((Ensign Vessa's Quarters, USS Atlantis))

VARAAN: =^= Now hear this, this is Commander Varaan speaking. May I have
your attention, please. Ladies and gentlemen, never have I served with a
more dedicated and hard-working crew. You should all be proud of yourselves,
and your fellow crewmembers. I am certain, that in the very near future, we
would have found a way to stop the anomaly and save thousands of worlds and
innumerable lives. Fortunately, we won't have to. Since before we left
Utopia Planitia, we have all been involved in an elaborate holodeck
simulation. That simulation has come to a completion, and is about to be
terminated. Please stand by. Varaan out. =^=

::Vessa stood where she was, shocked. Where she was had been her quarters
aboard the Atlantis, but now she seemed to be standing in a giant holodeck.
The truth started to sink in and her knees seemed to weaken. Standing around
her were all the dead and injured crewmembers of Atlantis as well as
Paladin, in perfectly good physical health. She was so relieved she thought
she might faint, but she felt she had better not in front of so many
officers.::

::An Admiral Harris was now addressing the crews, explaining what had been
going on. Vessa was only half listening, she was far more interested in
observing the reactions of the people around her. Many were relieved, others
were angry. As her profound relief started to wear off, Vessa joined the
list of the angry personnel.::

::Not far from where she was standing, Lt. Soul was speaking with Admiral
Harris, who had finished addressing the crews. Speaking, perhaps, might not
be the appropriate word as Soul was quite expressively telling the Admiral
what she imagined many were feeling. She was not the type to express her
emotions in such a loud way, but she could easily understand why Soul
would.::

::As a counselor, this experiment had been against absolutely everything she
believed in professionally. She realized the importance of testing the
crew’s abilities to handle situations but nothing, in her mind, justified
the torment the personnel had been put through for this ‘mission.’ The line,
she felt, had most definitely been crossed and she was surprised that
Commander Varaan had been a party to it. It had been her impression that her
commanding officer was far less reckless than that. Even as a Vulcan, he
should surely be able to understand how all of these events the crew thought
they had lived through would affect them emotionally.::

((Utopia Planitia - Arboretum, Virtual Testing Building))

::Following most of the crew outside the holodeck where she had apparently
spent weeks, Vessa was interested to observe a similarly angered response to
the news they had just received from Lt. Cmdr. Jamar, which he directed at
Varaan. She caught herself nodding her head in agreement and stopped herself
quickly. That would not do at all. Many of the crew might need their
counselor’s assistance once the new mission got under way; some might still
be traumatized by the ‘deaths’ of their friends, others might have trouble
trusting their surroundings again. She would have to put her own anger aside
to help them.::

::It was good that the crew would now have a week off; they deserved it and
she suspected that many would need the break. She decided she would travel
to Earth. Her friend aboard Atlantis, Rikki, might invite her to join her
visiting family, but she wanted to spend a few days on her own first. She
needed time to relax and gather her thoughts about her ‘first mission’
before reporting to duty for her real first mission. A mountain area,
perhaps, not unlike her home on Napea. She did not want to be indoors- she
might not have actually been in space for weeks but she felt like it, and
knowing that she had actually been kept in a holodeck for all that time even
furthered her feeling of claustrophobia. She wanted to be outdoors, in the
fresh air.::

::Everyone started to wander away from the facility where they had been
kept, against their knowledge, for so long. Vessa wandered away, also.::


OOC: I promise I will SIM better for our next mission. Really.


Ensign Vessa
Counselor
USS Atlantis

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