“Crossing Paths” (backpost)

Posted on Thu May 21st, 2026 @ 7:41am by Lieutenant Rala & Senior Chief Petty Officer Jadizon Enor

Mission: Lower Decks
Location: Deck 5, Ops Office
Timeline: Between "Showered with Responsibility" and "Pothole"

Deck Seven had felt too tight the moment Enor stepped off the turbolift. Too many eyes. Too much noise. Too much space for questions he was not ready to answer. He moved past the junction without slowing, ignoring the corridor that led toward Sickbay and the lingering stare he could feel burning into his back from Ronan Drake.

He had promised Drake he would check in with the Chief Medical Officer. Later. After he saw to something else first. Something he told himself mattered more than whatever was pounding behind his eyes. The entity’s whisper had faded again, tucked back into whatever shadowed corner of his mind it waited in. He could feel the echo of it like a bruise behind his thoughts.

He reached the ladder access and climbed down one deck, the motion steadying his breathing. Deck Four opened up around him, wide corridors humming with the familiar energy of Operations traffic. Console displays flickered with departmental routing overlays. Crew crossed back and forth in purposeful patterns, carrying out the endless logistics that kept a Luna-class running at peak form for deep-space missions.

Enor’s boots hit the deck with a muted thump. The steady hum of the ship grounded him more than the doctor ever could. He moved into the flow of the corridor, posture straight, expression settled into the serious calm people expected from the Chief of the Boat.

Truth was, something behind his thoughts still throbbed with a cold whisper he refused to acknowledge. The entity from the Threshold had sunk deeper hooks than he wanted to admit. But that was his burden, not the crew’s.

He took a turn down the portside passage. This area branched into the Operations wing, with a handful of smaller meeting alcoves and system monitoring nodes. He had been meaning to meet with Lieutenant Rala for a long time. Their paths overlapped constantly, Operations and the enlisted corps were tied together through half the ship’s functions. Somehow they had never had the chance to stop and actually check in one-on-one.

That needed fixing.

He rounded another corner and came face to face with her.

Rala was walking with a PADD in hand, focused on whatever data she was reviewing, apparently more cognizant of her surroundings than she appeared based on how she was threading her way through the moderate bustle. Enor halted immediately and straightened, the instinctive respect for her billet settling into his posture.

“Lieutenant,” he greeted with a nod.

Rala paused, looking up from her PADD. “Chief?” she said, mildly surprised to find him addressing her directly after being metaphorical ships passing in the night for so long. “Need something?”

Crew continued to pass around them, moving through the junction with the steady rhythm of a starship returning to normalcy after the Tial mission. Conversations layered in quiet tones, LCARS panels chirped occasional data prompts, and somewhere down the corridor a maintenance team rolled a grav-cart toward a diagnostics alcove.

Enor kept his stance crisp yet open. Something in his head pulsed again, but he suppressed the flicker and forced his focus forward.

“I was actually looking for you,” he said. “We have crossed paths a hundred times, but never had a real chance to check in one-on-one.”

He paused, knowing he was offering something he did not often extend. Not small talk. Not a report. Something real. Something overdue.

“I figured it was time we changed that.”

He let the space hang, giving her the room to step into the moment.

Rala lowered her PADD, looking up at the taller NCO thoughtfully. “You’re right, we should. Ops office?”

Enor gave a small nod, meeting her eyes with steady clarity. “Ops office works.” He shifted his stance, the tension in his shoulders easing slightly. “Lead the way, Lieutenant.” He waited for her to move first before falling into step beside her, keeping his posture sharp as they headed down the corridor together.

She led him to the nearest turbolift—not that he needed guidance; he probably knew his way around the ship better than she did—and stepped inside. “Deck five, Operations office.” She waited for the doors to close behind him before saying, “Honestly, I probably should have prompted this myself, some time ago. Then again, quasi-formal ‘getting to know you’ meetings with people outside my direct chain of command didn’t seem so important until the shake-ups that resulted from our visit to Tial.”

