Pieces Left Behind

Posted on Sun Feb 3rd, 2019 @ 12:31am by Commander Rita Paris & Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox

Mission: Earthly Visitation
Location: Earth. Loudonville, Ohio
Timeline: 2396, during Shore Leave

The cramped, two person rented shuttle decended from cruising altitude into Central Ohio airspace as Lieutenant Mnhei'sahe Dox punched in landing coordinates into the simplistic helm of the slightly musty rental. One of the smaller shuttles from the Hera would have been faster to bring Dox and First Officer Rita Paris from San Francisco to the rural town of Loudonville, Ohio, but one of the downsides of serving a top secret Starfleet Intelligence ship was not being able to announce that station.

As such, Dox was instead wearing casual civilian clothes as opposed to her crimson uniform. Still, her Starfleet Comm Badge was affixed to the left breast of the snug, black sweater she wore. It was hidden, however, by the olive green denim jacket she wore over it.

As the shuttle approached a landing station on the edge of the Town square, Dox turned to Rita Paris sitting in the seat next to her. "The town isn't zoned for even small shuttles. Just hover vehicles and the like, so it'll be a little bit of walking for a bit."

Then the redheaded Romulan took on a slightly melencholy expression. "And... uh... thanks for tagging along. I appreciate it. And, ya' know, for prodding me off the ship while we're here."

"I didn't tell you? We're going sightseeing, you and I. That's the price for me coming along with you here- you have to let me show you some of the cities of Earth, our great wonders and natural beauty." Rita Paris stepped out of the shuttle to take a stretch, and it was eye-popping to see for the locals. Clad in a simple cotton plaid button-up shirt and a pair of snug denim overalls, a pair of cowboy boots added a slightly lesser heel than her normal one.

Yet despite being as striking as she was, somehow Paris managed to look like a local.

"We're pilots, Miss Dox. We see the terrain much differently than others, and we see it best from an altitude. So we'll be doing that, but right here and now... small town USA, as they still like to call it, even though everything came under a blanket global Federation representation years ago. But we're humans, and we often identify by our region as well as our ancestry. So the USA thing never really died out." Grinning like it was all about her, the enthusiastic executive struck a vampish pose on the shuttle. "Last of the American girls, right here."

Following Rita out of the shuttle, Dox slipped on a black cap that actually made her restored Romulan ears stick out a bit more than usual. "Then you'll love this town. It's as 'Americana' as it gets. Half the region still has architecture that dates back to the mid 20th century. Most of the houses are older than that."

The perpetually anxious aviatrix turned to look down the overtly quaint main Street that looked like a Norman Rockwell painting brought to life, but for the hovering vehicles and holographic traffic signage. "I mean, I haven't been back here since I left for the academy and that was over ten years ago, but it looks the same to me."

"The buildings from these eras are time travelers. They were built so solidly that they're still in use. The big industrial replicators to assemble prefab buildings are in the large population centers with IKEA patterns. Out here, it's a different life. Slower," Paris explained as a hoverbike roared down the dusty road, followed by a careening unsafe driver in a shuttle with an open cargo bed.

"Yet faster in some ways, with less regard for personal safety," the California girl added with a smirk. So where do you want to go? Hit the homestead, see the old digs? Hit the pizza place where you used to hang out? Look up the garage loft where you wrote nihilistic poetry and practiced eyeshadow with a pencil?"

Letting an unguarded laugh out at Rita's joke. "Yeah, no. No poetry to dig up." Then the somewhat more relaxed officer smirked. "I do have some... stuff in storage on the other side of town I want sent back to Starfleet so we can have it sent to the ship."

"Which does require passing my favorite restaurant. You hungry?" Dox replied, starting to walk backwards towards town as she smiled at Rita. After her few short months on board, the two officers had become quite close as friends and Dox was much more comfortable separating 'Commander Paris' from 'Rita' when they were off duty.

"When could I NOT eat?" Paris quipped in reply. "This is actually native cuisine for me, made by natives, so it's a treat. What have we got, pizza, burgers, breakfast, buffet bar? What's your favorite restaurant, Mnhei'sahe?"

As they moved into the center of town, the architecture was something of of a time capsule of classic 'Main Street U.S.A.' nostalgia and the shopfronts were mostly antique shops. Their pace was slightly less intense than Rita Paris' usual military stride, but still far faster than everyone else on the sidewalks.

"Just a diner up here on the corner of Baker. They have a little bit of everything, but I spent an awful lot of time hiding in a booth in the corner reading or studying. Really good cheeseburgers and the best beef stew I've ever had." It was a slightly strange feeling for Dox at how quickly her memories of the town she spend four years in as a teenager returned to her.

