The day had fortunately been quite uneventful for Elliot. He'd gone to bed early and woken up late, eating breakfast in bed and not properly grooming himself until after noon. And it felt great. Currently, he was in the small lounge area he'd been shown to by Gia the previous day, and was flipping through a folder of newly-received data, sent to him by a generous assistant back home in Cairo. It was a series of graphs and charts, something that would have been overwhelming to him if he hadn't been so damn well-rested.
To finish off this blissful, if not idyllic, afternoon, he took a sip of a cup of tea, which tasted strongly of his childhood home. On the first page was a series of graphs showing patterns in atmospheric conditions and frequencies of alien encounters. Within a few minutes, he scribbled down a few notes before turning to the next page, a long interview with a person who had contacted him, claiming to have survived an alien encounter.
See, many times, he'd been contacted by people who claimed to have encountered aliens. He had believed them all, unfortunately, and ended up with skewed statistics as a few coworkers pointed out a high level of drugs in their systems at the time of their testimonies. It had destroyed months of work and made him a laughing stock for some time. After that, his assistant forced him to allow her to screen anyone who wanted to share data with him. This one had evidently had the credentials to come through, and began their interview by describing the encounter as best they could remember.
Then someone entered and Elliot's sanctuary was invaded. He looked up, taking another sip of tea. The individual in front of him was a lanky-looking man with features on par with a marble statue. Turning his gaze back to the statistics, he said, "Are you one of those coming onboard the Europa, then?" Before circling a small block of text that described the smell of the air as sulfurous- a common thread in most alien encounters.
