Sightseeing - part 4

Posted on Fri Jan 11th, 2019 @ 9:17pm by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Commander Rita Paris & Lieutenant Asa Dael

Mission: Section 31-B
Location: USS Hera, Deck 11, Holodeck 7
Timeline: 2396, en route to the Section 31 base

"Imirrhlhhse!" Lieutenant Melanie Dox cursed in Romulan, pacing angrily in the holographic simulation of the 23rd Century Starship Exeter she was trapped in along with Commander Rita Paris and Chief Medical Officer Asa Dael.

Their attempts at escaping the holodeck program by solving the simulated crisis had been discovered by the Exeter's First Officer, Commander Bhattacharyya. As their solution had involved Rita Paris issuing a number of orders in the his name against the ship's Captain's orders, the 24th Century trio found themselves in the brig as mutineers, despite their protestations. Struggling against the burly security officers had produced a similar effect, thus their position in the brig.

Calming herself down a little, Dox leaned against the wall near the open forcefield of their cell and sighed. "It's been well over an hour, now. Do you think that Captain Tracey jettisoned the Tribbles by now, Commander?"

Sitting on the hard rack that jutted out from the wall, Rita Paris had been uncharacteristically quiet for a few minutes, apparently meditating. Rousing slightly, the lost lieutenant opened one eye and sighed. "I'd like to hope that since we provided them with a plan, a means to execute it, and explained it all to them that they might have erred on the side of the angels. But I'm starting to suspect that the tribble crisis and the contagion from Omega IV might not have been the kind of test we thought it was, but a test of another sort."

Coming down from her anger, Dox paused for a moment to ponder Paris' words before responding. "Not... if we can solve the problems the holodeck throws at us... but how we solve them?"

"Maybe?" Paris held up her hands in a shrug. "It was like the computer wanted to see how we'd react to stimuli, not like it wanted to test our problem solving ability. My old office. Michael Stuart, Nathan Lang's old lab, Ensign Wells- none of that is in the computer's databanks. It was pulling that from my head, which makes me wonder if maybe it gave us something to do so it could expose us to stimuli, like an experiment. How about you two- did you encounter any unusual situations while you were about the 'Exeter' here?"

Leaning her head back against the bulkhead with a thud, Dox groaned slightly. "You could say that." She rubbed her ear nervously as she spoke. "The Shuttlebay... It went pretty much how you predicted. Actually, it went exactly how you predicted. Sexist, dismissive and difficult with them only responding to me being focefull and... commanding."

Dox pushed off the wall, pacing again. "But I leaned heavily on the idea that they thought I was Vulcan. I was terrified it would backfire on me, though. Then it did." Turning to face Paris and Dael as she talked, Dox's face went flush again with embarrassment.

"Fitzsimmons... the character in the transporter room. He wasn't acting like a sexist ass. He was accommodating and helpful." Dox rolled her eyes and sighed. "He... had some kind of Vulcan... fetish. He was... HITTING on me, believe it or not. Aaaaand to get him to comply with orders I had to let him think I would... reciprocate... after the mission."

"Why Mnhei'sahe Dox! You Vulcan vixen you! I am so unbelievably... proud... of you..." Paris' exuberance at Dox using her wits and wiles in a tight spot quickly drained away at seeing the miserable expression on the young Romulan's face.

Trying to allow a smile at Paris' compliment, Dox simply couldn't. Groaning softly and turning away from her shipmates, Dox was trying to push past her embarrassment. "The whole alien fetish part was... a little... personal. And specific. I mean... in hindsight, it might have been pulled from my own memories. I mean, that's how I lost my..." The young pilot froze mid sentence. "Sorry... yeah... too much information, there." Dox turned back with an embarrassed half-smile.

Dox turned to Doctor Dael, not so secretly hoping to hand Paris' question over to them and get the conversation off of her awkward sexual history for the moment. "What about you, Asa?"

"The way the man in Sickbay spoke to me... it was just like my father. Utterly dismissive and acting against the best interest of himself and others. He even looked a bit like images I have of the man, from his youth. Plus the whole aerosol medical solution to fix biological issues without a patriarchal figure knowing or stopping me? That has tailor made problem written all over it now that i think of it..." the Doctor concluded with a sigh.

"So, something is going through our heads." Dox's face went white as her stomach tightened with a rush of mild panic she did her best to put the thoughts out of her head. After a brief pause, she stood back up straight and adjusted the gold mini-dress uniform and collected herself.

"That means this is being directed by an intelligence for some reason. But why?" Dox's frustration and anxiety was mounting, but she was doing her best to manage it.

"Logic, Miss Dox," the kolinahr's wife replied. "Be calm, and think it through. Whatever agency is behind this, it locked us in here, and it can seemingly access and reproduce parts of our past. It's jamming comms. Now it seems to be trying to get us to react by prodding us with memories and situations similar to those we've faced before. I've been in and broken out of this cell in the brig of the Exeter. This is from my memory as well. I've never had super-fast breeding tribbles threaten the ship, but I have faced them in Captain Telvan's quarters."

