Posted by Lieutenant Kendric Tor (Chief Engineer) in COE’s Office Cadet Garret reporting for Duty

Posted by Cadet Claude Garret (Engineer) in COE’s Office Cadet Garret reporting for Duty

Posted by Lieutenant Kendric Tor (Chief Engineer) in COE’s Office Cadet Garret reporting for Duty
Posted by… suppressed (9) by the Post Ghost! 👻
It wasn’t nerves that stalled Claude that morning, and it wasn’t any sense of ill-preparedness or trepidation. It wasn’t even the imposter syndrome that had chased him all the way through university. It was his hair.

He’d spent the last year at the academy living like a nervous prey animal, venturing out of his dorm only for food, labs, and lectures, then scurrying back into the darkness to run simulations and work on his written projects. He’d always been a man that liked to take care of himself, but all the stress of his make-it-or-break-it finals had left him unshaven, malnourished, and pimpled. Claude’s looks had made a decent recovery since graduation, but whatever muscle he’d once used to style his hair had apparently completely atrophied.

Claude stalled again to adjust the look of his hair in the semi-reflective panelling of the computer interface systems that littered the halls of the U.S.S. Challenger. He wanted to come off as plucky and intelligent, but he looked more and more like a slicked back mad scientist with every preen. He’d applied concealer on the dull skin of his under-eyes that morning, but it had given him a kind of plastic-y look that was more unsettling than his usual tired human face. Eventually, and with only five minutes left until the agreed on meeting time, Claude breathed out and gave up.

The Lt. is Bolian, Claude reassured himself, he probably won’t care much about your hair anyway.

The Cadet did a few stretches before he chimed the COE’s office━rolling out his neck and shoulders, then folding his hands behind his back.

The doors slid open to reveal what may at one time had been a Chief Engineer’s office, but now looked like someone had made a critical mistake in one of the Academy’s Engineering labs and blown all the panels off the walls. Bits of wiring and discarded relay infrastructure littered every horizontal surface. It was like someone had stripped the office for parts. It was then there was a sharp curse from somewhere behind the desk.

“Lieutenant Tor?” Claude asked the table.

A bald, blue head shot up and warm and friendly smile greeted the Cadet. “Oh hi!” the smiling face said.

“Cadet Garret, Sir. I’m reporting for duty.”

“PERFECT!” the face said. “Yep, I’m him. Hey, can you do me a favor? Reach over there and grab that isolinear grounding bracket and hand it to me, will you?” and face disappeared only to be replaced by a blue hand wiggling it’s fingers.

Tor, CE

“Um,” Claude felt himself hesitate━immediately charmed, despite his confusion, “uh, of course, Sir, absolutely.”

Claude took a moment to think before he grabbed the bracket, and pressed it into Tor’s palm. He couldn’t puzzle the issue together, if there was one.

He folded his arms, and leaned on the desk, “What’s the project, Lt.? Anything I can assist with?”

─ Cadet Garret

OOC: That intro was FANTASTIC!!! Well done!
James
OOC: OH omg thank you so much!!
Rachel

OOC: Sorry for the delay! Im good to go now!

IC: The hand grasped the bracket and disappeared, but Tor’s voice said “That is the question, is it not?” and he chuckled. “I need to get a cooking range attached to this bulkhead-” and the hand shot up and slapped the wall behind the desk, “- but the power draw and need for ventilation wasn’t designed into this space… for reasons I’m sure you can understand.” Tor’s face reappeared, grinning. “I mean… who would ever think the Engineering Chief would need to cook.. right?” and he laughed once loudly and disappeared again. “So how are you at welding? How did you do in the Practical Applications Lab for that?”

Tor, CE

OOC: No worries, people get busy!

IC: “Um,” Garret chuckled. He’d completed all the welding training that was required of the Academy’s Engineering students, but it had hardly been with flying colours and he hadn’t exactly enjoyed it. Welding was so… chunky, or atleast, his welding was. Claude could handle himself with a soldering iron, but generally he prefered the theory of engineering, things he could acomplish behind a computer screen and a thick pane of glass. He didn’t want to say all that to Lt. Tor, though.

“I finished with a slightly higher score than average, but uh,” Claude shrugged, walking around the desk and crouching next to the Bolian, “it’s not exactly my strength.”

