Posted by Ensign Ashlyn Trenton (Security Officer) in side-sim Trenton/Fayth Quarters

Posted by Ensign Sharah Fayth (Doctor) in side-sim Trenton/Fayth Quarters

Posted by Ensign Ashlyn Trenton (Security Officer) in side-sim Trenton/Fayth Quarters
(snip)
Sharah nodded with a huff. “I KNOW. And with all my extra work…well what will be extra work, in the arboretum, it’s not like I won’t be talking to other people. And then my work with Zarath and your duties in security. It’s not like we don’t talk to other officers. It just surprised me. We’ve been here less than 48 hours and that was the assumption.” She shrugs because she can’t do anything about it. “OH! Shielding. That would actually be really good for you to know since you are in security. I actually helped Joseph with it a little bit. He asked me a lot of questions about it. He actually found a Cardassian technique that was very effective in blocking me. I’ll be sure to ask him about it the next time I talk to him.” That didn’t give away his personal secrets. Being able to block a telepath did not make one telepathic. “And Zarath knows how to do it too. We could ask him! I only get from him what he wants me too. It might be an Andorian trait. I’m not sure, but I can ask him when I report for duty tomorrow. Let’s get settled next door and see if we can start with that.” Before Ashlyn can turn away Sharah touches her shoulder. “Just because you WILL be able to block me, doesn’t mean you have to. Your mind doesn’t scare me, it never has. Not even that first time in the gym during Mok’bara. I was startled, but not afraid. And think about it this way. If you can block me you can block any telepath. My condition,” she stops she has to stop thinking like that. “My gift makes me incredibly strong, so if you can block me, no telepath is going to get into your head without your permission or harming you.” Sharah goes back to packing, then she grabs her bonsai tree and the plant food by the sink and her bag. “Ready when you are.”
En. Fayth, Doctor

Ashlyn took a little longer to pack than she was used to, most of the stuff would usually be reclaimed with the room and refabricated with the next place she ended up. In this case, their departure was only temporary so she needed to clear more stuff out. Ashlyn’s packing habits were strangely structured and organized to take up as little space as possible. She could easily get twice what most people could into a smaller bag, it was an interesting if almost ritualistic technique. “So in other words, I’ll have a mind no telepath will want to be in. First I’m just a hard target, then when they think they’ve finally gotten in, I’m just too damned noisy. I like the idea, but I’m also sure my fantasies are far from the reality of how shielding will work or how well I’ll be able to do it.” With that, Ashlyn finishes closing up her pack and was ready to go. “We’ll be back here after my next session with Nox and it’ll be awesome, all full of tubes to climb through, it’ll be harder to sneak into your bed at night.”

• Ensign Ashlyn Trenton
  Security, USS Europa

Shara was not surprised by how efficient Ashlyn was or how tightly she could pack everything down. “Actually I think with the conference, all working together, it would work just like that.” She headed for the door and then at Ashlyn’s last comment she picked up a pillow from the couch on her way past and threw it at her. “Stop that!”

Ashlyn took the pillow to the face, snapped her head back and jumped back to fall as if she had been hit with a pile of bricks instead of a pillow. The impact with the ground was controlled and didn’t cause any harm to Ashlyn as she raised a shaky hand into the air. “Alas, betrayed by my best friend!” Ashlyn went limp and let out a ‘bleh’ noise as she pretended to have died, which lasted all of five seconds before she burst into a fit of giggles and got back on her feet to follow her friend into the other room.

“Ashlyn you are so silly!” Sharah giggled and continued to do so until she stepped out into the hallway. A look at the door they were going into silenced her.

Sharah stepped out into the hallway and shook her head. She stepped across the hall to the extra room. It was empty, that was why no one ever came out, though she’d worked hard to not notice. She stepped inside and put her plant down in a window sill. She turned, the inside of the room was made for 2 and not 1, a mirror of theirs. It’d be okay. She closed her eyes…she had to get above it before it got worse. There were no other empty quarters on this deck. She could do it for a week. She fought with the sudden tears and went to put her bag down, blocking the memories. Then she came out and ordered two glasses of ice water and sat on the couch. She waited for Ashlyn. “Okay so the first way to block or shield would be misdirection. So if you don’t want a telepath to know what you are thinking about, you have to make some other thought REALLY loud in your mind. So…” Sharah thinks and then grins. “EVERYONE in your conference needs to think about a peanut butter sandwich! That thought always stands out loudly with just one of them. So let’s try that. You need to think of something else and you don’t want me to know what it is. And when I try to find the thought, everyone should shout Peanut Butter Sandwich over and over until I go away.”
En Fayth, Doctor

Ashlyn sat down at the other glass of ice water and watched Sharah attentively, stopping to go into deep thought about her comment on the Peanut Butter Sandwich. “I’ll try, but I’m not sure how well that will work. Peanut Butter Sandwich is sort of my derailing measure when I get stuck on a train loop.” So it began, Ashlyn was thinking about her first kiss which was innocent enough to not bother anyone but could still be considered mildly private and desperately tried to cover it up with the Conference calling out ‘Peanut Butter Sandwich’.

