Milk Run: Warm Up the Car

Posted on 21 Jan 2022 @ 4:49pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Commander Bruce Kensforth

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Obsidian Command, Medical Ward
Timeline: MD11 0915HRS
1388 words - 2.8 OF Standard Post Measure

Shoulders and necks and caps, all in myriad color, form, and variety, each from far and wide on far flung alien worlds. The rows and rows had a kind of cluttered symmetry, like a crowd— all different yet gathered in one purpose, one united cause. Each bottled cream, tincture, supplement…

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Calliope just stared at the nightstand, allowing her vision to go in and out of focus. It used to be just one medicinal object on her bed side table, ever since highschool. Just the day’s hypo. As she slid out from the sheets and put her feet on the floor, she pressed cool fingers to the back of her neck. Just where she would have applied the hypo. With one slow exhale, she imagined the hiss…and then let her hand fall again.

Aggressively she started opening the series of supplements, shaking out the required number of pills, then replacing it and going to the next. They’d increased them since the hair loss started which was indicative of … something else the docs said was happening with nutrient absorption or hormonal production of something— thyroid, enzymes, plasma, endocrine something. She hated this med-ward overnight bullshit. She should be home with Lance instead of the follow ups, monitoring like she was some kind of… untrustworthy… addict.

Again, she rubbed her neck with one hand while she looked down at the assortment of shapes and colors in her other open palm and then closed her fingers around them. Calliope took her fist full of pills over to the replicator.

“Glass of water, ” she said through a throat of morning gravel, knowing it wasn’t going to manufacture a glass glass. It came in a standard plastic formed bottle. She knocked the pills back a couple at a time until she was half out of the water. Although she was supposed to take some of them with food and some of them with out and some of them this or that many hours apart, after trying to schedule it all out like it was some sort of complex maintenance task she’d just decided she didn’t care to go to all that trouble of making her day roll on some kind of timer anchored to her supplements. In the end, she’d opted for taking them once in the morning, once roughly in the middle, and once at night. If she happened to remember. It was better than not taking them at all.

Calliope rolled her head side to side to loosen her neck and shoulders. She could already feel some of the pills hitting her stomach hard and revisited the replicator again for one of the preset breakfasts. It made the orderly happy when he saw the replicator had generated her a couple of meals and she left him some dishes to gather. She just took the toast to start with, scattering crumbs as she stuffed it down and gathered an armful of lotions and serums she’d gotten from Jeestroyt’s recommendations.

The little bathroom had become a cluttered spa over the past week. Aside from all of the products, it was filled with heating and steaming units, misters and diffusers, specialized “healing lamps”, and patented oscillating cellular regeneration floor mats with magnetized grounding factors. Calliope was willing to try anything. She gave herself a facial to try to feed her much thinned and anemic looking skin, and then peeled out of her night clothes to treat the rest of the freckled external organ as far as she could reach, right down to the spaces between her toes. After strapping on protective eye goggles, Calliope flopped back on one of the good-vibes floor mats under the reddish lighting of a hyper healing emmenator.

Arms apart from her greasy sides, hands palm-up like she was forming some kind of prayer stance on her back, she chuckled at herself just staring through the goggles, looking beside and beyond the angled lamp’s matrix and regarding the much familiar vent in the ceiling. Somehow it felt like a year had gone by since this whole thing had knocked her on her butt.

Her memory played back the CMO from the Paracelsus telling her “You’re not a kid anymore Cal” any time she had gone headfirst into some mission. Doctor Dan Ryder wasn’t much older than she was, and both she and Dan had been in their prime— were still in their prime!— but the way Dan always talked it was as though he wanted to apply for the senior discount. Calliope had been fairly certain he’d been born a curmudgeon. “You should leave the running around to the kids” he’d admonish. But now she knew why he’d always been trying to hold her back. It wasn’t just his innate pessimism. He’d been trying to detox her without her knowing, watching for signs of systemic complications. All the bitching and moaning about playing it safe and slowing down? He had just been trying to tell her without telling her.

“I feel great.” Calliope retorted up at the ceiling, tilting her chin up further— “Age is just a number.”

After a while of reflecting— or absorbing or whatever it was she was doing in all the magnetic fields and photon particles— she decided she really did feel better than most mornings. Good enough to finish her breakfast and go on a little mission, take her mind off the healing effort. She could take a shuttle down to the surface and look around for that cantina she’d heard about. The one that knew how to contact a good bush guide to work with the Marines. She wouldn’t even be gone for long. A couple of hours, tops. She’d be back in time for her lunch pills.

The recent memory of Lieutenant Winslow’s very serious stare over coffee at the cafe just the day before gave her pause. He’d been trying to admonish her against pushing herself over the edge. And he hadn’t let her brush it off either. There was that instance when Theo had to step in to keep her from being backhanded in the Kalaran marketplace. Probably she shouldn’t go it alone on the surface. There was no utility in being defiant to try and prove herself with the locals. She didn’t need to start any new trouble to add to the pyre of her career. So it had just as well be someone of the male persuasion so as to ‘respect’ the regressive Kalaran culture. But who was going to have the time to kick around the dusty cobblestone streets with her? Calliope absently twisted her necklace in her fingers as she considered. There was one who came to mind.

Well, maybe… as long as he wasn’t too busy running more flight quals or flushing pirates from cave-pocked asteroids.

Sitting up again, she stretched out one hand to find her communicator among her balled up clothing and pressed it to get the little questing chirp.

“Zahn to Commander Kensforth— hey Bruce, do you have any plans today?”

“No… but last time I said that to you, I spent the afternoon running from pirates in a runabout,” Bruce’s reply came back over the comm. “So unless you can promise the same, I’m afraid I’m busy.”

Calliope chuckled as she rolled over to sun the other side. “I just wanna call in that drink you offered at a cantina I heard about planetside. If my sources are good, there should be trouble.”

“Well. If you’re asking me if I’d rather have a drink or read another departmental report complaining about being stuck on this station while we refit, then I’ll meet you in the shuttlebay,” Bruce laughed back, tossing the data PaDD in his hand onto the couch like so much garbage. It could definitely wait until he got back.

“Give me thirty minutes.”

“I’ll get the shuttle warmed up…” Bruce trailed off. He couldn’t completely explain it, but having a task just got his blood moving. He was ready to be off the couch, off this damned refit and out doing what he loved doing most. Flying.