@malefikant sent:
"How does a man like you survive with folk around him this chatty?" The voice announced his return to the Lieutenant, quickly followed by the clicking of two beer bottles that had been carried over from the bar using only one hand, separated by taking one into each when he came to a halt besides their table. With a low thud the bottles were placed down before Dilnis and Alexander sank right back onto his chair, sighing while shifting into a comfortable position. His legs were too long and he was fed up of having to fold them.
We have little real information about the nature and amount of dissolved organic matter in the sea, especially in deep water. Among the few recorded determinations of dissolved organic carbon the limited numbers made by Krough have seemed to us to be perhaps the most reliable...
Dilnis pressed a palm over his eyes, his upper body slightly slumped over the table and steadied by the same hand used to prop up his head. Darkness enveloped his senses first, then an encroaching silence which muffled out the crowd of gamblers at the bar. As if he were purposely submerging himself in water, letting the turbulent waves fold over him like a shroud.
The general level of concentration of dissolved organic carbon which Krough reported was confirmed at these stations. However, instead of being homogeneously distributed it is definitely less at intermediate depths–
The Lieutenant focused on the voice, a half remembered holotape on the topics of marine biology and oceanography, abandoned by the time he’d found it in his mentor’s archives. Things were simpler then, quieter, his teenage years spent ruminating over some mindnumbing task. The narrator droned in the background as he organized their case files, filling the office with a semblance of life. It’d felt isolating back then, but the work of a scribe was usually a lonesome one. He’d been a fool not to appreciate the simplicity. Such a fool. Years later, surrounded by the tatters of his people’s own undoing, he would have given everything to recreate that seclusion.
Pressure had built at his core, and painfully, his jaw tensing with every memory that resurfaced. Yet he imagined himself still wading in the murk, reaching inside himself to dislodge whatever had obstructed his breathing. Then, envisioned pulling it from his chest and casting it away, as he let himself sink further and further into the ocean depths.
None of it mattered anymore. The past was lost and gone, even if it’d left its wounds. He was alive, and surviving for the present. Just as long as he could keep himself from…
“I drown them out.” He finally broke focus. Though little had changed in his demeanor as he looked up, dark and taciturn as always, betraying nothing but a burgeoning disapproval over his surroundings. All the sights and sounds of the Strip phased back into view, and he was instantly reminded of what had made him lurch inward in the first place. “It doesn’t always work.”
Dilnis looked at his own warped reflection on the beer bottle and quickly smudged it away with the pad of his thumb. “Thanks..."












