Posted by Lieutenant Commander Llakar Harel (Chief of Operations) in Office of the Counselor - Psych Eval

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Todd Nyman (Diplomatic Officer / CNS) in Office of the Counselor - Psych Eval

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Llakar Harel (Chief of Operations) in Office of the Counselor - Psych Eval
Posted by… suppressed (4) by the Post Ghost! 👻
He stood outside the counselor’s door for a moment longer than he probably should have—long enough to be aware of it, but not long enough to be obvious.

Mandatory psychological evaluation.

He had been through them before—after Turkana IV, after the Apollo, after the Ogawa, after the Leviathan… A litany of well-intentioned questions and carefully neutral expressions.

“This is routine, Commander.”

So was breathing. That didn’t mean he had to enjoy it.

He tapped the door chime, one sharp motion.

-Lt. Cmdr. Harel
Chief of Operations

The door opened to reveal the counselor, in uniform and looking slightly disheveled.

If one hadn’t read the briefing given to all Command level staff, you wouldn’t know he wasn’t human. And that was the point. He presented as 6’ tall, Caucasian, with sharp green eyes and shoulder-length blonde hair. A long face with a sharp nose.

He smiled, green eyes sparkling with a subtle charm,

“Oh, hello. You must be Commander Harel. Todd Nyman, I’m the ship’s new Chief Counselor. Well, come on in.”

He waved the officer in. The room was also slightly disheveled. Armchairs were moved haphazardly to different parts of the room. The Counselors’ desk was covered in small to medium boxes of miscellaneous decorative items he had yet to display. A couch sat at an odd angle in the corner, cluttered in a similar way but with at least one seat’s worth of room left free.

“Have a seat anywhere. And pardon the mess. I’m still getting settled.”

|Lt. Cmdr. Nyman, Diplomatic Officer / CNS|

Lieutenant Commander Harel had skimmed the personnel file and half expected to be greeted by a being with antennae, gills, or at least a few extra limbs. Instead, he found himself facing what looked like a perfectly ordinary Human—a touch disheveled, perhaps, but otherwise entirely unremarkable in form. Somehow, that was more disarming than any tentacled visage might have been.

“I’m not the sort to judge a messy office, Counselor,” Harel said, stepping inside. “Frankly, it’s almost reassuring. Proof that even counselors don’t have to have everything perfectly put together.”

He eased into the nearest available seat, brushing aside a stray holoframe and resting his hands lightly on his knees.

Todd picked up a half-full glass of water from his desk, and with his free hand pulled an armchair to be across from Harel. The motion was effortless in a way that made the chair seem much lighter than it was.

The ease with which the counselor moved the chair didn’t go unnoticed. Not just the strength—though that was there—but the comfort in motion. Unpretentious. Fluid. Like someone who had nothing to prove, and yet had already proven enough to himself.

Harel allowed the silence to stretch for a breath or two longer than necessary, watching the man settle in. No fanfare. No theatrical attempts to establish dominance or warmth.

Good.

There was a groundedness to this space, however cluttered. Harel’s eyes drifted across the disordered desk, catching flashes of unpacked memories—keepsakes, likely, or distractions. Everyone carried something. Even the ones trained to help others carry theirs.

His posture remained straight, composed—but not rigid. Observing. Absorbing.

He’d been through enough of these to know what came next. The questions, the quiet assessments, the measured glances. But this felt different—less like scrutiny and more like… orientation. As if the counselor wasn’t just trying to understand him, but calibrate himself to the room.

Harel found that he didn’t mind.

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And if I read the manifest right, it looks like I’m not the only new addition to the senior staff. Are you new to the ship as well?” He offered a small, wry smile—measured but not cold.

“Yes, I actually just transferred from…” he paused. How should he put it? Someone had slipped him the information that Harel was also former ARU. But at the same time, it was all still very covert, which he respected.

“Well, I was temporarily an Executive Officer, research vessel, covert operations, all classified stuff. But, I missed being Chief Counselor.”

He smiled, eyes squinting as he did. It was hard to tell if it was practiced that way or completely genuine.

Still, he couldn’t help but glance at Nyman’s eyes—so distinctly Human, yet clearly by design. The curiosity itched at the back of his mind.

“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, and I hope it’s not insensitive of me to ask, but… what do you actually look like?”

-Lt. Cmdr. Harel
Chief of Operations

The counselor stopped drinking his water, mid-sip. The question’s directness blindsided him. Theo had warned him that this might happen though. Especially coming onto a new ship. Humans were relentlessly curious.

“Well, I um… we don’t really tend to think of it in that way. All of our forms we consider a part of who we are. How I look now is just as real, to me, as any other way I look.”

It likely wasn’t the answer that Harel was looking for, and Todd knew that. It took the philosophical approach rather than the real answer.

