Looks like the Bounty fantasy crew is losing its luster a little... Maybe the game needs a rewrite with more accurate reproductions... Thanks!! rbs
Star Trek: Bounty - 206 - "Any Resemblance to Actual Persons is Purely Coincidental"
- Thread starter BountyTrek
- Start date
Part Two (Cont'd)
“Now this is more like it!”
Denella called out her affirmation even as she slammed her elbow straight into the stomach of her opponent, causing them to stumble backwards in the fighting arena. The Orion followed up her latest attack with a sweep of her leg, which turned her opponent’s stumble into a full-on collapse to the ground.
For a second, she thought that would be enough. But her bikini-wearing adversary was evidently made of sterner stuff than her scandalous outfit suggested.
With a glint in her eye, the fake Denella sprang back up from the ground with cat-like grace, before charging at the other woman. Denella parried her attack, but not before her adversary was able to scratch her long nails down her arm, with enough force to draw blood.
She winced and spun away, cursing the way that her opponent seemed determined to drag this down into some sort of catfight.
As the latest head-to-head scrap raged on, Jirel suppressed a wince of his own where he sat at the periphery of the holographic fighting arena.
“This is not more like it,” he grumbled, as Natasha ran a dermal regenerator across an ugly welt on his face, “I thought the holosuite safeties were on.”
“They are,” the medic noted, “But they don’t stop you from getting hurt. Especially if you don’t keep your hands up.”
Jirel winced again. Partly from the pain, and partly from the attack on his fighting style.
The new game that Administrator Trolow had devised to settle their little legal dispute was somewhat less elegant than the previous one. In essence, instead of fighting crew versus crew out in space, they were now fighting one-on-one with their fictional doppelgangers. Jirel versus Jirel, Natasha versus Natasha, and so on. A best-of-five contest, with the first side to three wins being victorious.
The Trill had felt fairly confident about their chances when the terms of the game had been explained, despite some fresh complaints from the rest of the crew. But that confidence had evaporated as soon as the considerably more muscular version of him had unleashed a fearsome punch at his poorly-guarded face, sending him to the floor of the fighting arena almost immediately.
“Still,” he managed, as Natasha finished her treatment of his, in a way, self-inflicted injury, “At least you got it back to one-all.”
Natasha scoffed and rolled her eyes.
“Right. I didn’t even get to land a punch. As soon as we stepped into the ring, she just cried out for help and then fainted.”
Despite their situation, Jirel couldn’t help but allow a slight smirk to cross his face at the sight of Natasha’s sudden indignation.
“Well, you know, she’s the damsel in distress, after all—”
“I’m well aware of what she is,” she fired back, “And I really don’t want to talk about it, ok?”
With the Trill’s injuries treated, she packed away the small medkit that Trolow had furnished her with, as Jirel observed her demeanour and sensed that her powers of righteous indignation weren’t likely to be forgotten that easily.
“But,” he replied eventually, “You…do wanna talk about it quite a lot, right—?”
“Just watch the fight.”
“Can do.”
They returned their attention to the fighting arena, just in time to see the overall-clad Denella deliver the final act of the third part of the contest, catching the bikini-clad Denella as she leapt forwards with fingernails deployed, deflecting her attack and slamming her body to the canvas below.
With the fake Denella defeated, the real one stood over the unsavoury manifestation of the exact sort of slave girl fantasy she’d spent so long trying to escape from.
“Now,” she growled with palpable disdain, “Put some goddamn clothes on.”
As she stalked off to where Jirel, Natasha, Klath and Sunek were waiting, Administrator Trolow stepped into the arena. The lighting in the holosuite turned bright again, and the defeated fake Denella was spirited away by the computer.
“Well,” Trolow nodded, “That makes it two to you, and one to the creator—”
“You really don’t need to call me that,” Mazur sighed from where he slouched against the wall on the opposite side of the fighting arena to the Bounty’s crew.
“So that means,” Denella pointed out quickly, “We win one more fight and the program gets deleted, right?”
Trolow nodded in affirmation, as Mazur scowled.
“And so,” the Wadi man continued, “Let the game continue!”
He stepped away from the arena again, just as the lights dimmed and the stoic form of the Starship Bounty’s take on Sunek shimmered into existence inside the ring.
“Hah!” the real Sunek piped up, stepping forwards and turning back to the gaggle of Bounty crewmembers, “And I’m gonna be the one that wins it for us. So suck on that, losers!”
