When all you have is...

Posted on Tue May 5th, 2026 @ 5:18am by Ensign Ziahli Lorel & Dominic Lowell & Lieutenant JG Nayisa Wrea & Jerant van Rijn
Edited on on Tue May 5th, 2026 @ 5:18am

Mission: Aeon's End
Location: Mess hall
Timeline: MD3
2677 words - 5.4 OF Standard Post Measure

The mess was packed with people, when Jerant scurried inside. Not only to find some semblance of refuge from the invaders, but also in the hope of finding something to eat. When it was finally his turn to receive a bite of food, the Betazoid noticed the man behind the counter wasn't having any kind of help and the line was only growing longer. "Need a hand back there?" He asked as dark eyes studied the man. "I'm not much of a chef, but there's nothing wrong with my hands. I can help serve it out."

If he was honest, which at a surface level at least seemed to be his preference, Nic really had no idea what was going on. Certainly, he had picked up the general vibe of shit-hitting-fan and, with a pragmatic fortitude that favoured optimism against all odds, had drawn the conclusion that this change in fortune had made everyone a bit too busy to spell things out to a lowly bartender. Still, it would have been nice to have some vague sort of idea of why the lounge was now off-limits and, subsequently, why he had been reassigned to shoveling potato salad onto trays.

"Grab a spoon," he offered with a wry smile. "It's pretty much potatoes and pasta, though that might be vegetable curry." He pointed his own serving ladle at a non-descript puddle of aromatic gloop. "It's a very slop-themed menu."

Jerant chuckled as he walked around and picked up a serving ladle. "That's a bit of a theme with service lanes isn't it? I remember a time when I visited my best friend at the academy and the mess served something similar looking, in terms of gloop and slop." He dished up a plate and handed it out. "Then again better this than no food right? Personal replicators seem to be out of order, and I doubt engineering can spare anyone to come fix them. And as a civvy, there's only so many places I can go to help. They don't even tell me what's going on, but I got this general sense of unease. People are scared, that's one of the main emotions flying around." Dark eyes settled on his companion. "Whatever it is, we're probably safe here."

There was hesitation to the way Nic screwed up his nose, a partial, sympathetic wince for being the harbinger of bad news. Of course, it wasn't his style to be entirely cynical, but given what he'd gleaned of the circumstances from standing very quietly in the background whilst more important people spoke freely about things that were probably meant for more confidential locations, it seemed highly optimistic that anywhere on board could be classified as safe at the moment. Safer, perhaps. Safe-ish.

"So," he leaned into after serving the next in line, "you, uh, don't know anything about what's going on here?"

Jerant shook his head. "Not beyond that we're somewhere in a grim future and that just off our bow is the tower us future version of the Athena. Starfleet and the Federation are mostly gone, from what I understand." He splashed a spoonful of food into a bowl and handed it to the next crewman in line. "And we're at red alert, so something is definitely going on," he added, pointing the serving spoon at the ominously flashing red light which sprang to life only seconds before. "And as everyone is doing their job, so are we." He managed an encouraging smile at his companion. "Maybe the most important jobs of all, we're feeding the crew. Though I do wonder if my best friend is alright, I'm usually assigned to him but lately he seems to manage well enough without me and I can't attend sessions anyway unless really absolutely necessary."

The Betazoid shook his head. "It's good that he doesn't need me, and fortunately I have linguistic projects and other stuff in OPS. Except right now, because as a civvy I'm not needed, apparently." He handed out another bowl of food, keeping up the feigned smile to pretend there was nothing wrong at all. He staggered and spilled the hot broth across the counter and himself when suddenly the whole ship seemed to vibrate violently. "What was that!" He exclaimed, tilting his head a fraction to listen to faraway sounds. He dropped the spoon and grabbed the counter to steady himself as a wave of terror washed over him. "Something is coming," he whispered, dark eyes now fixed on the door, ignoring the burning sensation of the hot spill across his shirt.

Whatever response Nic had been working on was lost to the stumble sideways and the inevitable sacrifice of an entire bowlful of stew, most of which landed on his shoe. There was a confusing moment, where a burnt foot seemed enough of a situation to warrant protest before it became immediately apparent that it was the least of any of their concerns. Still brandishing his serving spoon, Nic studied the Betazoid's expression long enough to get a general gist of the telepath's sincerity and then hobbled slightly as a surreptitious attempt to dislodge a piece of carrot from his sock accompanied the sudden frenzy of trying to find something better than a spoon to arm himself with.

