by Lara Valera Ryn
90222.00
Concurrent with With Gratitude
-= Shuttle Endeavor, en route to Earth =-
90222.00
Concurrent with With Gratitude
-= Shuttle Endeavor, en route to Earth =-
At first, curiosity did get the better of Lara.
Then, she recognized that a part of her was interested to know more about the Ryn symbiont, and immediately a wave of anger rolled over her.
This wasn’t supposed to be her life, her past, and now her present. It was supposed to belong to someone else, anyone else. Just. Not. Her.
So Lara tossed the PADD containing the profiles of the previous hosts of Ryn into her bag and decided to go through her mail. . . the mail she had not been allowed to see for six months. There wasn’t too much of it, but it was enough to keep her busy enough until she reached Earth and busy enough to forget about that other PADD.
Among that mail was a video message from an old colleague, Dagmar Hielt. Dagmar had been Julian’s second on the digs, but more importantly, she had slowly been becoming a mentor to Lara. And she was someone whom Lara had seriously missed.
Lara uploaded Dagmar’s message into the console. It only took a few seconds for the clip to begin to play.
[Hey, Lara!] Dagmar, the eternal optimist, greeted. [Well, I don’t know when you are going to see this, but it has been about five months since you left us.] Leave it to Dagmar to use such a nice euphemism.
[This is the third time I have tried to contact you. The first time, I’m not even sure it went through.] Despite Dagmar’s brilliance in the field and her more than twenty years of experience, the simplest technologies were sometimes still a mystery to her. [And the second one prompted a call from your father, who told me that you were doing okay. But boy, your impersonation of him is uncanny!]
Dagmar chuckled slightly, and Lara momentarily felt a twinge of guilt over that impersonation, but sometimes, with a dig in the middle of nowhere, they had all gotten rather creative in the attempts to keep themselves amused.
[So, maybe this one will get through. We all miss you out here,] 'Here' still being Kobheeria, Lara knew, [...and we cannot wait for you to come back to us.]
Lara shook her head. Well, if there were one bright spot to this assignment on a starship, it was that she was never going to have to return to that place.
[Communication has been kind of spotty around here, but if you leave a message with the prime base, we should get it within a few days. Don’t wait too long. Bye!]
The message turned off, and for a moment, Lara felt almost normal. She was tempted to send Dagmar a message, but in all reality, even after six months, she did not have much to say. Really, she could imagine the message now: ‘Hi, Dag, I’ve been in a loony bin for six months, which I’m sure my father told you, but not in so many words. They think I’m nuts, I think I’m sane. What’s new with you?’
Then again, Dagmar would probably get a kick out of such a message. Keeping up her humor was how she managed to maintain her wits and her all-around positive attitude.
But that call could wait for another day. For now, there was another message, this one to read, and it was marked priority. It was from a Gemini Lassiter, whoever that was.
Lara opened it, and immediately scowled. In a very less than amused and punctuated tone, she stated through gritted teeth, “You. Have Got. To Be. Kidding. Me.”
She dropped her head down into her hands, which were lying on the table in front of her. Just when she thought the worse was over, she was wrong. If this message were right -- and the likelihood was it was -- her very first shipboard assignment was yet another blasted psychological examination.
Lieutenant Lara Valera Ryn
Science Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Science Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012