Fic: The Summer Intern (cont.)
Oct. 31st, 2010 06:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalWell, as a test of my resolution, I managed to type about 1800 words of this next bit in just about two hours. If that's the average I can manage for Nano, and assuming my craptastic sleep patterns remain the same, I should be all right.
Nan was given the rest of the day and the next off by the First One. She spent most of the first afternoon exploring the administration village, walking along the cat walks strung between the trees for the benefit of locals who didn't have the advantage of a prehensile tail. Aside from the restaurant Nez had taken her to that first night, she located several other shops, including the local hair salon, which proved to be one of the most popular gathering places for the area does, not to mention a few of the bucks. That evening she composed a long overdue text to her parents, letting them know how she was settling in and giving them a very edited version of her first couple of days under the First One's tuelage.
She woke the next morning to a light drizzle outside the window her dorm room, which encouraged her to take her compad down to the lounge and spend the morning and afternoon organizing her notes from the past few days. So far her intensive language studies hadn't exactly proven useful, but she had to admit she'd at least seen a terrific example of ferin power dynamics, in the most literal sense of the term.
Nan was forced to admit that she felt a bit sorry for that rebellious ferin buck. He hadn't looked much happier living in the wild than he'd probably been serving in a power cell. Possibly less so, given that power service tended to be a highly pleasurable occupation reportedly, the ferin being designed by their creator to enjoy serving in the chambers. She could only pray that the First One hadn't been serious about his threat to move the buck's troupe. That seemed terribly high handed even for him.
“What I don't understand is how all one minute they can be nearly insulting him and then going down on bended knee the next when he gives them a taste of his bion,” she said to Nez that evening, as they shared a meal at the restaurant again. Nan chewed on a bite of baked kin goose, having to admit for a bunch of vegetarians, ferin did know how to spice meat really well.
“It's instinct with them. They can't help it,” her roommate said.
“They're sentient beings. Instinct shouldn't have anything to do with it.”
“Sentience doesn't have anything to do with it,” Nez countered. “Look, we've all got instincts that we follow. It's just the ferin are less pretentious about it. Haven't you ever heard of something like a vixen trying to clean their house and making sure their cubling's room is in order when they start going into labor?”
“I suppose you're right.” Still, it was disturbing to think about. She wondered if ferin like the First One and that former slave were what happened when instincts kept colliding with desire.
Still thinking about it, she ended up going to bed two hours after Nez, the wazagan giving into the demands of her specie's need for more sleep than the average Galactic race. Nan had just started to dream about a particularly handsome male from her university days when an ear-splitting buzz shot her back to consciousness, her heart racing. At first she thought it was the fire alarm, but the noise was coming from the vicinity of Nez's pillow. It was only when the wazagan blearily reached underneath and pulled out her personal com did she realize the claws-on-blackboard noise was a ringtone set specifically to wake wazagans up.
“Grrif, nrgh, f'tagh?” Nez mumbled into the receiver, eyes still closed. Then she waved the phone towards Nan, “Ish f'r me.”
Bemused and completely awake now herself, Nan took and answered, “Hello?”
This is Dr. Pouncer, a gravelly male voice on the other end said in a clipped tone. I need Nez at the landing pad in twenty minutes, please.
Nan glanced over at her roommate, who had pulled her covers back over herself and stuffed her head back under her pillow. “Twenty minutes? I really don't think she'll be able to make it.”
Look in her desk drawer for a small orange box. Take out the auto-injector and stick it against the primary artery in her neck. Then make she's dressed properly and at the landing pad in nineteen minutes. I'll be waiting for her. The com clicked off and Nan set it down, getting out of bed to root through Nez's desk for the mysterious box. She found it shoved in the back of the top right hand drawer, behind a box of staples. It was bright emergency orange, with a warning label that read FOR WAZAGANS ONLY. The auto-injector sat in a cradle of foam padding within. Taking it out gingerly, and not entirely certain about what she was doing, Nan managed to slip her paw under the death grip Nez had on her pillow and stick it against the vein in the wazagan's neck, listening to the hiss as it injected the drug into her body.
