ten_fwd_ooc | TEST DRIVE #6 - The Bridge and Ten Forward

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test drives

TEST DRIVE #6 - The Bridge and Ten Forward

Option 01. Ten Forward: The first thing you see is a bar. A large, lively bar filled with many different faces and many different smells, sights and sounds. This is Ten Forward, the Enterprise's off-duty lounge; feel free to get acquainted with your fellow travelers and try to find somebody who's in charge: this is your new home now, after all...

Option 02. The Bridge: Well, aren't you a lucky duck? You've found yourself in hallowed quarters. Wherever you were before, you're not there anymore. Now you're in a room that could be some kind of command center or control room; there's a captain's chair flanked by seats for his chief officers, computer panels and stations at each interior wall, and before you a broad viewscreen that shows the wide expanse of space rushing towards you. Have you ever wanted to be a starship captain for a day? Well, here's your chance. Feel free to roam around, but try not to touch anything shiny.

[OOC: The Bridge isn't usually available for in-game posts, so if you've ever wanted to play there, here's your chance!]

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Gaheris Rhade belonged to another world. A world where Dylan was happy, where the Commonwealth stood and its fragility had not been proven with such devastation, where Sara was still a part of his life. In that world, though, he'd been Dylan's closest friend, the one man he trusted with his life, his plans, his wedding. The man he'd been glad to have at his back in a fight, as second in command on his ship.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that he couldn't hide that something was wrong from Gaheris. He'd barely even been trying. He simply couldn't slip back into that easy friendship and camaraderie. Not when he was looking at Gaheris and still seeing that fight, still feeling the hurt, the anger, the betrayal.

He wasn't terribly inclined to feel the need to help Gaheris, but even if he were, he had no way to do it.

"We all want to find a way out of here," he said, daring a few steps closer to Gaheris. His hand still hadn't left the general vicinity of his force lance, though there was no tension of anticipation in the way he held himself.

Not that Gaheris was likely to move on him now, even if he were from near the time of his betrayal. Not when Dylan held the answers he wanted.

"Unless you have a way to cross parallel universes and travel through time, I doubt you'll be any more successful than I've been."

There were two things that Gaheris did that said a lot about what was on his mind. The first was, when Dylan took a step forwards, he took a step backwards. There was emotional space there, and the man that once walked shoulder to shoulder with him practically was keeping physical, cautious space. Something had gone very wrong in many ways that he couldn't quite count at the moment.

The other, though, is the arm that he had ever so slightly tensed near his force lance slackened and the boneblades tucked closer to his arms rather than being flared defensively. He did trust Dylan in saying that there was no way to help him. (In his opinion, there had been no way to help him in some time.) The lack of friendliness made him cautious but, for everything that he knew was supposed to happen, it wasn't a fight he wanted.

His stoic expression broke and rather than speak again, say what he wanted to (that if he could do that, things would be a lot simpler). It took quite a bit to finally muster something, and when he did the forever modulated tone didn't exactly match that look on his face that slightly betrayed him. "I need to return to my children." Not his plot, or the Commonwealth, but to his brood.

There was a tension in the air between them, and Dylan doubted it was any less obvious to Gaheris than to him. Those vaunted Nietzschean survival instincts always made Gaheris good at knowing when things weren't going right. There was a time when Dylan couldn't have imagined this distance between them, and particularly couldn't have imagined that he'd walk into a room with Gaheris in it and drop his hand to his holster. Everything he'd ever known has changed since Hephaistos.

Dylan was always an optimist, but this friendship, the closeness that had made Gaheris like the brother he didn't have, was broken. Even the understanding he'd gained on Tarazed, even the belated realization that Gaheris had, in some way, tried to warn him of the upheaval that was coming, even the unadmitted fact that he missed the friend he'd once trusted beyond all others, couldn't change that.

That didn't mean he had no empathy for Gaheris, so when the bone blades relaxed (the last time he'd seen Gaheris with bone blades extended they'd been aimed at him) Dylan's hand eased as well, to rest at his belt instead of his holster.

He knew the man well enough to know how telling the emotion on his face was. And how much those children meant to him. The children Dylan had left without their father, and Sara had saved by taking them to Tarazed.

"I know. But the being who brought us here hasn't shown any inclination to return us, and these people don't have the technology to do it."

Dylan wasn't a father and now probably never would be. He'd lost Sara with everything else, and when he wanted to return from this place it was to his ship, to his mission, to trying to save the Known Worlds from chaos and the oncoming threat of the Magog. There was nobody he'd loved left, save Andromeda.

Now, apparently, there was Gaheris, but too late.