Snatching up a frypan seemed cliche, at best, but brandishing it did permit an odd sense of satisfaction.

"That's the intruder alert! Everyone move to the back of the room!"

Nic couldn't see who it was stepping up to issue commands, he was only pleased to be rid of the necessity himself. The ensuing clatter of tables being flipped into makeshift barricades made it nearly impossible to hear anything from the other side of the door, but it did leave him acutely aware that the pair of them were fast becoming the first obstacle to anything deciding to bust through. Slowly, he sank down behind the serving table, just about managing not to kneel in a puddle of spilt food.

"Bit late to hope it's just someone coming to complain about the potato salad, I suppose?"

Still holding the ladle in one hand, Jerant followed Nic's example and grabbed a pan as well. "Who knows," he answered, hoping to make it sound light. "But doubt it. Whatever it is, I can't sense it. My hearing is good, but not very sensitive, I'm a Betazoid, not a Vulcan." He gritted his teeth, closing his eyes to hopefully hear better. "There's an odd hum that wasn't there before," he reported, "but it's not something I've heard before. Do you hear it too?"

If Nic was honest, life on a starship was full of weird sounds he wasn't used to. It had taken time to adjust to an environment where a constant regulation of systems meant there was always a steady background thrum to account for. It was equally as difficult to pinpoint any specific sound when the room was full of furniture thumps and sotto voices that kept interrupting his train of thought, but after a gormless squint resulting in a grimace of uncertainty, he did eventually have to concede that the Betazoid had a point.

"Bit of buzz, maybe. Sounds kind of like a massage chair," he pondered, which seemed, all things considered, unlikely. The thud of a weighted impact against the closed doors also didn't seem large enough to be furniture, and the fact it was immediately followed by a barrage of repetitious banging was far from therapeutic also.

"We should move," Nic hissed, pointing behind Jerant to suggest waddling behind the serving table to head around the corner.

Jerant nodded in understanding and agreement. "Is there a service hatch that we can escape through?" He glanced back over his shoulder as the pair hastily crawled away in the indicated direction. "Whatever it is, it won't take long for them to bust through the door. Look at those dents!" He could sense the fear from the others in the room, who were hiding behind the furniture and it echoed his own. "I don't want to wait and find out," he whispered, "you know this place better than I do, is there another way out?"

"Er."

There was value, Nic supposed, in having a final destination in mind when developing an exit plan. It hadn't always been his strategy but, in this case, he decided to humour the other man and hesitated long enough to flit through his meagre knowledge of the space to toss up a suggestion.

"I think there's a service hatch in the prep area?" A jab towards the wall behind with his frypan was meant to indicate the room adjacent, whose door was around the corner Nic was very keen to start making his way towards.

The Betazoid nodded, gesturing ahead. "Let's go then," he suggested and started to follow the other. He hopes those present in the room would notice their trajectory and follow on their own accord because there was no time to flag for their attention, nor did he want to draw unnecessary attention to themselves. "We'll send help for the rest of them," he said, more as a promise to himself than a comment to Nic. "When we get out of this mess, and I mean by that, when this is all over, we should have a drink or something... Sometime." He followed Nic into the hatch, feeling very cramped in the tight space. "I'll close the hatch behind me," he added in a whisper, "continue crawling and I'll follow."

It had been a marvellous idea right up to the point where the issue of lighting became impossible to ignore. It made sense, Nic supposed, that the internal infrastructure was drawing only necessary power; there probably wasn't a lot of need to light up a bunch of jeffries tubes when there was nobody inside them, but since that then required the use of head-lamps to compliment the dull ambience of the emergency lighting, the fact that he didn't have one handy made groping around in the dark a little problematic.

He'd already headbutted a conduit; the less said about that, the better.

"Do we have any idea which way we should be going," he whispered backwards, "Or is there a way we shouldn't be going? They don't drop these things out in the garbage chute, right?"

"Not that I'm aware of," Jerant whispered back. "The only thing I know is that we have to get away from those things, other than that your guess is as good as mine." He paused. "There's someone up ahead," he whispered urgently, "I can sense someone, but I don't know who."

