Idioms, Unwanted Change and One Epic Party

Posted on Sat Jul 6th, 2024 @ 11:00pm by Commander Tyrion Flynn

646 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Mission 0: In the beginning....
Location: Various
Timeline: MD 1 - 0700

"Tecumseh ... Tecumseh ... Tecumseh ..." Tyrion muttered as he found an open console and dropped lightly into a seat. His expression would have done a Vulcan proud. An idiom he'd picked up since joining Starfleet usually referring to the fact that he had a 'good poker face' and that was another idiom. Both meant his inner landscape was not easily read by others and apparently, that made people uncomfortable. Course, he had found in the latter case that they always wanted to relieve him of something he owned. It was, he thought, an uncomfortable truth that however well you learned a language, it was their idiomatic expressions, born of culture, that proved the hardest.

He found the ship in Starfleet's registry and scanned what information was generally available. Ascension class. Hauled out and readied with a three hundred day delivery schedule. Tyrion sat, leaning his elbow against the console, rubbed his hand along his jaw, and read. Old was something he, as a Mesaaini, understood quite well. His people held antiquity in reverence but, in his opinion, that didn't generally apply to something that was supposed to keep you safe while you were hurtling through the vacuum of space.

Truth was, he didn't want to go, but Captain Deschaine had been insistent on that. Something about birds leaving nests. Another idiom. This time it meant that his time on the Steady was over and it bothered him just as much as being told he had to leave the Faraday. The whole idea of moving on bothered him but ultimately, Starfleet would have its way.

He felt a pair of large hands clamp down on his shoulders, hard, and found himself grinning as he turned.

"Party time," Lyle said, grinning cheerfully. "We're going to send you off in style."

Another idiom. This one he didn't know but he had a feeling it would involve something wild. And that, he had no problem with at all.

[Twenty-Four Hours Later]

He sat back, eyes closed, and let the memories of those last hours wash over him. Laughter and memories, the good ones, the embarrassing ones. Joke gifts and one serious one, a picture of the ship, signed by the crew, with a tiny piece of metal, from that explosion where he'd helped with the evacuation. A piece of the Steady to carry with him always.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the space frame cradling the USS Tecumseh. Statistics flowed through his mind. The Tecumseh was a battle carrier, massive in size, with the capacity for well over two thousand souls to live on board. It made his previous vessels look like those tiny boats that kids like to float on the water. He would swim under them, now and again, and want to come up through them, miming a massive sea monster, but well, he didn't know children well enough, having never been around them, and decided to err on the side of not causing trauma. Massive in size. 170 plus meters in height, 600 meters wide, and over 1400 meters in length. His bright blue gaze, holding within their depths the oceans he loved, traveled from bottom to top and thought, 46 decks.

I wonder, he thought, if security is going to be running the decks the way they used to on the Steady, and grinned at the idea of how exhausted they'd be by the time they reached the 46th. He knew though that while he wouldn't run them, he would visit them all, at least the ones that were habitable. From somewhere ahead of him, he heard the pilot announce their arrival and readied himself for departure.

He knew the on-boarding checklist, remembered it still though he'd only done it twice before. "Let me stay this time," he muttered in the old tongue, the one that Starfleet's translators didn't know, "Fathers above hear my prayer, let me stay this time."

 

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