One deck was a pretty short turbolift ride, and the doors opened once again. Thankfully the Ops office was essentially just around the corner.

Once inside, she strode around behind the desk, adding her PADD to the dozen or so scattered across its surface, and sat down, being careful to position her tail so the less-than-ideal chair wouldn’t cause her too much discomfort. “So,” she began, “Where would you like to start?”

Enor stepped into the Ops office behind her and took a moment to look around. The scattered padds, routing schematics, and half-finished task lists felt exactly like the nerve center Ops was supposed to be. He waited until she settled behind the desk, giving her the space she needed before he spoke.

“First off, Lieutenant, congratulations on the promotion,” he said with a small, genuine smile. “And before you say anything about the circumstances, let me stop you there. Someone leaving, someone getting reassigned, someone moving up the ladder. Promotions happen for a hundred different reasons. But the title still lands on the person who earned it. Do not look at it sideways.”

He shifted his stance a little, letting the formality ease out of his posture. “You have been running Operations longer than I have been on this ship. Everybody knows that. The title just makes it official.”

Rala let out a snort of wry laughter. “It may look that way from the outside, since T’Pinga kept to herself for the most part,” she said, “but the truth is she handled a lot more of the work than most people on the ship think. In particular...” She picked up one of the PADDs and held it up between them for a second before dropping it back to the desk with a clatter. “Paperwork. I am not ready for this position, and I certainly wasn’t ready for the amount of Makers-damned paperwork that’s involved.”

She leaned back in her chair with a sigh, rubbing her face with one pair of hands and her neck with the other for a few seconds before letting all four hands drop to her lap. “But I’m going to do my best. This crew deserves nothing less. And, to be fair,” she added, “the rest of the senior staff are helping me settle in.”

Enor listened without interrupting, giving her the courtesy of full attention. The mention of paperwork drew a faint, knowing smile that never quite reached his eyes. “If there’s one universal constant across departments,” he said evenly, “it’s that no one ever warns you about the paperwork until you’re already buried in it.”

He shifted his weight slightly, posture relaxed but still disciplined. “Ready or not rarely has much to do with whether someone belongs in a position. What matters is that you care enough to feel the weight of it. The crew notices that too.”

His tone stayed calm, supportive, and practical. “And for what it’s worth, you’re not doing this alone. Ops doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Neither does the enlisted side. We overlap more than people like to admit.

His tone softened even further, almost conversational. “Truth is, you and I have been working the same ship from two different angles for months, and somehow never managed to sit down for a real talk. Figured we should fix that before the next crisis comes barreling in. Might be the only quiet moment the Chimera gives us for a while.”

He clasped his hands loosely behind his back. “Where things start is up to you. I can talk about the enlisted side, how my chiefs are holding up after the last mission, what we are seeing on the deckplates, or how I think we can make coordination smoother between your duty officers and my watch teams.”

He shrugged slightly. Not tired, just honest. “Or we can start simple. You tell me how you are settling into the new rank, and I will give you the straight version of what the enlisted corps needs from Ops moving forward.”

His eyes met hers, steady and open. “I am not in a hurry. We finally got a chance to talk. So we can start wherever you want.”

Rala rubbed her face again and gestured to the chairs on the other side of the desk. “Well for starters, please, sit down.”

Enor settled into the chair and gave a small nod, letting some of the formality ease out of his posture. “Before I start asking you questions, I should probably give you a little context on me.”

“I came up enlisted. Engineering. Grew up near a supply port, spent most of my career fixing things when they break and keeping people moving when they’re tired.” A brief pause, then a faint half-smile. “Starfleet’s in my blood, whether I like it or not.”

He shrugged lightly. “Father’s a Commodore at Command, on his way to flag rank. Mother’s a doctor back on Betazed. Siblings all went officer track, science, command, physics.” His tone stayed easy, not resentful, not boastful. “I just took a different door in.”

He looked back up at her. “Also, you don’t have to call me Senior Chief unless we’re in front of a room. Jadizon’s fine. Jad works too. Makes this feel less like an inspection and more like a conversation.”