There was a real answer: Vendorians are cephaloforms. Tall and wispy in appearance. They have a head dominated by five eyes. Bulging, pupilless, and bright amber, almost like a moth’s. These are positioned all the way around the head but slightly clustered around the front. They have no visible mouth, only a pair of pseudo-gills that lay flat underneath the eyes. They have no true body either, instead heads are attached to a sort of curved plate. Then connecting to six thin tentacle limbs that, despite appearance, do manage to hold up their weight. As for Todd himself, his skin was a deep coral color, he had a slight green tint to his eyes, and the deeper red markings on his head indicated he was of the Femaren region of his planet.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I forgot to ask if you wanted anything. Coffee, tea, water… What can I get you? ”

|Lt. Cmdr. Nyman, Diplomatic Officer / CNS|

Harel listened to the counselor’s answer with quiet attention, nodding slowly—not because it satisfied his curiosity, but because it made sense. Philosophically. Professionally. It was the sort of answer he’d expect from someone well-practiced at boundary-setting with warmth.

Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if that was the entire truth. He wasn’t offended by the deflection. He respected it. But it did reaffirm something he’d long believed: appearances were always part armor, part invitation.

“I understand,” he said simply, then added, “And no thank you. I’m fine.”

He leaned back slightly, finally letting the stiffness in his spine ease just a degree. His gaze drifted momentarily to the desk clutter, then back to Nyman.

“You’re good at that, by the way. Answering without answering. It’s a useful skill—especially in our line of work.” His tone wasn’t accusatory; if anything, it held a quiet note of respect.

Then, after a beat:

“I appreciate the honesty you did offer. It’s more than most give on a first meeting.”

He let that sit for a moment, then gave the faintest flicker of a dry smile—just enough to let Nyman know: he wasn’t trying to read him.

-Lt. Cmdr. Harel
Chief of Operations

Nyman became very distracted by the ice in his water glass, or so it seemed. Honesty , huh?

“Not many people it see it that way. I appreciate your being so … I guess open minded is the right term. But that’s a bit overused, isn’t it?”

He leaned back in his chair, a flash of smile returning to his face as he looked toward Harel once again.

“So, now you know why I’m here. It’s only fair you tell me how you ended up on the Saracen.”

This was just another way of sneaking in the traditional ‘what lead up to your transfer’ question that every counselor was required to ask. But like almost everything he approached it casually, more like small talk. After all this wasn’t supposed to be an interrogation.

|Lt. Cmdr. Nyman, Diplomatic Officer / CNS|

Harel’s eyes didn’t shift this time. He kept them steady on Nyman, not out of defensiveness—but out of habit. A learned kind of stillness. The kind you pick up when standing too close to explosions, both literal and emotional.

“I was on the Leviathan,” he said after a moment. “Briefly.”

The word carried weight it hadn’t earned in syllables alone.

“Before my assignment to the Saracen, that was supposed to be my next chapter—frontline exploration. Big ship. Big mission. Big promises.”

His jaw tightened, just faintly, like he was biting back a second thought. When he continued, his voice was composed, but softer—more precise.

“We encountered an Abell-level anomaly. Temporal, spatial, psychological—you name it. We didn’t even have time to identify what it was before it pulled me out of phase.”

A beat passed. No dramatics. Just a breath.

“I was… gone for several months. From my perspective, longer.”

There was no need to detail it. The kinds of anomalies that twisted time like that rarely offered a clean linear narrative. But even so, the silence that followed was full of the things he wasn’t saying.

“Most of what I experienced inside it wasn’t real in the physical sense,” he went on. “But it felt real. It made me relive every moment I’d spent years learning how to carry without breaking.”

His gaze dropped—briefly—to the counselor’s water glass. Watching the slow swirl of the ice, the ripple in a calm surface. Then, his voice again:

“When they pulled me out, the doctors gave it a name. Neural echo trauma. Synthetic emotional feedback. A dozen labels for something that mostly meant I couldn’t tell what day it was without a calendar, or whether the screaming in my head belonged to someone else.”

Nyman was quiet, listening with a quiet empathy. The story was familiar. He had seen it before on the Leviathan. Anomaly exposure leaving people broken in incomprehensible ways. Minds smashed against barriers of what is comprehensible and twisted in the wreckage of warped realities.

He looked up again.

“I took leave. Spent time offworld. Not because I was afraid to return—but because I didn’t want to return wrong. Not when other people’s lives might depend on me.”

He didn’t fidget, didn’t shift. Just sat in that truth a moment longer.

“When I was ready, I asked for something quieter. Somewhere I could still serve without constantly dodging plasma fire or unraveling paradoxes. Chief of Ops seemed… reasonable.”

His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite a grimace.

“So that’s how I ended up here. Quieter. Less action-packed. Just organizational charts and staffing rotations. And hopefully no anomalies.”

– Lt. Cmdr. Llakar Harel
Chief of Operations
U.S.S. Saracen

The counselor took a breath, processing what had been said to him. He was lucky, he had only worked in counseling, never directly with anomalies. Even as XO he was only there for such a short time rather than be called away.

“It sounded like you needed something quieter. You found a way to remain productive while taking care of yourself,” he commented quietly.

The compassion in his gaze was apparent. Even if it was learned from humans, it was still his feeling. And he allowed it to come out, sensing that it might help.

“There is no shame in that.”

|Lt. Cmdr. Nyman, Diplomatic Officer / CNS|