Bit of a Wander
Posted on Mon Jun 16th, 2025 @ 1:46pm by Lieutenant JG Elen Rell & Captain Niun Standing Bear
3,599 words; about a 18 minute read
Mission:
Prologue
Location: Main Engineer
Timeline: 2388
Learning the ship was an Azhadi thing; living your life in service to aliens meant rapid learning -- their technology, their language, their vessels. It had been ingrained in him from his first days and while he hadn't had a chance to serve his I'mai (cursed be her for her treachery) for very long, the habit was already deeply ingrained. Some said that the Azhadi were born with the knowing of certain things but this was a mystery it had not been given to him to know.
And so, he wandered -- when not on duty, when he couldn't sleep, when the inactivity of certain portions of his position threatened to make him crazy with the need to just ... move ..., he wandered. He entered Main Engineering and stopped outside of the door's sensor range so that it didn't keep opening and closing in a vain attempt to anticipate his next move.
Elen was elbow-deep in a diagnostic. Not literally since that would have meant opening up a housing unit and shoving her forearms into something not exactly humanoid-friendly. But she was out in Main Engineering, where she belonged. Despite being Acting Chief Engineer, she hadn't actually gone into the office and claimed it as hers. That would make it too big, too real. No, she was an engineer: this was her space. The soft, steady thrum of the warp core. The blue glow of plasma dancing in containment. Home.
She heard the doors open, her ears always knew the room, and then... close again. Politely. Then nothing. No footsteps. No voice calling out. Sort of endearing, really. Most people hovered just close enough for the doors to keep triggering: open, close, open, close, that rhythmic whoosh slicing through the warp core’s hum like someone tapping on her skull with a wrench. She turned, dark hair tied back with a braided scarf, functional and personal. It kept strands out of her face and out of the consoles, which was what mattered. Fingerless gloves, crocheted, the same not-quite-gold of her uniform. Everyone called it gold. She still thought it looked like English mustard.
And there he was.
Tall and lean but not lanky. More like tension coiled into grace. The kind of build you saw in dancers or runners: not big, but precise. Blonde hair, long and neat. She immediately wondered how it didn't get caught in conduit hatches or misbehaving EPS relays. And sonic showers: how did that work?
She stepped slightly, enough for the light to catch his face. Dark eyes, the kind that didn't give much away. The blue from the core shimmered in them, but she couldn't tell if it was reflected or just naturally that deep. She held his gaze a second longer than normal. Not cold. Not inviting. Just… watching. Like a tactical system in low-power mode, still running threat assessments in the background. Serious face, but not brittle. She didn't get brittle from him, and she was good with people’s edges. No, this was someone who smiled sometimes. You just had to earn it.
Her fingers twitched out of habit and instinct. This wasn't someone you filed under mysterious crewmen, generic entry 47. He had weight. And not the kind you measured in kilos. "Alright, then," she murmured under her breath. "Let's see what makes you tick."
She stepped forward with a small smile, raising a hand in greeting. Not that he wasn’t already watching her. "Hello there. Elen Rell, Engineering. What brings you all the way to the heart of the ship?”
"I am Niun," he answered. Like the Chief Medical Officer, Elen was edun, the Mri word for those within the tribe, those the Azhadi protected. Forced into exile by the (traitorous) I'mai, working in league with the (equally traitorous) Mo'aku, he had had to redefine terms a bit for sanity's sake. Those who were edun were healers and artisans, not warriors. The Azhadi had been called many things ... the outward turned face, living weapons, the star that shines brightly though briefly. There were more. None of them mattered. What mattered was keeping the edun safe. In that, he had never wavered.
And so, when he spoke to Elen Rell, he spoke warmly, his smile open and friendly. Begin, as Jackson once told him, as you intend to go. "I wanted to learn the ship and part of that was seeing it's heart."
