Dukat walks into his office, arms fulls of padds, hoping to catch his new assistant Tora Naprem there. She has duties that take her all around the station, but his office is her home base, and if Dukat is Very Lucky, she will have some down time right around now. Dukat spots her, busy in her own padd, and tries to orchestrate a convincing stumble, 'accidentally' dropping his pile of padds on the floor. "Oh, how clumsy of me," he mutters, bending over to pick them up, ass in her face.
Her new position on Terok Nor is drastically different from her former job working in a labor camp moving supplies, and Naprem finds it difficult to be doing and carrying around so much paperwork, adjusting to station life and the Cardassian’s hierarchy. She’s usually quite busy but every so often there’s a reprieve and she can work from the Prefect’s office.
There was just a report to go over that wasn’t worth the Prefect’s time, and then she was free to do her own project, learning from a kardasi reading program. Naprem isn’t sure how she’s managed to get by without admitting she never learned to read or write, not even in Bajoran, but thankfully her hearing is better than a Cardassian’s and her Kardasi comprehension nearly as good as her Bajoran, so she can make her padd read reports aloud without anyone noticing until she figures it out.
She’s surprised that she’s picking it up so easily, and is so absorbed in the teaching program she managed to buy using some of the latinum from her first week’s pay, that she doesn’t notice when Gul Dukat returns to his office until he drops his things and mutters to himself. He’s backward, bent over, so she quickly shuts off her padd to hide the program on display and gets up. “Let me help you, Sir!”
As she kneels down to help gather up the scattered padds, she briefly takes notice of how skinny his legs are. There’s no substance to him underneath his uniform, really.
procaldukat:
[snip]
Naprem nods and says, “It’s really different from anywhere I’ve been on Bajor, but I think I’ve adjusted pretty well to living on a space station, Sir.” She has no idea whether or not she’ll ever completely adjust to Terok Nor, but it’s no longer so overwhelming getting used to her life being completely changed.
And she wouldn’t say she likes the station. It’s nervewracking, being surrounded by so many soldiers, being exposed to so much technology she’s only ever heard about and is now expected to know how to use, dreading walking through or to certain areas where being the Prefect’s personal assistant-
She’s not even sure what that means. No one else does. None of the Prefects have ever had a Bajoran assistant before.
-makes things harder rather than easier.
Still, she vastly prefers this new job to the one she had in the mining camp down on Bajor she was taken from. Naprem would rather stay on Terok Nor forever than go back and risk being caught again. So she adds, “We haven’t spoken much, Sir, but I just wanted to say I’m really grateful for this job! It was very kind of you to give me this position.” She certainly wasn’t the only Bajoran brought up to the station from her camp that day, he could have picked any of the other girls that were with her.
“Of.. of course,” Dukat says, giving her a puzzled look. Does she not realize how he feels about her? How he’d felt since he first saw her? “You’ve done a wonder job, so far. If you ever need anything, please do let me know,” he adds. Like me!
It makes her a bit nervous, to be walking and making conversation with her new employer. She’s not used to it all, someone wanting to talk to her. So she avoids making eye contact, turning her gaze to the floor as he speaks to her.
His approval of how she’s been doing soothes her anxiety about the possibility of being sent back to Bajor somewhat, enough where she feels more comfortable speaking to Dukat. If she’s to continue being his personal assistant, she’ll have to get used to talking to him. Cardassians love conversation, and though her duties bringing her all around the station every day means she hasn’t seen much of him, there’s always these bits of downtime like right now that will require she talk.
And since he’d offered... There were plenty of questions she had about the station, but not many of them seemed relevant at the moment. Since they were headed to the promenade, though, she had one. “On our way to the bar, do you think you could point out somewhere I could get some new clothes? I haven’t had much of a chance to see the promenade besides the security office...”
It’s terribly hot on the station, and the Bajoran man who had been in charge of getting her and the other women from the camp ready to be presented had provided her an outfit with long sleeves and a high collar to try and hide most of her scars. The ones on her lip and under her right eye couldn’t be hidden, and she’d been told to keep her hands, just as laced with scars as her arms, out of sight. After she’d been chosen, he’d procured a few more outfits for her in a similar style before leaving her to figure things out for herself.
Since she’s still figuring out her replicator, it would be nice to get some clothes that weren’t so warm.
