Thursday had come. A few minutes before the appointed hour of Kastarak’s and Quentin Dawson’s sparring, Kastarak arrived early to inspect the empty gym room that he had booked for them.

He had after some bureaucratic difficulty with Dawson’s department (that would be a conversation for another time) managed to get clearance to take a lirpa from the ship weapons cabinet (why did it even have a lirpa) to the gym for training after some paper-pushing petty officer had been convinced that Kastarak was indeed trained to use a lirpa and that he was not going to use it either “ceremoniously” or “violently” on other people, but rather use it for physical exercise. Had he not suppressed his emotions at this stage (it was quite necessary!), he might have been tempted to use the lirpa on the actual petty officer in question instead.

In any case, here Kastarak was, in ship-issued gym wear – dark blue sweatpants and that hideous-looking dark-nlue t-shirt imprinted with CHRNV (why lose the vowels?) in silver.

He did some warming up exercises while waiting for Dawson.

– Kastarak