She gave a small, pleased smile. “Well, welcome to the heart. We keep it humming and try not to spill coffee on the plasma manifolds. Both more complicated than they should be.” Her gaze lingered on him briefly, calm and curious. “Niun. Good name...efficient. I bet it travels well through vacuum.” At that observation her eyes flickered to the console and she stepped past him, tapping a panel to clear a minor warning, expected at this time and she saw the computer compensate, then glanced back. “You wanted to see the heart of the ship. It’s not elegant, but steady...and steady is rarer than people think.” She paused, letting the quiet settle before continuing. “You don’t move like a tourist. You look like someone who’s seen things explode and didn’t flinch. Seem there's a lot of your type around her nowadays....” she gave him a small smile, raising an eyebrow. “So what are you hoping to find here, Niun? A systems map? Answers? Or just a pulse you can trust?” In her mind the questions made sense. He had come to learn the ship so in her head, jumping twenty steps forward and back, he was looking for connection. Maybe with the ship, maybe with the crew. Who knew. She wanted to though. To know.
"Names have meaning though mine,well, it died on my home world. Now, it is more a memory a ghost traveling with my other name, which now carries the meaning. As for steadiness? Loyalty is rarer than one might think and that is a companion to steady. And as for me, there are very few of my type in the Federation. Most committed suicide or chose to wander dead worlds. I seek connection ... understanding," Niun said.
The Mri learned quickly and remembered everything and so, her conversation wasn't hard as hard to follow as it might seem. Niun liked the liveliness of it, imagining one of those hard spheres bouncing in a common room back at the Academy. Movement. As though it never wanted to slow down or stop. "I want to know this ship and her crew in the same way that I know myself. I know how long it takes to draw a sword or run ten miles. I know how to understand the nuances of a language and culture that is not my own. I learned those things and now, I wish to learn about this oddly named ship."
“Well, damn. That’s a lot more poetic than I expected before my second coffee.” Elen glanced toward the warp core...its hum low, steady, and full of power. The heartbeat of the ship. Her ship. She felt it in her bones, in the rhythm of her breath when she worked too long without realising it. Then Niun’s comment about the name circled back through her mind, and that tug in her chest pulled taut. “It’s not a weird name,” she said, a little more fiercely than she meant to. Her head tilted slightly, eyes steady. “It’s a name with weight. With grief and grit and loyalty wrapped up in it. Arthur’s Queen. Guinevere. People forget she wasn’t just some love triangle footnote...she held the court together when the crown didn’t. The name has history.” Her fingers twitched at her side. Her thoughts raced ahead, two, maybe three tracks deep, skipping like stones across a pond. Sadness and love, Niun had said. That sounded about right.
She drew a breath, slow and practiced. In, then out. Find one thread. Follow it. “I love this ship,” she said, a little more quietly now. “The way she hums, the way she pushes back when something’s wrong. She’s not elegant, no, but she endures. She fights. If that’s not Queen material, I don’t know what is.” Then, a quick shift...a grin flashed across her face, warm and sharp. Softening any harshness in her outburst, trading it for teasing. “Oh, and for the record? If you do draw a sword in here, maybe not near the EPS relays? They’re finicky and explodey and I’m already on my third set of eyebrows this year.”
Azhadi warriors kneeling in the dust, hands resting lightly on the tops of their thighs, their long swords lying before them. Listening to the I'mai's word. The word they had sworn always to obey without question. The word that banished them from their world forever ... standing in line with his brothers as, one by one, the Azhadi left their swords lying on ever mounting pile. Wordless, silent vow to return one day, no matter how many generations it took, to retrieve those swords ... the sound his sword, made by his own hands, made as it fell onto the pile, the finality of it ... a death knell tolling the end of his life, his world.
"No swords," Niun answered dryly. The memory went with countless others into a compartment behind the eight-fold fence. It wasn't something he spoke about. Edun after all was a layered thing. "Guinevere was not real and the stories about her varied widely. It is a tainted name and that can be heavy, a burden." He cocked his head slightly to one side. "I ... read ...," he said quietly, feeling that slight surge of guilt for disobeying the I'mai's long-standing, generational order not to learn to read, "... about her on the way here."
Elen blinked. Her fingers flexed slightly, like they wanted to grab a tool just to have something to hold. Then she straightened, not quite defensive...more... grounded. She had felt a spark from him, but it was drowned in her own emotions rising. “She’s not tainted.” The words came before she really thought them through, but she didn’t pull them back. “Guinevere. The name, I mean. It’s complicated, sure. Messy. But so was the whole legend. So are most of us, honestly.”
