To the Left we have a Stool...

Posted on Tue Jul 26th, 2022 @ 9:59am by Petty Officer 3rd Class Sam Saghir & Lieutenant JG Nayisa Wrea

Mission: Shore Leave
Location: USS Athena, Intelligence Suite
Timeline: Between Missions
1792 words - 3.6 OF Standard Post Measure

While the intel offices were nothing new to Nayisa, there was always something exciting to her about seeing a new posting's department. There was always some small feature that made each department unique, and it felt like a game to figure out what that quirk was. It kept her on her toes to stay on the lookout for the smallest of details, if anything. It was a little trickier to find the offices in the ship's deck listing, but she was able to locate it and soon enough found herself inside the physical location of the department. She took a good look around, taking in where everything was and who was there. Perhaps it was because the ship was on shore leave, but the offices felt... bare? She expected a few more people. Nayisa looked around for another moment, then turned, only to dodge as she nearly bumped into someone. "Oops, sorry!" She said.

Sam stood, his legs cramped from far too many hours in the Jeffries tubes behind the intel suite working on the imaging software upgrades. Starfleet had of course provided a standard notice outlining the upgrades, but the login parameters had all been off. Lieutenant P'rel's operational and personal access logins had somehow been switched, and it had thrown the permission parameters to hell, causing him to take many times longer than he had bargained for. As one leg out of the tube propelled him upwards, he veered sideways to avoid an accidental elbow to his face and instead landed firmly on his butt. He looked up to see an obscenely beautiful woman with striking silver hair looking down at him. She was a gorgeous at Lieutenant Keating, but was wearing an intelligence officers uniform. "Th th that's an....that's improvement then." he stammered, with red flushed cheeks, before realising he hadn't actually yet asked her if she was Lieutenant P'rel's replacement. A brief pang of guilt sucker punched him right in the stomach; P'rel had only been dead a week or so and for all her faults she was a fellow officer and despite all his private hopes, he had never seriously wanted her to die.

"An improvement, you say?" Nayi asked with a little smile, offering a hand to the person she almost elbowed. The guy who fell out of the Jefferies tubes looked... well, nerdy, like the kind of guy who spends his days looking at a computer. Kind of cute, too, in a nerdy way, especially with that glaring blush lighting up his cheeks.

"I uhh er...oh." Sam stuttered, taking the hand offered him and standing up, forgetting to let go of the hand as he took in the striking woman in front of him. He noticed the single collar pip and regretted again not being an officer, seemingly every beautiful woman on the ship was a commissioned officer and therefore beyond his reach. "I m m mean umm....are you the replacement for L Lieutenant P'rel?".

"For..." Nayisa remembered from the files she read that P'rel was the former department head. The details to what caused her death were still hard to find, however, but that never stopped her before. "Oh, uh, no. At least, not to my knowledge. I transferred as an infiltration specialist." She didn't make a move to release her hand from his awestruck grasp as she watched him stare at her, instead letting the weight of his hand rest in hers. The poor boy was acting like he had never seen a woman before. In fairness, she knew she was a unique sight, with her light hair and very dark eyes, but it amused her sometimes to see how people reacted. Catching his gaze, she gave him a friendly smile as her eyes bore into his. "I'm Nayisa Wrea. And you are...?"

"I...don't...know...." Sam barely managed to form, his hand suddenly feeling as if it were encased is plasma as the stunning Ensign didn't let go, and her eyes seemed to physically grab hold of his own and stop them looking anywhere else but deeply back in to them. "Sam" he squeaked, his slowly returning self awareness informing him that he had by now turned as red as a Bussard collector.

A moment of silence blanketed them as Nayisa held his gaze. Internally, Nayisa was savoring the effect she was having on this poor man. It was euphoric, watching someone get so captivated by her that they forget how to speak. The breathless gaze, the heat coming off his cheeks that was probably not imagined, his inability to break the eye contact that held him with an iron grasp... the jitters in her stomach felt like they were giving Nayisa new life. She was surprised at how little effort it took to get him to melt into a breathless mess. Sam had to be a desk guy, because he would not last in any other position like... this. The thought gave Nayisa the devious temptation to keep this up and see how fast she could make him faint, but morals decided to step in. Damn morals, always ruining the moment.

