Posted by Commander Shara Calloway (Executive Officer) in Deck 6 - Captain’s Dining Room

Posted by Captain Sara Kiernan (Commanding Officer) in Deck 6 - Captain’s Dining Room

Posted by Commander Shara Calloway (Executive Officer) in Deck 6 - Captain’s Dining Room
Posted by… suppressed (9) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Sara often ate in her private dining room rather than her quarters, if only to justify the existence of the space. One evening she hadn’t even eaten, she just sat at the table watching the stars go by. Things kept changing. Her life was complicated by being in command and yet further by the mission profile of her ship. But she couldn’t have… a life. She didn’t know many people who had lives. =/\=Shara, have you had dinner yet?=/\= Maybe her XO knew something she didn’t.

-CO

A snort sounded over the comm. =/\=Three guesses and the first two don’t count.=/\= A pause as a couple quiet chirps could be heard. =/\=You proposing something? I should eat something and I told Micah I would done quite late.=/\=

~Shara Calloway, XO

=/\=Deck 6. Don’t keep your boss waiting.=/\= Sara enjoyed how she and Shara talked. It seemed wise to have picked an XO from people she already knew and trusted. She settled into her chair and considered some synthehol.

-CO

=/\=I wouldn’t dare. Be then in five.=/\=

Sure enough, five minutes almost on the dot, Calloway stepped into the dining room without any preamble, look a little tired, but overall well. “What have you in mind for dinner? I keep forgetting I don’t ahve to go catch my own dinner here and that I could have anything,” she said, all but flopping into a chair at the table.

~Shara Calloway, XO

“Long day so I was thinking steak sandwich and an ample supply of synthehol. But I could be swayed. Thoughts?” It was all invented on the spot, Sara hadn’t planned ahead and usually didn’t with things like this.

-CO

“A steak sandwich sounds good, though it’s one of those days where I wish my daughter Faye was around with my best friend’s hasperat recipe. Not that I’m allowed to cook any thing in it, but I miss really excellent hasperat some days,” Shara said. “But yes to a drink that still allows me to work after.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

Sara requested two identical plates of food and set them down at the table, accompanied by a synthehol job. She sat down and raised her glass. “To drinking on the job.”

Shara chuckled and raised her glass. “Hear, hear,” she said before tapping her glass gently against Sara’s.

“I think you’re the first guest to come to the dining room here. It’s the only place I don’t handle work. There’s work in my quarters, and all over the ship. Not here. This is just for getting some space from that.”

-CO

“At least you have this space. Micah and I have offices within our quarters out of necessity. I think the only place I would never do my day-to-day work is the holodeck, but I’ve never been super comfortable with the holodeck. My daughter Faye and I have the same aversion: we dislike the fantasy of it, how easy it is to forget it’s not real. think for me, when I’ve spent so much of my life fabricating my life, the last thing I want to do is spend downtime in a fabrication.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

“I am lucky to have this… didn’t on the old Asimov. Space to just clear my head was hard to come by. Feel free to use this place if you need it. Job like ours, a little sanity goes a long way.” Sara bit into her sandwich. “Y’know, I know food cooked in a real kitchen is better, but I’ll be damned if replicator food isn’t better than it has any right to be.”

-CO

She chuckled. “It’s definitely come a long way from anything they had before. We’ve very fortunate. I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that anything from the land is better, but it’s also not always practical or possible. A lot of people don’t starve when they might otherwise have before.” Shara gazed wistfully across the room. “I also appreciate replicators a helluva lot more since my days on Voyager when it was use precious replicator rations, eat ration packs on the dire days, or deal with whatever our… industriously creative cook managed to put out in the mess hall.” Shara couldn’t help but feel a bit of nostalgia for those days even if she wasn’t keen to repeat them anytime soon.

~Shara Calloway, XO

“It’s definitely changed everything for the better. I mean, if everybody and anybody can, not just eat, but eat good food… what a world we live in.” Sara ate some more. “You ever stop and think about the madness of the basic level of what we call a job? Go back not nearly as far as it seems and this would be an absolute fantasy.” She sat, quiet. Watching the stars hurtle past.

-CO

Shara chewed a bite of the steak sandwich with its perfectly tender thin strips of beef. “I don’t have to go back far at all. Before the Maquis and Starfleet, I did whatever I could to survive. When I met my first husband, Edward, I was working as a waitress at a bar on a backwater colony. Busy place, with its share of roughness, but I hadn’t even graduated secondary school, Sara, so I worked at the bar at nights and took classes during the day. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, just that I wanted to have options. travelling the galaxy? Starfleet? Living on a starship? That was a fantasy for my twenty-year old self. I couldn’t even come close to imagining any of it. All I cared about was making sure I had enough for rent and food. Everything else was a luxury, including my high school diploma.”

~Shara Calloway, XO

“You’ve come a long way from that bar. I grew up in San Francisco. My dad teaches an introductory engineering course at the Academy. He’s been there… gotta be 35 years now. They’re going to have him retiring soon. It’s a legacy family I guess. One of those families where you walk in the house and there’s portraits of each generation in uniform right inside the door. There was a uniform waiting for me from the moment I was born. I outrank my dad now. First one in our family to make it this far. I worked so hard in school, in the Academy, at every assignment I’ve gotten to get here and now that I’m here I’m… I’m afraid I’ve forgotten to live along the way. When you were 20, nothing was certain. When I was 20, everything was certain. There has to be some middle ground. Where the next sandwich isn’t in question but you get to be a little bit… out of uniform sometimes.”

-CO