“That’s great!” Tor’s voice said from behind the desk. “You’ll get a lot of practice, then!”

“Why do you need to cook, Sir?” He asked.

Tor’s head reappeared and he got to his feet. He was tall, and had a much thicker build than most Bolians. “Because people have to eat, Cadet.” he said with a smile. “And… I really like to cook. So there is that. Now, follow me.” and he walked past the Cadet and into the Engineering bay. “So the project at hand is to get my office set up so I can cook, yeah?” Tor asked and looked at Garret. “So walk me through the basics. If I am going to be cooking actual food, not replicating it, what would the cooking area need to be both safe and effective in preparing said culinary dishes?”

Tor, CE

“Uh,” Garret stalled, starting to sound like a bit of an idiot. He wasn’t actually well versed in what it took to cook something, he’d been eating replicated meals for as long as he could remember. He was vaugely aware that it required ventilation, like the Lt. had mentioned, and that there was always a bit of food waste left over that needed to be cleanly disposed of, maybe like animal fat, or… something.

“At risk of making myself seem incappable, Sir,” Claude uttered, “I don’t actually know off the top of my head everything that’d be needed for that.”

“If I could have a minute to locate some schematics, I’m sure I’d be able to rig something up, unless it would require us to gut your office completely…” He got the sense this was a test of some kind, unless the Lt. really was just that single mindedly invested in fine dining, and he didn’t want to make himself look like he couldn’t handle unorthodox tasks, but he didn’t even know what an oven looked like (he tried to imagine it and conjured up a greyish rectangle) much less how it explicitly worked.

Claude, Cadet

OOC: Apologies for the late reply!

OOC: None needed! I was hit hard by RL stuff, so I get it! lol

IC:
Tor listened to Garret and nodded. “Well, never shy away from saying ‘I don’t know.’, Cadet. It will actually help you a lot in the long run. So… let’s take this step by step, shall we? Cooking involves several basic needs. You need heat, right? And if you apply heat to something, especially high heat, it will burn; or in our experiment… ‘cook’. And if something is burning or cooking, it will get hot and then you get all kinds of reactions… sizzling, popping, smoke, maybe even fire. So how do we address that, do you think?”

Tor, CE

“Well,” Claude cleared his throat, “in that case, I’d install a semi-permeable force field, contained to the perimeter of the stove-top, if not strictly the area above the cooking pans themselves, depends how much fine tuning we can do,” he startered muttering, “although I think the coding would get complicated in terms of allowing for different types of organic matter to pass in and out, not saying that you’d be cooking Andorians for example, Sir, but certain species have very similar DNA structures and are considered cattle, if you get my meaning.”

He chewed on the inside of his cheek, “And then of course accounting for the worst case scenerio automatic fire surpression systems would be a must, can’t have any out of control fires. I guess we’d have to allow that material through the field, too…” he trailed off.

“Am I sort of getting it?” Garret grinned sheepishly, “I kinda thought I’d be asked to solve Warp 10 or something as my on-boarding assignment.”

Claude, Cadet

Tor grinned and said “Naw… Warp ten is a cakewalk compared to making sure your soufflé doesn’t fall.” and he laughed. “But yeah… you are sort of getting it. But one thing I want you to remember for as long as you are in Star Fleet, Cadet: Simple is always better. The more complicated you make it, the more things will go sideways. So… fire supression is great. Solid idea. And a necessity of course. Now… how would you get power to the cooking surface? Where would you pull it from?”

Tor, CE

“You mean aside from going about it the old fashion way?” Claude grinned. He thought of the first and finest feat of human engineering: the fire pit. “Well, I don’t see that being much of an issue in theory. If we wire it into the ship’s power grid all we’d need is authorization, no? Actually-” Garret recalled what Lt. Tor had mentioned earlier, that the ship wasn’t built with this sort of thing in mind, at least, not his office space. So, not that easy then?

“Huh, well- What sort of alternative power sources do you think could be approved, Lt.? Off the top of my head I know that natural gases were used to power stoves, which we can provide seperately from the ship, although we’d have to top them up manually. The only concern there is how likely are different power sources to cause issues in an enclosed space, or when being recyled in the air filtration system.”

Claude tried not to get too excited, “Do you think we could run this as a simulation?”

Claude, Cadet