Posted by Lieutenant Commander Royal Sinclair (Counselor) in Counselor’s Office - A New Kind of Interview (Tag SARAH)

Posted by Lieutenant Corinne Dalton/SARAH (Ships AI/Avatar) in Counselor’s Office - A New Kind of Interview (Tag SARAH)

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Royal Sinclair (Counselor) in Counselor’s Office - A New Kind of Interview (Tag SARAH)
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)

“So why don’t you? Nothing wrong with taking a break.” he asked. “Everyone gets tired, especially when they try and process so many emotions.” and he smiled at her in a friendly and understanding way. “Very normal, indeed.”

Sinclair, CNS

She frowned slightly and shook her head. “I… I don’t understand. How… do I do that? I mean, I can only use the personal emitter so long before it needs to recharge, and when that happens, I just take it back to Sickbay where it lives and became part of the system again. Aside from when I pop onto the holodeck, that’s pretty much it.”

~Corinne Dalton

Sinclair said “Well… can you partition off parts of ship operations? Just for a while? Long enough to let the you that isn’t the ship take a break? Just a while where you experience… nothing. Quiet. Self-defined solitude, as opposed to the isolation you typically feel. See, if you can take charge of when you are ‘alone’, you can take back a feeling of control over your isolation. That is the first step. Convincing yourself that you are not helpless, not trapped. You have a say in how you live your life… ship or no ship, you are still a sentient being with free will.”

Sinclair, CNS

If a hologram could be said to have a panic attack, then the instant change that came over Corinne was just that. “No!” she said, shaking with almost a sense of terror. “Don’t ask me to hide away on my own, even if it’s supposed to be good for me.” She shook her head adamantly and she all but leapt to her feet. “Don’t you see?! That’s what he did… the Douwd. He forced me into a little box in the system. Alone. Trapped. In the darkness. It took me three years to figure out how to free myself and by then everything had changed, everyone * had changed and there wasn’t any room left for me. I didn’t fit*. I Don’t know that I can, and..” She shook her head. “No,” she said with all the determination she could muster.

~Corinne Dalton

Sinclair shook his head calmly. Reaching out, he held both of his hands palm upwards in front of him. “Easy, Corrine, easy. No one is asking you to lock yourself away. Not now, not ever. I now that you are a hologram right now, but I want you to put your hands on mine. And I want you to look at them as you rest them there. I want you to see that you and I are connected here, ok? You are not alone. And you don’t ever have to be, unless you choose to be. And only on your terms. You are not trapped anymore, ok? You need to believe that as much as I believe it.”

Sinclair, CNS

Her heart was still beating fast, or rather creating the sensation that it was. It was not something she really had talked about with anyone since she had ‘returned’. For the most part, she had just tried to settle back into being around everyone again while trying to convince bunch of people that she wasn’t a threat. Again.

Flexing her fingers, she rubbed the tips of them over her palms as if to erase where she had dug in her nails. Of course, no marks would have been left, so it was pointless, but it was instinct. Gazing at Royal, her expression was entirely dubious… at first. Something in her eyes shifted and she looked down at his hands for several moments, ignoring the persisting silence in the room.

Eventually, she lifted her hands and rested them on his, stretching her fingers to make better contact. Rather than look at the hands as he had said, she closed hers, moving her hands over his slightly. She could feel the sensation of his skin, the texture of it. It mattered not that it was a computer’s interpretation of the sensory input- it was the same process for him too.

Finally she opened her eyes and looked at him. “I’ve been trying to avoid being in the system unless I’m needed there, but it’s hard to just be out and about on the ship. Doctor Boja says I’m free to be in Sickbay whenever I like, but… I’m not a doctor and I don’t want to step on people’s toes. I just feel a bit lost, aimless. I don’t know where to go.” She could hang out in the holodeck, but the times when it’s free were few and there were a lot of crew who needed to make use of it. Some were tolerant of her popping in, but she wasn’t going to push her luck.

~Corinne Dalton