As Rita spoke of tribbles, one bounced along the corridor outside their cell not unlike a tumbleweed.

Shaking her head and chuckling, the Commander held up a finger. "So logically the first question is, what about the facts we know has a common thread running through it?"

Mentioning logic and practically channeling her husband's clarity of thought reminded Dox of the meditation techniques that the Vulcan officer had been teaching her. Closing her eyes and focusing on her breathing for a second, Dox replied. "Well, the primary scenarios are all drawing on individual traumas, tribbles notwithstanding. Strong emotions are... disorienting... distracting. Assuming it has a goal beyond simply traumatizing us, could there be some other goal it doesn't want us working towards?"

"Seems unlikely. It locked us up in here, remember? It even foiled our answer to it's scenario, and dumped us here where we have nothing but time to think. So it doesn't seem to be wanting to keep us away from something so much as moving toward something. Trauma..." Those bright blue eyes of Rita Paris unfocused for a moment as her mind made connections. "That tribble encounter with the Captain was pretty traumatic at the time, actually. Trauma. It's trying to oh so gently traumatize us..."

Literally connecting dots in the air in front of her, Paris poked the air with each point. "We flew through the body of a forming titan who tested us, probing us, studying us. As it used the ship's holographic system to do so and this is a holographic scenario, we suspect a connection. This presence is now trying to emotionally distress us and is holding us captive. What if..." Commander Paris stood, wagging that finger before her as she hypothesized. What if we took a bit of that titan with us when we escaped the storm, some small sliver of its consciousness that remained undetected? What if it isn't here as a spy, but as a bit of it that is traumatized by the separation from the rest of it's form, and is trying to communicate with us that it is being traumatized itself by being kept from the the storm, that forming titan...?"

Leaning back against the wall, Dox looked at her friends and flow officers as Rita's words sunk in, and in her heart they felt true. "I think you're right. But it wasn't just showing us trauma... It was seeing how we dealt with it. Maybe it doesn't understand it's own pain. Can't process it... express it... it's..."

"It's... alone." Dox said the words not as a question, but felt it. "That's why it brought us back together."

Looking to the overhead, Rita Paris smiled a little piper's smile as her hand reached out to touch the bulkhead. "Hello... my name is Rita Paris. This is Mnhei'sahe Dox, and this is Asa Dael. We are travelers, and explorers. We think we understand- you are alone, and you don't know why. But you want to go home, don't you? Back where you belong?"

Looking up, Dox put her hands on the arms of her friends. "I was... I was alone once, too. So was Rita... and Asa. You... you saw that in us. In our minds. But we're not alone anymore. We're never alone anymore."

Gently, Dox touched the Starfleet badge on Rita Paris' chest, then the patch on her own. "That's what that means. It means nobody has to be alone. And now... you're not alone. You have us, too."

Throughout the conversation, Dael had taken on a serious look and was slightly squinting. After Dox finished speaking, Asa whispered, "That's it. That's the.....not right....feel to all of this. I can feel it now, I can feel the isolation. The loneliness...this was not meant to be. But it's ok, we can fix it, now that we know about it. If you can hear me....I'm a doctor, fixing things is what I do."

"If we've guessed right, we'll explain to the Captain, and we'll get you home. That's what friends do," Paris smiled at the two friends there with her in the antiquated brig, truer friends than one could ask for. "They help one another."

As Cell 4 of the brig of the USS Exeter vanished, it was replaced by the black and yellow gridline walls of the Holodeck.

Looking first at Asa, then down at herself, Dox chuckled slightly as they were still in the velour minidress uniforms that the holodeck had replicated their uniforms into. "I guess we get souvenirs, Asa." She smiled, no longer feeling quite as uncomfortable in the uniform, remembering what it all stood for, regardless of when.

"Oooooo, I love a good souvenir!" Asa proclaimed.

"Good as gold, Commander?" She said, smiling at Paris.




Later, the smile that lit up the face of the first officer was one of pride in her proteges and and joy at having done something right. As they sat in 10-Forward, still clad in their anachronistic uniforms, they drew a few stares and looks, but no more that usually accompanied anyone in a holodeck costume in the ship's lounge. Raising a martini glass with three olives speared into it, Paris proposed a toast.

"We made contact with another lifeform, and we found a way to reach out and help one another. The very spirit of Starfleet- still alive and well at the close of the 24th century. I suspect the Captain will want a hunk of a developing titan off her ship, so we'll get them home soon enough, and help a friend get home." The blonde in the old gold dress raised her glass a bit higher, looking at each of her shipmates in turn. "To Starfleet"

Smiling with a glass of Romulan ale held up to meet Rita's, Dox chuckled as she spoke. "To Starfleet. And to my not having had to sleep with a hologram to get out of there."

Snorting a bit at Dox's second statement, Asa lifted their glass high into the air saying, "To Starfleet, and to friends!"