Biologicals 101

Posted on Thu Jan 16th, 2020 @ 12:16pm by Ahreva Malana & Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Ensign Weiaex
Edited on on Fri Jan 17th, 2020 @ 10:19pm

Mission: Neutral Zone Neutrality
Location: Mess Hall
Timeline: 2397

Grabbing a tray with one hand, reading a PaDD in another and waving yet another wildly about as she spoke, the Edosian pilot, Ensign Weiaex me her order in the otherwise almost empty line of the crew mess hall of the U.S.S. Hera. "Yeah, so... no. Sorry, but that so-called Pizza is sad and I have standards. Maaaaayyybe the meatloaf? It's hard to mess up meatloaf. Except that there's no actual meat in it. All... ya' know... reorganized protein and reshuffled molecules."

"Probably the same molecules from waste reclamation, because, ya' know, efficiency. I mean, it's literally broken down to nothing and reconstructed. I know in my head there's nothing wrong with it, but it still kinda weirds me out to think about sometimes, ya' know what I mean, Mal?" The orange-shelled woman with three arms and three legs said as the crewmember working the line placed a plate of meatloaf on her plate. "Oh, and a sweet tea." The talkative Edosian added as she flipped her shoulder-length, silver hair over as she turned back to the woman in line behind her.

Malana, the literal mountain as she was from a race evolved from granite, smiled politely as she looked over the available foods but waved it all off. As an Ashrevanian she didn't need to eat, but she did at least pick up a tray and a mug to at least hold and keep up appearances. She enjoyed posing quite a bit, if the truth were told.

"I would have to take your word on it. I have never eaten any of it and from my perspective, it's all biological so the distinction is less clear." Malana did her best to categorize the various food products in her mind but even as a biologist, she was having trouble.

"Well, I got you to try real Pizza when we went to New York, so I will take that as a victory, even if you can't really taste it the same way I do. But hey, that's that Vulcan thingy? Infinite diversity and all that." With her free hand, the carapaced pilot lightly slapped Malana's arm in a friendly manner as they began their way towards a table. 

"So, how do you keep your engine running if you don't really eat biological food?" The talkative Ensign asked as they sat down. "Especially since you, ya' know, DO things that use up energy unlike the rest of your people. I mean, I'm no biologist, but you're alive, so you need to have energy from somewhere, right?"

After they sat down, Malana stared at her friend for several seconds before replying. "I am told that it is quite unpleasant to watch... Every few weeks I eat raw materials. Things like soft metals, softer stones, ceramics..." She then held up the coffee mug she had grabbed. "Like this mug."

"Is it good? Like, mugs? What do you like?" Weiaex asked, forking into her meatloaf with a raised eyebrow, genuinely curious.

"The glaze tends to be off-putting. I prefer slate tiles or freshly kiln-fired ceramics." The literally stone-faced woman studied the mug for a moment before setting it back down on her tray. "However, another purpose to me always being in public with a mug, other than to look more... Biologically normal... Is that I always have a snack at the ready."

"Nice!" The talkative pilot said with a grin. "N' I figure if you want you can program mugs that just LOOK like regular mugs, except make 'em to your taste. Like a slate mug. Gotta remember that." As she spoke, one hand was managing lunch while the other kept holding up the PaDD.

Being Edosian, she was naturally good at multitasking, but it was clear she was glancing at the PaDD every few seconds, anxiously.

"Indeed. I will have to consider shape as well as materials and consistency. Thank you." Malana was inherently observant and she easily noticed that her friend seemed distracted, which was unusual for her. "Is there something wrong with your PaDD? Should I... eat it for you?" She didn't often tease as her slow and steady speech patterns rarely conveyed emotions well, but she hoped the offer came across as an attempt at a joke.

"No, I..." Weiaex began to answer, absentmindedly, before what she had just heard sunk in. In spite of generally talking a mile a minute, she did, in fact, listen to what was being said around her, and what she just heard stopped her in her verbal tracks. No mean feat.

"HAAA! Nice one, Mal!" The orange shelled woman let out a deep, authentic laugh at the first joke she can ever remember her friend making. "Yeah, no. I wish. It's the Chief. She's been running me through the ringer trying to see if I'm up for the assistant chief position. I swear, I thought Leprechaun was exaggerating when she said how tough the Lieutenant Commander was during her combat training."

Waving the PaDD in the air, she ran another hand through her silvery hair while taking a drink of her tea with the third. "But she's quizzing me on every system on the deck. Every system in the shuttles and runabouts. Stuff that makes some of the exams at the academy seem tame in comparison. I think she's gonna make me field strip a Runabout at this rate."