"Sam," she repeated, finally breaking the silence. Nayi gently slid her hand out from under his, loosening her metaphorical grip on his soul. "It's a pleasure to meet you!" Her tone had changed to something more cheerful, as if the moment of ensnaring his entire being didn't just happen. "If you aren't busy, could I convince you to show me around the department?"

"Oh I..." Sam was reasonably sure his legs were about to give way if he attempted to step anywhere; how he was still standing with shaking knees was anyone's guess. "Um..well...there's um...there's the uhhh.." his eyes searched the room for something - anything - which he could refer to so. Something interesting. Something which highlighted he knew what he was talking about; that he was confident; smart. "Stool".

Nayisa followed his gaze to what indeed was a stool, standing alone next to a work station, before turning her attention back to Sam. Was he like this with all women, or just her? She gave him a polite chuckle, "what a lovely stool that is. Is that your work station?"

Smiling with a dumb, vacant, smile back at the ensign; Sam stumbled over the response; "Oh y - y - y- ye...well, um no...". He looked around the room, anywhere to avoid her gaze, and was fairly certain the environmental controls had tremendously risen the temperature. This wasn't going well, he concluded.

There was a pause before Nayisa laughed. Not a side-gripping one, but a gentle one that recognized the man's awkward situation. "Sam, it's ok. I'm not going to bite your head off," she assured. The man was embarrassingly easy to read, with the flush still on his cheeks and the almost nervous shifting as he looked anywhere but directly at her. Usually, she'd get a glass of supercooled water from the replicator and watch it turn to ice as she dumped it on the head of the infatuated, but this was his first impression of her and she didn't want to ruin it just yet.

“Oh well, yes, I mean no, no no of course not” Sam blathered. “So you you’re erm….you don’t uhhmmm fit in…” he quickly realised now that sounded, he was trying to convey that her attractiveness was far from the ‘grey man’ that was often sought in intelligence. “Blend in! Blend. In. I mean. I mean you…you’re uhm…..” how was he going to ‘stunning, professionally he wondered….?

Nayisa could guess what he wanted to ask, but it was so much fun messing with him. That inner voice of unreason telling her to ramp up her efforts was winning. Leaning in, she grabbed his eye contact with her own again. "I'm what? Old?" She was used to the assumption that she was at least twenty years older because of her hair, but she did sometimes take advantage of that to get what she wanted. Nayi leaned back and crossed her arms with a mock huff. "Us older women can be in Starfleet too, you know."

"I uhm...." Sam went red hot in his neck, and felt as though he had large beads of nervous sweat forming in his collar. "N n no...." he mumbled, "I mean....I mean you stand out....good...." he finished, barely making even the most basic grammatical sense.

How much more of this would make him faint? Nayisa wondered, watching Sam practically have a stroke. Watching him sweat, the faint line of moisture on his collar a sign that it wasn't just a figurative statement, she cracked a smile, "I stand out, huh? What has your attention?"

His brow erupted with sweat and he couldn't help but recall his counter-interrogation training, sat beneath a holographic Cardassian looming over him with questions of increasing intensity. It hadn't been a pleasant day, and if the interrogator had stopped moving back and forth in front of his field of vision then Sam could have probably very well have just told them how many lights he saw, instead of his view being constantly obscured back and forth. Sam stood, however, speechless; Don't look down...don't look down... he told himself.

It was a losing battle to keep the amusement off of Nayisa's face, a wide but silly grin slowly creeping across her lips as she stole his gaze yet again. At this point, Nayisa was starting to speculate where Sam was in the path to fainting. He was obviously sweating, and the faint but repetitive tremor in the fabric of his uniform suggested he was nervous and probably close to feeling pins and needles in his fingers. Was he hearing that dull ring in his ears yet? She could tell his heart was racing, both by the "red alert" blush across his face and by the very subtle movement of his collar by the artery in his throat.

"Well," Nayisa almost whispered. "If you come up with an answer, let me know." Gently raising a hand, she gave Sam's red and sweaty forehead the lightest of taps with two fingers. "You probably know where to find me," she added with a wink, before turning to go explore more of the department.

All that escaped Sam was a pained and somewhat raspy squeak, as he tried desperately to form words. What words, he had no idea, but some words at least would have done. On the verge of physically collapsing, he watched as the bewitching Ensign left the suite, and left him stood alone in a damp uniform clinging to him with nervous sweat...

 

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