"I'd help you if I could. I need to get back to Andromeda."

That Dylan hasn't replied that he needs to return to Sara will probably be a revelation in itself.

"Then we both have things we need to accomplish."

It hadn't settled in that Sara hadn't come up as a subject. Mostly he knew Dylan as a firm believer and supporter of the Commonwealth. It was baffling, really, that Gaheris was standing here in that reprehensible uniform (that symbol of support for parasites that violated people) and Dylan was... free of it.

In fact, he seemed freed of many of his shackles of idealism. Maybe that wouldn't be how Dylan looked at it; he had always prized his optimism against Gaheris's cynicism (or realism, in Gaheris's opinion). If he was still optimistic, anyway, with that weathered expression and lack of beaming light in his eyes he was obviously not blindly so.

Maybe there was enough realism between them both they could recognize common goals.

"I'll do what I can to help. We both need to leave. These... people don't seem very surprised to have strangers abruptly appear around them." He was just noticing that, since taking in every detail about his former friend had been holding his attention.

Odd.

Pragmatism.

That was a very Gaheris attitude, to ignore the tension, the fact that the warmth and friendship that had been between the two of them has disappeared, broken by the betrayal of everything that Dylan believed in by the man he'd thought was his friend.

Dylan didn't know what Gaheris saw when he looked at him, but he did know that more had changed than their friendship. Dylan still held his ideals above anything else, still loved the Commonwealth that Gaheris and his people had destroyed. He didn't see just how far those ideals had been tempered, but he did see that pragmatism had a far larger role in his decision-making than it ever had.

He'd worked before with people with whom he was ideologically opposed. Even with Nietzscheans, for all the trouble it's been to have the Sabra-Jaguar Pride as signatories of his charter. Gaheris' appeal to pragmatism made sense, but ...

There was more than sense at play here.

"They're used to it," he said, because that at least was something he could bring himself to share. "It's been happening for months. People just appear here from different times and places. I've been here for months. We're lucky the captain of the Enterprise hasn't decided to throw us all in his brig."

To Gaheris, Dylan was always his friend. Nothing would erase his affection for him (despite his intense feelings about having sided with the Magog) because Gaheris was a Nietzschean, and Nietzscheans simply expected trickery out of one another. He didn't think whatever changes in Dylan included that understanding, however, and pushing for it felt like a losing battle. Gaheris didn't like to lose, not unless he chose to. He picked his battles carefully.

So far, despite whatever was going on in Dylan's head, there was at least enough pragmatism there for his captain (he was still his captain right then) to give him factual information about this odd new place.

"Perhaps he should." Oh, if only he knew. The way that Gaheris, in a last ditch effort to stop himself, had asked Dylan to detain him and the other Nietzscheans in the crew. But he had no way of knowing. "In any case if they're capable of FTL travel I suspect they have their own instances of time travel and divergent realities. I'm not a physicist but I'm a good navigator and tactical pilot and I can assist them in any way that's necessary."

He had avoided mentioning the insurrection. It hadn't happened for him yet, so why would he? But if Dylan was from a different time, and place, and looking at him like that, there was only one thing that he could think would have gone wrong.

A year ago, if Dylan had walked onto the bridge of a ship and seen Gaheris there, he'd probably have called for security to do just that: escort him to the brig. Gaheris had asked him to do just that, as the battle at Hephaistos broke out around them and the scale of the Nietzschean treachery became apparent. Dylan hadn't believed it of his friend then, hadn't wanted to send his First Officer to the brig, hadn't wanted to lose Gaheris' skill and intelligence in a battle where the odds were against them. Dylan held the deaths of those security officers to Gaheris' record.

"I wouldn't."

In fact, Dylan had long thought that he'd react in a similar way to Captain Picard, though he might be more willing to accept the assistance of the visitors than Picard. If it had been Gaheris' decision, though, Dylan would not have been surprised to find everyone confined to the brig. The balance between trust and suspicion, optimism and cynicism was an old one between them, as old as their friendship.

"They've had their own instances," he agreed, because Gaheris was right about that, and Dylan had discussed it with not only Starfleet personnel, but other of Q's unwilling guests here. "So have some of the people who've been brought here." Including Dylan, though Gaheris had no way to know that.

"They're reluctant to accept help from anyone but medical personnel. We're their guests and nothing more." For the first time, there was the hint of a smile on Dylan's face, but it wasn't friendly.

Gaheris little needed to be told the skills Dylan could bring to this ship. Or just how much he disliked being unable to contribute in any valuable way. Regardless of what happened between them, Gaheris was his First Officer. He knew Dylan as a captain better than anyone.

