.

Irynya's eyebrow rose in mirror to Noah's. Hers, however, was pared with a teasing smile, eyes flashing with amusement. "To the shower," she answered deliberately leaving off the key descriptor. She held a beat, watching his face and then, unable to help herself, fell into a fit of giggles. She dropped her hand, wrapping her arm around her middle as if she might be able to quell the giggling. "Just come here " she managed, extending her hand again and then, for emphasis, flexing her fingers insistently.

The engineer's eyes settled again on her hand and he issued, slowly, the held breath. Wait why had he... why had he read it like that? Noah's eyes narrowed and he grimaced, "Sorry. Oh-ok..." He felt rather silly and took her hand in his. "I think... um... wow I need uh... I-I need some coffee. Or a hot spiced jala. Which uh its... too early for."

His hand was cool and smooth against her palm. For a moment longer than necessary she held his gaze, wrapping her fingers around his and and squeezing lightly. And then she grinned at him, something complex making its way through her gaze. The pit of her stomach stirred, but she ignored it and rugged him over the threshold a d into the luxuriously appointed bathroom.

Noah's nose wrinkled not in disgust but mild confusion. But he followed, tugged where Irynya intended, with trust applied to a friend who'd seldom done him wrong.

The room's designer had outdone themselves in this room. A sink settled into a warm brown lacquered piece of wood--or at least it appeared to be wood. It's edges were raw giving the impression that someone had cut a slice from a tree. The mirror above it spanned the length of the countertop where an assortment of soaps and creams in tiny bottles mingled with the hastily discarded toiletries that they had each left there the night before. The floor was a cool tile with a series of lily pad like carpeted spaces that curved through the room placed carefully to give the option to stop on a soft spot at the obvious landing points. The carpet decor lead towards the far end where a large glass shower stall dominated one side while a deep tub met it at a 90 degree angle. Options. Clearly they were meant to have choices. Like the main sitting area a holographic continuation of their perch high above rolling green treetops dominated.

Iry led, not releasing Noah's hand until she stood before the shower door. "Ok," she said, "watch this." And then, reluctantly unwinding her hand from his, she slid aside the glass door and stepped into the shower stall. A panel on the wall lit and then, as if on cue, the ceiling of them disappeared and the room filled with warm sunlight filtered through the cool lens of leaves. It dappled across the space giving the impression that they were, in fact, outside. Even the smell in the room shifted.

Holding her arms wide Iry grinned. "Isn't this amazing?" She asked. "Can you imagine the holographic programming that this took?" She looked up. "It's real water too."

Though Noah felt less special regard for the natural settings of a living and breathing world- for his home was a technologically marvelous bathyscaphe under a kilometer of ice- he was intensely curious. And the technology it took to make such settings and details was well beyond that of a typical starship. The light was easily created. It felt felt more like a sort of sunlight to his fingers. The filtered ripple of it as if through leaves was impressive. The smell was... outdoorsy. Noah's eyebrows rose as his bottom lip pouted out. "N-not bad," he attested, his eyes skirting over Irynya's undergarments when she'd raised her arms.

Tickle.

His eyes moved to the suggestion of a tree canopy. It smelled wet, like petrichor and salt and sea. With the heaviness of a greenhouse.

The Risian's eyes crinkled at the corners with the enthusiasm of someone tempted to exclaim, But wait! There's more! Dropping her pose she slid the fee feet to the back wall of the shower, fingers dancing over the small interface. And like that the scene shifted. Warmth was replaced with a light chill as if the air was being conditioned. Goosebumps rose on Iry's skin and she shivered in the sudden drop in ambient temperature. Where before the scene had depicted lush greenery now it was the icy cool of an enormous ocean, ice floes and refracted light drawing patterns that seemed to flow across the wall and ceiling. Unlike the impression of being outdoors they now appeared to be safely ensconced behind a window, the smooth cool grey edges of the viewing area curving around the scene.

This time when she turned to clock his reaction, Irynya's expression was softer, contemplative. "Did I get close?" She asked.

Noah turned in a tight circle. It was close... it was certainly close. He recognized elements of it as probably a conglomerate of the various Enceladus installations- The Bright complex, Memory One, Eilat Anchorage and Eilat Hub. That was the fault of Enceladus- in the years between the destruction of Mars and now, Enceladus had gone it relatively alone. "It's... it's pretty good." Noah murmured as he completed his circle back to face Irynya. "Especially since we cut off the Alliance for, um, a few years. Like.. we don't use LCARS." Noah smiled warmly and pointed at a panel that was the warm yellows, gray and pinks of the LCARS from a few decades ago. "We use the AMIRA system back home." Noah's brow arched and his mouth ticked up at the corners, "Archived Machine Intelligence Retrieval Algorithm."

Something like relief, and maybe a bit of pride, flooded her at his confirmation that she hadn't completely gotten things wrong. She was far from the capable holographic engineer that he was and had worried that it would look too much like a kid's project and not enough like the oceans he had described. Or worse, nothing like the original she knew he loved. "AMIRA is a prettier name though," she commented across the threshold of the shower.

He shrugged and leaned a hypermobile hand against the wall. "AMIRA can't do this though." His nose wrinkled, amused. "So, you-you can have your shower first?" he looked down, and back up with a hot prickle in his neck and spine now.

His comment had sounded like a question and for a moment her mind went in several different directions, none of which wouldn't alarm him if spoken aloud. Her cheeks flushed slightly and she finally took a moment to take in the whole of him. She'd been so fixated on his facial expressions that she'd barely made note of his attire. As if her eyes had a mind of their own they darted down the tall length of him and back up before she pointedly returned to his face and pulled on a broad agreeable smile. "That works for me if that works for you."

"It does yeah... so um..." Noah pushed off the wall. "Happy shower-" he bumped in to the wall. "Showering." he turned to go, disappearing rather quickly.

Stepping quickly out of the shower on the heels of Noah's exit, she quickly stripped off her shirt and underwear before stepping back into the shower stall. One hand hovered over the interface as she debated whether to change the scene back to the forest. The pull was strong--the thought of bathing under a stream of water in what at least felt like natural light tugging at her. Another moment of hesitation passed and then she flicked her fingers over the interface, feeling the warm pulse of water over her head even as she stared out into the vast holographic ocean.

Noah, once past the bathroom door, closed it with a deliberate press of its door. "Computer, privacy." He murmured. His next breath, a bit terse came. He pointed down at... himself. "You. Just. S-stop that." He hissed at his groin. He balled and relaxed his fists a few times and then went back to his room.

--Hijinks By

Lieutenant Irynya
Accidental Holography Enthusiast

Ensign Noah Balsam
Also an Enthusiast