Sharah got the thought, but was quickly blocked by several Ashlyn’s yelling peanut butter sandwich at her. But they didn’t do it all at once so she was still able to get glances if not specific details.

“This isn’t working, she’s still watching us make out with Roh. Peanut Butter is meant to be our derailing thought, we need a thought that will derail her instead.” There was some quiet discussion among the Conference when the one that usually derails the thoughts with peanut butter sandwiches mentions her idea. What came next was…not appropriate for a lack of better words. The thoughts involved Joseph, leopard print articles, and was equally distracting for Ashlyn given how much creative thought she was putting into this image for Sharah. The memories of the first kiss were promptly forgotten to make more room for this imaginative creation of Lieutenant Rainns. “Okay, first try…don’t think I did that right.”

• Ensign Ashlyn Trenton
  Security, USS Europa

In the interim where the conference is trying to decide how block Sharah, she picks up all the details. However she’s distracted after a moment by the certainty of the conference that they know how to distract her. Her embarrassment is quick, extreme and she’s out of Ashlyn’s head and ready to dive into the chaos that is the noise around her. The look on her face tells Ashlyn quite clearly that her relationship with Lt. Rainns never got that far. She’s TOTALLY embarrassed.

“Okay so it was your first kiss with someone named Roh.” Sharah says while pacing the room, trying to calm her embarrassment. “The peanut butter sandwich worked great. It does derail you so for now there is no reason to not use it on others. It’s a derailing technique you already know how to use. Instead of one Trenton yelling it at the others, they all yell it at the telepath. The reason it wasn’t effective is because they were all yelling it at different times with different levels of intensity.”

Her level of embarrassment didn’t really lessen, but it was going away until she looked at the table and chairs. That table, right there, or it’s counter part on Challenger, was where Joseph had kissed her the first time. And these, though Ashlyn had no reason to know it, quarters were his quarters on Challenger. It made her sad and she started to spiral, but tonight was about helping Ashlyn, not her self pity. She turned around and mock glared at her friend. “That was NOT fair! And .... and..... I don’t want to know why you have that image of Joseph in your head to begin with.” She was picking because she knew that Ashlyn had a hate/tolerate opinion of Joseph. “Okay so that didn’t really block me, but it certainly scared me off. However embarrassment doesn’t work on everyone. So that was very fast thinking on your feet and creating the protection specific to the telepath. Let’s come up with another word, or image that would work on a larger population of telepaths.”
En Fayth, Doctor

Ashlyn pondered on this and dug a lot deeper into her memories to a time when she was a child. There was some cringing from the Conference at the innocent and naive Ashlyn, but it generates something that would be derailing to anyone. “Makoan Banshees. They’re giant bats that live in the mines and the sound they produce is…well mind numbing to be frank, and loud. Hold on a second, let me get the sound from the database so I can remember it correctly.” Ashlyn moved over to the computer and queued up the requested information. While the computer was searching the database for the bat call, Ashlyn refilled the water for both of them. When the file was ready, Ashlyn set up a small speaker so she could limit who was listening to just her for the moment. When ready she came back and sat with Sharah. “Okay, one more time.”

This time the Conference was silent while Ashlyn was thinking of Doctor Zarath, slowly making him younger and healthier, then making him dance on a bio bed. This way even if she couldn’t block Sharah, at least she would be entertained and spend less time thinking about Joseph. She may be hiding it well, but Ashlyn is aware of what room she is in and how it might be affecting her friend. When it came time to try and block, the conference gathered around wearing white bat masks. A lone four winged white bat with red eyes lowered itself into the center of the group with a few quick chirps of sound. When it began to scream, however, the conference chimed in with it, all making the same ear spitting sound. Like an entire kindergarten class all raking their nails on the chalkboard while screaming after a wasp sting while the swarm of wasps try to stab the ear drums.

Ashlyn’s eyes roll back at the memory of the sound, most Makoan Miners avoid the bats because their scream could cause cave ins. Coming out of the thought, Ashlyn reached out to hug Sharah. “I’m sorry, that was a bit much.”

