Get Me Another Bottle

Posted on Fri Jun 12th, 2015 @ 4:51pm by Lieutenant Lhravitelim th'Endirhc
Edited on on Fri Jun 12th, 2015 @ 5:16pm

Mission: The Belle of Bellatrix
Location: The Brew House, Justerini Street, Pike City
Timeline: 2278.45 2100hrs [Backpost; the day of Gunning's murder]

Lieutenant Lhravitelim th'Endirhc - or Telim, as he introduced himself, knowing that non-Andorians were terribly abysmal at pronouncing proper names - had managed to find one of the cheapest bars on Cestus III while he waited for the woman who had convinced him to stay on in Starfleet to get there and order him aboard. He hadn't been too fussed about the quality of the alcohol he was drinking; just that price, so that he could afford to make his way through copious amounts of it.

As he sat and watched the various patrons of the bar come and go - he noticed more than a few in the new maroon-style Starfleet uniform - he reflected on how he had managed to end up here. Only a couple of months ago, he had been planning on leaving Starfleet when his service period was up, and finding something else that he could do to pay for his drinking. Captain Elsa Gunning had other intentions for the dour Andorian, however. Telim knew that he was a good pilot - always had been, the skill came as natural to him as sensing ice bores did to the aenar in the northern caps back home. Gunning had seen his piloting first hand during a rescue mission on some volcanic planet a few years back, when they had to use a number of shuttlecraft to evacuate people instead of the transporters. Now she had a new command and had insisted that he join her as her helmsman on it.

She hadn't really given him a chance to refuse, and so he'd ended up signed up to another five years with Starfleet. He didn't even think that she knew that he had lost his bond-group in a freighter accident last year. All three of them had been killed when the merchant marine vessel had lost power to its atmospheric thrusters and had crashed into the terminal building where they were waiting for another transport. They had been among twenty three killed that day. He should have felt guilty about the fact that he didn't care about the other twenty. But all he could think of ever since was his bond-group... and the child that the zhen of the group had been carrying. Ever since that day, he had drifted along his assignments, doing the bare minimum required, and taking the drink in his off-hours.

Then Captain Gunning had tracked him down. By that point he was working the dockyard shuttles on some backwater colony not too far from Earth. She'd come to him while he was sat in the station's bar, looking absently out of the windows at the empty space beyond and drinking another bottle of Andorian ale. The infamous captain had turned up without warning, and told him - flat out told him - that she was going to have him reassigned to the Farragut. She'd held out the padd containing the agreement for his Starfleet service to be extended for five more years and stood there until he put his thumbprint to it. Then she'd told him to get his ass to Cestus III, took his bottle of ale, and left without another word. He admired the captain like anyone else who had worked with her before, but even that couldn't stop him from resenting her for that. Why she couldn't leave him alone to see out the last few months of his service in misery he didn't know.

But now here he was, watching some drunken idiot trying to chat up the bar's owner and getting more drunk all the time, before being joined by some other newcomer in one of the new uniforms, just waiting for tomorrow when he would have to report back aboard another starship, where he would then be stuck. He downed the rest of his glass and then held the empty bottle up for the waiter to come and refill.

"I'm sorry sir," the waiter responded as he came over. "But that was our last bottle of Andorian ale. We don't have any more to give you."

"Then get me something else, I don't care what," Telim slurred in response. He went back to absently watching the rest of the room while the waiter went off to get him something else - not that he was really paying attention to what any of them were actually doing.