"If anyone can do it, I believe you are the one," replied the stone woman with a surprisingly soft smile. "Though having observed your chief multiple times, I am able to confirm that you are in for... stressful days."

"Yeah. She's... she's intense. I mean, she's a beast at a helm. Flies like she was born in a pilot's seat and almost never even looks down at the controls and still nails sims. But she's a workaholic. She's always in that officer reviewing files, running sims, reading department reports. All of that stuff." The Edosian pilot slouched slightly. "And if she's not in there working, she's on the flight deck checking systems or doing repairs on the runabouts herself. Which... I guess is why she needs an assistant. Someone to help her take some of that off her plate. Still, it's a lot to take in."

"I can figure out the technical stuff, but she's so dang intense. She just kinda stands there staring at you with her hands behind her back and you have no idea what she's thinking. It's kinda freaky. Maybe it's a Romulan thing... being intense. I dunno." Wieaex said, taking another bite of her lunch. "You were on a mission with her Mother, right? From Intel? Is she like that too?"

"Her mother... Yes... If she lived a few hundred seasons more, that one may be able to intimidate one of my people into talking." Malana mused over the thought of a biological being able to get literal stone to talk, but she thought that if any of them could do it, it would be that one.

"Sounds like a real ray 'a sunshine." Wieaex said, finishing off her plate. "So, enough of my nonsense. What about you? What's going on in the Biology Department? Workin' on anything interesting?"

Malana grinned slightly once more. "I believe I have concluded that my co-workers do indeed possess the required sentience and patience necessary for proper observational skills. They may make decent disciples as we observe the life cycles of various bacteria this week."

"You sneaky lady. You're observing your co-workers while doing the bacteria research?" Wieaex grinned mischievously. "Is that a paradox workaround? You figure out a way to observe without affecting because your subjects are expecting you to be there observing?"

A strange, almost cheeky look crossed Malana's face. "As an Ashavenian biologist, my purpose is to observe all biological life. My coworkers are indeed biological life, are they not?"

"Well, that's one way of describing the job." The orange Ensign grinned as she leaned in, conspiratorial, "So...any juicy observations?"

Taking the hint that this was to be a quiet discussion, Malana also leaned in and spoke softly. "I have always found fascinating, the predilection to discuss in the open a desire for bonding and mating with others as well as the drama in a particular biological's life. For instance, one particular crewman expressed a sincere desire to... 'jump the bones'... of their Vulcan supervisor while he was not around to the agreement and delight of several other presumably female crewmembers. Another expressed frustration at their inability to find a mate and how it seemed like everyone on the vessel were now producing young biologicals. Even some of the non-female crew that overheard had to join the discussion and it quickly turned to talk of the new maternity ward where young biologicals are cared for. They seemed displeased with it but I am not sure why. Perhaps if they had young of their own, they would be more pleased with it."

Chucking lightly, Weieax leaned in a bit more, folding two of her arms while sipping her tea with the third. "Well, they may be more displeased with their lack of 'female biologicals'. Or they're just the kind of guys that get defensive and hyper-masculine whenever the concept of commitment is brought up. And nothing says commitment like 'young biologicals'."

"Frankly, we got less and less of guys like that every crew rotation. This is gonna be the U.S.S. Lesbos before too long. Not that I'm complaining. I like 'male biologicals' as much as the next girl with three hands, but those three hands make me… adaptable enough in a pinch." The chatty Edosian whispered with a grin, glancing to the side to see that nobody was eavesdropping.

"But there's this one guy in the flight crew… Harnell. He's been trying to get into MacNielle's pants for a year, but she just isn't into him. But to hear him tell it, it was a personal assault on his honor that she turned him down. Word is, he put in for transfer. People just seem to be in the mood for settling down the last year or so. I've never seen anything like it on any ship before."

The stone woman nodded thoughtfully, considering the change in the crew's behaviour and trying to think back on when she too noticed things changing. "I too have noticed a sharp incline in the desire to mate aboard this vessel. I believe the change happened... Possibly around the time of the Meroset mission or shortly thereafter. Prior to that point, most biologicals aboard spoke primarily of their duties and consumption of flammable intoxicants."

"Flammable…? Ah, liquor. Duh. Heh." Wieaex shook her head and chuckled lightly as she caught back up. "Yeah, that was a cluster. I was still working cargo, then. Trying to work my way up to shuttle duty back then. Heh, and now I'm up for the assistant chief's chair. But at least I didn't get transferred out of the department like the Leprechaun. I figure she must've pissed the chief off something fierce. Damn, the Leprechaun has a kid. The chief's wife is pregnant as all get out. I dunno, I don't have any kind of desire to drop my eggs anytime soon. Maybe whatever's goin' around missed me."

