Boot camp Training Day 1 Base Ops department

[Aralyn Thorn]

Aralyn nodded a little at the dragoness, smiling softly.  She liked Freya, the big female seemed to be honestly trying to help her feel welcome and encouraged, even if she felt like an overabundance of delta V in a linear regression equation: that is, a square peg in a round hole.  She didn't belong here - being in the field wasn't her field! If only she could relate to people the way she could relate to math and science!  She would never have made that incredibly awful blunder yesterday that set her this way.  Of course, then she might not have met these three, who all seemed nice enough.  And even Commander Cobalt seemed to be stern, yet kindly, trying to teach and instruct rather than berate and browbeat like some professors she had known.  The pretty little white vixen sighed, musing all this to herself, and almost completely missed Cobalt's comment and look directly at her.  She blinked, then flattened her ears: she had taken a nibble! Well okay, she ate one of those purple-reddish berries, but the database had said they were okay and tasty and she had thought they were indeed!  But wait, how had Cobalt known?  Were there cameras hidden in the jungle?  Had they been watched by someone?  If they had, she hadn't heard or smelled them, and her senses were as acute as any other fox: admittedly she was a bit scatter-minded, especially if trying to concentrate, but she didn't sense anyone...yet he seemed to know!  HAD it been poisonous?  Maybe it was just poisonous to foxes! She gulped and whimpered.  First task and already she had trodden into bad territory.  Brilliant.  Well, she may not know how to deal with people, but she always spoke the truth (when it occurred to her, and sometimes left out bits that seemed irrelevant - to her at least) and might as well own up to it.

Standing up to her full (five foot) diminutive height, she picked up her bag and came forward. "Um, sir, I did um, eat a berry, one of these.." she rummaged into her sack and pulled out the bunches she had picked and displayed them, "..which my database had said might be tasty, and urh..well, um..I didn't think too well about if it might be poisonous to me or not. I'm sorry, sir."  She tucked her bushy ebony-tipped tail between her legs and adjusted her goggles on her head; a nervous gesture after depositing the bunches into bucket.  "I um, well, since I don't know anything about uh, picking anything from the thickets, as it were, I didn't get a whole lot because I was busy checking things in the wilds out there against uh, the database you so handily provided, Commander, thank you for allowing us to use it!  Uh, I'm not making excuses, sir, just that my inexperience led me to check very carefully and try to be as certain on the first foray as could possibly be, since I had no wish to poison my teammates or you, sir.  I was, um, learning as I went, sir, and I'm not sure, but I think that is uh, part of the reason I'm assigned here, sir? Um..urh...", she trailed off, not sure what to say, she wasn't certain, but this 'tempering' that the General had spoken of, could it be related to something like this? Maybe. She had been rude and insulting without meaning to be, but perhaps that was the lesson here: she was impulsive and energetic, maybe if she approached these assignments like a theorem?  Sooooo complicated!

Having said as much, she brought out every item and displayed them to both Cobalt and her den-mates....well, they WERE, now, sort of, the barracks counted, did it not?  Great Newton, figuring out how to relate to people was impossible, how do people manage it?!  She called up the images and descriptions on her tablet, announcing why she had chosen each bit and bob she displayed and placed in the bucket - like a school presentation - finally emptying her bag before bobbing her head respectfully to the Commander and marching her little self back to her seat, setting her empty bag beside her and sitting once more, rubbing her little black paws together fretfully.