"What about you? Is that how you got here?" He had the good sense to ask. Though he stopped short of saying that the captain of the Enterprise should try harder. He can't imagine that he's the only person, if many appear here, that say that.

He still kept his distance with Dylan as went around him to get to the door. He did turn his back on him- not that it meant he was unaware. Dylan would probably know that his paranoia would never allow him to completely drop his guard. Especially as he hesitated at those opening doors and watched warily down the corridor. But there was still an odd balance of trust there, slim though it was.

Maybe trust wasn't the right word. Confidence might have been a more apt description for what he felt in Dylan's behavior.

"One moment, the Andromeda, the next, here," he said, in agreement to Gaheris' question.

It was the longest he'd been away from Andromeda since he took command of her nearly five years ago. It came at the worst time, when his mission was not just to rebuild the Commonwealth, but to defend against the Magog. The very threat Gaheris had hated the Commonwealth for being weak against. There was, perhaps, an irony in that, that Gaheris' betrayal had led, in however oblique a manner, to Dylan leading the fight against the Magog.

Gaheris was businesslike in circling Dylan -- though he still kept distance between them in a deliberate way that would have been unthinkable once -- to head for the door and look out into the corridor.

That was like countless missions the two of them had gone on together, Gaheris checking the exits, looking for threats, except that usually, Dylan would have had his back.

"I've never encountered a threat on this ship."

Not that he expected Gaheris to take his word for it. In fact, he'd probably have been disappointed in him if he had.

Gaheris was always the paranoid one.

Edited 2014-11-20 02:37 (UTC)

He thought it was a perfectly logical reaction, considering the place, but he did fall back to let Dylan take the lead because, as Dylan mentioned, he had been here for a while and while he was sure it would be unnerving to have Gaheris at his back, Dylan knew this place and he didn't.

Though seeing Dylan a little more cautious was gratifying, he was surprisingly saddened by the notion that Dylan would have to be so guarded. As much as he argued against foolish idealism, there was no denying the circumstances that led to... whatever happened to Dylan... were ones that Rhade had resented for some time.

"I need you to lead the way." He said as if him falling back needed explanation. It probably did.

This used to be normal, too, Dylan stepping forward with Gaheris at his back, walking just behind him where Rommie could often be seen, the two of them working together in an agreement that had once been nearly unspoken. Now, Gaheris had to explain why he'd fallen back, and Dylan had to honestly consider whether he wanted the Nietzschean at his back, especially armed.

Their fight on the bridge of the Andromeda Ascendant had been hard fought, and Dylan might have been an optimist, but he was not enough of one to assume he'd win a second time. Gaheris was not only a Nietzschean, but one with High Guard training and a hell of a lot of skill.

He hadn't been wrong about what he could offer the Enterprise if Captain Picard wanted it.

It only took a moment for Dylan to decide, the pause so brief that most wouldn't have noticed it. Then he nodded and stepped forward to the door. Gaheris, Gaheris at whichever moment he'd come from, however far along he was in his plans for treachery, was in many ways an unknown, but in many others, Dylan still knew him. Though if he'd ever known him as well as he thought he did, Dawn would not have died.

He nodded and led the way through the door.

"This ship is smaller than the Andromeda and has a smaller crew complement. But it has the capacity to treat its guests with hospitality and relative comfort."

For the first time, a hint of the wryness that used to be so common in banter between the two of them slipped back into Dylan's voice. He was nowhere near as comfortable with being on this ship as his apparent calm made him seem.

"Do the engines break every week or so?" Almost forgetting the tension, Gaheris had to say something wry about the state of their slipstream engines- even when there was a full crew compliment to the Andromeda, the stability of Slipstream FTL engines wasn't exactly something you would brag about.

Small things might have slipped under Gaheris's radar before, but there was enough significantly different that he even had to pay attention to the minutia. Everything. Dylan's pauses. Distant sounds in the corridor that Nietzschean ears could pick up but human ones couldn't. The unfamiliar texture of the carpeting and the flat corridors, but similar shape.

At least there were enough small details that he had to stop worrying over Dylan's reactions. He had to force himself, with considerable effort, to focus on the place.

"I appreciate hospitality but I am skeptical. Why is he freely supporting our stay? And what do you know of the force that brought us here?"

There'd been a joke, once, between Dylan and the Andromeda's engineer, that the slipstream engines were her way of staying in a job. Though Dylan would never hear a word said against his ship in general, Slipstream engines were exempt from that particular rule.

"They were broken when I got here, but in general, no." For another moment, Dylan's tone slipped into something more like the quick humor of old. "In this reality, they've managed to find a way of traveling FTL that doesn't break down all the time."

