On Meeting Strangers

Posted on Wed 8th Apr, 2020 @ 4:39am by Lieutenant Damion Ildaran

529 words; about a 3 minute read

Today, while Elizabeth and I were checking out her office in Brown Sector, we met one of the food vendors--tasty food, by the way! Good lemonade, too.

Something about him reminded me of how I felt when I first made contact with Boze of the Fine Investment. I'd met some of his crew first; they'd been taken to tour our hydroponics gardens, and I was on duty there that month.

I remember thinking the Ferengi were the strangest-looking--and acting--people I'd ever met. I had literally never seen anyone who wasn't human before that day. I'd seen pictures of Vulcans, Klingons, Trill and the like, but they weren't real to me; they were just pictures. They could have been humans in costume, for all I knew. But the Ferengi? No, they were distinctly not human, and I found them very strange. They smelled like the swamps. They moved strangely. Looking back on it now, I am stunned that I dared approach any of them.

I think, at the time, I realized that being wary of the Ferengi would see the Ferengi gone and me stuck in Turkana City for the rest of my life. I was determined to leave, so there was no help for it but to talk to the strange group of short people with over-large ears and crooked teeth. And not just talk to them, but strike a deal with them.

I know now that I did a rubbish job of bargaining, and they hired me for dirt-poor wages--and would have swindled me out of even that if I hadn't played hardball with them, at last. They claimed my extra weight would mean their ship would have to use more fuel--which it would--but not to the extent that they filched from my pay. But they signed me on, and that was more important to me than pay. Likely, they guessed that; the greatest part of bargaining is understanding how to read people. It wasn't a waste; I learned a lot on the Fine Investment.

Something about the way that food vendor studied Elizabeth and me--carefully--brought my meeting with the Ferengi to mind as if I'd met them yesterday. I'm thinking they must not get many visitors from elsewhere on the station. I wonder what they think of those of us who've come down there? Do they want us? Wish we'd go away? I suppose the answer varies by individual.

I think, for the sake of my work, I'll keep a closer eye on what goes on down there. It's not as if we have a great lot of crime to make the repair shop crucial at the moment; it's more there as an 'in case we need it in the future' set-up.

As for Brown Sector, there oughtn't to be a place that's so isolated on this station, and those people shouldn't be so segregated from the folk on the upper decks. I'm a bit baffled as to why all those people haven't looked for places planetside by now, after the disasters that befell their homeworlds. Starfleet's retaken control of the station for a few years, now; surely they'd have looked into this?

 

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