RP Log: Who Counsels The Counselor
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| 2019-01-19 21:12 | |
You trigger the door chime in Ready Room.
Knock from Ready Room: enter
The door leading to Ready Room swooshes open.
- Ready Room <USS Callisto NX-99901>
- The Captain's ready room is not much more than a small office. A small desk occupies one corner of the compartment, behind it a very comfortable looking high-back chair. One other chair is available for guests. Situated within the aft bulkhead wall is a food and beverage replicator. The opposite wall has a small bookcase at the upper portion, and bench like seat below it. A desktop console adorns the deck.
The Vulcan is preparing for her next detached mission. The ship is still on standby power, and she sits at the ready room desk, three padds before her.
"Lieutenant," the Counselor says in greeting as she enters the ready room. "Am I interrupting?"
"No," the Vulcan says, gesturing to a chair. "In truth, I have been expecting you to visit me for sometime, given all that has gone on. Refreshments, Counselor?"
Svetzvani seems to consider the replicator for a long moment, then nods as she sits. "Coffee, black," she says. "Thank you." She settles into the chair and very nearly slips her shoes off, but just narrowly resists. "Is there something specific you've been expecting me to see you about?" she asks.
T'Shaav stands and replicates the coffee, taking the same for herself. As she does this, she answers, "While I am no expert in your own field, logic suggests that what with my having lost someone under my command and given the unusual nature of our missions, such as the temporal causality loop, you would, in time, wish to check on the state of the people who have been experiencing such ... unusual missions. If I am mistaken, I ask your pardon." She hands you the coffee and sits back behind her desk.
Svetzvani accepts the coffee and takes a satisfying sip. "Your logic, as usual, fails you not," she says in a somewhat formal manner. ""So, tell me then about your thoughts on those matters. I assume you have some, if for no other reason than to prepare yourself for my logically inevitable visit."
"Just so," the Vulcan says. She steeples her fingers. "Just before the planet Lliyoclite II was decimated by the Qee's atmospheric dicipation weapon, the settlement was under orbital bombardment. My away team and I were on the surface, and I was ordering us beamed out as the bombardments moved towards the town and our location. The ops officer informed me that there was atmospheric interference affecting the transporters, and that the away team would have to be taken in sections. I ordered the rest of the team beamed aboard first, and myself transported up last. These orders were not heard in time, and the rest of the team and I, save Nevabi, were transported aboard. When the Qee started employing the atmospheric dicipation weapon, I was concered that the Callisto, then still cloaked in orbit, could be destroyed or detected, and ordered us to break orbit. by the time we returned 10.2 minutes later, the planet was devoid of atmosphere, building structures, and lifesigns." She lets you take that in.
Svetzvani nods once. "I've read the report," she says simply, then sips her coffee.
T'Shaav nods. "I appreciate the fact that if my orders had been able to be followed, I myself would either be dead or missing," she says. "That said, I regret we could not retrieve her. I believe, however, that she survived that incident and may still be alive. It is ... regretable ... that we do not have a faster and more efficient means of conducting our searches. Our resources are limited, and more limited by the need for stealth."
Svetzvani nods again. "Certainly," she agrees. "But Lieutenant, you were expecting me, the ship's counselor, to come talk to you. Do you expect that I would be professionally satisfied by a response from you that simply says, it's regrettable that we don't have a more efficient method of finding our people?"
T'Shaav replies wryly, "Admittedly, I predicted that you would need to see me. I am not certain what sorts of answers you would find professionally satisfactory, however. Perhaps if you were to ask specific questions, I could answer usefully."
"Alright," Tink says slowly. If you must instead be lead... How are you dealing with the loss of Chief Nevabi?"
"I am convinced that she may still be alive," the Vulcan says. "Leastwise, there is evidence that suggests it. That said, I hope that if we find her alive, she does not feel a sense of betrayal on the part of her commanding officer for being unable to retreive her. I experienced a certain amount of guilt concerning her loss, and I have considered many alternative scenarios to the mission. That said, I do not believe any other decisions would have had a better chance of succeeding."
Svetzvani sips her coffee again. "Tell me about this guilt," she suggests. "If there were no alternatives, is it logical to experience guilt?"
"It was not logical," she says. She studies the human. "The myth persists that Vulcans do not possess or experience emotions. You undoubtedly know this is not the case. So, I can say that emotionally, I did experience guilt. I then dealt with it after the fashion of my own people. I sought to understand the reasons for it and to deconstruct those reasons. I understand that there is a difference between feeling guilty and being guilty, and I am not guilty of anything. I do not experience the guilt today, but I do experience a certain hope, or anticipation, that we will find my missing crewmember."
"I'm not trying to prove or disprove the merits of Vulcan logic over raw emotion," the Councelor replies. "But with you... and with other Vulcans... I find that I often have to play on the stereotypes in order to break through all of the formal propriety so that I can find out what's swimming around underneath. Honestly, I don't like it any more than you do."
"I can believe," the Vulcan says, "that Vulcans do not make the easiest patients. At the risk of generalizing, I will say that it is not because any of us wish to hinder your work. It is because we simply approach emotions differently and deal with them differently. But they certainly do exist."
Svetzvani shakes her head. "I'm also not debating the existance of Vulcan emotions," she says. "But, we've gotten off topic, whether it was by accident or design. Allow me to bring it back... Are you experiencing any misgivings regarding the events of the past several weeks that you're having trouble dealing with?" she asks.