She looked at the warp core, then back at Niun. “It’s not about some perfect queen who never screwed up. It’s about choices. Consequences. Power and love and loss. That’s what makes her real, even if she was never real in the historical sense.”
She swallowed, a wave of emotions stuck in the back of her throat. She dismissed it as much as she could with a small shrug. “I don’t think this ship was named to be pure. I think it was named to endure. To hold onto something beautiful even when the story didn’t go the way it was supposed to.” She tilted her head, the way he had. “Besides, names get rewritten all the time. That’s what people do. We tell the stories again and again until they mean something new. And you know, sometimes...we become those stories. We take what we got and we build on it, making it something worth...telling.”
"The ship and the story," Niun said, resisting the urge to sit cross-legged on the deck, "are not the same. I do not say that the ship is 'tainted' if I understand the word correctly." His accent strengthened as it when he struggled to make himself understood. "A name that changes through retelling? Becomes something new? That seems a lie. If it changes through the telling, then the facts are no longer the facts. Course, this Guinevere was not real so ... maybe there are no facts."
He shook his head slightly. "Choices. Consequences. Power, love, and loss. What does that have to do with a ship? This is not something I understand. Why not name the ship for Arthur? A king who tried always to do the right thing even in the face of betrayal. Someone who believed in an ethical stance? Ethics are a very Federation concept are they not?"
Elen let out a breath...not quite a sigh, more like something working its way free. “No, you’re right. The ship and the story aren’t the same.” She turned slightly, eyes flicking toward the warp core. “But they’re connected. That’s the thing.” Her fingers tapped the console edge, grounding. “Facts are what you measure. Truth’s what lasts. And Guinevere...she’s not about being perfect. She’s about surviving. About holding on when everything falls apart. Love, betrayal, power... consequences. She lived in the middle of all of it.”
She glanced back at him, voice even. “Arthur? He’s the easy name. Shiny ideals, big speeches. Safe. Captain maybe a bit arrogant, but you know...shiny Starfleet. But Guinevere, you name a ship that when you know things break, and you build anyway.” She paused. The thrum of the core filled the space her lack of words left behind. “You came looking for something that endures,” she said softly. “She does. Even when the story changes.” Then, a flash of dry humour sparked across her face. “Besides, if you want a name that stays the same forever...good luck. People don’t. Neither do names.”
"Survival through betrayal, giving in to passions, isn't an ideal that I would choose for a ship but it is true that she endures." His midnight blue eyes twinkled ever so slightly as he added, "much as do some viruses. They might go dormant, mutate, but they survive."
Niun turned thoughtful as he considered the notion of a name that endures beyond, presumably, the length of a person's life. "I was not meant to endure," he said. "Nor did I want to. It was enough for me to be part of something that did live forever, greater than any one individual. But then, the Mri, my people, do not embrace technology as you do. What I knew was always alien. As this ship is alien."
Elen’s smile twitched ...not quite amused, not quite offended. “Viruses and ships. That’s one hell of a comparison,” she murmured. “But I’ll take it. Both adapt. Both get underestimated. And both have a way of reminding people they’re not done yet.” She stepped closer to the warp core, let the hum fill the space between them. Her voice softened slightly, more thoughtful now. “You weren’t meant to endure. But you did. That matters more than design ever does.”
She turned her gaze back to him. “The Guinevere wasn’t built to be mine. I wasn’t supposed to be running Engineering, either. But here we are. Me and this feat of technology kept together with spit, hopes and Starfleet Engineering training...alien to you, familiar to me, holding the line.” Her eyes softened slightly as she watched him, as she saw him. A person who wasn't quite sure where they stood, who might be straddling what they had once been with what they could become. “You don’t have to embrace the tech,” she said gently. “But you’re here. You’re choosing to know it. And I think that’s braver than just being born into it. And if you don't want to deal with this...then do not worry. I can deal with it for you.”
"This is good," Niun answered dryly. "Because were it my job to fix anything that broke on this ship, we'd be living with a broken ship. Still, I ... read ... when I can. History mostly but I am thinking now, that it would be a good thing to understand this ship and how it works. Not to fix it, just so that I can glimpse something of what you see. This is right, yes? I don't always get the words right even now."
