Familiar Faces

Posted on Sat Jan 31st, 2026 @ 11:38pm by Lieutenant Irynya & Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant Timmoz & Lieutenant Chaali

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Pathfinder Station; Regency-Balancar Luxury Suites
Timeline: Mission Day 19 at 0130

The door closed with a quiet whoosh and a light click. Anachronistic. Or maybe just different. The whole suite had been decorated to resemble a particular aesthetic. The doors being something other than Starfleet standard wasn’t a surprise.

It was different, though.

For several beats Irynya stood at the foot of her bed.

She stood, poised there, arms crossed and fingers tightly wrapping the edges of the PADD containing her messages. She pressed the device against her chest letting the otherness of it ground her while the dissonance of helplessness rolled up through her, filled spaces inside of her that didn’t have room for alarm, and pressed outward as if to consume her whole.

One long slow breath out was the only thing to be heard. Shaky at first, but firming as she went.

You shouldn’t have asked.

As if she weren’t the only person there she shook her head, a small gesture, more echo than act as she disagreed with the narration in her brain.

You shouldn’t have asked.

No. That wasn’t fair. Maybe she could have asked differently. Better. With less urgency. But no. Noah was her friend.

Her best friend.

A tiny part of her wriggled uncomfortably at the certainty she felt in that. Marteli had always been her best friend. And Noah was not Marteli. But still…

After another long inhale followed by the same out-pressed breath something gave. Knees bent and she flopped backward onto the bed hearing the whumpf of the comforter as any air that had been beneath it escaped with her fall. She let the pillowly blanket surround her as if she could melt her edges into the softness and let all of the feeling of things that seemed so loud flow out through the combined edges.

Noah was her best friend.

Noah was hurting.

She couldn’t fix it.

She could make it worse.

You shouldn't have asked.

“You can’t do this,” she told herself, voicing the words whisper-like into the room as if doing so would make them solid. “Doing this doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help Noah.”

Something about saying it out loud quieted the accusing tone in her head. It wasn’t gone, but it was quieter and so she sat up and crossed her legs lotus style, sitting in the middle of the bed as if its edges contained the safest space in the room.

Her PADD had landed next to her, dropped when she’d let herself topple back onto the bed and she reached for it now, coaxing the display to life and bringing up the message queue that she’d received while picking up her packages.

One message from Jovian and Piri
Two from Marteli
Two more indicating that Marteli was the sender on behalf of a group
One from Chaali
One from…

Iry’s heart stuttered and leapt all at once.

Timmoz

One from Timmoz.

Seeing his name on her PADD filled her with a sense of relief and anticipation and longing so strong that it felt like homesickness had smacked her over the head. With quick fingers she brushed at the screen to open the message.

"Well well well..." The voice, familiar, laced amused, that Cluros-driven confidence. It was all there. "Look... ah..." A tall being with dark lime green skin settled into a chair and put his feet up. "Who decided to call." His hands were stacked on top of his head. He wore a loosely comfortable garment, ivory cream, that came down to the elbows with sleeves. It looked maybe... not Orion, but something else.

Pressure in Iry's throat built, coming out somewhere between a gasp and a sob. There had been no news. Understandably so. The lag in time for messages was significant enough to raise issue and while she knew he and Nico had arrived at Pathfinder safely, he had still been in stasis at that point.

"Hello Qash," she said quietly, her own tone full of unspoken weight and affection, to the familiar form on the screen.

"Lieutenant, I see, Irynya," he really emphasized her new rank. "Kava. Master pilot of the Sojourner." The gleam of his white teeth, his double sets of canines rose from the smiling parting of his full lips. "And they say assassination is the only way for upward mobility." He tsked with a slight sway of his head. "No wonder the Klingons are a dying species. Not that uh..." He lowered his hand and picked up a long, elegantly black glass rod at which the end there was some kind of bulb and a lazily curling bluish-white smoke. He put the other end of the delicate rod between his lips and breathed in.

His brow rose as he lowered the pipe and set it back in some kind of simple holder, a bit like a chopsticks holder. "Not that I want to give the V'draysh too much credit. It goes straight to their egos." He leaned closer to the camera with a cheeky look, one eye half-closed.

