Tracking Dread Pirate Tribble TipTup!

Posted on 10 Oct 2014 @ 2:08am by Nesh Saalm & Lieutenant Olsam Mott

2,026 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 06 - Legend of Souls
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 3, Sickbay
Timeline: MD 09 :: 0128 Hours

ON

Nesh's initial panic from deck 5 had subsided once the Orion found herself with a purpose. It might have had something to do with calling that purpose 'responsibility,' but it wasn't a thought she was going to dwell on until after the tribble was cared for.

Science had, oddly enough, proven to be lacking in help during the Gamma shift. Nesh's initial thought had been to seek out the Zoologist, who was most likely to have some qualifications in caring for creatures with odd anatomies. However, Shroll had mysteriously vanished on Nesh, as well as the rest of the Science staff, and was nowhere to be found, nor was anyone else who could have been remotely helpful to Nesh and her noble tribble endeavor.

Which left Nesh dashing into Medical with a second panic hovering over her head and a frantic look in her eye. "Hello? Is there anyone here? I have a... a patient who needs some help!... You can fix tribble problems, right?.... Hello?"

"A patient, you say?" Olsam said, appearing off to the side as a blue head sticking out of the Chief Medical Officer's office. When he saw it was Nesh, he smiled so hard his eyes nearly disappeared among chubby cheeks. He stepped out of the office and grabbed the nearest medkit. "Hello, Cadet Saalm. Surely you're not working this shift... Is everything all right? What sort of tribble problems? I'm a fixer of a great many problems. Did you get one stuck in a bodily orifice? Did you step on one? Obstructed airway from fur inhalation?"

Thankfully Nesh had remained happily oblivious as to the happenings of the Medical department, and wouldn't have known whether the Bolian doctor's smile was one to be relieved about or afraid of. It didn't cross her mind to think twice on the matter, as she instead held out the damp, green mess of fuzzball for the doctor to see. "He was caught between the wirings. I think he scared himself. Can you examine him, please?"

"Why, of course we can," Olsam said, smiling as he took the tribble from her. He shuffled over to the nearest biobed, wading through tribbles himself, and placed it on top as he would any patient. He flipped open the medical tricorder, detached the sensor wand, and discreetly ran a cursory scan of Nesh before turning his attention to the tribble - someone bringing in a bleeding tribble could be dealing with anything: psychotic episode, ultra-violent tendencies, delusions, so on and so forth. Better to rule those things out... "Where did this occur?"

While he waited, the sensor wand was redirected to the bleeding tribble. It was rare for something to actually cause a laceration given how difficult it was to penetrate all the fur, but they were well-known as one of the universe's most resilient species. Everything about them seemed to be fine-tuned for survival and propagation, including their hematological processes. He'd never seen an organism form hemostatic plugs so quickly or thoroughly.

Predictably, Nesh was much more concerned about the tribble than she was of her own mental well-being. "On Deck Five, in the jeffries tubes. He was stuck in something... I couldn't catch what, Asa-Lieutenant Kita found him." She followed after the Bolian doctor, looking over his shoulder nervously as he continued his scan. "... Is he going to be alright?"

To Olsam's slight annoyance, the injured tribble seemed to be causing the other tribbles in Sickbay to congregate at the base of the biobed. If they started climbing over one another in an attempt to hop up on the bed, he wasn't going to hesitate to start kicking, ethics be damned.

"Oh, of course. I think it's stopped the majority of the bleeding itself," Olsam said cheerily, trying to instill some confidence in her. He turned to the medcart for the thrombic modulator and dermal regenerator to begin the repairs, and by the time he'd turned back a few of the tribbles had managed to form a tribble ladder to get one of their kind up on to the biobed. Olsam frowned at it; even he, the unflappably cheery Olsam Mott, was getting sick of these damn things. He reached out, snatched it off the bed and put it back on the floor with its companions. "I swear, if I ever find who started all this..."

Nesh kept quiet as she watched the tribbles at work. In her attempts to clear the tribbles out, she had learned quite a few things about them. They were more sentient than the Federation gave them credit for, and were capable of much more than what even she had originally thought. Their near hive-mind capabilities were, for all intents and purposes, quite weird for a bunch of fuzzy cuddlebutts.

"I wasn't aware they were capable of healing like that." She may not have brought the tribble down to medical if she knew they were so durable. It made sense that they were capable of at least accelerated healing, but she hadn't thought much of it until now. At his next statement, however, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, which she tried to hide behind a hand, hoping that the Bolian was much more focused on the tribbles. Hopefully an attempt at humor would cheer him up, at least a tiny bit. "... You'll... hug them and tell them never to do it again?"