“He is aware that we’re all on the same team here, right?” Natasha muttered to Jirel.
“Sunek, just be careful, ok?” Denella offered, “Don’t get cocky.”
“Cocky? Moi?” the Vulcan replied with an affected air of innocence, as he took a backwards step towards the arena, “Impossible!”
He took another step backwards as his colleagues gave him a litany of differing glares that strongly suggested they weren’t buying that claim.
‘Come on, trust me,” he continued as he stepped inside the fighting arena proper, “That lame version of me is just a dumb robe-wearing stereotype. There’s no way he can handle my—”
Having stepped too close to his silent adversary during his backwards journey, he was silenced by an immediate neck pinch from the robe-wearing version of Sunek. In an instant, he slumped to the floor, unconscious.
“Intriguing,” the robe-wearing Sunek noted with a raised eyebrow.
“Ha!” Mazur called out in glee, “And that squares it up again!”
Jirel, Natasha and Denella stared dumbfoundedly at the slumped form of their pilot on the ground, even as the other version of Sunek vanished as quickly as he had shimmered into existence.
Then, the three of them turned to the one remaining bullet in their gun.
“Well, buddy,” Jirel shrugged, “Guess it’s all down to you.”
Klath felt the blood lust inside him rising, as he stepped into the ring with a growl…
****************************
Two hours later, Klath was still growling.
As was Klath.
The other Bounty crew members, including the conscious-again Sunek, along with Mazur and Trolow on the other side of the arena, were starting to get distinctly bored, as the deciding bout in their fighting tournament entered its third hour.
While Klath’s opponent was a mute, eight foot tall killing machine clad in impenetrable armour, Klath himself was still Klath. And as such, he wasn’t backing down.
He was assisted in his efforts by the holosuite’s safeties. Which, as Jirel had painfully discovered, couldn’t entirely prevent injury, but still guarded against serious ones. Meaning that neither version of Klath was able to land the requisite strength of blow to end the fight. All Klath had to do was endure the pain of each fresh blow to his aching body. And he was doing that with a warrior’s style.
He roared again as he thundered his entire body into the vast torso of the monstrous fictional Klath, using all his remaining strength to push him backwards towards the ground. But the beastly Klath managed to keep its footing, and swatted the real Klath away with a huge swing of his gigantic arm.
Klath went flying across the fighting arena, snapping several more minor bones as he did so. But he gritted his teeth against the fresh rush of pain and forced himself back to his feet with a roar of defiance, even as his opponent charged him.
The original Klath saw this latest attack, but as he had done several times in the fight already, he used his adversary’s rather slow sensibilities against himself. He braced for a second, and then dived out of the way just as the attack arrived, leaving the monster to slam into the ground instead, accompanied by a fresh roar of pain.
On the sidelines, despite the fight that was still rampaging on, and what was at stake on the outcome of it, the audience were tiring significantly faster than the two fighters were.
“I mean, I still definitely want Klath to win,” Jirel offered, “But at this point…I just want it to end.”
“It’s the holosuite safeties,” Denella sighed as she kept her attention on the fight, “It means he can’t actually get injured seriously enough to lose. Which means he just has to endure the pain.”
“And Klingons can endure a hell of a lot of pain,” Natasha nodded.
A fresh bellowed roar from the Bounty’s weapons chief from inside the area succinctly confirmed that statement.
“I mean,” Sunek added, “I don’t think neck pinches should even be allowed in this sort of fight. It’s just unfair, y’know?”
It was far from the first time that Sunek had voiced his unhappiness with the manner of his defeat since he had regained consciousness. But it was an argument that continued to fall on a gaggle of unsympathetic ears.
Jirel broke his attention away from the never-ending Klath versus Klath encounter to glance over at his pilot.
“You…do know how to do one of those neck pinch things, don’t you?”
Sunek momentarily looked a little flustered, before recovering enough of his confidence to respond.
“Psh. Does this Vulcan know how to do a Vulcan neck pinch? What a dumb question.”
“Ok,” Jirel mused, “It’s just…I’ve known you for a long time now, and I can’t actually remember seeing you do one of those.”
“No, me neither,” Denella chimed in.
“Nor me,” Natasha added.
“Wha—? Well, of course I don’t normally do them! Because when I fight, I fight fair!”
There was a long, knowing pause, punctuated only by the further roars and crashes from inside the fighting arena next to them.