She had never felt remarkably comfortable here, but was trying to give this period of her life a second chance and was trying to see it through Rita's eyes. Because the native Earth girl was waving, being friendly and watching the locals.

More than a few of them were giving askance glances to the pointy-eared dumpling in the denim jacket. 'Here's hoping this is the small town experience that's welcoming to outsiders,' Paris thought to herself as they strolled up the sidewalk to the old white and chrome diner with large windows, a staple of the north American experience named, of all things, 'Space Diner' with a colorfully lit retro rocket as a sign.

"Can't remember the last time I had an actual beef hamburger..." Paris admitted as they walked through the swinging glass front door, a bell jingling as they did so.

Dox found herself smiling authentically as the walked in to the small chrome plated diner. The restaurant was about half filled with locals who filled most of the booths along the back, but there were plenty of empty stools at the bar. "That was the booth in question." Dox pointed at the occupied booth while the two made their way to the open bar to sit.

Her restored Romulan ears picked up on some of the whispered conversations at the rear tables as the locals were talking amongst themselves about the two. But so far, the chatter was limited to simple curiosity.

An older man walked over and handed the pair of undercover explorers menus with a smile. "Ladies, I'll be right back to get your order." Grabbing two plates of steaming food from the kitchen behind the bar, he walked into the dining room at a pace quicker than his age would suggest.

"Oooh, eggs! Grits, oh I haven't had grits in so long... and they have homefries and toast and jam and pancakes!" Browsing the menu, Paris was overjoyed to find local cuisine she didn't have to create herself to teach the replicator how to make it, only to find the replicated version was not as good. "Bacon, extra crispy specify when you order!"

The blonde bombardier was practically beside herself with joy over breakfast foods as their server arrived. "What can I get for you two ladies?"

"I'll have the big breakfast, eggs over easy with the hash browns and the grits. I'd like cheese and mushrooms with my hash brows please, and make sure they're crispy. I'll have the toast and the pancakes, and maple syrup please, real if you have it. A cup of coffee and a glass of water. And three strips of crispy bacon, please." While the curvy commander lived mostly vegan to be harmonious in eating habits with her spouse, who made no demands that she do so, Rita did keep bacon as a little treat for herself from time to time, and in a diner on Earth in the middle of the heartland, she was not going to pass up the opportunity to try some of the real thing.

Writing it all down, the older gentleman's face wore a bemused look as if he wondered where she was going to put all of that food, then he turned to take the redheaded Romulan's order. As he did so his eyes narrowed and he cocked his head curiously.

"Melanie...?" he asked, unsure of himself.

For a moment, Dox was lost in thought, smiling as she watched Rita gush over the menu when the sound of the name she had lived with for most of her life, but had recently left behind, snapped her out of her distraction.

The last time she had been in this diner was over a decade ago and she was an extremely different person, but somehow the older man had recognized and remembered her. "Uh... Yeah. Dox, Mnh... Melanie Dox."

The older gentleman, a slightly paunchy man with a heavily wrinkled but chubby face and thinning silver hair smiled broadly. "I thought I recognized you. Shawn and Juliet Dox's granddaughter, right?"

His face dropped a little as his tone shifted slightly. "I was sorry to hear when they passed." After a brief pause, his face returned to a pleasant smile that Dox was now remembering, although she was struggling to recall his name and failing.

"Um... Thank you." She said, softly.

"Ben, Ben Shepherd, s'okay, most folks don't remember my name and they live here. So what can I get for ya Miss Dox?" In a standard midwestern manner he continued on, using the honorific he would have anyway, adding her name now that he was assured of it. Which was how also how the very human Rita Paris so often referred to the little lieutenant.

Smiling a little awkwardly, Dox rubber her ear as she looked back down at the menu. Then a broad smile crept across her chunky cheeks. "The Beef stew, please. I haven't found any half as good anywhere else. And a glass of water, please."

"Sounds good to me, ladies. I'll get right on that, thank you." He said as he stepped into the back of the kitchen.

The local to the planet was loving it, watching the old beat-up grav sleds pull in and out of parking spaces. Not everything here was replicated, people still went to town for supplies and socialization and the small tribes and communities at the heart of a long ago agrarian lifestyle were still alive and well in a small town in Ohio. Which thoroughly enchanted the sailor of the stars, who breathed it in deeply, dust and all. "So this seems like a cute little town to stop in but not the most fun to grow up in, because everybody knew everybody else's business, and when you were the new kid, there was all this mystery about you, and then somebody said-"

"Romulan?!?"