A couple turns away, Nayisa held out a hand to pause Zia. She just heard something. A thump, maybe? It was definitely something hitting a part of the tube. Shortly after the red alert had gone off, she and Zia left the section of tube they were working in to try and get... well, elsewhere. "Do you sense anything?" She asked quietly, turning her head slightly.

It was a question Zia had been asking herself for the past few minutes. On any given day, the crew's presence was a familiar background hum, a dynamic ebb and flow of moving parts; psionic shadow-puppetry she had called it when trying to explain to Kevan what living with telepathy was like. There were no distinct shapes unless she chose to focus but the movement was there, distinct enough that if it ever decreased or increased enough, it became an instant distraction.

Ever since arriving in a timestream that wasn't strictly their own, those shapes had become distorted, twisted and elongated just enough that even when she tried to tune in, the results were slightly warped. Kevan had asked if it was like trying to see things that were underwater, and Zia had conceded it was an apt enough analogy without really being convinced it was anything like it. Perhaps it was similar to what people who needed corrective eyeware experienced, that vague sense of blurriness that made it harder to distinguish details.

She was relatively sure whoever was just up ahead was familiar but it gave the Betazoid no confidence to admit she wasn't sure. Zia, if nothing else, was almost always willing to back herself.

"There's someone ahead," she confirmed, already frowning at her inability to pinpoint exactly who.

At least the response confirmed that the noise wasn't the ship buckling in on itself. With confirmation, Nayisa moved forward again, eventually turning a corner.

As she turned the corner she came almost nose to nose with Jerant, who breathed an audible sigh of relief. "The way we came is unsafe," he told them, the mess is getting overrun."

"Who is it?"

The voice from behind was slightly muffled, which given the cramped confines and relative positions, gave the unfortunate impression that the person had run face-first into Jerant's backside. As it happened, this wasn't the case and, instead, Nic was partway through trying to pull his apron over his head since the damn thing was creating movement issues. For a split second, he paused, with both his head and his arm poking through the hole only meant for one of them.

It was alarmingly similar to the first time he'd met these women.

"There are giant bug things!" He turned, attempting to indicate the space behind him with the flail of a trapped arm. "At least, that's what it sounded like."

Jerant nodded in confirmation, shifting as much to the side as possible to allow Dominic to see who they had encountered. "I haven't seen them," he reported, "but I heard them too. And what's worse, I can't sense them. As if there's no mind in them or something."

Nayisa nodded. That chattering sound had been echoing through the tubes, along with an occasional faint whisper of something that sounded like someone's day becoming their last. "Yeah, that's the vibe here too. We've only heard them."

"But how do we combat them," Jerant mused, "and what do they want anyway..." His voice trailed off as he listened. "We can't stay here and we can't go back to the mess. Any suggestions on where we should go?" As a civilian, and non-combatant, he was at a loss. "I doubt there's any reasoning with them," he added under his breath, "no doubt that option has long been exhausted by those in command."

"Well this isn't somewhere to get stuck if they decide to investigate." The pragmatic voice of reason from behind Nayisa was accompanied by Zia's deep frown. Jerant was technically correct; the intruders weren't transmitting on a psionic-spectrum that allowed for easy detection but the Betazoid wasn't entirely convinced she couldn't sense them at all. It was an irritation at best, and one that was well on the way to giving her a headache. "We should get to the brig." This suggestion was made directly to the Intel officer. "Providing they cooperate, the internal forcefield generators are some of the strongest on board."

"Lock ourselves in?" Jerant queried curiously, "or find a way to lock those things out a section at the time."

Despite everything, Zia offered her fellow telepath a circumspect shrug and answered pragmatically, "We need to get there first. After that, I guess we just improvise."

Nic, who had been struggling for the last few minutes with a sneeze that refused to disappear despite a valiant effort to surpress it, stretched his face out yet again to stifle the urge and then realised the direction Zia was talking about was directly behind him. With a glance over his shoulder, and realising there was not room enough to maneuver before the next junction, Nic took the moment in his stride and started crawling...backwards.

"If a bug bites my butt," he cautioned Nayisa, dubiously next in line and left to crawl face-to-face with the jovial bartender, "you're all legally obligated to remember me as brave, handsome and devastatingly delicious."