A quick tap to the message paused it as Timmoz's face swam closer to the screen. Iry studied him with the critical eye of family as if she could assess his wellness purely by evaluating the verdant tone of his skin or the gleam of his eyes. He was... she decided... well. Or as well as he might be. He didn't look like he had just before he'd gone with his team to search for Kaldri. Nor how she remembered him on the ship. Then again, the lighting where he was recording was hardly the almost sanitary Starfleet tones.

"How are you girl?" He chuckled around. "Me? I'm a caged and luxuriating bird of paradise. A fancy feral prize kept in captivity, amused by whatever holograms my credits can conjure... within the prudish limits of V'draysh concepts of safety and propriety."

He stood. The slinky shirt simply... slinked... down his narrow torso. He snapped his fingers and swung his wrist in a circle, finger up. And whatever was recording him seemed to follow. He began to walk and he stepped outside on to some kind of elevated veranda. "At least my keepers have my cage in some place agreeably warm. I believe the Earthers call this sector.... Thai Land. This golden glittery thing Earthers in the background, heh, laughably called a river is apparently the Kwai. Storied and in song. So I'm told." Wind caught his great span of loose curls and swayed them.

He leaned on the tweak wood of the verdana balustrade. "The V'draysh are treating me well. Kava. Don't worry about that. But I'm not yet my own person. Every week some milktoast agent for Starfleet Intelligence or Federation Security pay me unannounced visits and ask questions. Some I know, some I don't. But they don't even ask for Xo-I, Kava." His nose wrinkled with distaste, "It's deeply insulting."

A chuckle, one pulled from a place she didn't even know had unwound, passed the Risian's lips. She could imagine the tall figure of Timmoz peering at anyone who came to ask him questions with the haughtiness of someone whose culture clearly understood a different set of standards.

"But. I digress." He gestured with a shrug. "No. I'm no longer in the service of the V'draysh. And that is fine with me. Kodak was a worthy Tahedrin and I would have taken a blade for him. But." He wryly chuckled, "That is not something the V'draysh seem to see as career material. No. The new Admiral they have assignment to that monitoring monstrosity near that cloaca of a space aperture decided Sojourner was too important for a loose element. And my presence was needed elsewhere."

No longer in the service of... Somehow Irynya hadn't expected that he'd relinquish his commission. Or maybe it made more sense than that. Nearly dying, she imagined, had a way of changing perspectives. Still, she wished she could ask him about it. Had he decided or had Starfleet? And if he was no longer an officer, what else could they possibly ask of him? She knew so little about this part of his life, but could just as easily imagine how he might evade her questions, Cluros on full display, as he gave her answers that weren't answers. She could all but hear them in her head.

"Nico," he added, "Is fine. He transports in and out as he pleases. He works in orbit right now. I see him most nights. Again," Timmoz shook his head, irreverently, "No request of Xo-I from that one. But I have still him between my legs when I choose," he shrugged, "Most of the time. And his company is still agreeable if..." He sighed. "Peppered with shop talk. Engineers, programmers. Why can't they ever learn. But at least he isn't a Tellarite engineer."

Iry spared a moment of appreciation for news of Nico. She had never been as close to the Orion's engineer partner, but they'd bonded in those few terrifying days of keeping vigil after the Twinfire Nebula when Timmoz's life hung in the balance and Dr. Wang had worked tirelessly to keep him stable.

He turned and went back inside. "I am fine. I'm not longer all original parts, but I'm fine. I'm roughly thirty percent biosynthetic. But then, what great racing shuttle is ever all factory issue?" He hummed amused at that, darkly. "They still force me to come in for tests and evaluations... endless evaluations. Psychological, physical." he gestured as if to dismiss it away. "Well... what news. Ah."