• Ensign Ashlyn Trenton
  Security, USS Europa

Sharah began to look for the thought Ashlyn was ‘hiding.’ She saw Zarath looking younger and younger. The time it took the bat to settle and chirp instructions to the conference was long enough for Sharah to know who Ashlyn was thinking about. Then Sharah momentarily stumbled backwards, a good thing she was sitting down. The screaming of the Makoan Banshee was painful and disorienting. She actually dived into the noise around her to ease the intensity. Once Ashlyn stopped she shook her head, as if dislodging the noise. “Okay…” She hugged Ashlyn back briefly, and tried to gather her thoughts. “Okay, so that was SUPER effective.” She grinned evily, “Use that on Nox.” She shook her head again and blinked a few times. “So that was effective, but at the end it bothered you as well. So it’s a good last ditch effort to use, or if the telepath is very determined. Let’s try for something in between.” She thought back to her time with Joseph and then Oliver. “Okay let’s try this. So my friend Oliver, the botanist. He could block me, a little. He used a different technique. So he wanted to show me a bonsai tree, but instead of thinking about the tree he concentrated really hard on where it was, and not what it was. So I saw a shelf in the arboretum with several potted plants and gardening tools on it and the space around that table, but I had no idea which plant it was that he wanted. Does that make sense?”

Sharah had several more ideas as well, but after the Makoan Banshee, she was ready for a gentler approach. “This technique is also good for when a telepath is simply curious to see if they find anything. The thoughts are truthful but not forthcoming.”
En Fayth, Doctor

Ashlyn rubbed her temples and gave it another try, this time picturing a large section of the town where she had grown up. Intricate details went into this though, houses identified with numerical markers, people meeting and eating on the main roads in front of restaurants, Starfleet officers wandering about. Even with all this going on, there was a muteness to the image. Something was wrong here but from this perspective, it wasn’t obvious. Changing the perspective to get a different side of the memory continued to reveal more of the mundane everyday activity of a mining colony. A clinic for the less fortunate of the mining colony had guards out front, but this isn’t anything out of the ordinary. That must be the problem with the memory, everything is so normal that whatever is happening doesn’t stand out at all. Scrutinizing the memory would reveal someone hiding in a stack of cargo containers, attempting to open one of them without drawing attention. If no one paid attention or were too drawn in by the normalcy of the area, they would never notice the young Ashlyn attempting to steal food from a container.

• Ensign Ashlyn Trenton
  Security, USS Europa

After a few moments Sharah stops. For a few moments she was very drawn in by the normalcy of the scene. However, Sharah had been around more times than either of them could count when things had escaped the box. Sharah knew what the colony looked like in reality so eventually she was able to figure out what was being glazed over. “Okay, that one was really good! The problem though, is that for me, is that I’ve already seen this memory, so I knew what was different. I don’t think anyone else would though. Let’s try this. Pick an object in our quarters, but then think about where it is, in general, but not the object, and we’ll see if I can figure it out.” Ashlyn was proving to be very resourceful in this and she could hear the conference taking massive amounts of notes. “There is no need to push to exhaustion the first time we try this.”
En Fayth, Doctor

Ashlyn buried her head in her hands and shakes her head, “I think that’s enough for now, feels like I’m trying to multi-process and that hurts a lot. Maybe we should do this with a monitoring system to make sure I’m not trying to think on multiple lines at once so I don’t hurt myself trying to hide my mind.” Ashlyn finished the water she had and leaned back into the seat with a sigh. “Sorry, probably isn’t that much progress but this is harder than I thought it would be. I’m not really sure how people do this unconsciously.” Ashlyn got more water to drain down before returning to the chair. “That and I should go do some Parkour, let instinct take over for a bit. If you want to join me?”

• Ensign Ashlyn Trenton
  Security, USS Europa

Sharah nodded, “No I agree. Hang on.” She grabs her tricorder and scans Ashlyn quickly with it. “You’re okay. But it IS time for a break. And anyone who tells you it’s by instinct is lying. It takes concentration and hard work and focus. Even for natural born telepaths. But eventually you lean to multitask with it. Some people to great degree and others to minor degree.” She nods heading to her bag to get her parkour clothes out. “Let’s go do that. I need to get out of here for awhile.” Sharah steps into the other room to change and then braid her crazy curly hair into a tight French braid to keep it out of her eyes and then puts on her cover up and is ready to go. While she waits for Ashlyn she grabs her medkit and some waters.
En. Fayth, Doctor