Bottoms Down - Part Two

Posted on 17 Nov 2014 @ 3:41pm by Commander Norvi Stace & Lieutenant Asahi Kita & Lieutenant Olsam Mott
Edited on on 18 Nov 2014 @ 3:07pm

2,971 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Episode 07 - Sojourn
Location: Starbase 84 - Mott's Temporary Quarters
Timeline: MD 30 - 1412 Hours

ON:

Mott's Temporary Starbase Quarters

Olsam Mott had been trying for twenty minutes to readjust the picture on the wall of his temporary quarters. It was bad enough the thing was hideous, but it looked crooked to him. And if he was going to have to look at an ugly picture then it should at least be straight! Apparently, some fool engineer had bolted the thing to the wall so he'd been forced to replicate a tool, unbolt it, drill new holes in the bulkhead and then reattach it to the wall. He was just about to repeat the process, as he'd drilled the holes wrong, but the door chime interrupted him.

The Bolian knew most people just opened the door, but as far as he was concerned that was a good way to get killed. Hadn't people in Starfleet seen any thrillers before? Read an espionage novel? Participated in a contract killing holodeck program? He'd seen, read and done enough of all the above to know better than to just shout out 'come' and hope for the best.

"Computer, identify visitors."

"Identities unknown."

Olsam gasped. Unknown? Someone had finally come to put him in an early grave! "Elaborate," he said, picking up the drill like a weapon.

"Two humanoids detected - one Trill female, joined, 5'9", 145 pounds. One human male, 5'4", 126 pounds. No Starfleet commbadge or identifying information found on station logs."

The doctor narrowed his eyes, recalling medical personnel files from the ship. There weren't a lot of joined Trills wandering around or short human males, so it seemed likely the visitors were Norvi and Asahi. He could even check the biometric data from the internal sensors with the Galileo's database. But how could you trust even sensors these days, with Changelings and Undine and whatnot wandering around the universe? When the doors to his quarters finally opened, Olsam was brandishing the drill like a phaser.

"Tell me something only I would know!" he shouted, then twisted up his face in sudden revulsion. Either these shapeshifters were really bad at shifting shapes or his two crewmates had been through some sort of terrible ordeal.

Between using the nearby wall as a lean and shielding his eyes from the overhead light that threatened to make his headache much worse, Asahi hadn't been prepared for the super-excitable Bolian. He frowned, squinting at Olsam as if the doctor had jammed the drill into the Galileo's precious warpcore. "... I know that if you shout too loud, I'll reprogram your biobeds to shoot out confetti at inopportune moments." He paused, grumbling low. "I dunno what that means yet... there's throbbing and swirlies and no thinky thinky of the brain thing..."

Olsam nodded slowly, supposing that was good enough. "Okay, come in. You aren't being chased by Orions or something, are you? If there's phaser fire, it might hit my rock collection."

The Trill followed Asahi in and through bouts of dry-heaving, grabbed the back of one of the chairs and lowered her dainty and fragile body into it. "You'd better - *blugh* - watch that tongue of yours, Doctor," she replied, sinking her head into her lap to gain some sense of balance and then shooting a narrowed gaze up to him continued. "And those loose lips of yours. You never know what might be lurking to just burst out of them." If Asahi's personality hadn't sealed Olsam's confidence, then hopefully a verbal elbow to the Bolian's ribs concerning his pathogenic crisis would. "We need help. Her angered and pained face now softened into her more familiar visage as she added, "Please?"

Olsam stared at Norvi for a long moment, confusion written all over his face. What the hell was she talking about his tongue and lips for? Was she coming on to him? This hardly seemed like the appropriate venue for that sort of thing. She was pretty enough, quite intelligent, and he'd enjoyed working with her on their little project, but, frankly, the Trill wasn't at her most attractive at the moment. And why had she brought Asahi? Did she need backup? He got nervous sometimes, too, but the whole thing just seemed entirely ill-conceived. You'd think with all those lifetimes the Stace symbiont would have learned how to properly hit on a Bolian, but then again with a symbiont it was sometimes hard to tell what was going on in the Trill's mind. Maybe she was just confused; goodness knows he certainly was.

"You need my help? Uh... Well, okay," Olsam said, placing the drill down on a nearby table. As soon as the metallic casing of the piece of equipment touched the table's surface, the Bolian's face lit up with understanding. "Ooooh. You need my help. Medical help, off the record, hush-hush, top secret, classified. I get it." He wiggled two hairless brows. "So, what's happened? Let me get my medkit." Suddenly, he gasped. "Are you pregnant?" Olsam's head whipped around to face Asahi. "Did you impregnate her? Oh my goodness, what are we going to do?"

