08:05 - While the coffee’s synthesizing, a quick update before I get started on work. I plan to start bright and early. First impressions! Well, third impressions? I get the feeling that Silas doesn’t want me here, so I have to prove that I will be a help.

About my roommate: besides Captain Ava, the only other woman on board is Sarge. (Or Sage? I didn’t quite catch it with her accent, and now I’m too scared to ask?) She’s very tall, and she looks like a military pirate, and one of her arms is made of metal. I mean, it’s a prosthetic. It’s honestly incredibly cool, but also really scary. She hangs it on a rack on the wall at night, like a sword over a mantlepiece. She also had to clear off my bunk because it was covered in plants.

Sarge is the botanist/medic, but I’m pretty sure she likes plants more than people. Or at least more than me. I tried to start with some small talk, and she just stood there and stared at me until I stopped. Then she put a finger on her lips, shushed me, and went back to messing with the plants. So, our room is a quiet place.

What isn’t a quiet place is the lounge. The crew’s quarters make a little half-circle around the lounge, and everytime I come out of our room to get a drink of water or a snack, Vedod and Kal are somewhere in the lounge or the adjoining mess hall. Vedod is the cook I mentioned earlier, and he and Kal are apparently best friends. The kind of best bro friends where they shove each other around and make fun of each other.

Speaking of, Vedod is here. Grabbing my coffee and retreating for the moment.

08:09 - I feel like I should clarify: I don’t dislike Kal and Vedod! They’re just loud and boisterous and I don’t know how to approach them. Yet. Books and coffee first.

08:36 - Silas was already here in the Archive Processing Center. He gave me a very brief, very half-hearted tour of the facilities. Their restoration equipment is a bit outdated, but I can make it work. Their Inspiration Extractor is excellent, though! I can tell that he’s taken really good care of it. It deposits the energy directly into canisters instead of a storage tank, which I think is really smart, and they have canisters for both the pure energy and the slag. When I asked Silas why they kept the slag, he shrugged and said, “Vedod thinks it could be useful.”

Then he kind of hovered awkwardly over the restoration table. He’d been working on deconstructing an old book, and the cover and the pages were all laid out.

“I could help with that,” I said. “I’ve taken three different practicums in physical restoration.”

“I’ve got this one.” His eyes darted around the room. “Why don’t you… start with this.”

He slid open a drawer and handed me a teensy little collection of poems. I hurried to put on a pair of vinyl gloves. The leather cover was rotting and felt like it would fall apart if I moved it too fast, and the ink on the pages was so blurred, I could barely read it.

“Do what you can,” he said, and went back to work on his book.

That little book of poetry is practically beyond restoration, so I’m taking this as a challenge. I’m going to restore this book so well, they won’t even know it looked like a soggy newspaper.

12:03 - I don’t know if I can do this. The cover obviously has to go, but I can rebind it without affecting its inspiration output. The problem is the actual pages! They’re so old and damaged, I don’t know how to preserve them. I don’t want to copy them, because that loses a little something from the text, plus that’s the obvious solution. Silas doesn’t think I can do this, so I have to prove that I can do this incredibly well!

13:45 - Yeah, I can’t do this. I’m just going to copy them as best I can to preserve originality.

That makes me mad and disappointed.

15:52 - Okay, let’s look at this in a different light. Silas obviously gave me a really hard, throwaway assignment on purpose, so it’s okay that I wasn’t able to totally ace it. This was just the first day! There’ll be other opportunities to do something impressive. I just have to wait and keep on working, and eventually something will come up!

Got to go soon. Captain Ava called a dinner meeting, and Vedod is cooking something that makes my eyes water from here.