Posted by Captain Zachariah Cobb (Commanding Officer) in Package Deliveries

Posted by Lieutenant Casela Synthi-er (Counsellor / RTF) in Package Deliveries

Posted by Captain Zachariah Cobb (Commanding Officer) in Package Deliveries

(snip)

“Alright, Zachariah, who is Prim?” Casela turned her now purple gaze on Cobb and sat back, propping her feet on the console while the shuttle flew on autopilot for the time being.
Lt Synthi-er, CNS

With a grunt, Zachariah emerged from the rear of the shuttle, fully dressed. The silver-streaked hair and beard were his own, although he’d lifted the colour somewhat with a curious product called ‘hair snow’. It made him look like his father.
His entire, round body was dressed head to toe in bright red with white fur trim, the jacket held together by a wide, black belt that strained over his impressive stomach, accentuated further by the thinnest layer of padding, and his feet and calves covered by black boots. On his head was a similar red and white-trimmed hat, long and with a bell on the end that jangled merrily every time he moved. Or talked. Or breathed.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked Casela, spreading his arms wide and nodding his head to activate the musical bell. “Will I pass muster, eh?”

Casela smiled, “You look perfect for the part. Oh you’ll pass alright. And make some children very very happy.”

But this faux-innocence could not be maintained for ever. He’d heard the question. And her eyes told him that she knew that he’d heard it. Settling himself into a chair, he reached into the red coat and drew out his hipflask, drinking long and deep from the pewter neck.

“Prim?” he repeated, one red sleeve wiping lingering drops of whiskey from his lips. “She was, is still, I presume, a counselor.” He paused to let the coincidence sink in. “It was four years ago now. I was the chief engineer on the USS Wolverine, a Brazen class destroyer. The captain was a Cajun chap. Decent enough fellow but…well, you know me and authority.” A laugh, hearty enough from the lips but not quite surfacing in the eyes. “He had some concerns about my…liquid intake and assigned me to a series of counselling sessions. I don’t need to tell you that I’d have submitted more willingly to a full root canal without anesthetic!”

A pause. Cobb’s eyes were drawn to the viewport to his left. Beyond. As if she could be glimpsed from here. Short, sun-blond hair, hypnotizing grey eyes, and those spots, like a teasing, tantalising path, beckoning him home. He found himself wondering, briefly, if Casela felt a similar magnetism from Rauuhl’s Trill markings.

Casela simply nodded, realizing that drink and Cobb went hand in hand. She’d never get him off the bottle but at least she had managed to get him out of the depths of its stupor.

“But go I did,” he continued, tearing his eyes away from the window and the reflection in his soul of her. “And was surprised to find her an old friend. Or, the symbiont, at least. The first time I met Zar, the host could not have been more different.”
His mood was changed almost instantly, the unbearable anguish of heartbreak kept at bay, momentarily, by the recollection of pleasure - the memory of debauchery and pure, unfettered joy. And nowhere in his entire existence had he found such a vivacious love for living itself as he did in Shamera Zar.

“Sham was the owner of the Falcon’s Maze, the premier drinking establishment on Outpost 42,” Cobb carried on. “I was, again, a chief engineer. Or ops, as my title was back then. I never sought romance from Shamera Zar and, in truth, she had eyes for another. But she remains to this day, the closest thing to a true friend that I have ever, and possibly will ever, know.”

Zachariah got to his feet. It was difficult to find striding room in the claustrophobic confines of a shuttle, but his feet paced where they could, his injured leg aching from sitting.
“It’s a curious thing about Trills, lass,” he began to suggest, all too aware of her own experience with the same, “how desperate the rest of us become to make that connection with a new host, when we cared for or loved another. I wanted to find Shamera in Prim, I wanted to believe that she too had the requisite darkness to handle me. But she was such a young thing. An ancient soul, trapped inside an innocent body. I fear that she may never recover from our time together, brief though it had been. I fear it enough to have left her alone, that evening, on OED V. To have walked away and never, for one second, looked back.”

• Captain Zachariah Cobb

“Perhaps it is easier being Betazoid, or perhaps more complicated.” She tapped a few buttons passing control of the flight to Alfred, whereever he was within the computer at the moment. “Did you know that I knew Raauhl’s previous host? Noa. Slimy, cowardly, cruel man. At least around me he was. That was the source of the friction between Ryder and myself those early weeks on Leviathan. It was strange and…enlightening to look at one man and hear and feel so many others there.” She considers quietly a moment, contemplating Cobb and herself, but her gaze introspective. “Perhaps it is only the Trill that can accept us as we are. After lifetimes of experience, the things we do are not so shocking, they can see the larger ramifications of our actions when others do not. Perhaps that is was draws us to them, the utter acceptance.”

“Or perhaps it the spots?”
Lt. Synthi-er, CNS