The envisionarily enabled executive was cut off by a local who had just walked in the front door, which Paris had her back to but Mnhei'sahe could see, as a paunchy fellow about her age stepped in with a woman and presumably their child, dressed as a junior version of his father. Scooting the wife off to tend to the child, he swaggered over to the table to inspect first Dox, then Paris, lingering a bit on Paris, who leaned back and smiled blankly at him, which brought a leer to his lips that was particularly telling. Turning to meet the eye of the returning Romulan, the local nodded enthusiastically.

"Knew it'z you. Lookitchoo, done got your ears did and a tomboy haircut and a..." Looking at Dox's short cut, then back to Rita's 'I'd like to speak to the manager', he nodded knowingly. "Hot damn, and you done scored you the purtiest girlfriend in the galaxy, too. The hell you doin' back in Loudonville?"

For a moment, Dox squinted slightly as she pieced together fragments of the few teenage years she lived here trying to remember specifically which antagonist of her youth she was dealing with. The name wasn't coming to her, but the memories of living through his verbal abuse was, as her face went flush with anger.

"I'm here for lunch." Dox replied as the knot of anxiety that seemed to live in her stomach tightened up. "What are you here for, then?" She asked, somewhat aggressively.

"We're here for lunch too!" he grinned. "Best beef stew in town. Hey, I hear you done run off and joined Starfleet after graduation, zat right?" As he spoke the local's gaze drifted back to her ears more than once.

For a moment, Dox wanted to brag about how far away from this town she had truly gone. She also wanted to just punch him in the throat and collapse his trachea for everything she could remember from high school. But everything had consequences and Starfleet officers can't get into fights with civilians and Starfleet officers on the U.S.S. Hera can't talk about what they do.

Instead, the angry officer put on a smile and tilted her head to the side. "I just got far enough away to know that this place has the best beef stew in the quadrant. Worth the occasional visit. That's all. Enjoy your lunch." Dox nodded in the direction of the table his presumed family had gone to and turned around on her stool.

The local got a disgruntled look on his face, but took the hint. "Aight, aight, well, I'll seeya around then, ah... Dox, right? Mary or somethin...?"

For a second, Dox thought for a moment of ending the situation easily and saying 'Melanie'. But she smiled as she turned over her shoulder and instead replied, somewhat drawn out on each syllable. "Men-hey-say. Mnhei'sahe Dox."

"Splains why I couldn't remember it, that's fer sure," the local opined as he headed to the table where his wife and child awaited him.

Turning back towards the counter, Dox smirked with an exaggerated look of faux embarrassment as she whispered to Rita. "For the life of me, I cannot remember that guys name."

"See, the locals aren't unfriendly, just uncouth," Rita whispered with practiced ease where the sensitive Vulcanoid hearing could hear her but most nearby could not. "Give your old home town a chance. You don't have to go to high school, which is a blessing, and you get to leave. So it should be a lot better this time around, right?"

Smirking, Dox took a drink of the water that had been served while she had been talking then whispered back. "Well, this time I got the 'purtiest girlfriend in the galaxy' with me." She snorted a little as she said it, shaking her head lightly.

Hooking her thumbs in the denim shoulder straps, Paris beamed, "It's the overalls. They make me look accessible because I'm wearing these and I'm smiling, so I must be a moron. Because only morons and farmers wear overalls, right?" To emphasize the point, Paris smiled with a practiced vacant-eyed stare into the distance.

That broke the tension, then their food arrived, and conversation became quite secondary.

After finishing their meals, or at least as much of it as Rita could manage, the pair continued their walk through the town that had once, for a brief few years, been Mnhei'sahe Dox's home. They talked and laughed as Dox shared memories, both pleasant and disastrous.

But time and good company had a way of making it easier for the young part-Romulan pilot to remember that her time here wasn't always bad. That this place had it's own kind of beauty that she had actively tried not to see the first time around.

Near the edge of town, they arrived at their destination. It was a sprawling storage complex with fairly modern architecture that seemed amazingly out of place in the quaint little Ohio town otherwise stuck in a different era, predating even the time tossed Rita Paris by a few centuries.

The storage compartments were all accessible from the outside, and after a few minutes of walking, Dox stopped in front of one and paused, lingering for a moment with a sigh.

"I think this is where I'm supposed to have some sort of wisdom about facing your past, but I'm crap at that. I keep losing my past," Paris pointed out. "When I went to the Academy, Daddy recycled my entire room and gave himself a second den. When I was declared KIA on the Constitution, they recycled my quarters and I lost everything. I'm sure they did the same for my quarters on the Exeter."

"So maybe if you can recover a few pieces of yours it might be worthwhile, eh?" Rita shrugged. They couldn't all be winners.