“So,” Jirel offered eventually, “You can definitely—?”
“Oh, I can neck pinch, buddy. You wanna get neck pinched? Cos I’ll neck pinch all of you, right now! Just form an orderly—!”
The Vulcan’s defensiveness was interrupted by a loud klaxon that echoed all around the holographic arena. It was loud enough to cause both versions of Klath to pause, mid-grapple.
Seconds later, the eight-foot armoured Klath shimmered out of existence, leaving the real Klath grappling with thin air.
Another second later, Administrator Trolow stepped into the arena from the other side of the room and shook his head.
“This game is proving…inconclusive,” the Wadi said with a sad shake of his head.
“Not to mention boring!” Mazur called out from behind him.
“And so,” Trolow continued, “As the arbiter, I am forced to declare this entire contest a draw!”
This was enough to cause Mazur to pace over to the administrator’s side, looking annoyed.
“Now hang on, a draw? So all of that was completely pointless?”
“And it wasn’t a draw,” Sunek argued, “Cos my guy didn’t fight fair, so he should be disqualified from the whole—”
“Shut up, Sunek,” Denella cut in, “But…what now?”
There was a pause as Trolow considered the situation. Then, a wider smile crossed the Wadi’s face as he came to a fresh realisation.
“Ah, but of course! The right game was here in front of us all this time!”
“I don’t understand,” Jirel responded dumbly.
Trolow tapped a small controller in his hand. In an instant, the entire arena disappeared, replaced with the more familiar confines of the holosuite grid itself. Except for one wall, where a huge advertisement remained in place. The same advertisement depicting the fictional Starship Bounty crew that they had first seen some hours ago.
Advertising their latest ‘epic’ adventure. Captain Jirel and The Quest for the Stone of Unity.
Trolow gestured to the advert with satisfaction.
“The perfect game. Bring me…the Stone of Unity!”
End of Part Two
“Now this is more like it!”
Denella called out her affirmation even as she slammed her elbow straight into the stomach of her opponent, causing them to stumble backwards in the fighting arena. The Orion followed up her latest attack with a sweep of her leg, which turned her opponent’s stumble into a full-on collapse to the ground.
For a second, she thought that would be enough. But her bikini-wearing adversary was evidently made of sterner stuff than her scandalous outfit suggested.
With a glint in her eye, the fake Denella sprang back up from the ground with cat-like grace, before charging at the other woman. Denella parried her attack, but not before her adversary was able to scratch her long nails down her arm, with enough force to draw blood.
She winced and spun away, cursing the way that her opponent seemed determined to drag this down into some sort of catfight.
As the latest head-to-head scrap raged on, Jirel suppressed a wince of his own where he sat at the periphery of the holographic fighting arena.
“This is not more like it,” he grumbled, as Natasha ran a dermal regenerator across an ugly welt on his face, “I thought the holosuite safeties were on.”
“They are,” the medic noted, “But they don’t stop you from getting hurt. Especially if you don’t keep your hands up.”
Jirel winced again. Partly from the pain, and partly from the attack on his fighting style.
The new game that Administrator Trolow had devised to settle their little legal dispute was somewhat less elegant than the previous one. In essence, instead of fighting crew versus crew out in space, they were now fighting one-on-one with their fictional doppelgangers. Jirel versus Jirel, Natasha versus Natasha, and so on. A best-of-five contest, with the first side to three wins being victorious.
The Trill had felt fairly confident about their chances when the terms of the game had been explained, despite some fresh complaints from the rest of the crew. But that confidence had evaporated as soon as the considerably more muscular version of him had unleashed a fearsome punch at his poorly-guarded face, sending him to the floor of the fighting arena almost immediately.
“Still,” he managed, as Natasha finished her treatment of his, in a way, self-inflicted injury, “At least you got it back to one-all.”
Natasha scoffed and rolled her eyes.
“Right. I didn’t even get to land a punch. As soon as we stepped into the ring, she just cried out for help and then fainted.”
Despite their situation, Jirel couldn’t help but allow a slight smirk to cross his face at the sight of Natasha’s sudden indignation.
“Well, you know, she’s the damsel in distress, after all—”
“I’m well aware of what she is,” she fired back, “And I really don’t want to talk about it, ok?”
With the Trill’s injuries treated, she packed away the small medkit that Trolow had furnished her with, as Jirel observed her demeanour and sensed that her powers of righteous indignation weren’t likely to be forgotten that easily.