In their world, that's an impossible dream, because thousands of years of the Known Worlds' best science hadn't been able to even approach it. Slipstream was what they had, unreliability of the engines and all.

Dylan's expression was level as he glanced back at Gaheris. No, Gaheris wouldn't understand it. Dylan had, when he'd spoken to Captain Picard. He'd seen something of a likeminded commander in Picard.

"The captain is a good man. I've met him, and I think he's trying to make the best of the situation he's found himself in."

Dylan was always more willing to trust someone's good intentions than Gaheris.

"I'm surprised to hear that. Almost as surprised as showing up on an unfamiliar ship." While that was going to lead into a wry comment about how seldomly Nietzscheans were surprised he didn't want to consider the worst surprises that Dylan had been through.

What had happened to Dylan.

But he supposed Dylan would discuss it in his own time, once the pertinent information were dealt with. "I saw an alien on the bridge, unfamiliar to me. Are there different races here? No magog?"

Please, please let there be none of those deplorable creatures in this universe. One place, one alternate reality, should be spared the horrors of what they did.

There it was: the Magog.

The thing Gaheris had blamed for him turning on the Commonwealth, on his ship, his captain, his best friend. Though Dylan had fought as hard as anyone in the war while it lasted, had received the Order of the Vedran Empress for saving Dawkinstown Station from a Magog attack, had met Sara evacuating a research base in the face of their wrath, Gaheris had said it wasn't enough. Gaheris had decided that the peace that was made in order to save lives from the horrific war of attrition as Commonwealth worlds fell to the Magog had been weakness, and that the Commonwealth deserved to fall for it. And with the Commonwealth, Dylan.

They'd all hated the Magog. They'd all been horrified by Brandenburg Tor, by all the Magog attacks. Peace hadn't been an endorsement. It had been an escape from a threat that the Commonwealth was completely unprepared for. Now the task of dealing with that threat was now his, with higher stakes and fewer resources than the Commonwealth ever faced.

Fortunately, Dylan was good at not showing what he was thinking, though Gaheris had once known him better than almost anyone. He managed to look, if not as he once would have at the question, at least impassive enough to not flash anger at Gaheris for the thinking he was sure was behind the question.

"We're far enough in the past that there's no way to tell. This is long before the Magog appeared." He holds up one hand in a non-committal gesture. "But given that in this reality humans haven't met the Perseids and there's no sign of Vedran technology or of any alien race I know, maybe not."

He hoped not. The Magog and their World Ship in their reality was more than enough.

Edited 2014-11-22 13:55 (UTC)

Maybe one day Rhade would, not in a situation of betrayal, explain how betrayed he had felt as well. After he had moronically (in his opinion) defended the Commonwealth to his brethren, just to have the outer worlds colonized and terraformed by his people devoured and pity shown to the aggressors.

But for now, he didn't want to bring it up beyond that. Instead, all he added was a simple, "Good". That would suffice for now. Any other threats he felt he could face and tolerate.

"So what is it that we're expected to do. Sit around and do nothing? I can be placated with games for a while but we need to be able to do something substantial rather than have our minds and bodies be spoiled and grow soft with excess and entertainment."

"This is a ship in some sort of past. Surely there are threats and difficulties that it encounters." Hopefully none as scathing as the hairy demons from the depths beyond the three galaxies.

Knowing there may well be no Magog here did little to ease Dylan's restlessness at being here. He wanted to be back in his world, on his ship, rebuilding the Commonwealth and preparing to face the Magog. With that threat on its way to the Known Worlds, he had to get back.

There was more than just his dream at stake, and his dream had been enough on its own.

"The captain has been trying to do what he can, but so far, there's not much we can do. As far as they can tell, the being that brought us here likes to create challenges for the crew of this ship for his own entertainment."

Dylan's tone said precisely what he thought of being a piece in Q's game. It was, perhaps, the most honest emotion he'd displayed since Gaheris had appeared.

"There are threats." There were always threats. "On the last planet the Enterprise visited, there was an earthquake and the people it trapped were attacked by aliens."

It had been a situation more suited to Dylan's skills than waiting on the Enterprise for something to happen.

"At least our skills can be put to some use." And it seemed like they were far enough from other people for Gaheris to ask, with a certain urgency.

"What happened, before you were here." Because something had. Dylan was too hardened, his uniform was gone, and he had an emotional distance. He had his suspicions. Did he give in? Did he admit what the Nietzscheans were planning? Or had he done the unthinkable and-

And-

He went into it expecting his wives to come out widows. But it was still a terrible thought, coupled with the failure of the man that gave their children his genes. They they trusted to aid in their survival. He had to think it would be worth it.

