Ensign Sotak - Adaptation

[Brell]

Ensign Sotak - Adaptation

(( Sotak’s Quarters, Deck 5, USS Atlantis ))

(( ooc: this takes place after Sotak receives her physical alterations on the second day of the voyage to Lydor V ))

:: After waking up in a biobed in sickbay, Sotak left sickbay’s alpha shift personnel to hurriedly return to her quarters, where she’d intended to deal with whatever reactions she had to the alterations. It was a procedure she would only do in her solitude and not in front of others. It could be that she had no big or relevant reactions, but whichever she did have she would rather deal with on her own. ::

 

:: As she entered her room she stood a few metres from the entrance and breathed in deeply, eyes closed. That way she calmed her bodily reactions to her hurriedness and wonderings. Once she believed she was in the proper state of mind she stepped into her bathroom and looked at her reflection in the mirror. She knew how it was a strange experience for the brain to not be able to find itself after a dramatic change in appearance, and she preferred to go through that in her own company and not in sickbay full of expecting doctors and nurses. ::

 

:: Her new skin was paler than Jann’s had been, a result of female Lydorian physiology, if their current information was to be believed. Their skin colour would be coherent with a nearby island to where they were actually beaming in to so as to appear as travellers for their own convenience. ::

 

:: She touched the new gills on her neck while studying her webbed hands and feet. The nurses had removed her shoes before the procedure, and she had carried them to her quarters by hand when she left, since they were no longer usable. Every of these aspects was completely out of the ordinary for her, and yet she found the experience to be… incredible fascinating. It was not like she had wished to study the Lydorians all her life, obviously, but nevertheless, the opportunity to study a pre-warp species from the Freeworlds region… She did not presently wish to be anywhere else in the galaxy, or doing anything else than this. Of course, that was a limited statement based only on what she knew or cared to recall, but it was how she thought of her situation at that moment.. ::

 

:: When she had finished familiarising herself with her new physical appearance, she sat down on her meditation mat to begin her mental preparation for the mission. As she sat there, she noticed for the first time the itching that her new skin gave her as Ensign Jann had mentioned the day before, but she ignored it completely. She had been trained since birth to control her reactions, and scratching would not help the newly applied skin and was therefore illogical, for which reason she avoided those actions wholly. ::

 

:: She did not pretend even to herself to having achieved anything close to a Kolinahr level of control of her emotions. Doing so would be a lie, a deception, and that was the opposite to her way of life. If there was no logical reason for deceit, she would not do so. And so she knew just how far her control went. She was far from achieving Kolinahr. Decades away from it, if she allowed herself to speculate. Sotak was young, and she was aware of this. But her path to gaining that level of control began at the start, and she had already covered a portion of it. ::

 

:: She would do what she had joined Starfleet to do. She was beginning this other path to understanding, another important aspect of her life she wished to improve upon. She would learn, she would understand, and she would add the conclusions to her memory for later expansion of cthia. And she would continue to do this until she was physically unable to, as the other extremely unlikely outcome would be to achieve full clarity of cthia, something no one had ever come close at being able to do in the known galaxy, nor was she likely to do it either. When either outcome came, she would share her accumulated knowledge with other people. ::

 

oO Return to the present. Concentrate. Oo

 

:: She strained her ears for any external sound she could focus on. She breathed deep before exhaling and listening to those sounds. After this she began to bring forth all she had learned while being in the science laboratory organising and making sense of the information on the Lydorians. ::

 

:: And finally, at the end of her meditative process, she brought forth all her internal conflict accumulated in the thoughts she’d had during meditation and allowed herself to feel the conflict she did not even know how to recognise. She took a deep breath and allowed it to fill her, holding her breath before finally releasing the it along with (figuratively) all her conflict, leaving her thoughts at peace for the moment. ::

 

:: She was ready for the mission. ::

--

Ensign Sotak - Science Officer

USS Atlantis, NCC-74682

A239503S10