PHD #135: Babble
Babble
Summary: In which Davis displays remarkable intuition.
Date: 11 Jul 2041 AE
Related Logs: Rainy Day Woman Number Twelve and Thirty-Five
Players:
Cidra Davis 
Pilot Berths - Naval Deck - Battlestar Cerberus
The battlestar's pilots call this place home. Bunks line the walls with grey curtains to cover their sleeping areas. Lockers sit between each pair of bunks and a round metal table sits in the center, furnished with simple but comfortable steel chairs. A hatch at the rear of the room leads to a communal head.
Post-Holocaust Day: #135

Cidra makes her way through the hatch and into the berthings. Still in her duty gear, though she's undoing the buttons of her officer's blues jacket already. Looks like she's just coming off. She proceeds straight to her locker, to get said jacket stowed. A quick, idle look around the bunks. To get a sense of how the various birds are settled. She has a bone tired look about her, but it's been a long set of days. She's not the only one.

Davis sits crosslegged on her bunk, the one below 'Splash' Malone. In her lap is a rather voluminous duty jacket with several chalk lines on the sides. The puffball redhead is humming a tune made atonal by the pins held between her lips like itty-bitty ciggies. As the Boss Lady's gaze passes her direction she raises a hand, flexing fingers in a scrunching wave. The Ensign reaches up to carefully remove the metal slivers from her lips too.

Cidra catches the wave. Once her jacket's off and stowed she raises her right hand to return it with a small waggle of her slim fingers. "Ensign Hathor." The faintest of smiles is offered to the younger woman. Head tilts a notch at the humming. As if she were trying to follow it. To place whatever remains of the tune.

"That's why you make the big bucks," Davis chirrups, bobbing her head to affirm the Major got the right name. Without grace she slips her feet off the bed and carefully arises, having shoved the pushpins and needle-and-thread into the uniform jacket. The amount of fabric suggests a maternity uniform, but it has the full complement of pockets and is just the wrong cut for the job. "Do you know how many times I got called Midshipman or Cadette Davis?" the Petrel asks, eyes rolling galactic north.

"Hathor, Davis. V-S-P One-Oh-One. Of Picon of origin," Cidra says back to her. Of course, she has access to all the Air Wing personnel files. She can memorize details if she's of a want to. A faint chuckle to that last. "I would not deign to guess. How are you feeling? I know it can be most difficult easing back into the duty rotation." Particularly after so long…out of it.

Davis flashes a bright smile to the CAG. "I'm doing better," she says cagily, the last word said in a wary cant. "To me I was just out for, like, just a little over two weeks." The laugh that follows is just as strained. "So, I'm just ready and roaring to get back in the cockpit!" The Ensign swings a fist across her chest, but the enthusiasm is forced.

"Most excellent," is Cidra's reply to that. She'll take even feigned enthusiasm if she can get it. "Pending clearance by Medical, of course, I am quite…roaring for you to be about it as well. And, yes, Hathor, I know your name." Now that she's stripped down to her off-duties, copious tattoos on display, formal officer-wear stowed in her locker, she proceeds to her bunk. It's opened, but she doesn't sit. Instead, she begins rifling through her possessions. "I take special care with names. They are important. A name gives form to a thing. Gives it substance. Without them, we are all of ephemeral."

Palms clap together eagerly, punctuated by a chiming laugh. "Hahah oh wow, you sound like this Aerilonian stoner I was with in college!" Davis' grin flashes like an oncoming truck's high beams, and just like one she continues to barrel down that highway of thought. "He said the craziest things when he was broiling, but they were like, so crazy they're true, you know?"

Cidra reaches fully back into the cubby that is her bedspace. Legs still out and balance on the floor (she has a lower bunk) as she continues to rifle. She's not doing it aimlessly. She seems to know what she's looking for. At last, she locates it, backing up and sitting properly now that she's got her quarry in hand. Facing out again, at Davis. That thing she was so intent on finding was a box of plain silvery metal. The comment about what she sounds like earns the barest hint of a smile. "Do I, now?" A low chuckle. "I am Gemenese, not of Aerilon." The rest of it, she just takes with mild but notable amusement. "What else did he say, this 'boiling' friend of yours?"