He'd known, on some level, that it would be impossible for Gaheris not to notice the difference. They'd been the closest of friends. Gaheris had been the man Dylan chose to have at his back, at his side. The man he trusted with his life, with his ship, with his crew. He'd been going to be Dylan's best man.

Now he was the man Dylan blamed for ruining his life.

(Yet ... he still kept a photograph of the two of them in his quarters on the Andromeda.)

What would happen, if he told Gaheris the honest answer to his question, the result of the uprising? Could he stop it, or win Gaheris over? Did he have the right to even try? Could Gaheris see sense, see that what he was doing was setting the Known Worlds up for three hundred years of chaos?

At Witchhead, he'd decided to maintain the timeline, whatever the cost, because no other option had been better. Because nothing was certain except what had happened.

What had happened was that the man walking beside him had plotted against him and everything he stood for. Had shot one of his friends in front of him, sabotaged his ship, and tried to kill him.

Yet here he was, acting as if they were friends, when Gaheris had been planning to betray him for years.

Dylan paused, for a moment, then, very slowly, drew his force lance.

"The last time I saw you, you sabotaged my ship and tried to kill me."

Gaheris set his chiseled jaw hard, hands clutched behind his back for the time being. But his eyes had strayed from Dylan's face to his elbow, watching what he was about to do with that force lance. It was obvious that he wasn't about to take chances, not really.

But still he was reluctant, at this point, to pull his weapon on his friend.

"Put it away. We're not aboard the Andromeda and it would do no good here. Revenge is my prerogative, not yours." He didn't move. Not a hair. Not an inch. Not a sigh. Not a breath beyond what he needed to make words. He was intent and ready for defense.

"And I don't suspect anything that I say about what hasn't happened yet-" what he wasn't even sure he wanted to happen "-will matter to you now. I can tell from the look on your face." So, with that, he let his gaze slip up to Dylan's face. And then he did what would otherwise be unthinkable. He almost needed to see if, whatever had been done, had actually broken Dylan.

"Put it away or shoot me in the back. It's your call." And with his hands still clasped behind his back he turned on him to continue down the corridor. But it made him grind his teeth, a risk that rubbed him the wrong way and ate at him. He was a fool, an idiot. If he shot him in the back for such a moronic risk he would deserve to be removed from the gene pool.

If he didn't, at least he would have given the man he betrayed his space. Because despite some Nietzschean traits, Dylan wasn't Nietzschean. He wouldn't understand, and he didn't think he would be able to explain it.

Dylan, like any soldier, knew better than to pull a weapon he's not prepared to use. That didn't mean he was about to shoot.

It did mean that if Gaheris made just one move that made Dylan think he was in for a repeat performance, he would.

He'd shot Gaheris. They'd fought on the command deck of the Andromeda with Dawn's body still slumped in the pilot's chair. He'd held Gaheris while he died as a battle raged around them and as everything he knew and believed in started to fall apart. Somewhere, inside, where he almost never let it show, even to himself, he hated himself for that almost as much as he'd hated Gaheris, at times, for what he'd done.

Though Dylan's stare was harder than Gaheris had once been used to seeing and his hand was perfectly steady on his weapon, Gaheris was, of course, right.

Dylan was never a man who could shoot someone cold as he walked away, offering no immediate threat and with no weapon in his hand. Not even if it could change history. If he ever became that man, he'd have crossed a line he never wanted to cross.

Still, for almost nobody else would he, in that moment, have slid the force lance back into its holster. Gaheris had always had a way of speaking as if whatever he suggested was the only logical option and anyone else, including Dylan, was a fool for thinking otherwise.

This time, he was right. But it took a lot for a Nietzschean, especially one as paranoid as Gaheris, to deliberately turn his back on a man with a weapon drawn on him. It was a simple, potent move, and it called a bluff Dylan hadn't really meant to play.

"You know I can't," he said, one small concession to that fact.

He stalled toward the end of the corridor, and looked back to Dylan.

"No, I don't." Because if he knew that for sure, then why was Dylan standing there and looking at him that way. He didn't want to ask, because he knew that- even if he wished for his failure, hearing about it would set such a sick sense of disgust with himself it would be intolerable. And even that would be repulsive because no Neitzschean should hold themselves in contempt.

Gaheris didn't. He didn't want to, either.

Any sort of parting words, even temporary, seemed inappropriate for the moment. So he continued on after that, in search of some crew that could give him more information.

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TEST DRIVE #6 - The Bridge and Ten Forward

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