Olsam's hands went up in the air and he let out an exasperated sigh, as if he was on the edge of absolute panic. He began pacing nervously back and forth, and any attempt to intervene in his monologue fell on deaf ears. "You really should have advised one of the ship's physicians before you decided to engage in that sort of behavior! Are your physiologies even compatible? And I hope you're here for a prenatal visit because I don't think there's anything I can do to help otherwise. You should have thought about the consequences before you two decided to engage in sexual intercourse. I mean, really? Didn't you know this sort of thing can happen? For goodness sake, Stace, you're like 150 years old! I can't do that kind of procedure on a starbase; I mean, maybe if we were on Bolarus I could look into-"

"She's not pregnant!" Asahi finally managed to blurt out, albeit a tad more loudly than he had meant to. He immediately flinched at his own volume, holding a hand to his now deeply reddened face. "I think-I believe-maybe-... unless I sold my kidney to some... odd-looking Ferengi-god I hope not..." He trailed off, suddenly losing his thought the idea of having to shield himself from Olsam's extremely bright lighting-or, at least he thought it was bright. "...... M'too hungover for this."

Stace enjoyed Olsam's unusual ways. In fact, after five lifetimes of experience, it was difficult to pique the Trill's interest when it came to friendships and relationships; and Bolian's certainly could babble with the best of them. But at this unsavory moment in the Chief Science Officer's lifetime, her patience was as thin and as ragged as her appetite. She leapt up from the chair and grabbed the blue buffoon with both hangds by the collar and pressing her nose up against his, began to hiss through clenched teeth. "Just fix us and find out what we have been drugged with. And for my own sanity stop bloody talking!" But the sudden jolt had unsettled something within the Trill that seemed to permeate down to her fragile bones. Without a second to stop it, or deflect her face, a surge vomit gushed forth from deep within her and splashed right into the Bolian's open mouth. As she pushed herself back from him, another load jettisoned all down the front of him.

Olsam sputtered, spitting the fluid right back on to Norvi's uniform and trying desperately to expel all of it from his mouth. He'd had some unusual things in there before like spoiled meat, live birds and precious gems; in fact, there were few things in the galaxy that hadn't been in Olsam Mott's mouth, but Trill vomit was definitely among them.

"Gracious!" he cried out then - eyes widened - turned on Asahi. These things often ended up being a chain reaction... "Don't you dare!"

While distracted by the increasingly painful lighting, the pure sound of Norvi throwing up nearly made him wretch himself. He put a hand to his mouth, gagging on his own bile as it threatened to spread itself all over Mott's floor, sheepishly looking over at the Bolian with a silent, pitiful look on his face.

The Bolian retrieved his medkit, removed the medical tricorder and detached the sensor wand without too much concern for his personal appearance or the pool of liquid on the carpeting. After all if he stopped treating people every time they vomited on him then hardly anything would ever get done down in Sickbay. Olsam eyed both of them as he took the preliminary and then more detailed scans, storing the data away for more detailed analysis in a few moments.

"Norvi, you can use my sonic shower. Please," he added. "I'll replicate a new uniform for you and take a look at these scans, hm?" He shifted his eyes to Asahi, looking a bit like a mental patient playing doctor what with the vomit and saliva dribbled down his chin and uniform. "What happened, anyway? Someone drugged you? What were you two doing?"

Once the wave of nausea passed over, the engineer settled himself in the nearby chair, elbow leaning on the desk and head buried in his hand. "... I don't remember anything after the Stardust. Just a swirly drink and few psychedelic lights."

Norvi slowly, and unsteadily, rose to her feet. She gripped the arm of the chair next to her and embedded her nails into fabric whilst holding back another bout of nausea. She looked up sheepishly to Olsam, the blue of his face now seeming to pulse in waves of dizzy vibrations. She hung her head for a second and as she righted herself fully, with her right hand wiping away the congealed mess that lay at the corner of her mouth and chin, she managed to say: "I'm sorry, Olsam. For... snapping and making a mess on you." She moved slowly passed him, each foot step she took sending beats of sickness through her, and made for the bathroom.

It took her almost six minutes before she returned back, wrapped only in a towel, the spots people so rarely got to see now extending past her clavicle and disappearing into the towel beyond. This was a not a time to appear sheepish or to worry about her state of undress. She noticed the new uniform folded neatly on the chair but merely sat next to it.

"Any news?" she asked, looking to Asahi and then settling on the doctor. "Please. Anything you can help us maintain at least some of our dignity with."

Olsam snorted, looking over data on his PADD. Dignity. He glanced over toward the replicator where he'd disposed of his soiled uniform and replicated a new one for himself. Weren't they beyond that at this point?

"I think you were drugged," he said, nodding in agreement with himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, as if to clear his thoughts. "I mean, I know you were drugged but I just don't know what you were drugged with, yet. I'll have to get a more detailed analysis with a blood sample then I can isolate the compound and study it a bit more. It's synthetic, I could tell that much from the initial scans, so I wouldn't call it an accidental drugging. Not that we have many of those, I think. Although there was that one time on the Tranquility when I... Well, nevermind, anyway..."

