Crew Info Board: the Tempest's message wall

The Crew Info Board was the shared message wall of the Tempest, installed in the crew quarters on Deck 3 of the Andromeda Initiative survey ship, in the bunk space below the bio lab that served the Pathfinder team as the closest thing it had to a common room. Running software identified as InfoBoard v3.4 and watched over by its own tirelessly cheerful virtual intelligence, the board carried the small daily business of a crew drawn from two galaxies: duty notices and drill reports from Cora Harper, dinner announcements, lost property threads, language lessons from Jaal Ama Darav, and at least one outburst about the drive core that the resident VI refused to print.

A board for the whole crew#

The board introduced itself the moment it came online, congratulating Pathfinder Ryder on the successful installation of InfoBoard v3.4 and promising to keep the Pathfinder and staff informed on the latest developments aboard the Tempest. The practical work fell to Cora Harper, who set up user accounts for the entire crew and opened the first thread. When Liam Kosta asked whether they could really post anything, Cora answered that they could post anything they wanted the whole crew to see, though she had disabled image embedding. Liam mourned the "missed opportunities."

The InfoBoard VI enforced its own standards. When the engineer Gil Brodie ran an unannounced drive core stress test and declared there was nothing wrong with an 0500 wake-up call, Liam's reply survived only as "[Profanity deleted by InfoBoard VI. You're Welcome!]", followed by the workaround "Adjectived verbing nouns, Gil!" Cora warned that if the VI ever learned to censor all language she would make Liam reprogram it himself. Jaal, still learning the ways of his Milky Way shipmates, judged the whole exchange "Educational, in a way."

Notices, drills, and ship's business#

For all its clutter, the board did real work. It was where Cora announced that she had finished the assignment paperwork with the Nexus making Nakmor Drack and Peebee official members of the Pathfinder team, admitting she had needed to fudge a few details. In the same post she checked in with Drack, publicly, about something she had said to him; the old krogan told her to relax, since "the best headbutt is always the one you don't see coming."

Cora also posted the after action report from the ship's last fire drill. Liam's new evacuation plan had cut 22 seconds off the crew's best time, Drack still needed a solution "vis-a-vis ladders," and Peebee was ruled dead for reaching the evacuation point two minutes late, a verdict she appealed in capital letters on the grounds that she lived in an escape pod. Cora and Drack ran proficiency courses in firearms and biotic offense and defense in the cargo bay from 1400 to 1600 for crew off duty, with simulation weapons for target practice but real biotics, protective gear advised. Suvi Anwar signed up with the warning that she was a little jumpy; when Drack asked since when she fired anything meatier than survey probes, she answered, "Since I've known I might need to."

Gil used the board to schedule maintenance on the Nomad from 0700 to 0800, blowing out its dust filters and retuning the microthruster array after everything the vehicle had been through. Liam wanted to know why all of Gil's maintenance happened at the crack of dawn; Gil pointed out there was no dawn in space and that he was usually awake at 0400 anyway. Liam's reply doubled as a landmark in the ship's history: "We saved the cluster. Take a nap." On the more serious side, Dr. Lexi T'Perro circulated a refresher on the Andromeda Initiative's mental wellness program after a stretch of hard events, reminding the crew that stress, PTSD, anxiety, and depression were real conditions rather than tiredness, that their colleagues had likely felt the same things, and that such disorders were treatable with medication, therapy, and support, with her medbay door open to questions.

Dinner rotation and lost and found#

The crew took turns cooking, and the board kept the schedule honest. The salarian pilot Kallo Jath once posted a dinner announcement reading only "NULL ENTRY," apologizing that he had forgotten his turn and that half the rations were still unpacked. Vetra Nyx covered for him with soup in the galley, dextro and levo both, plus fruit cocktail, prompting Kallo to marvel that they might have left port without her. Drack's turn produced a fine grunnien roast that occupied the galley oven most of the day under strict orders that no one open the door while the juices settled. Peebee sampled it anyway and pronounced it pretty good already, drawing the krogan ruling that "thieves get sandwiches."

The lost and found threads ran longer. Cora found a mug with a magnetized base near the bio lab, left stuck sideways to a bulkhead; Suvi claimed it, insisting she had only put it down for a second when her hands were full. Gil lost his hot patch gun from his workbench and feared it had fallen through the deck plating, only for Liam to confess he had borrowed it to fix a loose boot sole. Cora asked for it next to patch a strap, then Kallo for the pilot's seat cushion, then Vetra for a rickety shelf, until Gil simply built a second hot patch gun and told them all to fight over that one. Peebee found a sweater outside the laundry that she described as looking like a coloring book had a nightmare, and threatened that if no one claimed it she would cut extra holes in it and put it on Poc; Lexi quietly asked her to leave it in medbay and admitted, after a pause, that she knew exactly whose it was. Vetra, for her part, confiscated Kallo's soap opera OSDs until he stopped watching them at full volume during her naps. Kallo protested that "Dynasty of Stars" was no soap opera but a historic, award winning extranet drama running over 70 seasons, and lamented that he had come to Andromeda before seeing how the Trade Fleet arc was resolved; Suvi consoled him that transmission signals traveled a long way, and the crew might eventually catch the 600 year rerun.

The Angaran Word of the Day#

Jaal turned the board into a language classroom with his recurring Angaran Word of the Day. He taught the crew tavum, a pleasant intoxicant stirred into hot water or fruit juice, which set off a round of research questions: Vetra asked what it was made from, Drack asked what happened if it was mixed with booze, and Peebee proposed scientific tests, possibly involving little umbrellas. The verb gosan, to cling or to grasp, came with the idiom gosan yav daar, to be stubborn, literally clinging to a rock, and the derived noun gosavar, the Resistance. When Peebee asked whether that meant the Resistance were "stubborn, pig-headed people," Jaal corrected her plural to gosavara and conceded the point.

Not every lesson was comfortable. Vesagara, literally "uprooted people," was an impolite term for those from the Milky Way, used mostly by the Roekaar. Liam thought it milder than it could have been, and Jaal admitted the fairness of the image, since one did not get more uprooted than being a galaxy away. The series closed on a warmer note with javegara, "the people closest to me/us," a word covering friends and mentors as well as family. Vetra called it a good choice. Jaal thought so too.

The best seat in the house#

The board's least official threads said the most about life aboard. Liam posted an open call for help moving a couch, offering payment in beer or whatever else the crew found, with preference given to biotics who could drop the weight. Suvi asked if he was serious; Liam never joked about comfortable seating. Vetra disputed the word "comfortable" entirely, and when Liam accused her of envying the best seat in the house, she answered, "Not a thing, not a house." Suvi revived a tradition from the Nexus with a comparative religious study meet-up, inviting shipmates to bring their own texts or simply listen, with a sign-up rotation for coffee; Jaal and Kallo both signed.

The board's celebratory peak came from Liam, who admitted to swiping a couple of bottles of champagne from Vortex so the crew could toast Meridian properly with the good stuff, chilling them next to the coolant tanks. Suvi volunteered to fabricate proper champagne flutes, and when Gil questioned spending resources on glassware, she told him he could drink his from a coffee mug if he liked; she wanted a proper clink. Between the drills, the dinners, the arguments, and the toasts, the Crew Info Board preserved something no official log did: the record of a crew from two galaxies settling into one small ship and making it a home.