While digging through my belongings after returning from the party, I found the silliest damn toy I have ever owned. I came across it when doing a research project on toys during my second semester of 20th century studies in the Academy. It's called an Astrojax, and it is the love child of juggling and yo-yos. While both concepts had been around for a long long time before the invention of this toy, no one had thought to try to combine the two together.

When I was telling Corey about the odd thing a physicist had invented, he insisted we had to replicate one. It took a bit of fussing to get a pattern for the replicator, and ultimately we had to reinvent the thing based upon what I'd been able to find out about it while writing my paper, but I think we were ultimately successful. Corey bored of it quickly, so it was a good thing we only actually bothered to replicate one, but I still find myself picking it up to play with years later. It also helps that Delilah is absolutely fascinated with the things, and will happily sit and watch me play with them for hours. Certainly comes in handy when I need to distract her from something else.

I was very underwhelmed by how the party went, but we seem to have picked up a couple more crew members at random and they made it to the party for me to meet them. One's human, seems like she'll be fun to get into trouble with. I didn't catch her last name, certainly sounded Russian, but her first name is Svetlana. A touch of a mouthful, I'll have to figure out something shorter to call her. The other's an Andorian, named Imaru, but she's weird for an Andorian. Not like standard I'm in Starfleet Andorian weird, but something else. She bristles at the presence of other Andorians, and some of her remarks implied that she considered herself different from the others. It doesn't seem like it'll be anything to bother me, and it will be nice to have someone else to share the feeling of personal vendetta against the Blue Bastard with.

One other thing about her that's worth noting... She had been serving aboard the Terra Nova the same time as I was, but I somehow hadn't encountered her. I guess she usually keeps to herself down in Engineering or something like that. At any rate, that part is less weird that it should probably seem. The weird thing is, I had somehow not heard of what had happened to the Terra Nova not long after I'd be transferred to that shit hole, Milliways. Apparently there was some big to-do, whole ship got fucked up, official report claimed subspace anomaly destroyed her, and we lost a lot of good people. I looked up the official reports I had security clearance for, thankfully no one had bothered to take away my clearance levels left from Delta Force, as there was a little more information in the reports one level up. Not enough to actually explain what happened, but just enough to support the cryptic remarks Imaru made when she was bringing me up to date at the party.

The worst part about it was I knew a good chunk of the crew lost, partied hardy with more than a few, and they'd been dead and gone for over a year before I even heard about it. I knew Milliways was basically a black hole in the fleet, but I thought Mouse had kept me up to date on most of the big events that happened in the fleet during my sentence there.

I think the full impact of what I had missed hearing about, the lack of a chance to timely mourn the loss of so many good people, was what left me melancholy enough to dig out that silly Astrojax toy. It's a good way to distract oneself enough to left stuff sort itself out in the back of one's head without having to consciously think about it.