He paused, then let the moment shift naturally. “Alright. That’s me in a nutshell.”

His attention settled fully on her now. “I’d like to hear about you.”

Rala watched him relax, even if only slightly, as he sat and talked, and found it to be a change for the positive. She took a breath and let herself relax somewhat as well, a bit more than he had. She nodded as he finished. “’Jadzion’ it is, for now;” she agreed, “I usually prefer a bit less formality than official policy calls for.” She glanced at him more directly for a second. “It...honestly might be part of the reason we haven’t had a chat like this yet. I’m not sure if you realize it—and I mean no offense—but a fair amount of the time we cross paths in public, I get the impression of an over-tensioned spring; not necessarily near breaking, but...well, when people around me are tense, I get tense, and I try to avoid that when I can.”

[optional tag]

“Anyway,” Rala said, waving off the previous topic. “You asked about me.” She pondered where to start for a moment. “I never really knew my biological parents. It’s not exactly common, but it’s hardly unheard of either, given how communal Draakri generally are. There could be twenty adults, only a few of them related by blood, all helping raise fifteen younglings, and for our purposes it’s one family, with a variable roster; people come, people go.”

She let out a small sigh before continuing. “I was one of the strange, quiet ones who only had a few friends and mostly kept to myself. Never really fit in; never felt at home.” She tapped one clawtip on the desk a few times, thinking. “I considered turning sathir—closest translation, probably, ‘nomad’—but even that didn’t feel like it’d satisfy my wanderlust.

“Then,” the claw came down on the desk once more and stayed there, “First contact. A partially-disabled Starfleet ship accidentally wandered through the anomaly that surrounds Draakri space, and picked up our piddly little in-system warp jumps—all you’re capable of when the only dilithium in reach is low-quality dust, and not much of that, and you haven’t figured out how to properly process or recrystallize it yet—and suddenly proved to us that we were right, there is, in fact, life out here, and quite a lot of it, in fact...and suddenly I knew where I wanted to go.

“Before that ship left, I managed to get a message to its Captain expressing my desire to join Starfleet. He couldn’t do anything for me at the time, of course, but I finally had direction. A few years later, with his endorsement, I was off to the Academy.” She smiled, tapping gently again. “Best decision of my life, although whether or not I thought so at any given point has varied over time.”

She paused, taking a deliberate breath. “Engineering track at the Academy, because I like to tinker and see how things work; almost had Espersen as a professor, like it seems half the folks here did, but wound up with Katarina Scott instead—yes, that Scott. That was...interesting, to say the least.”

She shook herself slightly, and continued, “Made it through the Academy with good but not spectacular grades and got assigned as a junior engineer on the U.S.S. Thunderchild. A year or so there spent crawling around Jeffries tubes and up to my elbows in utility conduits, and I learned that I don’t like doing that day in and day out. I didn’t feel connected enough, and needed to see stars—and not just when I happened to pass by a window. So I put in a transfer request to Ops. It was denied at the time, but noted in my file—along with my precise wording of ‘not wanting to be buried in the bowels of the ship all the time’, apparently—so I was stuck with another year or so of that.

“And then,” she let out a sigh of frustration, “there was Johnson. Then-Ensign Bradley Johnson, one of the other kids in Engineering, the one who taught me that even assholes sometimes get their shot in Starfleet; barely competent, overconfident, overly friendly to some folks and downright rude to others. Nobody liked him, as far as I could tell, and nobody knew how he’d made it through the Academy, let alone more than a month or two on a posting, but he notably did not like me, and I have no idea why. Year two was miserable.”

“And then I find out I’m getting transferred to the Chimera, moved over to Ops, and promoted. Started hearing rumors about the ship, mostly less-than-savory; Johnson was gloating over that and convinced that the promotion was a mistake.” Her gaze had wandered as she rambled, not really focusing on anything, but now she glanced back up at Jadzion. “I suspect nepotism, but I can’t prove anything.”

