The cavernous space of Cargo Bay 1 had been transformed—mostly.

The crates were pushed back into tight, orderly stacks, leaving a wide-open floor at the center of the bay. Portable floodlights leaned at odd angles, casting long shadows across hastily erected scaffolding. Cables trailed like snakes from power nodes to amps, speaker towers, and an overclocked lighting rig that Ree’za was definitely not certified to operate.

A few tension clamps rattled loose near the makeshift riser, prompting a low, Bolian curse from somewhere beneath the drum platform.

“I said it’s level!” Jax’s voice echoed upward. “By Bolia’s fourth moon, just jam the stabilizer under the corner!”

“Is this what you call level?” came the skeptical voice of a nearby petty officer, bracing the edge with a knee. “This whole stage is a hazard.”

“That’s the aesthetic,” Ree’za called down from atop a speaker stack, tail flicking. “We’re going for ‘aggressively unsafe with a touch of cosmic enlightenment.’”

T’Lex, standing a few meters away and surveying the space with the quiet judgment of a Vulcan facing aesthetic ruin, slowly turned a spotlight six degrees to the left.

“That light was angled specifically to highlight the forcefield shimmer,” he said, deadpan.

The shimmer in question rippled faintly across the far side of the cargo bay—an energy field standing between the band and the vacuum of space, now visible thanks to some clever field-tuning. Beyond it, stars hung still and cold in the void. Empty space as the ultimate stage backdrop.

The two enlisted crewmembers still hanging around—NE Machar (Operations) and NE Hu (Engineering)—stood near a stack of crates labeled SOUND EQUIPMENT: PUNK and exchanged a long-suffering glance.

“Are they always like this?” Machar muttered under her breath.

Hu snorted. “Worse when the security guy’s here.”

There was no sign of Buddy yet—but the energy in the space already felt like a fuse being primed.

Ree’za jumped down from the stack and dusted her paws off. “He’ll show. Probably with some last-minute ‘creative vision’ that involves setting something on fire.”

“I have calibrated the forcefield to account for heat dispersion,” T’Lex offered mildly.

“See?” she said. “Teamwork.”

Ree’za, T’Lex, & Jax
Ensign Cullum ●
Security Officer
U.S.S. Ark Angel