Perfectly Ordinary

Posted on Fri Nov 21st, 2025 @ 6:52pm by Lieutenant Commander Julian Wishmore

484 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: What's Past is Present

Lieutenant Commander Julian Wishmore had been aboard the USS Sullivans since the day before launch. He’d slipped onboard during the final supply intake, another face in the rush of quartermasters, engineers, and logistics officers trying to get a once-mothballed starship ready for a wartime sprint.

He’d intended to report in immediately.

But then an operations team had called an emergency deck inventory.
Then engineering had sealed off three compartments for recalibration.
Then medical had taken over half the corridor for biocontainment packing.

By the time Julian found a clear path to the bridge, reporting in felt almost… intrusive. Everyone was working. Everyone was tired. Everyone had something urgent to do, and he had learned long ago that sometimes the kindest thing an Intel officer could do was stay out of the way until the dust settled.

So instead, he walked.

He learned the ship’s layout the quiet way — through its sounds, its routines, its people. He watched how the crew moved, who deferred to whom, what corners still felt new and what corners still felt like they remembered 2290s carpet patterns.

Nobody noticed him, and he didn’t mind.
The ship was old, the mission was intense, and he’d always been good at blending in.

Then, after departure…
things shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic.
No alarms, no shaking bulkheads.
Just small things at first:

A corridor panel whose colour temperature looked wrong for a second.
An archway that felt narrower than it had the day before.
A young ensign swearing she had just seen a man in a uniform Starfleet hadn’t worn in decades.

Julian had paused at that one.

He wasn’t sure what he’d seen — or if he’d truly seen anything at all — but the atmosphere aboard the Sullivans had begun to feel subtly, perceptibly… off.
Like a room where someone had moved the furniture half an inch to the left.

People were whispering.
Deck reports were inconsistent.
A turbolift paused halfway between floors for no reason, then resumed as if nothing had happened.

Julian watched all of this quietly, hands in his pockets, expression composed.

He wasn’t here to jump to conclusions.
That was someone else’s job — science, command, engineering.
His job was to observe.

And as he made his way down the corridor — past a crewman who walked by without recognizing him, past a bulkhead that looked both older and newer depending on the angle — Julian found himself smiling faintly.

“Well,” he murmured under his breath, “that’s… interesting.”

He tightened the strap of his duffel on his shoulder and continued walking, still unnoticed, still unannounced, still gathering impressions.

He would introduce himself soon.
Really, he would.

But for the moment, with everyone racing to understand why the ship felt increasingly crowded and inconsistent, one unassuming lieutenant commander drifting through the halls was the least mysterious thing happening aboard the Sullivans.

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