Sleepwalking

Posted on Fri Jun 29th, 2018 @ 6:09pm by Commander Rita Paris

Mission: Holographic Horrors
Location: USS Hera, Deck 4, Flight Control Operations
Timeline: 2395
Tags: Recap

After having been thrown violently from her bed in the middle of the night, then hurling up her toenails, then being summoned to a senior staff meeting, Rita Paris was told that the ship had been hauling ass so fast that when they ran into the dark matter ion storm it took them three light years to skid to a halt.

That was impressive.

So not only an ion storm, the very magical crucial ingredient for dimensional travel, but a dark matter storm interspersed with it. Which apparently no one had ever survived, but Paris had a theory about that. What if those lost in such a storm were never heard from again was because they transposed universes? If you left your native reality, it considered you to be most definitely 'never heard from again'.

Which was optimistic, she recognized, but it was definitely a possibility. If nothing else it was a way to try to escape one of those fates worse than death, although how they could move the entire ship... by using the shield harmonics to balance the transporter signal across the shields and create a capsule for the starship to traverse dimensions through the ion storms where the veils between worlds thin...

Sitting at the desk in her office, the loopy lieutenant snapped awake from the doze she had been leaning into. Exhausted as she was, she had just been imagining how to pilot a starship between dimensions. Which was interesting, since she lacked the knowledge base to make such connections. Of course, Sonak could likely intuit it from what she had studied of the relevant systems, which is what the lost navigator suspected she was experiencing. A little bit of his katra- little by comparison- she carried within her, and he still tried to lend science to her outlandish ideas. Which to him had always seemed to make perfect sense.

Standing, Rita Paris extended her arms over her head and stretched, good and long. Then she reached for the floor and stretched a bit more, shifting her weight at her hips to stretch out the leggy lieutenant's calves as well. Even with good socks, twelve hours even these boots was taking it's toll on her calves and her feet. Rising up to twist at the waist a few times, the buxom bombshell settled into a set of thirty waist twists to get the heart rate going and work on the waist. Even contained by a good bra and a snug uniform, the visual effect was a prime example of fluid dynamics in motion.

When she was finished, the retro Starfleet throwback took one more stretch upward, then grabbed at her bellybutton, which was where the bottom of her uniform currently resided. Tugging it down with practiced ease, Paris cracked her neck, then out of the corner of her eye noticed movement in the hangar. The crewmen and officers on the shuttle hangar flight deck, apparently emboldened by the leftover Orion pheromones they had been dosed with earlier, were now applauding.

In her fog of exhaustion, Rita had forgotten all about the flight deck and the big deck to ceiling windows in her office. The ones there behind her while she had taken herself a good energetic stretch, letting her dress ride up and giving the flight deck crew a thrill. Taking it with the only grace she could, Lieutenant Paris owned it, waving to the men before taking a bow to their applause.

This would look good at the next staff meeting.

"I don't care if we're still stuck in this dark matter cloud," Paris muttered to no one in particular. "There are... Computer! How many crew are aboard the USS Hera?"

=^=There are currently 721 crew members aboard the USS Hera=^=

"Swell. That means that 720 of them that are working on this problem. Well, except for those guys," Paris chucked a thumb over her shoulder at her appreciative flight deck. "I got beat up by a video game character, escaped quicksand, hid from a mugatu, chased my damn plan all over the ship, damn near drowned in tribbles... I'm done, I'm going to bed. Cap'n can fire me if she wants."

That pronouncement declared to her empty office, Paris began to stride, but quickly tapered off to a sort of half-speed version of her usual ratcheting locomotion. She dozed off in the turbolift, on her feet, and rode it for a full five minutes before someone woke her up and asked what floor she was trying to get to. That embarrassment woke the lost navigator up enough to gave her the jolt of adrenaline she needed to get back to her quarters.

11:24 hours, she had barely been up for 12 hours and it was still technically her duty shift, but it had been one hell of a 12 hours. A trail of uniform parts were dropped as the old school officer moved across her cavernous quarters, Rita stripping as she staggered toward her bed. Eventually she ended up tugging her bra over her head, tired of fighting with the snap. Her stomach growled and her lips were dry, but she was too tired to care.

Crawling onto the bed, she paused long enough to grab her old communicator off the nightstand, then clutched it to her prodigious bosom. Sometimes she imagined that if Sonak ever found a way to send her a message, it would come through her old communicator. Thus she kept it charged by her bedside if she wasn't carrying it, and for the past few nights she had begun what was to become a long standing ritual of sleeping with her black and gold flip front clamshell communicator. She set the alarm for four hours, and a backup for 5.

"Four hours, Cap'n cn fire me if she wntzz..." Paris muttered as her body shut down.

The exhausted extradimensional explorer had enough time to wonder if she would dream, and if so, whether the dreams would be good or bad.

It was a peaceful sleep, with no dreams at all.