Dead Star Dockyards

It was day six aboard the Oberlux for Diana.

She had apologized again and again for what had happened to the Scholar, but she still felt remorse about it. Thinking back on it, she should have never allowed someone unfamiliar with a canine's sensitivities to touch Mercedes around her head.

The Scholar insisted that he was fine, that it was his own failure and lack of understanding that caused Mercedes to react in the way she did. He had treated it as a learning experience, now he was no longer ignorant of the risks.

Indeed no blood had been drawn, and the Healer confirmed that there was no damage done besides some surface level bruising. At this point it was entirely likely the tooth marks had healed.

The Captain had gone so far as to apologize to Diana for his subordinate 'causing undue stress'.

Nobody involved seemed to think of this as any sort of diplomatic incident, merely the fault of one of the two parties present. So why wasn't the Scholar there?

It turns out that his tasks in the fields of diplomacy, translation, and culture were not actually his primary job. Those were officially described as a secondary set of tasks he performed to busy himself while he was not needed.

They were paid hobbies.

He had explained that his real job involved three different sets of tasks. Paperwork, cataloguing, and classification.

Paperwork was fairly simple. If anything needed replacement, he would take note of and file it. Records of places they docked? Recorded, filed, financed. He wrote the ship's official correspondence. In the unlikely case of a death he would be responsible for recording the incident in as much detail as possible from crew descriptions of the event to help authorities either find the culprit, or identify why it happened.

Anything to do with administrative writing for the most part went through him.

Cataloguing was a bit harder for her to understand, likely because Earth didn't have an equivalent.

It was explained to her as a method of keeping track of seemingly anomalous events and items that happened in the general vicinity of the ship. From what she could tell, this was something related in large part to Split, and was not something she would have a notion of.

Apparently, there were creatures that lived in the void, and strange occurrences like asteroids materializing from nothing were fairly common.

Cataloguing was the act of recording the incident, the location it happened, and the environmental conditions. If there was a noticeably high concentration of these events happening in a short period of time, then a warning would be put out to avoid the area.

Running into hostile megafauna or an asteroid field that materialized without warning was an excellent way to get killed.

Categorization was, surprisingly, related to combat.

Once again she didn't understand much about what was said, likely because she didn't have an inkling about how they fought their battles.

Apparently stars 'changed' quite frequently, using different attacks and defensive methods. These changes were chaotic, irregular, lacking a cycle or pattern which could be followed.

You could fairly easily determine what the attacks had changed to thanks to their visual characteristics, Diana thought that was likely to do with the color of the beams that she had seen, but how the Star was defending was difficult even with the proper training and equipment.

In her head, Diana boiled it down to a game of rock paper scissors where the Scholar was a tool that helped them cheat. His countenance upon her explaining her understanding of it suggested that there was far more to it than that, but he assented to that comparison as adequate for someone with absolutely no idea how Split worked.

Seeing as the Sun had apparently 'tired itself to a safe level,' they were now free to attack. Let alone the Scholar, the entire crew was in an aggressive combat stance. The only people she saw were the Chef and the Healer, and those occasions were few and far between.

Diana was bored beyond belief, a situation she had never even considered when thinking about being in space on an alien ship that looked like a tree.

She attempted to stave off the lethargic feeling by having ARC make her word and number puzzles like crosswords and sudoku, but they could only entertain her for so long. Her eyes hurt more and more the longer she stared at the tablet.

She wondered how Mercedes managed to do it with only a chew toy.

Diana was starting to wonder if she had made a mistake when she decided to stay by his side.

"No." She violently shook her head. "I can't be thinking like that. Donovan will need someone who can understand his needs and describe the situation to him when he wakes up."

She tightened her grip on his hand.

Saying that was easy, but doing it was a fair bit harder.

Diana's lower back and butt were sore from her seated position. The only exercise she had was walking Mercedes to and from the Noah. She was lacking in physical engagement.

Just about the only thing she had going for her was that the food exceeded her expectations.

Refusing to succumb to her boredom, she began to whistle some of her favorite tunes.

Old songs from her father's movie collection were her go to. Binary sunset was a topical choice of course, though you could only whistle the same thing for so long until it got boring. So she would switch it occasionally.

Eventually, she got to a song from a movie which was produced by the same film company as the movie the first song was from, and it was one of her personal favorites - Indiana Jones.