In the Running: Rough Cut

Posted on 10 Mar 2022 @ 3:41pm by Sylvie Hardt - Surrat Gallery & Yuliette Marayan

Mission: M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Surrat Gallery
Timeline: following 'In the Running: Something in my Eye"
872 words - 1.7 OF Standard Post Measure

There were a lot of people in the Kiosk center, Yuliette thought, many of them from her own redirected flight. On the one hand all of those people could serve as cover, allowing her to blend in. On the other she disliked the idea of being crowded and waiting to be served while standing in lines just outside of the Promenade Security Office. She decided to kill time until there was a shorter wait for assistance.

As she continued walking she watched what amounted to a street fair in the center lanes, surrounded by joyful colors and banners declaring Obsidian Command's grand reopening. Children ran around screeching happily and climbing play features while people ate from a diversity of food carts with various ethnic offerings. Yuliette felt her heart pang at a bajoran cart serving hasperat. She stopped to order one for herself hoping it would assuage the pain. But eating with her current knotted stomach just made it sour. When she couldn't finish the roll, there was no one else to offer her unfinished food to. She looked at it sadly before throwing it into a reclaimer bin and brushing the crumbs off her fingers.

It was no good trying to look back, she decided. She had to move on. Her eyes caught sight of cardassian signage. Since Lanis had been teaching her to read cardassian, it seemed to leap out at her in electric colors anytime she saw the forms now.

Surrat Gallery
Contemporary Fine Art

The secondary lettering in standard was more subdued but confirmed her reading of the cardassian letter forms, especially as she was uncertain of the forms spelling out “contemporary”. It hadn’t exactly been on the starter word lists Lanis had given her.

Yuliette paused inside of the entry door and looked side to side. Standing in the threshold, she had the big, open air sound of the mall passage to her back, while an enticing bass woodwind instrument of some type set the mood before her. The center of the gallery was moodily dim, which made the gallery lighting over the artwork seem like stage lighting on various characters.

Yuliette began her tour on the right, her curiosity drawn by a display of figures hewn from some sort of modern material that reminded Yuliette of the frosted translucent architecture she had last seen in the Rotunda Fortuna of the Zodiac. The figures were solid, but the material made them seem simultaneously ghostly, and overlaid with one another as she walked around the pedestal they were posed on. In places the forms were highly technically detailed and finished to a polish, while in other parts it seemed as if the artist had just begun to hew in long, radiated lines, or hadn’t even begun to carve from the cast block.

“Welcome to the Gallery.” A silken tenor greeted Yuliette. She jumped a little as if she were caught at something and turned around to face a much taller cardassian woman. She marveled for a moment as the taller woman was… also likely only half cardassian. She knew so few cardassians throughout her life, and even fewer like herself, mixed race. And this woman had poise that Yuliette knew from her lifetime before her own exile. The kind of poise that came with money and pedigree. And her lean, commanding figure was topped with hair so white that Yuliette was doubly sure she couldn’t be fully cardassian, even apart from her slightly softened ridges. She was too young to have caught silver hair by means of age. The taller woman smiled gently as the smaller appeared frozen, her eyes dodging around taking in the measure of her. she folded both hands, one clasping the other loosely in front of her, causing a fine bracelet to dip and swing gently, playing in the soft light it caught and twinkled in. “This is a very new piece. I commissioned it from a refugee by the name of Dervan Telensca. His skill in subtractive figure work with the laser chisel is well trained.”

“It’s unfinished.”

The silver haired woman laughed a silvered laugh. “It is intentional, I assure you. Seeing as his own journey is yet unknown, in his current expressions none of his figures are fully revealed from the medium.”

Yuliette looked back at the partly freed forms and wasn’t sure if the concept was a cheap cop out to pass off half finished work, or more true than she cared to admit she understood…

She took a couple steps back to the entryway.

“Leaving so soon?” Quested the taller woman, inviting with a stage-acting gesture of her slender fingers further into the gallery chambers. “There is much more to contemplate.”

“No that’s… it’s alright. Thank you.” Yuliette resettled the shoulder strap of her travel bag. She couldn’t afford to be distracted. Maybe the lines at the Kiosk had gone down by now and she could arrange to get back on track to her new life.

Yuliette could feel the other woman’s eyes at her back as she left and she caught the silvered voice in compassionate bemusement claiming her to be, “...a nervous little hekant, that one...”