“But,” he replied eventually, “You…do wanna talk about it quite a lot, right—?”
“Just watch the fight.”
“Can do.”
They returned their attention to the fighting arena, just in time to see the overall-clad Denella deliver the final act of the third part of the contest, catching the bikini-clad Denella as she leapt forwards with fingernails deployed, deflecting her attack and slamming her body to the canvas below.
With the fake Denella defeated, the real one stood over the unsavoury manifestation of the exact sort of slave girl fantasy she’d spent so long trying to escape from.
“Now,” she growled with palpable disdain, “Put some goddamn clothes on.”
As she stalked off to where Jirel, Natasha, Klath and Sunek were waiting, Administrator Trolow stepped into the arena. The lighting in the holosuite turned bright again, and the defeated fake Denella was spirited away by the computer.
“Well,” Trolow nodded, “That makes it two to you, and one to the creator—”
“You really don’t need to call me that,” Mazur sighed from where he slouched against the wall on the opposite side of the fighting arena to the Bounty’s crew.
“So that means,” Denella pointed out quickly, “We win one more fight and the program gets deleted, right?”
Trolow nodded in affirmation, as Mazur scowled.
“And so,” the Wadi man continued, “Let the game continue!”
He stepped away from the arena again, just as the lights dimmed and the stoic form of the Starship Bounty’s take on Sunek shimmered into existence inside the ring.
“Hah!” the real Sunek piped up, stepping forwards and turning back to the gaggle of Bounty crewmembers, “And I’m gonna be the one that wins it for us. So suck on that, losers!”
“He is aware that we’re all on the same team here, right?” Natasha muttered to Jirel.
“Sunek, just be careful, ok?” Denella offered, “Don’t get cocky.”
“Cocky? Moi?” the Vulcan replied with an affected air of innocence, as he took a backwards step towards the arena, “Impossible!”
He took another step backwards as his colleagues gave him a litany of differing glares that strongly suggested they weren’t buying that claim.
‘Come on, trust me,” he continued as he stepped inside the fighting arena proper, “That lame version of me is just a dumb robe-wearing stereotype. There’s no way he can handle my—”
Having stepped too close to his silent adversary during his backwards journey, he was silenced by an immediate neck pinch from the robe-wearing version of Sunek. In an instant, he slumped to the floor, unconscious.
“Intriguing,” the robe-wearing Sunek noted with a raised eyebrow.
“Ha!” Mazur called out in glee, “And that squares it up again!”
Jirel, Natasha and Denella stared dumbfoundedly at the slumped form of their pilot on the ground, even as the other version of Sunek vanished as quickly as he had shimmered into existence.
Then, the three of them turned to the one remaining bullet in their gun.
“Well, buddy,” Jirel shrugged, “Guess it’s all down to you.”
Klath felt the blood lust inside him rising, as he stepped into the ring with a growl…
****************************
Two hours later, Klath was still growling.
As was Klath.
The other Bounty crew members, including the conscious-again Sunek, along with Mazur and Trolow on the other side of the arena, were starting to get distinctly bored, as the deciding bout in their fighting tournament entered its third hour.
While Klath’s opponent was a mute, eight foot tall killing machine clad in impenetrable armour, Klath himself was still Klath. And as such, he wasn’t backing down.
He was assisted in his efforts by the holosuite’s safeties. Which, as Jirel had painfully discovered, couldn’t entirely prevent injury, but still guarded against serious ones. Meaning that neither version of Klath was able to land the requisite strength of blow to end the fight. All Klath had to do was endure the pain of each fresh blow to his aching body. And he was doing that with a warrior’s style.
He roared again as he thundered his entire body into the vast torso of the monstrous fictional Klath, using all his remaining strength to push him backwards towards the ground. But the beastly Klath managed to keep its footing, and swatted the real Klath away with a huge swing of his gigantic arm.
Klath went flying across the fighting arena, snapping several more minor bones as he did so. But he gritted his teeth against the fresh rush of pain and forced himself back to his feet with a roar of defiance, even as his opponent charged him.
The original Klath saw this latest attack, but as he had done several times in the fight already, he used his adversary’s rather slow sensibilities against himself. He braced for a second, and then dived out of the way just as the attack arrived, leaving the monster to slam into the ground instead, accompanied by a fresh roar of pain.