He trailed off as he placed the PADD on his desk and picked up an empty hypospray. At first he made toward Norvi, feeling more familiar with her, but then deviated toward Asahi when he remembered what happened the last time he was in close proximity to the Trill. Without waiting for permission - after all, they'd come to him - he depressed the device into the chief engineer's neck and withdrew a healthy sample of blood to be analyzed in the phoretic analyzer he conveniently - and oddly - had with him in his quarters.

"Do you two make it a habit to accept strange drinks from strange people in strange bars that have strange side effects?" Olsam asked, lifting a hairless brow as he slid his rolling chair up to the phoretic analyzer and loaded the sample.

"Don't act as though we pilfered someone else's drinks, Olsam. Or like we go swanning about strange space stations accepting the wares and woes off anyone that crosses our path."

With her head still spinning and now the knowledge that they were drugged adding to the nausea, the Trill quickly swallowed back another regurgitation. She gasped for air and then sank her head into the armrest.

Her bubbling anger, for now her temper had began to fray at the edges with both the situation and the doctor's superior attitude, began to present itself with her clipped and rarely used aggressive tones. "And we'll have less of that attitude from you as well, Lieutenant. I might be in a state of undress, and have, unfortunately, relieved my stomach of its contents in your mouth, but that certainly does not give you the authority to treat me any differently out of that wretched uniform than in it. Despite the fact that you've just had to change out of yours because I happened to vomit on you!"

She took in a breath and then exhaled... carefully. "Why would someone want to purposefully drug us both?" she remarked, almost hopelessly pathetic.

Thankfully, Olsam had his head down to the eyepiece of the phoretic analyzer so she couldn't see his smirk. He'd noticed such outbursts were a common response to the loss of one's dignity, especially in front of colleagues. Although vomiting both on and in someone you worked with had to move to whatever was beyond embarrassment, so it was a wonder the temperamental fit hadn't been longer and more intense.

"Maybe we can ask them when we find them," Olsam suggested, face still buried in the analyzer. Coming from anyone else it might have been taken as a smart-ass type of comment, but given its origin it seemed more likely he was being serious in his own simple sort of way. Eventually, he pushed himself away from the phoretic analyzer and spun around in the chair to face them; the amount of force he used spun him in an additional rotation and undercut the dramatic effect of the move significantly.

"Well, it's definitely a synthetic drug; you wouldn't find that sort of chemical structure in nature. It's similar to some hypnotics that are commonly used to treat insomnia...in the Cardassian Union," Olsam said, frowning and rubbing at the non-existent beard on his chin. "But someone has tinkered with it, altered the pharmokinetic properties to boost its bioavailability so it would work faster and be stronger."

He fell silent and frowned more deeply at the ship's chief scientist. "You're lucky your symbiont is still alive, Norvi. It's a sloppy drug to use on a Trill; the mechanism of action has the very unfortunate side effect of blocking the isoboramine receptors that help maintain the connection between symbiont and host. Curiously, it almost seemed in-built into the drug, as if someone wanted to reduce the connection between you and the Stace symbiont. The only reason both you and the symbiont are alive is because someone took measures to keep you alive. That and the drug's half-life is fairly short," he added, shifting the frown into a smile. "You'll feel better in like...eight hours or so."

Asahi had only registered potentially half of the conversation by the time his brain had caught up with the rest of his body. He hadn't even felt the hypospray pricking his skin as he found himself staring at a spot on Olsam's wall. "... Why so severe-I think that picture's crooked." Eying the pair, he frowned. "... But what do they need that requires something fast-acting and... messy? Out of a scientist and an engineer, even... That... that makes no sense. Then again... nothing makes sense right now."

If Asahi had only listened to half of what the doctor had said, then Norvi had listened to nothing that the engineer had uttered. Her mind was now reeling from the revelations he'd concluded. So much information to take on board that she could barely make sense of anything he had said. Cardassian in origin? Specifically designed? Isolate her isoboramine receptors? Actively kept alive? This all seemed like too much information to work through with her head still swimming in the drugs she had been given. "Eight hours," she managed to say slowly, looking up to Olsam; her blood-shot eyes tearing up a little. "I feel like I can't even process this until I'm back to normal. And after a magnificent sleep."

She turned to Olsam and then to Asahi. "Sorry to drag you both into this. If this arrow-head did have my name on it then I'll get to the bottom of it."

"Sorry?" That was the word Asahi keyed in on, now alert and attentive, or as much as he could have been under circumstances. "... We were enjoying a drink... you couldn't have predicted this. If this has your name on it, I want to help out any way I can... and we can start with tracking down our comm badges.... I have an idea."

OFF

Lieutenant Asahi Kita
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant Olsam Mott
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

&

Lieutenant Commander Norvi Stace
Chief Science Officer & Second Officer
USS Gailieo

RSS Feed