Her gaze wandered again. “And then I’m out here. Met Katie and Kally as we were transporting over.” She smiled. “Not sure I fully realized it at the time, but I think that was my first clue that this was going to go better than I’d feared, or even really hoped.” Her thoughts lingered there for a moment, on the first real friends she’d made away from Draakrona—and the one who, along with one other, occupied her thoughts more than most people in her new home.

She shook herself again and buried that thought; there were multiple reasons why getting wistful over those hypotheticals in present company was probably a bad idea.

She glanced back to Jadzion. “Sorry, I’m rambling. To wrap it up briefly, the promotion to Junior Grade was a bit stressful at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly, and the move to Ops has been good for me, at least until now; getting another rank promotion less than a year later and suddenly being the actual head of Ops was a rogue wave in the middle of the night: sudden, disorienting, and terrifying.” She slid one of the PADDs slightly to one side to indicate the paperwork she’d complained about earlier.

“On another hand,” she continued, “I’ve also found at least the beginnings of a kinatra here—approximately, a ‘family’—closer than any I had back on Draakrona,” her thoughts turned back to the web of connections she felt and the two brightest points near its center, this time focusing more on the one that wasn’t directly connected to the man sitting across from her, “and I’m hoping that latter trend in particular continues.”

She shooed the thought back to the corner of her mind where it lived, and sat back in her chair. “So that’s me. Somewhat stressed over this,” she gestured to the desk again, “but I finally feel like I’m home, and things are...almost perfect.”

Jadizon listened without interrupting, hands folded loosely in front of him, eyes steady on her rather than the PADDs. When she finished, he nodded once, slow and deliberate.

“That doesn’t sound like rambling,” he said evenly. “That sounds like someone who stepped into a bigger role, felt the weight of it, and didn’t flinch.”

He glanced briefly at the paperwork she’d pushed aside, then back to her. “Admin stress is real. It’s also survivable. We’ll find ways to keep it from swallowing the parts of the job you’re actually good at.”

At the mention of kinatra, his expression softened just a fraction. “Finding a sense of family on a ship like this matters more than most people admit. Especially when you’re far enough out that going back isn’t really an option.” A pause. “I’m glad you’ve found that here.”

He leaned back slightly in his chair, posture relaxed but attentive. “Almost perfect usually means you’re doing something right and just need a little help keeping it balanced.” A faint, reassuring hint of a smile. “That part’s fixable.”

Jadizon inclined his head toward her. “If this feels like home, then it’s worth protecting. And if the stress starts tipping the scales, you bring it up. That’s what leadership actually looks like.”

Not dismissive.
Not overbearing.
Just steady, and meant.

“Oh, I flinched,” she said. “Believe me, I flinched.” She pulled the new second solid gold pip off her collar and started fiddling with it, staring at the rank indicator as she rolled it between her fingers. “I flinched hard enough that Ca—” she nearly used the name, but caught herself and adjusted, “—the Captain almost took it back. Or, well...” she gave a snort of wry laughter, and looked back up at Jadzion. “...she offered me more time to think about it, at least.”

Her gaze returned to the pip, which her fingers hadn’t stopped playing with. After another second or two, she let out a small sigh and reattached it to her collar. “But I accepted. So here I am, one of the least-experienced Chief Operations Officers in Starfleet, somehow managing not to drown in paperwork, if only barely.” She looked up at him again, giving a small nod of thanks. “I appreciate the offer of help. She made a similar one.” She sighed, leaning forward to pick up one of the PADDs. She looked at it for a second, then tapped it on the desk. “Honestly, at least for this particular maelstrom, I think I’ve about got the organization sorted out, it’s mostly just going to be doldrums from here on.”

For an instant, she considered clarifying that the ‘almost’ in her ‘almost perfect’ was less of a balance issue and more of a lack of something, but decided not to. She set the PADD back down and scrabbled through the several on her desk to find a blank one, then faced Enor more squarely. “So, now that we’ve got better pictures of each other, is there anything the new Chief Operations Officer needs updating on in regards to the enlisted crew?”