It couldn't have been more than ten seconds before Nez threw off her pillow and sat straight up, her eyes wide as saucers. She drew in a sharp breath and started to recite quickly, “Ar-Rahmān, Ar-Rahim, Al-Malik, Al-Quddus, As-Salām, Al-Mu'min, Al-Muhaymin, Al-Aziz, Al-Jabbar, Al-Muta... mut...” She blinked, eyes returning to something like their normal size, though her pupils were still dilated. “Darn it, I can never remember more than ten of them.”
“What was that?” Nan demanded.
“The Ninety-Nine Names of God. Well, nine and a half of them anyway.”
“No, this stuff,” she said, waving the empty injector.
Nez peered at it. “Oh, that's an emergency stimulant. Guaranteed to wake up any wazagan no matter how deeply they're sleep.”
“Is it safe?”
“Hu? Oh, sure,” Nez said, waving her hand casually as she got up and started to throw her clothes on. “I'll be good for about five hours now.”
“What happens after that?”
Nez took the injector from her hand and stuck it into a sharps container she'd been using as a desktop trashcan. “I puke up everything I ate last night and sleep for another twelve. I sure hope Dr. Pouncer has a good reason to need me.”
“He said you were to meet him at the landing pad in twenty... okay, ten minutes now,” Nan said, glancing at the clock.
Nez shrugged on an Emergency Services coat, bright red with plenty of reflective striping. “I'd better get moving then.” She gave Nan a wave and headed out. Nan stuck her head out the door to watch her stagger slightly, bumping against the wall, before she reached the stairwell. Then, with the certain knowledge that there was just no way she'd get back to sleep now, she quickly threw on her own clothes, grabbing her coat and running after Nez into the cold wet rain that was still coming down, harder than ever now.
She caught up with her right as they both arrived at the landing pad. A weary Skyler, looking like he just woke up himself, was sitting the pilot's seat of the air ambulance. Dr. Pouncer, an old greyfur in his seventies, was waiting in a jump seat in patient care area, the First One sitting across from him. They both looked up as Nan and Nez stepped through the back door of the ambulance at the same time, bumping shoulders.
“Nez, I'm glad you made it so quickly,” Dr. Pouncer said. “Who's this?”
“My latest intern,” the First One said. He was dressed in his formal clothes again, looking seriously annoyed. “What are you doing here, Vix? You're supposed to be in bed.”
“Following her to make sure she doesn't fall on her face,” she answered, sitting beside him and strapping herself in as Skyler warmed up the engines. “What's the emergency?”
“Not an emergency exactly,” Dr. Pouncer said, as the ambulance rose and started to accelerate. “There's a patient arriving at the spaceport.”
“What patient?” she asked.
“You'll see when we get there,” the First One said, his tone indicating he would brook no more conversation on the subject. Nan dozed for the hour's flight, half-hypnotized by the drone of the engines, until she heard Skyler speak up into his headset.
“We are a priority transport,” he repeated. “I need you to clear a corridor for us directly to Landing Pad 39-A.” He paused, listening, “I know it's irregular, but we need to be right there when the ship arrives.”
“Gimme your headset, Skyler,” the First One ordered. The pilot handed it back and the First One, who settled it over his ears. “This is the First One. Priority Code Omega Five Six Treona Alpha Townsend. Check my voice print and then get whatever traffic is in front of us out of my bloody way.” He waited, then smiled in satisfaction and said, “Thank you, Traffic Control. We'll be landing in ten minutes.” He handed Skyler's headset back to him and settled back in his seat.
“I didn't know you could order Traffic Control around like that,” she said. “I thought your authority only extended to the borders of the Region.”
“Only under limited circumstances,” he replied. “This circumstance being one of them.”
Ten minutes later the air ambulance settled down next to a wide concrete landing pad, looking sized for ground to orbit shuttlecraft. Dr. Pouncer opened the back doors and looked out at the pouring rain unhappily.