“You got the words just right, I get it...you want someone to just show you how things work a bit, so you know what is what...” Elen said quickly, gesturing around as she smiled. Then she stopped. And looked at what he was wearing. The uniform, the colour...and the pips. Her cheeks flushing just a little. “Oh... wow. I didn’t realise...” She cleared her throat, trying to smooth over the sudden awareness. “Executive Officer. Captain.” She gave a small, sheepish smile. “Here I am, mildly arguing about a ship’s name with the person who is the second in command of this entire place. That’s... a little embarrassing.”
She shifted, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “But yeah, I’d be glad to show you around. There’s a lot more to this ship than circuits and consoles. Sometimes, you have to listen to her.” Her tone softened, genuine. “If you want to understand what I see, you’ve got the right guide. You might even end up walking away from the experience with a scarf.”
Smiling now, the kind of a smile that lit up the depths of his eyes, giving a glimpse of who he could be when he was relaxed, Niun said, "I would love that ... the tour I mean. To know the ship as you do. When I was young, just starting my training, we would be taken into the woods, blind-folded, and taught how to experience the world around us in a new way. To sit under a tree, feeling the wind on my face, an insect walking around my hand, the sounds of birds in the trees. It wasn't the point of the exercise but I loved that part of it very much."
“There are holodeck programs like that,” Elen said lightly, though her mind drifted, just for a second, to someone else in a misty forest. She blinked the memory away. Not the time. Not the place.
“Look, Sir...I can show you. A tour, a tutorial, maybe even a hand-drawn guide on how to handle an Engineer in a crisis—I've got options!” She grinned, shrugging a little. “I can start now, buuuut...” She let the word stretch out playfully, mischief flickering behind her eyes.
“I’d really need about half a shift to do it properly. And fair warning: half of that’s going to be me giving a passionate lecture on how, when an Engineer says it’ll take six hours, it’ll take six hours. No bartering, no haggling. Physics does not negotiate.”
A bit of the light left his eyes when she addressed him as "Sir" though he understood the need for it. The Mri believed that titles didn't matter - except for two, the I'mai, mother of the tribe, and First, the warrior who represented the I'mai in battle with another tribe. And while the I'mai never changed, First did, by agreement among the Azhadi who were brutally honest when it came to assessing their own skills and those of other Azhadi.
Sir changed things. Though he still wanted to learn.
"I am not given to negotiations either," Niun said. "If you say you need the time, you will have it, even if means security is standing on the outer hull with phasers or the off-duty crew is out there, arms linked, chanting 'we are the ship ... we are the ship'.
“Ooh, don’t knock ritual chanting with a side of weird psychic power until you’ve tried it,” Elen said, mouth twitching into a grin. Still...she clocked the promise, and it meant something. Whether he'd hold to it when the warp core was sulking and the ship needed to do something ill-advised fast... well. She’d see.
Cautiously optimistic. Heavy on the cautious.
“Maybe tomorrow? Or the day after?” she offered, pushing her sleeves up on reflex. “Start of my shift, I’ll walk you through the quiet parts before the alarms start yelling.”
"Day after tomorrow then," Niun said. "I will be ready. Meet you here?"
"I practically live down here," Elen said with an easy grin, tipping her head toward the heart of Engineering. "So yes, two days works. And if you’re curious before then, just poke your head in. I don’t mind."
"Always," Niun murmured. "Interesting." He nodded politely and headed out of Main Engineering because there was so much more ship to wander. Though the engineer, well, she stayed with him.
Elen watched him go, the soft hum of the core settling into the quiet he left behind. Niun moved like someone used to walking out of worse: precise, contained, like everything he did had already been tested somewhere harder. She didn’t know what he was. Didn’t really care. He’d said yes without hedging. That kind of answer usually meant something.
She turned back to the console. The room felt like hers again, familiar edges snapping back into place now that he was gone. Still—something in her brain snagged on the rhythm of his voice, the way he’d looked at the ship. A thread she wasn’t ready to pull yet.
Her fingers twitched.
Focus.
“Alright then, Niun,” she murmured. “Let’s see what you do with Guinevere.”
Captain Niun Standing Bear
First Officer
USS Guinevere
and
Lieutenant Junior Grade Elen Rell
Acting Chief Engineer
USS Guinevere
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