Outsiders

Posted on 23 Apr 2017 @ 8:51pm by Lieutenant JG Akuhl K'Tel

750 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: General Sim Postings
Location: USS Tomcat - Lounge
Timeline: Current

[ON]

It took Akuhl only twenty minutes to get to the lounge with only two wrong turns along the way, and she wondered if perhaps she was starting to learn her way around the ship.

Pleased with her success, she decided to push her luck a little further and ordered a cup of bahgol. The drink came a few moments later, she took a sip and smiled. The CMO was right, the replicators were good at producing Klingon food.

She turned and her eyes swept over the lounge, looking to see if any of the other Klingon crewmembers were there and was rewarded with seeing one of them.

There was one, a male, but he was different than most other Klingons she had seen. His hair was short and well-groomed, and he was wearing clothing of a distinctly human style. He sipped a drink as he looked over something on his padd.

A burst of noise diverted her attention.

She turned to see several Klingons swagger the lounge, and if she had to guess they were the fighter pilots her supervisor had mentioned in their first meeting. They walked into the lounge as if it was their personal property and their voices were full of loud bravado.

If she was expecting them to greet her, she was sorely disappointed as they made their way towards the other Klingon. He had hunched his shoulders in a defensive manner, but then they slumped as the pilots approached.

They surrounded the table on all sides, and the one facing the sitter leant in and began talking to him, but the words were spoken too softly to hear.

She looked around the lounge and saw the other patrons making a very good effort at looking anywhere else.

She got up and started making her way to the table, but then the pilot doing the talking took the sitter’s drink and threw it in his face. He and the others then swaggered back out of the lounge.

Talking resumed in the lounge, though she could still detect some residual tension in the words. She picked up some napkins from the bar and went over to the sitter.

“You all right?” she asked, handing him the napkins.

He looked at her suspiciously for a moment, then took the napkins and began cleaning himself up.

“I’m fine, Ma’am,” he said.

“How did you know—“

“Since there are only six Klingon's on board this ship, word spreads fast when another one joins the crew,” he said. “You’re the doctor, huh? These next four years are going to feel like forty.”

“Why, because of those pilots?” she asked. “You know, maybe if—“

“If I stood up to them like a proper Klingon warrior, they would leave me alone, right?” he snapped. “When I was three years old, I was found by a human salvage ship among the ruins of a Klingon freighter. They contacted Kronos, and you know what the response was? There was no passenger manifest list, so as far as they were concerned, they couldn’t properly identify me and therefore didn’t want me back.

“Fine, if they didn’t want anything to do with me, I wanted nothing to do with them,” he continued bitterly. “I took a human name and was raised by a human as one of their own. I have more in common with them than I do with those four idiots who just left, and if they can’t understand that, that’s their problem, not mine.”

“There’s plenty of Klingons who aren’t warriors,” she said. “Those pilots want to see that you at least have a warrior’s spirit. Someone who won’t even defend himself can’t be trusted to defend others, and that’s what they want to see, that you’re willing to do that. If you show them that, their treatment of you will not be as harsh.”

“I’m an engineer,” he said. “I’m good at it and I like doing it. Any idiot can kill and destroy, it takes a lot more to fix things and build them. I’ve got no interest in learning to be like them, and if you can’t see that, then we got nothing to talk about. See you around, Ma’am.”

He stormed out of the lounge.

She looked after him and sighed.

[OFF]

Lt. Jg Akhul K'Tel
Ship Doctor
USS Tomcat

PO3 Ramon Machado [PNPC: K'Tel]
Engineer
USS Tomcat

 

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