Selected Quotes Nov/Dec '23
Posted on 02 Jan 2024 @ 6:30pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Selected Quotes November & December 2023
Stay a While
Quinn could go as far as the Fleet would take him for all she cared but she couldn’t let him go and leave Calliope in his wake. The cold-hearted bastard would have to take care of his wife or she would personally eject him from the airlock.
B+F-L=HP
I’m beginning to think you are on Ara’s side. What with your long silences this afternoon and your withdrawn attitude. If it is the case, be blunt and say so.”
“The only side I’m on is mine.” She realised that her shirt, a bright affair best described as lemon yellow, was spoiled with paint and she sighed. “How can your day be worse than mine when I’ve spent hours listening to the ramblings of your grandmother? Go on, tell me. For if you don’t, you’ll simply sound like a fibster.”
By an odd form of mimetism, Brek also sighed. Awkward women, he was sick and tired of them. “You can take my word for it. My day’s been horrible. So much so that I’d better spare you the details.”
“A fine fibster, as I said,” Kreca nodded her head. “There are plenty of them on Ferenginar, you should be proud to have such a splendid trait!”
“No more splendid than your uncooperative behaviour, Kreca. I’m asking again: are you in league with my grandmother?”
“You should leave. I’m not talking to liars.”
Chronological Displacement
A pained smile formed on her lips. She’d long ago learned that there really was something to be said for acting first and asking for forgiveness instead of permission, wherever the sketchy line presented itself. Come-what-may of diplomats and space navies, Korix and the Federation would still have science to share.
—
“You’re Starfleet,” the angry trill woman had growled. “You serve a higher purpose. You can’t be an activist while a crewmember of the Nimitz. Either stand with your command or get the hell out of the Ninth.”
—
Closing her eyes, Ibis began repeating a new inner mantra Agaia had suggested to help to soothe herself and ease the disconnect she felt:
The past happened. The past isn’t happening now.
Senselessness
"Practically no one's in balance. I know I'm not, but for myself it doesn't affect me the same way that it would you. But that doesn't matter entirely, we'll get to the bottom of it one way or the other." The Doctor twiddled one curl absently as she thought about how she was going to set up this brain scan. She was going to need a projective telepath for at least part of it.
Living a Little
“I saw you conferring with a Vulcan diplomat. In your gallery. Are you denying it?” The tone of Thitur’s voice was as intense as his gaze.
“Why should I? Only I didn’t confer with her, as you put it. Cmdr T’Sheng passed by, thinking she would find Terran art in my gallery. She left an unhappy woman. I can never satisfy those Vulcan forbidding types.”
“You admit, then, that you did talk to her.”
“Is it a bigger offence than you surveilling my gallery day and night, by the look of it? A perfect waste of time, by the way. I’m a perfectly honest art dealer.”
Thitur smiled, ever so briefly. “Mr Brek, your levity is always stupendous. Without fail it will put a smile on my face.
Breaking the News
Ibis took a step back, while Lu took her by the hands. She felt betrayed as the more likely truth occurred to her. Eloise Khandra Vogel was visiting her for the first time in over fifteen years because she was the news.
—
Frozen with uncertainty and something approaching a sense of betrayal, Ibis stared, wide-eyed into the camera over Lu’s shoulder, the small red recording light trained on her face and tracking her motion like the laser of a borg drone. “I can’t… talk about… now,” she managed.
Testimonies: Hawthorne and Tobias-Hirsh
“The darkest days do forge souls of iron and the mountain calls to its own kind, indomitable and true.”
Tobias was uncertain what type of greeting to account this as. Subconsciously, he shifted his stance, in case he was being challenged.
—
“Look at this thing. It’s meant for war. But look at it critically. The weapons positioning is off, there’s no forward deflector, no aft emitters or torpedo bays. Take a look at the engine spacing and orientation,” he said, giving the watcher the chance to form some of their own conclusions that they might not have before. “Starfleet ships are built following generations of trial and error. We’ve learned the best way to do it to maximize efficiency and function. But these guys,” he said, pointing to the ship. “They just strapped every gun they could to an aggressive looking spaceframe and sent it out,” he explained. “They don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just bullying their way through it.”
At The Appointed Time
Jalaine mimed an expression of fainting, her arm across her forehead dramatically. "Ah! She believes herself to be completely smitten! He practically glows supernaturally in her esteem! But in reality, he's nothing to look at."