“Do you think she'll delay her landing until the weather clears up?” he asked the First One.
“No. A little bad weather won't stop her. Not with the cargo she's carrying.” The First One stepped out of the ambulance, ignoring the rain as it soaked his clothes. Nan got out to stand beside him, wishing she'd thought to bring an umbrella.
“Who are we waiting for?” she asked.
“You'll see,” he replied.
In less than five minutes a bright light began to pierce the cloud cover, the loud roar of engines overwhelming the patter of rain on the concrete pad. From out of the darkness, riding on her ventral thrusters, a slim fightercraft dropped down out of the clouds, her thin wings retracting in upon themselves as her landing gear extended. She settled down on the landing pad with barely a bump, as Nan gaped in surprise. Any vulpine schoolchild could have identified the ship, if not by the classic line of the hundred and fifty year old Swift Wing hull, then by the chess piece logo on her side, of a stylized riding beast of Earth origin. She managed to take in a breath as she realized she was looking at the famous White Knight, the personal fighter of Lord Rufus Brushtail.
The cockpit opened and a spacesuited figure clambered down the boarding ladder awkwardly. The pilot turned towards them and removed their helmet, revealing the head of a vixen perhaps two years younger than Nan, with bright orange fur and black ear tips. She looked the group over, then dropped her helmet and grabbed the First One in a tight hug, lifting him off his feet and spinning him around. “Uncle Teri!” she exclaimed. “It's so good to see you!”
To Nan's surprise, the First One not only tolerated the hug, he actually smiled at the pilot and hugged her back, giving her a fond rub between the ears for good measure. “Glad you could make it, Meribeth. Any problems along the way?”
“Nah,” she said, putting him down. “Brightstone's orbital monitoring is a bad joke. No one saw me land or take off.”
“Good, good,” he said. He turned back to Nan and the others. “This is my niece, Lady Meribeth Brushtail. She decided to take after her great-grandad and become a pilot. Meribeth, this is Dr. Pouncer, his assistant Nez, Skyler our pilot, and my latest college vixen, Nan.”
“Hi there,” Meribeth said, waving as she stripped off her flight gloves. “Let me open up the cargo bay for you, Uncle. Then I have to get over to the pilot's lounge for a shower. I've never gotten around to changing the relief system on the Knight for vixens and I've been wearing what's oh so fondly referred to as a “waste relief garment” for the past fifty-two hours.”
“All right. Pop it open.” he said.
She nodded, tapping a code into the lock of the White Knight's small cargo compartment. It popped open, revealing a metal box, little more than a mter long and half as wide. which she carefully pulled out and laid on the ground with Nez's help.
“Is that a coffin?” Nan asked the First One in a low tone, seeing the dark expression on his face.
“Not exactly,” he said. He waved Meribeth and Nez away from the box. With infinite care he unlatched the top, opening the sealed lid. Strapped inside, wrapped in a silvery emergency blanket with an oxygen mask over her face, was the tiny, slim figure of a strawberry haired doe.
TBC
Note: I originally introduced Meribeth in the story Determnation. Fortunately she decided to redirect her anger in a more productive direction.
Nan was given the rest of the day and the next off by the First One. She spent most of the first afternoon exploring the administration village, walking along the cat walks strung between the trees for the benefit of locals who didn't have the advantage of a prehensile tail. Aside from the restaurant Nez had taken her to that first night, she located several other shops, including the local hair salon, which proved to be one of the most popular gathering places for the area does, not to mention a few of the bucks. That evening she composed a long overdue text to her parents, letting them know how she was settling in and giving them a very edited version of her first couple of days under the First One's tuelage.
She woke the next morning to a light drizzle outside the window her dorm room, which encouraged her to take her compad down to the lounge and spend the morning and afternoon organizing her notes from the past few days. So far her intensive language studies hadn't exactly proven useful, but she had to admit she'd at least seen a terrific example of ferin power dynamics, in the most literal sense of the term.