Timmoz went back to sitting down but first seemed to stack some dishware nearby- perhaps the remains of lunch or dinner? "Your flagship suffered some sort of... mishap. The Enterprise. A whale-sized vessel. I imagine it maneuvers like a Stimber-val Walric. Flobbers more than corners. Something about a rescue mission that went wrong. Major systems corruptions. And, according to Nico, decommissioning it made more sense." His brow shot up, "I don't know if he believes that, or if he is relaying the consensus. The things you learn when engineers can't not shop talk. Ah. What else?"

Timmoz pursed his dark green lips and eyed his pipe again. But for the moment he didn't touch it. "Ah. They repealed that... ban... on synthetics. And they are working to bring those synthetics in to the Federation. Urqinzhe save them all. And they are voting around here for a new president." Timmoz shook his head. "How can you decide if someone is a worthy Qaj-Tahedrin if they see themselves as servants? That..." he squinted an eye and tapped his temple. "Is strange V'draysh thinking. Again." He smiled easily and widely. "Maybe some day they will choose a Risian. Ban these hideous two piece suits I am seeing over over this planet. Gray... symmetrical. Hideously dull. Like a Arbazan designed them. Or an Arcturian."

Had she known about that? Irynya couldn't recall hearing about the ban being lifted, but then if she had heard it the news would have come to her through Noah. The specter of an earlier thought... what if he had never joined Starfleet... twisted itself into new form. What if he left? Now that he could work with synthetic life forms beyond the diagnostics he did with their LMH. Now that the synthetics were being reintegrated... She frowned and tapped on the screen to replay the last ten seconds realizing she'd been distracted and missed some of Timmoz's words.

He finally went for his pipe and dragged off it again before settling it, almost reverently, back in its two prong holder. "Now, tell me news. How is your harem of pretty boys who desperately need thumbs taken out of their asses? I doubt I'd recognize the senior staff hardly at all anymore. Are the Great Bear, and T'Nai still running the ship? I suppose I wax poetic and darkly a little, it hasn't been that long since I left. But things around here are changing quickly and I wonder how much of that ripple has come your way."

Another drag came off his pipe and a minute of quiet reflection. "Well. Unfortunately I don't have much else to say. Caged birds don't live interesting lives Kava. I hope you're faring better. I'll say my until next times. For now. Avoid safety. Be bolder than that.' He smiled one last time and nodded. And then the feed ended.

The blank screen brought with it another wave of intense homesickness. Not for a place, but for a person. There had to be a word for it, but she couldn't imagine it in the moment. Her fingers hovered over the PADD, poised to open a new recording--to pour out everything that had happened, everything hat weighed on her still in a response to Timmoz's request for news.

Instead, her hand dropped and she sighed. Soon. Before they left the station she would send him something.

The list of messages returned to her screen and she considered it for a long moment finally settling on the message from Chaali.

"Che-chinni..." The voice was musical, lyrical. It appeared with the smooth, glossy blue face of a Bolian woman about Irynya's age. "I was so glad to see your message." The Bolian- Chaali- adjusted the tilt of the view screen. She appeared to be in... quarters? They were similar, perhaps quite a bit larger, than ones of similar design to the Sojourner. "You will never guess where I am. I'll give you three." She smiled, her purple gums and white teeth on display as she bit bemusedly into her lip. "No, not Bolarus. My co-husbands landed in some uh..." She closed an eyes, "Uh, financial... shall we say... difficulties. So they must leave Bolarus for a couple of years."

The warmth that flooded Iry at the sound of Chaali's voice pushed at the anxiety that had previously threatened to overwhelm, nudging it back from the edges. Hearing from Timmoz had unwound some of it and now it was easier to refuse. The added puzzle of where Chaali was, clearly a starship, but which one and why was unclear, slid her earlier thoughts about Noah to the side, settled for later consideration with a clearer mind.

There was a long pause. She smiled. "Not on Earth or Risa either. I'm closer than you think." As she spoke, her vast array of mannequin heads on shelves, each topped with fascinating and varied arrays of wigs came to view. One- one of tiny plates of copper, polished, she ran between her fingers. "I'm aboard a ship... in the Delta Quadrant. We're in Malon space trying to negotiate a trade deal with the Salvage Consortium. A few Federation ships were damaged in recent raids by Kazon clans using Trabe technology. The Malon moved in and salvaged our ships. We're trying to get them back."

