To the door! (After putting her boots back on.)

She sits where the door will not slide shut on its own, and retrieves her comlink.

"Doctor Gelrath," she says into it, "please report to my ship at your earliest convenience, something unexpected's come up that looks like it might require your analysis."

"Is it important?" comes the plaintive voice from the other side.

Callida rolls her eyes. "Yes."

The voice on the other end huffs a slightly unprofessional, "Fine."

"Thank you," says Callida, dryly.

"I take it he's acquainted with you."

"Oh, yes. He's been my ship's doctor for..." she stops and thinks. "Two and a half years, or so. He likes working for me, he's just annoyed at being interrupted while he was... I forget what he was doing. He will doubtlessly explain it to you in excruciating detail if you want to know."

"Will he be annoyed if the technicalities go over my head?"

"From experience, no."

"Good to know."

Smile.

A brunette pokes her head around the corner. Her eyes widen, and she nearly flinches back around the corner again.

"I heard voices - um?" she begins, then stops. "Um. Is this another cereal incident, because I can just turn around and pretend I didn't see anything -"

"It is not," says Callida. "Luke, this is Lieutenant Deenia, my pilot. Deenia, this is Luke Skywalker."

"Uh. Hi?"

"Hello, Lieutenant." He smiles disarmingly.

Deenia doesn't know what to do with this. She looks at Callida, then Luke, then back to Callida.

"Um. I can so turn around and pretend I didn't see anything if you revised your policy on - on, um." She scrutinizes Callida's inscrutable expression and promptly shuts up. "You know what, never mind, better question, how weird is the weird here."

Callida considers. "Very?"

Deenia makes a squeaky sound of dismay.

"Good weird?" offers the Sith Lord.

Deenia repeats the sound of dismay, this time lengthening it by another two seconds.

"You have my permission to hide in the cockpit and pretend nothing weird is going on, I will come get you if there's anything you're going to want to know."

"Okaycoolthanksnicemeetingyoubye!" says a rapidly disappearing brunette.

"Nice to meet you too!" he calls.

Callida fails to disguise her smile.

"She'll calm down soon enough," she assures. "She just needs a little while to play holo games on her console to get used to the idea of everything suddenly being very weird."

"Not the worst coping mechanism I've heard of."

"Not at all. She's ended up training herself some impressive reflexes, even. Part of the reason why I hired her."

"I usually do my own flying. Just a starfighter, though."

"Really? I never had the time to learn. Or, if I'm honest, the inclination."

She starts typing out an explanation of Milliways onto a datapad, for handing-over-to-Occlus purposes.

"Flying was what we did for fun. My friends and I used to race through Beggar's Canyon in our T-16s."

"That sounds nice," says Callida, smiling a little. "Flying, shooting local wildlife, and sharpening your wit. I don't think my childhood was quite so educational. I learned some basic repair work?"

Why did she bring up her childhood. Her childhood is terrible. Noooo.

"Sometimes we would shoot wildlife while flying. And then make jokes about it."

"Aha. And multitasking. Will wonders never cease."

"The galaxy would get sort of boring if they ever did."

"It would, wouldn't it. Luckily for us, there's no chance of that."

"Actually, it's sort of a wonder we never killed ourselves doing that. There was one section we used to fly that had about a meter of clearance."

"Charming. Congratulations to you all for making it to adulthood. It does speak well for your skills, though."

"The experience came in handy for destroying the Death Star. Had to fly down a maintenance trench and drop a torpedo down a thermal exhaust port."

She envisions this.

".... Yes, that sounds - let's go with tricky. And it's probably harder than I am estimating it to be."