On the sidelines, despite the fight that was still rampaging on, and what was at stake on the outcome of it, the audience were tiring significantly faster than the two fighters were.
“I mean, I still definitely want Klath to win,” Jirel offered, “But at this point…I just want it to end.”
“It’s the holosuite safeties,” Denella sighed as she kept her attention on the fight, “It means he can’t actually get injured seriously enough to lose. Which means he just has to endure the pain.”
“And Klingons can endure a hell of a lot of pain,” Natasha nodded.
A fresh bellowed roar from the Bounty’s weapons chief from inside the area succinctly confirmed that statement.
“I mean,” Sunek added, “I don’t think neck pinches should even be allowed in this sort of fight. It’s just unfair, y’know?”
It was far from the first time that Sunek had voiced his unhappiness with the manner of his defeat since he had regained consciousness. But it was an argument that continued to fall on a gaggle of unsympathetic ears.
Jirel broke his attention away from the never-ending Klath versus Klath encounter to glance over at his pilot.
“You…do know how to do one of those neck pinch things, don’t you?”
Sunek momentarily looked a little flustered, before recovering enough of his confidence to respond.
“Psh. Does this Vulcan know how to do a Vulcan neck pinch? What a dumb question.”
“Ok,” Jirel mused, “It’s just…I’ve known you for a long time now, and I can’t actually remember seeing you do one of those.”
“No, me neither,” Denella chimed in.
“Nor me,” Natasha added.
“Wha—? Well, of course I don’t normally do them! Because when I fight, I fight fair!”
There was a long, knowing pause, punctuated only by the further roars and crashes from inside the fighting arena next to them.
“So,” Jirel offered eventually, “You can definitely—?”
“Oh, I can neck pinch, buddy. You wanna get neck pinched? Cos I’ll neck pinch all of you, right now! Just form an orderly—!”
The Vulcan’s defensiveness was interrupted by a loud klaxon that echoed all around the holographic arena. It was loud enough to cause both versions of Klath to pause, mid-grapple.
Seconds later, the eight-foot armoured Klath shimmered out of existence, leaving the real Klath grappling with thin air.
Another second later, Administrator Trolow stepped into the arena from the other side of the room and shook his head.
“This game is proving…inconclusive,” the Wadi said with a sad shake of his head.
“Not to mention boring!” Mazur called out from behind him.
“And so,” Trolow continued, “As the arbiter, I am forced to declare this entire contest a draw!”
This was enough to cause Mazur to pace over to the administrator’s side, looking annoyed.
“Now hang on, a draw? So all of that was completely pointless?”
“And it wasn’t a draw,” Sunek argued, “Cos my guy didn’t fight fair, so he should be disqualified from the whole—”
“Shut up, Sunek,” Denella cut in, “But…what now?”
There was a pause as Trolow considered the situation. Then, a wider smile crossed the Wadi’s face as he came to a fresh realisation.
“Ah, but of course! The right game was here in front of us all this time!”
“I don’t understand,” Jirel responded dumbly.
Trolow tapped a small controller in his hand. In an instant, the entire arena disappeared, replaced with the more familiar confines of the holosuite grid itself. Except for one wall, where a huge advertisement remained in place. The same advertisement depicting the fictional Starship Bounty crew that they had first seen some hours ago.
Advertising their latest ‘epic’ adventure. Captain Jirel and The Quest for the Stone of Unity.
Trolow gestured to the advert with satisfaction.
“The perfect game. Bring me…the Stone of Unity!”
End of Part Two
I can see the lightning scar on Jirel's forehead now... Thanks!! rbs
Part Three
“This is an even stupider idea.”
It was the sort of refrain that Jirel was used to hearing since they had arrived on Markon V, and one that remained objectively accurate. But equally, it remained one he felt he had no choice to ignore.
“Hey,” he shrugged back at Natasha, “At least this time we know exactly what we need to do.”
He looked around the table in the Bounty’s dining area at the nonplussed faces of Klath, Natasha and Denella as they finished their respective breakfasts and continued to debate the latest plan to win back their likenesses from Martus Mazur’s holosuite program.
Administrator Trolow had run through the rules for the latest ‘game’ before they had called things a night and headed back to the Bounty to rest. They would be playing the Captain Jirel and The Quest for the Stone of Unity holosuite adventure alongside the fictional, computer-controlled crew. Both with the same goal in mind, to secure the Stone of Unity and return it to the designated winning point in the game.