She smiled at the camera. "I miss you Che-chinni. And I hope I get to see you soon. We are far, far from the last location we tracked you at. And we couldn't message you because we were being stalked by Kazon. One of their major captains... we think... might've attacked our supply ship, the Andarok. So our next hope is to locate the crew and ship. We think the Malon might have leads. Or more."

The description that Chaali offered pulled Iry up short. Kazon using Trabe technology. Federation ships damaged in raids. With a quick tap she paused the message, closing her eyes and pressing her thumb and pointer finger to her brow. Tork, certainly, had come from another Federation ship. Or been en route to one. Had he mentioned the ship's name at any point? She couldn't remember. Details of the each minute they had spent on Subrek's ship had dulled around the edges, leaving only the intensity of emotion with less of the realistic trappings of remembering the moments. Dropping her hand she puffed out a breath and tapped at the PADD to restart the message.

The Bolian girl smiled close to the camera. "I hope your ship comes to Pathfinder and we can meet up. I miss you Che-chinni. Miss your smile. Miss your fashion sense." She shook her head, "Miss how you can always point out the best butts among the men-crew. You said something about... a bare Bolian butt? With stripes?" She chuckled. "He was entering... or maybe peaking... at his fertile state. The J'jonpari. Was there a smell? A bit like... sweet vidalia onions?"

This drew a surprised laugh. She had nearly forgotten about the Bolian man whose rear assets she'd gotten a glimpse of while temporarily sleeping in the enlisted berthing. Had there been a smell?

Chaali smiled again. "Well, nevermind. That was the J'jonpari. It happens about once a year. Me, I've had quite enough on males eager to burn their J'jonpari." She chuckled and tickled at the rubbery cerulean skin on her neck. She sighed lyrically. "How I miss just having my own quarters away from those two. Be careful about locking yourself down to just one male, Keffidi. They are trouble."

It was such an easy exchange. She'd always been comfortable discussing men with Chaali. In many ways it mirrored the kind of easy giggle-filled interactions she had with Marti, and Wrena, and Elwe. She imagined the three of them would get along with Chaali as if they'd known her all their lives. She also knew that despite her protestations, Chaali was quite enamored of her husbands. What would Chaali say if she knew Iry was taking shore leave with the tall thin then-cadet who she'd accidentally walked in on in the buff?

Chaali moved and pulled on a jacket exactly like Irynya's only its field color was yellow. She slipped it on and smoothed down the fasteners. "Well lovely Iry, I am due on duty. But I hope to hear from you soon. Stay healthy and stay happy." She smiled at the camera and closed the channel. On the screen was the symbol of the Federation and in the lettering beneath it read. "CHANNEL CLOSED. U.S.S. ADELPHI NCC-89717."

This time when the message ended the homesick feeling was different. Different, but no less strong.

The Adelphi.

A newly commissioned USS Adelphi.

One where Chaali was aboard in the Delta Quadrant. Memories of late nights sitting on each other's beds discussing the latest wig fashions on Bolarus or the ensign with the really cute butt that had bent over to pick up a dropped tricorder flitted through her mind's eye. It was so... simple. So light and uncomplicated. Not that they had never shared deeper things with each other. Next to Timmoz, Chaali had become such a natural friend, closer to family in the way that Risians conceived of it.

But then there was the baby. She hoped that the presence of Chaali's husbands meant the baby was with them. Her friend hadn't mentioned the child, but then Iry didn't have kids and maybe it just wasn't something that Chaali had thought to include. For a brilliant moment it occurred to her that she might get to meet the little one now that Chaali was on this side of the wormhole and the idea warmed her, clearing her further worry further away.

Much of the earlier tension dispersed, she flopped back into the pillows, holding her PADD such that she could see the rest of the queue and with a smile, she tapped on the first message from Marteli.

---- Messages by:

Lieutenant Irynya
Chief Flight Controller

Lieutenant Timmoz
Starfleet-Retired

Lieutenant Chaali
Ops - Assigned to the USS Adelphi