T'Shaav shakes her head. "I am not," she says. "I am not experiencing any fears or apprehensions. I am merely resolved to do whatever it takes to find those we came out here to find."
Svetzvani studies the Vulcan, takes another sip of her coffee, studies her some more, and then takes a deep breath before letting it out slowly. "Alright then. I've asked you what I should in an official capacity, and you have either been forthright or you haven't. I will have to trust that you have. And now..." She reaches up and takes off the rank pips from her collar, dropping them on the desk in front of her. "Do you understand the significance of this gesture?" she asks.
T'Shaav studies the rank pips lying on the desk. "I think," she says after a beat, "that you are wanting to be, how does one say, off the record?"
Svetzvani nods. "If you're willing to oblige, yes," she replies.
"Certainly," the Vulcan says. She considers, and then sets her own insignia beside yours. "What would you know?" She asks.
"Whether or not you have reason to distrust my ability to fulfill my role on this ship and her missions as diplomatic officer," Tink answers simply.
T'Shaav blinks. Whatever she was expecting, that was clearly not it. "Absolutely not," she says. "I apologize if I have ever given you reason to think so."
Svetzvani takes a few seconds to consider her next words. Now that the confrontation is at hand, she has to struggle to keep her own emotions in check. "You're aware of what happened when those people tried to launch that ship they built," she says evenly. "You know how many people died as a result." she pauses and watches for T'Shaav's reaction.
"Yes," the Vulcan says. "I was not on the final planetside mission, but I have Lieutenant Chandler's report." A beat. "Please continue," she invites quietly.
"Has it not occurred to you that such a disaster may have been avoided if we had been able to make contact with those people and found a way to convince them to stop, or to wait, or that we could help them succeed?" Tink asks next. She's holding her coffee cup with both hands. The surface of the liquid inside ripples with the slight trembling of her hands.
"Yes, it has," the Vulcan says. "I know there can be many ... tipping points in situations like that, and I do not know if the people who went missed one, or talked to the wrong person. There are so many variables." A beat. "My fear is that we will return to the planet to find that the Qee have done to it what they did to Lliyoclite in reprisal for the attempted launch of the rebel ship."
Svetzvani slowly, deliberately, places her cup on the desk next to her pips. she then crosses her legs and interlocks the fingers of her hands over her knee before continuing. "We were in negotiations with a member of Antietam's crew with a connection to the rebels," she says quietly. "He had Nevabi's commbadge, a channel of communication between us and the rebels, and I was trying to gain his trust. and then, out of what appeared from my point of view to be impatience on your part, you acted in a way that completely destroyed any and all possibility of building a productive relationship. In the process, you removed the one channel of communication we had between us and the rebels." She pauses to take a tense breath. "It could easily, very easily, be argued that in doing so, you removed any chance we had of avoiding... the events that followed. Not only am I finding it very difficult to accept that we could have had a chance to save those lives and lost it, but I'm finding it just as difficult to believe that your actions were not taken because of a lack of faith in my ability to negotiate and build a relationship, even a tenuous one, with the single contact we had at the time." She manages to keep her tone level, but her bright blue eyes flash with barely restrained anger.
The Vulcan takes that in. "I understand," she says. "You are talking about what happened on handalia I." She studies you. "I want you to understand that I do not doubt your abilities. However, I was reading the situation differently. I did not see that Shirol was trusting us, or moving in any direction that might have been trust. Nor did we have the chance to confer about it. I read his attitude as insulent, arrogant, and believe he was, I think the phrase is, toying with us. I believed prime directive issues were involved, and I could not allow more Starfleet technology, that commbadge, to fall into their hands to be used against the Qee." A beat. "You are not the first person to disagree with my command decision, and if I had it to do over again, I would probably have done something else. But for what it is worth, that is what I was thinking at the time. It had nothing at all to do with doubting you or undermining your abilities."
Svetzvani takes a moment to compose herself. "He said that he would take our message to the others, and that he would be in touch with a response," she tries to explain calmly. "That's not a bad end to such a rocky diplomatic relationship. It gave us hope. I understand that hope can't be measured, but when hope is all you have, more often than you might think, hope is enough. He wasn't a member of an outside race. He was a Federation citizen, a member of Starfleet, in possession of Nevabi's Starfleet commbadge." She stops and sighs. "Never mind. I'm not going to argue these points with you. What I will say is this... You may not have thought that things were going well in a diplomatic sense, but you aren't the diplomatic officer. If you can't trust that those of us with the responsibility to perform specific jobs under you are able to do those jobs, then we all have a very big problem here. You say that you don't doubt my ability, but you also didn't have faith that I would have let you know whether things were going so badly that we needed to take more drastic action. That, Lieutenant, doesn't engender trust going back up the chain."
T'Shaav listens attentively. Finally, she speaks. "I understand what you say," the Vulcan says. "All I can do now is assure you that if a similar situation presents itself, I will do things differently. Just as I both trust your abilities and cannot alter the past, I ask you, in turn, to accept my apology and my present assurances."
"I hope you can appreciate," Tink replies. "That it's very difficult for emotionally driven beings like humans to simply accept such assurances on trust that they won't happen again. Once bitten, twice shy, as my people sometimes say. But, we're out here all alone, and we only have one another to lean on for support. So in this case, I guess I don't really have much choice but to accept it, do I?" She picks up her pips as she stands and snaps them back into place on her collar. "Thank you for your time, Lieutenant, and for the coffee. As always, I am at your disposal if there's anything I can do to help." And with that, the Counselor turns and leaves the Ready Room.