Pulling a small key card from her jacket pocket, Dox looked at it, then back to Rita. "You had your past taken from you. I ran away from mine as far as warp speed could take me. It's not fair." She wished she could open the unit door and somehow restore what Rita had lost too. But all she could do was be glad she had a friend at her side and hope that she could be half as good a friend in return. "But... thanks. Thanks for coming."

"Emotional support I got covered," Rita offered a thumbs up. "I'm here for you, Mnhei'sahe. So take a trip down memory lane, hm?"

Entering the key card, the large metal door rolled open. "Most of this isn't mine. It's theirs. My grandparents, collected after they died. I was on a starbase on the other side of the Galaxy when I found out."

The lights turned on as Dox stepped in to the room, half filled with boxes. "Technically, my father could claim most of this when he gets out of prison if he wants it. My stuff is over here. Just a couple of boxes they're going to beam to a unit in San Francisco after we leave, then to Starfleet then the ship."

Next to the small pile of boxes marked 'Melanie', was something covered with a large tarp, approximately two meters long and a meter or so high.

"So are you going to save his folk's stuff for your dad, then?" Rita asked, peeking into a box or two.

"He'll have to fight me over it legally. The storage unit is mine and I'm not giving it up to him." Dox replied with something of an edge to her voice. The one part of her past her feelings we no longer mixed was over her father.

"But..." Dox said with a pause where she lightened her tone, "What I really wanted to get out of here, no matter how impractical it is to bring to a Starship, is this." She pulled the tarp back, revealing a vintage hoverbike.

Mounted on a small a frame, the hoverbike was a matte greenish gray about two meters long with a long double seat of cracked leather. "This was my goth poetry, Rita. I spent two years putting this back together from parts I salvaged from junk yards. This is what I worked on when I really wanted to kick the crap of people at school."

"Why Dox, I wouldn't have taken you for an engineer. Look at this old girl!" the ancient astronaut's enthusiasm for the hoverbike was genuine, as she liked speedy vehicles just like her fellow pilot, and she was glad to see Dox claiming parts of her past. "Think she's still got any life left in the power cells?"

"On the Forager, everything was constantly breaking down, so I had to learn how to keep her running as best as possible. I'm no engineer, but I think I did okay." Dox leaned over the side towards the back and pulled a cord from the wall out of the side of the bikes engine that had been covered by the tarp, waving it at Rita with a smirk. "And I called ahead from San Francisco. She's fully charged."

"Well then open her up and take her for a joyride, Miss Dox," Rita encouraged, pleased to see Mnhei'sahe planning ahead. "I have nowhere to go and nothing to do, and I can poke around in your grandparent's junk for a while and see if they kept any antiques that look like futuristic devices to me. Go indulge the need... the need... for speed!"

"I can't argue with that idea, Commander." Smiling, Dox punched a four digit code into a pad on the control panel on the hoverbike, and seconds later, the nearly antique vehicle hummed to life. After a brief moment, the bike began to hover in place, which made it easy for Dox to push out of the unit to the outside.

Grabbing her old helmet from the storage space under the seat, Dox hopped up on to her old hoverbike. Pulling the dark green helmet on, she smiled back at Rita Paris. "But you get the next ride." Then, Dox pulled the bike off down the path outside and into the air.

Circling the storage complex, Dox had a massive smile across her face. It had been over ten years since she had ridden the hoverbike and she felt like a kid again. In that moment, her anxiety was gone and the bitter, old memories that this town carried for her melted away.

Arcing the bike high over the treeline, Dox felt like she was 17 again and the controls came.back to her like second nature. The bike wasn't designed to fly quite that high, of course, but Mnhei'sahe had done a fair bit of customization while she worked on it. Then she thought about it and became momentarily sad, remembering that her grandfather had tried more than a few times to offer to help her. But in her anger at all things Human, she pushed him away.

Pushed everyone away, and now she had to face the idea that this town might never have been as unaccepting of her as it was had she not actively refused to let it in. To let them in. She pushed the bike to it's maximum speed as she brought it low over the nearby river as her eyes teared up slightly. So much of her life had been missed opportunities to not see what was right in front of her.

Pulling back, the bike raced into an arc back over the storage facility where she could see the open door to her unit. Inside, she imagined Rita Paris looking through the boxes as she had said and smiled at the thought of the woman who had become like a sister to her in such a short period of time. And Rita was one of many friends made on the Hera that Mnhei'sahe could count on as family. An idea that had become as alien to her as this town once felt but that had become a source of comfort. She looked forward knowing that she wasn't going to make those same mistakes and push these people away. She wasn't going to shut them out.

Continuing to fly, Mnhei'sahe was glad and grateful now that Rita had been so encouraging to her to try and reconnect not just with her Romulan roots...

But her human ones as well.