"Yes, precisely," Olsam said, nodding his head as if she'd read his mind. "And give them a strongly worded letter written in a very stern tone. But not too stern, because people make mistakes. And they might be a superior officer. That's just poor form to be too stern with your superior officer, you know? Although once I was really very tempted to give this CMO a piece of my mind. Dr. Albert Porter, do you know him? Head of the pediatrics unit on Valon IV? He had the absolute worst bedside manner! In a pediatrics unit, can you imagine? He'd just go around telling the children they were going to die. Right to their face. 'You're going to die.' He said it was better they accept it. And of course they were going to die - there was a dreadful bacterial strain going around among the colony's children causing hemorrhagic colitis - but you shouldn't just say it like that. He needed more than a few strongly worded letters. Not that they'd do any good, he's dead now. Rest his soul, poor bitter horrible old man that he was."

Olsam finally paused for a breath and realized he'd gotten a bit carried away with the thrombic modulator he'd been using to clean up the dried blood in the tribble's fur. Now a big patch of the fur looked darkened and slightly singed. The Bolian chuckled nervously and tried to pat down and smooth out the damaged fur. "That'll heal. Eventually. No harm done."

The young Orion stared, almost petrified, for a good half second, before nodding along with everything that the doctor told her. Mentally, she checked off 'Medical' as a place to look for a Starfleet career, if Mott was any indication of how bonkers they all appeared to be. If she had paid any attention to what he was doing with the tribble, she may have pointed it out sooner, but she was starting to fear what he'd to do her, especially if he was in the wrong mood.

"... Oh, I think he'll be just fine!" She chimed in agreement, smiling at the tribble as it cooed. "Comparatively, I mean."

"Yes, comparatively," Olsam echoed, thinking she may have had a promising career in medicine ahead of her. Medicine was all about comparison. Was your kidney doing comparatively well, or not? Oh, sure, you'd lost 83% of its function but it had been functioning at only 3% efficiency moments ago. "So, will you be keeping this particular tribble? I can give it a subdermal identifier tag if you'd like. You know, so it doesn't get lost among the other green ones."

The Bolian turned away from "the patient" and looked out across the Sickbay floor; within moments he'd spotted at least a dozen other tribbles with similar fur.

As intelligent as she may or may not have appeared to be, the word 'subdermal' took half a second longer for her to register than it possibly should have. "Uhm... I think I can-" She paused, eying the sea of tribbles around them and narrowing her eyes. "... I mean, yes please. I want to make sure he turns out alright by the end of this madness."

"He?" Olsam asked. He reached out, picked up the tribble and held it above his head while inspecting its underside, as if there were some easily identifiable external genitalia. Finding none, he set the tribble back down and began rummaging through the medcart; subdermal identifier tags weren't something readily on hand. As he carelessly dug through the different shelves, an occasional piece of medical equipment would topple over the side and disappear into the sea of tribbles on the floor. "Does he have a name?"

"Yes, he." Nesh nodded, as if she had just done a full scientific study on tribble biology and re-classified them by gender. Keeping the thought at the back of her mind, she shook her head. "Not quite yet. We just found him, but-" She paused, snapping her fingers. "I'll name him Tiptup!"

"Perfect!" Olsam exclaimed, as if that really was the perfect name, as if it was the very name he'd been thinking of himself. He stood up from the medcart with an odd device in hand that he programmed on the way back to the biobed. The long protrusion disappeared into the tribble's fur, gave a quick sort of puff sound, and then he set it aside. "There we go. Mister Tiptup won't be wandering far without the ship knowing about it. It's like a tiny little commbadge. You just say, 'Computer, locate Mr. Tiptup' and-"

"Mr. Tiptup is currently on Deck 3, Section 29, Main Sickbay," the computer interrupted.

Olsam looked a little put out at the interruption, as if it was the EMH and not the computer talking. He hated being interrupted. "Yes, well, as you can see, it works perfectly well."

Nesh peered at the tribble as the device was implanted, shivering as she watched. She hoped never to have to worry about implants like that on her own person. It did make it easy to keep track of a tribble, though. "Thank you! Will I be able to ask any computer this information, Doctor?"

"Well, I only programmed the subdermal identifier tag with the ship's computer," Olsam said, whipping the implantation device into the air to show off its programming interface but nearly slicing her nose off in the process. As if he didn't notice, he kept right on talking, "But I guess we can log the identifier chip with the broader Federation sensor networks so that you can find him wherever he goes. They're very mischievous creatures. He might hop into an escape pod or something, you know, crash land on some remote moon colony." The Bolian's eyes seemed to unfocus slightly as he lost himself to his own imagination. "Or join a crew of Orion pirates in the Devron system, pillaging and looting... Mr. Tiptup the Merciless, they'll call him, Scourge of the Devron system...."

Nearly flailing, Nesh squeaked at the close-call. She would not have liked to be considered one of the first noseless Orions due to wily Bolian doctor attack. That would have been how she claimed it to have happened, anyway. "Oh no, I meant the ship's computer! There's no need for the trouble..." Even though the thought of a rogue tribble terrorizing the Federation sounded just a bit more appealing than it possibly should have. Smiling, she cradled the little tribble in her arms. "Thank you, Doctor. I'll make sure he stays out of trouble, or at least the ship's systems."

OFF

Lieutenant Olsam Mott, M.D.
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

Cadet FG Nesh Saalm
Scientist's Mate
USS Galileo

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