Nan was forced to admit that she felt a bit sorry for that rebellious ferin buck. He hadn't looked much happier living in the wild than he'd probably been serving in a power cell. Possibly less so, given that power service tended to be a highly pleasurable occupation reportedly, the ferin being designed by their creator to enjoy serving in the chambers. She could only pray that the First One hadn't been serious about his threat to move the buck's troupe. That seemed terribly high handed even for him.
“What I don't understand is how all one minute they can be nearly insulting him and then going down on bended knee the next when he gives them a taste of his bion,” she said to Nez that evening, as they shared a meal at the restaurant again. Nan chewed on a bite of baked kin goose, having to admit for a bunch of vegetarians, ferin did know how to spice meat really well.
“It's instinct with them. They can't help it,” her roommate said.
“They're sentient beings. Instinct shouldn't have anything to do with it.”
“Sentience doesn't have anything to do with it,” Nez countered. “Look, we've all got instincts that we follow. It's just the ferin are less pretentious about it. Haven't you ever heard of something like a vixen trying to clean their house and making sure their cubling's room is in order when they start going into labor?”
“I suppose you're right.” Still, it was disturbing to think about. She wondered if ferin like the First One and that former slave were what happened when instincts kept colliding with desire.
Still thinking about it, she ended up going to bed two hours after Nez, the wazagan giving into the demands of her specie's need for more sleep than the average Galactic race. Nan had just started to dream about a particularly handsome male from her university days when an ear-splitting buzz shot her back to consciousness, her heart racing. At first she thought it was the fire alarm, but the noise was coming from the vicinity of Nez's pillow. It was only when the wazagan blearily reached underneath and pulled out her personal com did she realize the claws-on-blackboard noise was a ringtone set specifically to wake wazagans up.
“Grrif, nrgh, f'tagh?” Nez mumbled into the receiver, eyes still closed. Then she waved the phone towards Nan, “Ish f'r me.”
Bemused and completely awake now herself, Nan took and answered, “Hello?”
This is Dr. Pouncer, a gravelly male voice on the other end said in a clipped tone. I need Nez at the landing pad in twenty minutes, please.
Nan glanced over at her roommate, who had pulled her covers back over herself and stuffed her head back under her pillow. “Twenty minutes? I really don't think she'll be able to make it.”
Look in her desk drawer for a small orange box. Take out the auto-injector and stick it against the primary artery in her neck. Then make she's dressed properly and at the landing pad in nineteen minutes. I'll be waiting for her. The com clicked off and Nan set it down, getting out of bed to root through Nez's desk for the mysterious box. She found it shoved in the back of the top right hand drawer, behind a box of staples. It was bright emergency orange, with a warning label that read FOR WAZAGANS ONLY. The auto-injector sat in a cradle of foam padding within. Taking it out gingerly, and not entirely certain about what she was doing, Nan managed to slip her paw under the death grip Nez had on her pillow and stick it against the vein in the wazagan's neck, listening to the hiss as it injected the drug into her body.
It couldn't have been more than ten seconds before Nez threw off her pillow and sat straight up, her eyes wide as saucers. She drew in a sharp breath and started to recite quickly, “Ar-Rahmān, Ar-Rahim, Al-Malik, Al-Quddus, As-Salām, Al-Mu'min, Al-Muhaymin, Al-Aziz, Al-Jabbar, Al-Muta... mut...” She blinked, eyes returning to something like their normal size, though her pupils were still dilated. “Darn it, I can never remember more than ten of them.”
“What was that?” Nan demanded.
“The Ninety-Nine Names of God. Well, nine and a half of them anyway.”
“No, this stuff,” she said, waving the empty injector.
Nez peered at it. “Oh, that's an emergency stimulant. Guaranteed to wake up any wazagan no matter how deeply they're sleep.”
“Is it safe?”
“Hu? Oh, sure,” Nez said, waving her hand casually as she got up and started to throw her clothes on. “I'll be good for about five hours now.”
“What happens after that?”
Nez took the injector from her hand and stuck it into a sharps container she'd been using as a desktop trashcan. “I puke up everything I ate last night and sleep for another twelve. I sure hope Dr. Pouncer has a good reason to need me.”