That was it. First one back to base with the prize won.
Still, while the plan seemed straightforward, it was clear that it wasn’t popular.
“I am tired of these…games,” Klath growled, now patched up after his epic encounter with his opposite number in the fighting arena the previous evening.
“Hey now,” Jirel argued back, “You liked the last one, right? So did you, Denella.”
The Orion woman sighed and shook her head, recalling her own fight with the scantily-clad Orion from the Captain Jirel game.
“It was therapeutic. But it wasn’t fun. None of this is. I’m not sure you’re getting how much I hate that…depiction of Orions. The sort of thing everyone thinks about when they see the green skin.”
“I just can’t believe that sort of fantasy still exists,” Natasha sighed sympathetically, “Now we know so much more about the Syndicate.”
“It’s always there,” Denella shrugged, “People find any excuse to live out the fantasy. You know, centuries ago, when they first stumbled across the slave girl trade, even humans had a theory that Orion women actually controlled the men using pheromones. That they were somehow willing participants in everything that was happening to them.”
“Um,” Jirel replied, scrunching his nose up, “That…doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. But I guess people don’t worry about that so long as they can enjoy their little slave girl fantasies. Guess there’s nothing weird about enjoying that if you’ve convinced yourself that the girls are doing it of their own volition.”
Jirel, Natasha and Klath pondered this in silence for a moment, as Denella pushed several unhappy memories from her years in the Syndicate to the back of her mind.
“Either way,” she concluded with a firm nod, “I really want that program gone.”
“We all do,” Natasha affirmed, “But I still think this is an even stupider idea.”
Jirel grimaced and attempted a further act of defence.
“It’s not a—”
“Yeah, it is.”
The foursome at the table turned to see Sunek idly walking into the room carrying a padd. He ordered his own breakfast from the Bounty’s replicator before joining them.
“Nice of you to join us,” Jirel noted, “Alarm not go off?”
“What?” the Vulcan replied with confusion, “No, I’ve been awake for ages. Thought I’d take a look at exactly how stupid this new idea is.”
He waved the padd for emphasis. Now it was the turn of the others to look confused.
“What do you mean?” Klath eventually grunted.
“Well,” Sunek continued through crunches of toasted saffir bread, “Seeing as none of you thought to bother, I decided to take a closer look at this dumb Captain Jirel series. Read some reviews, news articles, that sort of thing. And it’s not good news.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Denella pressed.
“It means that, as dumb and two-dimensional as the characters are, this is still a money-spinning holosuite program. Which means that something as easy as ‘find the Stone of Unity’ involves going through a million different twists and turns and side quests. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up wasting hours getting nowhere while that robe-wearing idiot and his buddies are racing to the finish line.”
Jirel felt his spots start to itch as he felt the eyes of the others returning to him with fresh accusatory glares.
“But,” he tried, “It can’t be that hard to figure out, surely? It’s just a holosuite program.”
“It’s a holosuite program that’s made Markon V a ton of latinum,” Sunek pointed out, “You don’t do those kinds of numbers if everyone’s completing it in one go.”
“And our…opponents will know this whole thing inside and out,” Natasha pointed out, “While we won’t know what we’re doing.”
“We never know what we are doing,” Klath grunted unhappily.
“Exactly,” Jirel nodded.
“He didn’t mean that as a compliment—” Denella began.
“I know. But I’m taking it as one. Cos we always get through these things, right? Hell, since we’ve all been one crew, we’ve seen off angry Jem'Hadar, Vulcan cults, Nimbosian cowboys, murderous Pakleds, a huge mugato—”
“Wasn’t a mugato,” Sunek called out. *
“—time-travelling cranks and all the rest of it, right?”
“Hmm,” Natasha mused as she drained her raktajino, “When you put it all like that, it almost sounds like we’re the ones in the badly written holosuite program…”
After a short, awkward pause, Jirel continued his best stab at a heroic captain’s speech to his crew, standing up from his seat as he did so.
“Well, we got through every one of those adventures, and we’re gonna get through this one as well, I can tell. That Stone of Unity is ours!”
His impromptu speech at an end, he was a little unhappy at the palpable lack of a response it seemed to get from his small audience.
“You gonna pop your shirt off for an encore, Captain Jirel,” Sunek guffawed.
Jirel’s heroic stance wilted slightly.