"Perhaps. I believe the colloquialism is that there is something in the water. Please do not drink from the refresher." Malana mused for a moment before bringing up her observations of the R&D department. "I believe I have observed the short one and the porcine one that you refer to. The feathered one seems quite fond of them and their work output. I gather that they are unconventional, yet they are superior in ways that she values."

At the first comment, the Edosian pilot almost spat out the last sip of her tea. "Yeah… Heh heh… drinking from the refresher is never a great idea, Mallie." Then, as the rolling laugh ended, she continued, "I dunno. For all I know, she wanted to transfer. Heh. Maybe she knew the assistant position was opening up and she ran as fast as she could from the chief."

"Ugh… speaking of which. I should probably be studying this stuff." She waved the PaDD about as she sighed. "I want the gig. It would be a huge career move. Could get me promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade finally. But dang, you gonna know everything."

"With enough patience, you will know... Ah, but your lifespan is considerably more limited. I understand the need for expediency better. Your chief desires you to take on the role within hours rather than seasons." Malana tapped her mug thoughtfully, wondering if her friend would be able to learn one of her people's tricks of perception. "Has time ever seemed to slow for you? Do you experience time at a semi-variable rate?"

"I guess." Wieaex replied, cricking a brow slightly. "I mean, I've sat through lectures at the Academy that were only an hour long but felt like they took all day. And sometimes, at the helm, when the proverbial excrement is hitting the equally proverbial fan, a second can feel like ten. Yeah."

"Then perhaps..." Malana reached out her hands and took two of her friend's in her own, beginning to open her own inner self as she did on top of Earth's tallest mountain, but instead of stretching out her perception, she compressed it around herself, pushing that boundary out to Weiaex's mind as well to hopefully slow things to a crawl for her as well.

And crawl it did. The perception shift seemed to almost have a sense of its own gravity as the Edosian Ensign felt herself grow heavy. There was a tingle that shot from her hands and raced down her spine, but in that moment it seemed to crawl, inching across her like spiders stepping delicately across her thick carapace. It was a bizarre sensation, to say the least.

Turning her head, an action that seemed to take much longer than it should have, Wieaex looked at her shipmates as they seemed to move to a crawl. Coffee being poured almost froze in place, collecting in a laminar stream in mid-air as the few voices around her dipped to a much lower octave and began to stretch out with a vibration that she could almost feel across her shell-like skin like a heavy baseline.

"Wwwwwhhhhaaaaaattttttt iiiiinnnnnn ttttthhhhheeeeee heeeeeecccccckkkkk? Tttttthhhhiiiiiisssss iiiiiiiiissss sssssssoooooooooooooooooooooooo wwwweeeeeiiiiirrrrddddddd, Mmmmmaaaaaaallllll. Aaaawwwwwweeeeessssssoooooommmmeeee." Her own words stretched out of her at a pace that seemed glacial as an awkward smile crept onto her face as slowly as everything else.

Malana just smiled and looked down at the PaDD in Weiaex's third hand knowingly, seemingly implying that she had all the time in the world now.

It took a moment for the concept to register to Wieaex, but her thought process was moving at normal speed to her sense of perception, even if her body was lagging behind. So the look of surprised acknowledgment seemed to take half a minute to register on her elongated, orange face. It was a slow reveal that would be positively hilarious to anyone who could perceive how long it seemed to take.

And, in her head, she realized what Malana was doing. Not just that she was helping her study in an extremely unorthodox way, but that she had figured out how to let her study and still spend that time together, which was unusually sweet. Smiling back, Wieaex squeezed both of the stony hands holding her own slightly and looked down at her PaDD. While the motions took a bit to play out, she found that she could read, review and process what was on the screen at a perfectly normal speed to her. After reading through a full-page normally, she slowly glanced up to notice that that coffee was still hovering in place.

The longer they held hands, the quicker Wieaex seemed to be able to move, as the physical lag on her own body seemed to catch up to her own perceptions and she wondered what she must look like to the rest of the room. Looking back up, she smiled softly, and spoke. The words were still drawn out, but not quite as extremely as they had been a minute earlier. "Tthhaannkkss, Mmaall."

Rather than speak physically, the stone woman smiled, nodded, and gave a look that spoke miles for the feelings she felt for her biological companion. She'd have a lot to explain later, but for now...

They could just enjoy this moment as two sentients. Biological and Geological.