“He said you were to meet him at the landing pad in twenty... okay, ten minutes now,” Nan said, glancing at the clock.
Nez shrugged on an Emergency Services coat, bright red with plenty of reflective striping. “I'd better get moving then.” She gave Nan a wave and headed out. Nan stuck her head out the door to watch her stagger slightly, bumping against the wall, before she reached the stairwell. Then, with the certain knowledge that there was just no way she'd get back to sleep now, she quickly threw on her own clothes, grabbing her coat and running after Nez into the cold wet rain that was still coming down, harder than ever now.
She caught up with her right as they both arrived at the landing pad. A weary Skyler, looking like he just woke up himself, was sitting the pilot's seat of the air ambulance. Dr. Pouncer, an old greyfur in his seventies, was waiting in a jump seat in patient care area, the First One sitting across from him. They both looked up as Nan and Nez stepped through the back door of the ambulance at the same time, bumping shoulders.
“Nez, I'm glad you made it so quickly,” Dr. Pouncer said. “Who's this?”
“My latest intern,” the First One said. He was dressed in his formal clothes again, looking seriously annoyed. “What are you doing here, Vix? You're supposed to be in bed.”
“Following her to make sure she doesn't fall on her face,” she answered, sitting beside him and strapping herself in as Skyler warmed up the engines. “What's the emergency?”
“Not an emergency exactly,” Dr. Pouncer said, as the ambulance rose and started to accelerate. “There's a patient arriving at the spaceport.”
“What patient?” she asked.
“You'll see when we get there,” the First One said, his tone indicating he would brook no more conversation on the subject. Nan dozed for the hour's flight, half-hypnotized by the drone of the engines, until she heard Skyler speak up into his headset.
“We are a priority transport,” he repeated. “I need you to clear a corridor for us directly to Landing Pad 39-A.” He paused, listening, “I know it's irregular, but we need to be right there when the ship arrives.”
“Gimme your headset, Skyler,” the First One ordered. The pilot handed it back and the First One, who settled it over his ears. “This is the First One. Priority Code Omega Five Six Treona Alpha Townsend. Check my voice print and then get whatever traffic is in front of us out of my bloody way.” He waited, then smiled in satisfaction and said, “Thank you, Traffic Control. We'll be landing in ten minutes.” He handed Skyler's headset back to him and settled back in his seat.
“I didn't know you could order Traffic Control around like that,” she said. “I thought your authority only extended to the borders of the Region.”
“Only under limited circumstances,” he replied. “This circumstance being one of them.”
Ten minutes later the air ambulance settled down next to a wide concrete landing pad, looking sized for ground to orbit shuttlecraft. Dr. Pouncer opened the back doors and looked out at the pouring rain unhappily.
“Do you think she'll delay her landing until the weather clears up?” he asked the First One.
“No. A little bad weather won't stop her. Not with the cargo she's carrying.” The First One stepped out of the ambulance, ignoring the rain as it soaked his clothes. Nan got out to stand beside him, wishing she'd thought to bring an umbrella.
“Who are we waiting for?” she asked.
“You'll see,” he replied.
In less than five minutes a bright light began to pierce the cloud cover, the loud roar of engines overwhelming the patter of rain on the concrete pad. From out of the darkness, riding on her ventral thrusters, a slim fightercraft dropped down out of the clouds, her thin wings retracting in upon themselves as her landing gear extended. She settled down on the landing pad with barely a bump, as Nan gaped in surprise. Any vulpine schoolchild could have identified the ship, if not by the classic line of the hundred and fifty year old Swift Wing hull, then by the chess piece logo on her side, of a stylized riding beast of Earth origin. She managed to take in a breath as she realized she was looking at the famous White Knight, the personal fighter of Lord Rufus Brushtail.