Becoming Unglued
Since the run-in with Eloise Khadra-Vogel, Agaia had sat in her office in quiet contemplation on chaos with which El Auriens had a special relationship: they could sense it. As everything in the universe coasted on its entropic highway, that gave her species a significant talent. It’s why Q feared them, because although they couldn’t reverse it with a snap of the fingers they discovered millenia ago that they could cause harmonic realignment nonetheless (although they rarely did).
It also made them particularly talented in fields where healing was a point: medicine, physical therapy, psychiatry, and bartending.
Skipper and the Grease Monkey
"Yeah. well. The good news is, this ol' girl," Tilmer pointed out the window at the Pathfinder, "she's about as plumb as she musta been her first shakedown cruise. Close as she'll ever be sighted, anyhow."
—
"Don't... call me Skipper." Calliope tried not to visibly wince. Last thing she needed to stick to her image was a cutesy word like Skipper. Maybe crusty old men could handle it with old fashioned irony, but on her? It made her sound like a beach house party girl. She pointed to the exit. "Get lost, Max."
The Spirit of Science
"Great. Then if the Pathfinder is dispatched... we can still meet remotely.. Uh." Ibis fumbled through all the wrong menus in the display board before finding her presentation. And then she couldn't find the right load settings for the file formats. She blushed. "Sorry. LCars... is a few versions newer than I'm used to."
The Age of Innocence
When in doubt, flee, was Brek’s motto, but he wasn’t silly enough to advertise it out loud.
Refocusing
“No harm there. It would keep me from being cooped up around here all the time.” She glanced over at Aiden who had relaxed a touch, though he still seemed wary. “Think you can teach me how to use that thing of yours?”
He frowned. “I’m still learning myself. Not sure how good of a teacher I would be.”
“You know more than me already. What, are you afraid I’ll show you up?” The remark garnered her an amused snort as Aiden shook his head. “Alright then. Tell the council I’m more than willing to serve as escort - full-time if they wish, unless they’re afraid the scary former Orion operative will convert me to his ways.”
Testimonies: Wallace & the USS Sunrise
“Shields must have fallen shortly after the order to prepare to abandon ship.” Wallace remembered the confusion in the corridors, the loss of the portside pods and everything that came after, but he found himself unwilling or unable to tell these people about being manhandled by his own first sergeant aboard the lifepod. The past eclipsed the present and the conference room faded replaced with Bolivar Titus’s telling Wallace to tell the sergeant’s wife he loved her. The hatch slid shut, Titus saluted, and the thrusters shot the pod away. When the memory faded, he was left gripping the arms of the chair, his heart pounding with adrenaline that had surged into his body. Frantically, he looked around to find someone at the conference who could give him permission to leave. No one moved and finally he just mumbled, “I think I need a break,” and dashed from the chair toward the door.
—
Gordon folded his face in his hands, but found the images from the projection still on the inside of his fingers. They were overlaid with many other memory reels of many other wars and skirmishes, each having left indelible impressions on his psyche.
—
“It never gets any fucking easier to see,” she whispered bitterly.
“I would never want that to be easy to see,” he replied.
Out With the Old
When she was a kid, she recalled, she and her mother never replicated clothes. They couldn't afford the energy credits to wish new clothes out of the wall all of the time.
—
Calliope covered her face and raked her fingers down over her cheeks. "Don't trade names with him! Oh my god, don't trade anything with Sarge Tenpenny! Mom, Mom listen to me—"
Shortcuts
“What Tithur is saying is that I don’t want to entertain a life with Kreca. I told her so last night, and I’m telling you so now. I’m done with your silly plans, Ara.”
“Have you noticed, my dear Senator,” Ara continued as if Brek wasn’t there, “how, in most species, wisdom is pretty much non existent until we reach the age of fifty? Unfortunately, from that moment, everything slows down. Why must we learn our lessons when it is too late?”
“You make a good point, Lady Ara,” Thitur agreed, a slight smile dancing on his lips. This annoyed Brek. The old Romulan was seldom accommodating. To see him trying to be pleasant, well, it was suspicious. “We all have to make our own mistakes. If we don’t, can we say that we have lived?”
“Of course we can! The trick is to avoid going through life blundering at every opportunity. How can we reach our goals, otherwise? This is why we, elders, play such an important role: we educate.”
“It is true, we have this opportunity, when we are being heard, obviously.”
Brek stared at Thitur. Had anyone heard so much nonsense coming from the mouth of a Romulan?
Lacking Sufficiencies of Data
Sleep was always a gateway into the traumatic events, even in those who had entirely blocked it out of the conscious mind.