"Oh, you know the stuff people say when they're high," Davis flippantly says, turning her back when Cidra's all tucked away rummaging through her bunk. She turns herself to that uniform jacket, which has been draped over the top bunk length-wise. As she uses the pushpins to hold the jacket's fabric together, with the chalk-lines concealed, the girl assumes a husky voice as she prattles. "We're done all from one thing, see. Everbody, jis'… star dust. Jis stardust, man. We's jis the charcoal bricks frim bunted oot stars. So high bit so dawn low, what was once white hot, naw jis black'n'dusty, we livesded for aeons an aeons without thoughts, bit only frim death does we learn ta think." The accent she puts on is a comical mix of hippie and hillbillie. It's gone after a pause as her natural voice returns. "Stuff like, that, but sometimes he'd just babble like math equations which was funny 'cause he was a rubbish mathematician."

It takes Cidra a moment to open her box. It's locked, with a built-in number-combination lock rather than a key. She has to pause a moment with her fingers on it, as if dredging the correct pattern up from her memory. But she hits on it eventually, and the thing opens with a soft click. Still smiling that ever-so faint, ever-so-slightly amused smile as Davis quotes from the stoned. "Math equations, eh? I always preferred poetry. The physics grads do have a tendency to go off in directions such as that, though." She plucks something out of her box. It's wrapped in delicate white tissue. The first thing she does is raise it to her nose and sniff it. Once, twice, three times. The third earns a nod of apparent satisfaction. "And do you ever meditate, Hathor?"

"Yeah-I-know-right?" she babbles in the pause in the other woman's words when the little satchet is sniffed. "I don't even know what he studied, because he didn't study anything. I went to P-MAL to push out a Flight for two weeks, and when I came back he was gone. Honestly I think he smoked himself," she giggles over her shoulder. Yes, all that in just the space of Cidra pulling the tissuepaper packet from her box and sniffing it; the girl's got the talking speed of an air traffic controller when she's excited. "Oh yeah, I'm great at that! This one time these two pilots were all at each others' noses cuz someone did something with someone else's girl, or maybe car, but I think it was both, anyways they were having it out in the day room and I was like 'Whoah!' and they were like 'Whoah?' and I was like, 'Yeah, whoah,' and so they whoahed." She yanks the jacket off the bunk and shakes it out, holding the freshly sewn seam up to the lights for inspection.

Cidra locks her little box again once she's obtained her packet. It is settled, carefully, back into the depths of her bunk from which it came. She just sort of takes in Davis' babble like ambient noise. Little of it seems to require a response, but it's nice enough to have humming along. "You…ahhh." As she does make an effort to follow that story. "I do think what you did there is, mediation, yes? Meditation is an attempt to obtain clarity of thought and equilibrium through…deep reflection." Her wrapped whatever-it-is is given another long sniff and pocketed.

That jacket is draped back over Malone's bunk, and Davis unravels a length of dark thread. "Oh." The pause is punctuated by silence, though the pale back of her neck pinkens somewhat. "Right. Meditation." It takes a little bit, but her tongue gets back into second gear, and third follows quickly. "Well not really, because I used to do that in the pool, see what I'd do was I'd let all the air out my chest and fold my arms over it like I was in a coffin and sink to the bottom, but the lifeguard told me he was getting really sick of diving in to get me and it was the only clean pool around so I had to cut it out." She bites through the thread during a brief pause for breath. Despite the speed of speech, Davis' sewing is much more deliberate and careful. "I was little," she says softly, slower than usual. "But I realised a lot about life doing that, sinking in that black tunnel of stars… Hahah! To think!" There's her speed and gusto again! "I probably shoulda drowned like a hundred times doing that!"

"At times one needs to give over oneself to see matters clearly," Cidra says softly, after listening to Davis story. "It is a matter of knowing how long one can stay under before one must surface, I do suppose." A shrug, and she slips out of her bunk again, closing it behind her. "I am off duty, but I have matters to attend to and shall likely not be back for the duration of the evening. If any ask for me, do tell them to leave a note in either my bunk or the offices, and I shall attend to it promptly in the morn."

Davis tilts her head, letting go of the needle and letting it fall. She pivots slowly, small muscles rippling to bring her spine straight. "Certainly, Madam," the Ensign says in structured finishing-school speech, but the wide-eyed curious confusion is something she can't school out of her expression. "Go with the Lords, Madam."

"My callsign is Toast. Call me that if you like," Cidra says, to all the madam'ing. Again, there's that hint of amusement dwelling under the surface. "I always do try. At times with surer feet than others. Go with the Lords yourself, Hathor." And with that, she slips out of the berthings.

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