The cockpit opened and a spacesuited figure clambered down the boarding ladder awkwardly. The pilot turned towards them and removed their helmet, revealing the head of a vixen perhaps two years younger than Nan, with bright orange fur and black ear tips. She looked the group over, then dropped her helmet and grabbed the First One in a tight hug, lifting him off his feet and spinning him around. “Uncle Teri!” she exclaimed. “It's so good to see you!”
To Nan's surprise, the First One not only tolerated the hug, he actually smiled at the pilot and hugged her back, giving her a fond rub between the ears for good measure. “Glad you could make it, Meribeth. Any problems along the way?”
“Nah,” she said, putting him down. “Brightstone's orbital monitoring is a bad joke. No one saw me land or take off.”
“Good, good,” he said. He turned back to Nan and the others. “This is my niece, Lady Meribeth Brushtail. She decided to take after her great-grandad and become a pilot. Meribeth, this is Dr. Pouncer, his assistant Nez, Skyler our pilot, and my latest college vixen, Nan.”
“Hi there,” Meribeth said, waving as she stripped off her flight gloves. “Let me open up the cargo bay for you, Uncle. Then I have to get over to the pilot's lounge for a shower. I've never gotten around to changing the relief system on the Knight for vixens and I've been wearing what's oh so fondly referred to as a “waste relief garment” for the past fifty-two hours.”
“All right. Pop it open.” he said.
She nodded, tapping a code into the lock of the White Knight's small cargo compartment. It popped open, revealing a metal box, little more than a mter long and half as wide. which she carefully pulled out and laid on the ground with Nez's help.
“Is that a coffin?” Nan asked the First One in a low tone, seeing the dark expression on his face.
“Not exactly,” he said. He waved Meribeth and Nez away from the box. With infinite care he unlatched the top, opening the sealed lid. Strapped inside, wrapped in a silvery emergency blanket with an oxygen mask over her face, was the tiny, slim figure of a strawberry haired doe.
TBC
Note: I originally introduced Meribeth in the story Determnation. Fortunately she decided to redirect her anger in a more productive direction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-10-31 11:55 am (UTC)Yeah, sounds like it. XD
Sucky sleep patterns are sucky; I hope if they stay that way, they at least won't leave you a walking dead.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-31 10:17 pm (UTC)I really didn't expect to see any more of this til after nano. Thanks for this... made me smile after my crappy shift.
I will write something of my thoughts on this section plus the previous piece when I've had some sleep. Good lick with nano and congrats at the almost 2 k words in 2 hours.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-31 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-31 10:59 pm (UTC)...great :)
Is this Pereki? Why was she transported in deep-sleep?
*looking forward to more* :)
mjkj
(even if it is after-NaNo... - a long time to wait...)
no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 04:30 am (UTC)First off... loved hearing a bit about the physiology of wazagans... hmmm sleeping so deeply they need chemicals to wake up in an emergency... wish I was like that. Nez's recital of some of her gods apon waking made me lol... reminded me of one of my patients who sat up out of the blue one night... sang 'Johnny fell down the well' followed by all of the commandments before dropping back off to sleep again. But what a nasty rebound at the end of five hours. I REALLY hope you use this somewhere in your nano.
Loved Nez's observations about ferin behaviour... right on the money, she knows her stuff.
Loved Teri throwing his weight around to get clearance to land.
My fav bit was the White Knight coming in for a landing through the rain and Meribeth stepping out of the cockpit. She succeeded in her goal of restoring it and using it to help her uncle's people. (Must change the bathroom system though... 52 hours... ewww! (How much time has past since the arguement in the hanger?)
Aiye! And there's my little doe. Given the last scene I wrote with her in it (which I haven't posted yet because I'm slack) this sounds like a last ditch effort to save her life, given that Rexanna has foregone the usual legalities of shipping a rescued ferin off Brightstone. (If you want the scene I can email it.)
no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 10:35 pm (UTC)Glad you liked this so much. I'd been itching to write this scene ever since I decided t ogive Meribeth a cameo. An I suppose Rexanna wanted to make sure the doe got there ASAP and didn't want her to go through have to be transported in a pet carrier. If you could send me that scene I'd appreciate it.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 11:26 am (UTC)