—
How often had the chief worked past the point of pain, to injure herself to the point of an inability to use a sense?
Lord Help My Unbelief
I’m starting to think doubt might be a feature and not a bug of the whole ‘belief’ thing.
—
Sometimes we can see enough ahead to be ready for what’s coming at us, but by definition, we go out into the wilds of this galaxy never fully prepared. Never.
An Artful Distraction
Ah, yes. There is a brief biography for him, and a self portrait. Although… he didn’t expound terribly much. He strikes me as a very private young man and I’m not one to pry. Much.
—
Ever the eager tourist, Oly turned and nearly choked as he caught the profile. Though years were stripped aside, the bones were there in the angle of the jaw and shape of the eye.
Crossed Signals
=^= I know exactly why I sent you, and I will thank you for not speaking back to your superior. I promised your services to Harshman; if you value your position within the fleet, I advise you take that to heart and get your ass back to the Diplomatic suite. If you’re lucky she’ll actually let you show your face in public with the rest, since that’s likely the only chance you have of finding Sawyl at this point. =^=
Plenty of Imagination
Only three or four times, in his whole life, had Brek felt such a boundless happiness, motivated, he was proud to say, by a trance of greed. Late this afternoon he had received a large parcel containing three magnificent latinum beetles, said to have belonged to the first Grand Nagus. Gint, the most enlightened Ferengi ever born had possessed ten of those beauties and to get hold of three of them, all at once, well, it was a stroke of real genius!
He observed them, one by one, under the bright light of his gallery. They were quite large, heavy, and each one had a different shimmer: green, red and blue. These were the sort of items that made you feel warm and clever and proud of your achievements. Just looking at them, he was bathed in one unalterable truth: he was a better man than he had been the previous day.
He would put these beetles on display, in his office and on his desk. Only fools believed that modesty was an asset. When you are a son of Ferenginar, different rules apply. You had better shine, or live as a miserable soul crawling in the shadows: an under-achiever whom nobody wanted to know.
Of Being Here
“Let it out,” Wallace said, as if he was reading her mind. Don’t get a grip. Grips don’t help. He stood and walked over to her, not touching, just standing next to her. “Let it out.”
—
“I’m scared. What if I wake up. And it’s gone too. What if. I can’t. Speak.”
He squeezed her, kissed the top of her head, and confidently said, “It won’t come to that, but should it we’ll deal with it. Together.”
Better to Give
Time of day felt arbitrary, the world around artificial. How she had ever lived and worked all of her adult life on ships seemed anathema to her now.
—
She started to reach as if to offer to take his hat and he put a hand on top of his maneuvered defensively, dodging that as well. “Oh, no I won’t stay long enough to forget my hat,” he laughed. “This way when your mother finds out, you can tell her, ‘oh he wasn’t there for long. He didn’t even take off his hat!’”
Testimonies: Parnell & the USS De Grasse
Do not attempt to negotiate with these people. It’s not in their nature to. We are Starfleet and at our core we do not desire conflict of any sort, but these people are not like us. Much in the way that Vulcan’s cling to their logic, these people cling to conflict. It’s their nature to fight.
Negotiations
Harshman pinched the bridge of her nose, “Excuse me, Ambassador. What you’re suggesting is impossible. Diplomacy takes two to tango.”
“Like the Romulans,” Honor joined in. She hated to agree with the woman, but Harshman had a point. “They chose silence on a couple of different occasions and weren’t going to talk until they were ready.”
—
“You would stand by and watch us die then? Is that just? How is that moral? I’ve heard these words bandied about by you, but you speak as a shark who promises friendship.”
“We are no sharks. Even if the Federation agreed to give you weapons, it would not change anything.” T’Sheng pointed out. “You would fight, and you would be eradicated within minutes. The sheer savagery of the Pyrryx would wipe you out. We need a solution with more finesse. A solution where your voice can continue to be heard.”
“If we cannot protect them, and there’s to be no partnership of forces— not for advisement or for defense and communications— what possible hope can the Korinn have to protect themselves?” Even Gordon came to his feet to pace and manage his frustration with the futility of these talks.
—
“I don’t suppose you’d want to spearhead a planet wide evacuation, Admiral?” Gordon knew it was a low blow, as Brigit had been instrumental in pulling out of the Romulan evacuation aid after Mars. She’d been against aid even before the Mars tragedy, which had only justified her position on the matter.
She glared at him. “Let’s move on, Ambassador.”
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