Mildly Repulsive Behaviour
Posted on Thu Apr 2nd, 2026 @ 6:13am by Lieutenant Harinarayani Khatri
Edited on on Fri Apr 3rd, 2026 @ 7:42am
1,001 words; about a 5 minute read
Mission:
Episode 0: 48 Hours and Counting
Location: Deep Space 4
Timeline: 0345 hours, roughly 2 days before launch
An interesting choice, if not a little impulsive. Still, it may suit you.
As far as last-minute races-against-the-clock went, the transfer had gone smoothly enough. As may have come as no surprise to anyone, Raya was a terrible passenger. From a young age, she had never enjoyed sitting idle whilst the landscape outside the viewport whisked by, confined to a seat she was expected to remain in quietly without fuss as the world around her thrived on forward momentum. If she was lucky and the adults she was traveling with were distracted enough by their own priorities, there had been the occasion for brief adventure under the guise of impromptu exploration but those had almost always resulted in being chastised back into her seat before she actually found out anything of interest. Years later and she had about the same amount of patience for staring out the window as her younger self had mustered, she was just arguably better at hiding it.
Still, it may suit you.
Even after all these years, praise never landed without its garnish of disapproval.
Disembarkation procedures were not a tedium to reward a long journey and though it possibly would have made sense to just take the station's quartermaster up on the offer to allocate overnight lodgings, it would have constituted an unnecessary burden. Those existed when you took struggle and effort and perseverance that were your responsibility and tried to make them someone else's. It was certainly ludicrous to think that there was any kind of recuperation warranted after a day-and-a-half trapped inside a transport ship. Practically a holiday.
An interesting choice.
Life was full of those.
So she had turned down the offer despite the hour, comfortable in her certainty that a fortunate arrival ahead-of-schedule was an opportunity not to be squandered. She would worry later about the fact she hadn't had a decent night's sleep in days, or that her ongoing dissatisfaction with replicated meals made dinner seem a very long time ago. Duty called, and in Raya's little black book of priority numbers, it had pole position.
At this rate, it probably had her on speed-dial.
A little impulsive.
There was something about a docked ship that humbled the soul. This was a private thought not often shared because it served no real purpose other than to romanticise the essential but there was no escaping the fact that it was one of the few times a crew really got to compare themselves to the vessel they not only entrusted with their lives but considered a home for the duration of their combined service. It was hard to appreciate the vastness from the inside, the sheer brilliance of complex ingenuity that went into the design. It was, Raya had always thought, the only chance she ever got to look the great beast in the eye and strike a deal before the pair of them were thrust into the vaccum to make sense of the oncoming particles together. It was also just an opportunity to appreciate the privilege, especially in this case.
Impulsive, maybe. Nostalgic, perhaps. History mattered.
The best part about arriving at 0345 hours was that there were very few station personnel around to give her weird looks. The skeleton crew were preoccupied by their own misfortunes, primarily coordinating supply intake by the look of things, which seemed a little on the heavy side for this early in the shift. It made sense. Jaro had made it reasonably clear in his last missive, attached to her transfer details, that the schedule had shifted up considerably. It had skewed her timeline, which may have resembled impulsiveness, yes, but given the circumstances was blatantly unavoidable. A ship couldn't fly without its pilot and this one was due out in less than two days from now. It had necessitated some short-cuts when it came to the transfer options she had available, and that had meant compromising on comfort, but she couldn't fault the arrival time. Stiff and sore for a few days she may be but an inconvenient delay, she would not.
One thing sitting on your rump doing nothing did allow was reading. Raya wasn't opposed to this for pleasure's sake, but this trip had been more about familiarising herself with the ship once known to her father as the Repulse. This was a fact she was very sure of as he had referred to the reclassified ship by its old designation for the entire duration of their brief conversation following the submission of her transfer request; all 7 minutes, 15 seconds of it. The old Intrepid-class had seen enough in her day to be afforded her own opinion, which meant Raya would reserve judgement on whether the old lady had taken kindly to her name-change until after she'd consulted the source. Privately, she hoped so, not only because Raya personally thought the new name was an improvement but, perhaps a little on the petty-side, because her father clearly didn't.
Impulsive. Repulsive. Funny how he could manage to imply very similar meanings.
It would take, she had been told, probably an hour or so for the rest of her belongings to join the queue for loading. There was really nothing keeping her from just staying here, tucked out of the way, sizing up the future. Any self-respecting Commanding Officer would be asleep by this hour, especially still tethered to spacedock, and Jaro was nothing if not respectable, if her father's wordsmithing was anything to go by. Her arrival had likely be logged by someone but probably nobody that would really come looking for her any time soon. She wasn't due for half a day, after all.
With a sigh, Raya slung her rucksack onto her shoulder and pushed away from the railing. Then again...
She'd never liked standing still for too long, not when there were so many more interesting choices to be had.
Lieutenant Harinarayani Khatri
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Amazônia
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