Monotony at last
09 May 2016Tristan Pacheco
Combat dulls your senses; it destroys your empathy. It's a necessary biological reaction to the constant threat of death. It's what makes humans natural warriors. But a natural warrior, once created, cannot so easily return to society. Or...we couldn't. This is the 33rd century, and there is a plethora of drugs and therapies available to effectively combat PTSD. Sitting around drinking wine from what is probably a glass made of painite with my squadmates under our ancestral sun just felt...wrong. But I'm a logical man, and I'm not opposed to clinical help, so today I strolled down to the local pharmacy and picked up some overpriced antidepressants and now I'm feeling like a proper Federal citizen again. That being said, even without combat or the ever-present threat of death, there is a certain draw to the void that I have trouble escaping. I at least need to be in the sky for so long to retain my sanity. I guess it's why I became a pilot, instead of staying on LHS 3447 A 5 like all of my friends and becoming a doctor or a lawyer or any other manner of boring land-based professions. So, post-medicating, I went solo to the spaceport and rented someone's unarmed, ageing F63. A man by the name of Ho Abdul. A friendly and extremely rich character he was. Atmospheric flight in the thing was a dream. My Type-9 was capable of limited atmospheric flight, but ascent was nearly impossible. However, the thruster upgrade to let "my" Corvette do the same would be of an astronomical (ha, get it? cuz it's a spacesh...no? ok.) price, so it'll probably be quite a while before I do so, probably after I get a proper crew and docking module for it. Why the Federation doesn't finance this for me is beyond my understanding, since they can technically ask me to surrender the ship back to them at any time.
There's a way to get the registration passed from the Navy to the pilot, but I'd have to check the regs (It's a huge goddamn book so not doing that anytime soon) to see if I could keep the FNS appended to the name. And again, it would probably be very expensive, and I'm fearing the alcohol on this planet alone is going to bankrupt me. I paid 1200 credits for a single glass of wine the other night. Supposedly it was a 2025 vintage, but I find that extremely hard to believe. This is the Federation after all...people will tell you anything for money here. Anyway, I digress. After draining half the fuel in the Condor and seeing most of the megalopolis that is modern Earth, I returned to the spaceport, and then to the hotel, where I've been kind of slumping around for the past few days watching the news like a normal person.
It's relaxing and alarming at the same time. I know the news has a propensity to make everything sound worse than it is, but hearing about Halsey's delusions making everyone go crazy at the possibility of discovering some hidden alien race (not the Thargoids) irks me. She should've been admitted to psychiatric care immediately upon her return, among other things. Regardless, this boring ass short playing between the episodes of a TV show I'm watching is over, so I guess I'll go ahead and get back to that. See ya!