“Well,” Natasha sighed, “As confident as I’m sure that little display has made us all, I feel like we need a…Plan B.”
“We’ve still got my ‘photon torpedo to the computer core’ idea,” Denella pointed out, only slightly in mirthless jest.
“Tell you what we do need,” Sunek offered as he crunched down on his final bite of food, “Someone who knows the ins and outs of the whole program. So we don’t get any nasty surprises.”
At this, Jirel’s face lit up a little more, as a new idea formed in his head.
“Actually, that’s a good point,” he nodded, “And we might have a way of getting just that…”
As the Trill smiled knowingly, the unimpressed looks made a swift return around the rest of the table.
* - Sunek's right. It wasn't a mugato.
“This is an even stupider idea.”
It was the sort of refrain that Jirel was used to hearing since they had arrived on Markon V, and one that remained objectively accurate. But equally, it remained one he felt he had no choice to ignore.
“Hey,” he shrugged back at Natasha, “At least this time we know exactly what we need to do.”
He looked around the table in the Bounty’s dining area at the nonplussed faces of Klath, Natasha and Denella as they finished their respective breakfasts and continued to debate the latest plan to win back their likenesses from Martus Mazur’s holosuite program.
Administrator Trolow had run through the rules for the latest ‘game’ before they had called things a night and headed back to the Bounty to rest. They would be playing the Captain Jirel and The Quest for the Stone of Unity holosuite adventure alongside the fictional, computer-controlled crew. Both with the same goal in mind, to secure the Stone of Unity and return it to the designated winning point in the game.
That was it. First one back to base with the prize won.
Still, while the plan seemed straightforward, it was clear that it wasn’t popular.
“I am tired of these…games,” Klath growled, now patched up after his epic encounter with his opposite number in the fighting arena the previous evening.
“Hey now,” Jirel argued back, “You liked the last one, right? So did you, Denella.”
The Orion woman sighed and shook her head, recalling her own fight with the scantily-clad Orion from the Captain Jirel game.
“It was therapeutic. But it wasn’t fun. None of this is. I’m not sure you’re getting how much I hate that…depiction of Orions. The sort of thing everyone thinks about when they see the green skin.”
“I just can’t believe that sort of fantasy still exists,” Natasha sighed sympathetically, “Now we know so much more about the Syndicate.”
“It’s always there,” Denella shrugged, “People find any excuse to live out the fantasy. You know, centuries ago, when they first stumbled across the slave girl trade, even humans had a theory that Orion women actually controlled the men using pheromones. That they were somehow willing participants in everything that was happening to them.”
“Um,” Jirel replied, scrunching his nose up, “That…doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. But I guess people don’t worry about that so long as they can enjoy their little slave girl fantasies. Guess there’s nothing weird about enjoying that if you’ve convinced yourself that the girls are doing it of their own volition.”
Jirel, Natasha and Klath pondered this in silence for a moment, as Denella pushed several unhappy memories from her years in the Syndicate to the back of her mind.
“Either way,” she concluded with a firm nod, “I really want that program gone.”
“We all do,” Natasha affirmed, “But I still think this is an even stupider idea.”
Jirel grimaced and attempted a further act of defence.
“It’s not a—”
“Yeah, it is.”
The foursome at the table turned to see Sunek idly walking into the room carrying a padd. He ordered his own breakfast from the Bounty’s replicator before joining them.
“Nice of you to join us,” Jirel noted, “Alarm not go off?”
“What?” the Vulcan replied with confusion, “No, I’ve been awake for ages. Thought I’d take a look at exactly how stupid this new idea is.”
He waved the padd for emphasis. Now it was the turn of the others to look confused.
“What do you mean?” Klath eventually grunted.
“Well,” Sunek continued through crunches of toasted saffir bread, “Seeing as none of you thought to bother, I decided to take a closer look at this dumb Captain Jirel series. Read some reviews, news articles, that sort of thing. And it’s not good news.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Denella pressed.
“It means that, as dumb and two-dimensional as the characters are, this is still a money-spinning holosuite program. Which means that something as easy as ‘find the Stone of Unity’ involves going through a million different twists and turns and side quests. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up wasting hours getting nowhere while that robe-wearing idiot and his buddies are racing to the finish line.”
Jirel felt his spots start to itch as he felt the eyes of the others returning to him with fresh accusatory glares.
“But,” he tried, “It can’t be that hard to figure out, surely? It’s just a holosuite program.”
“It’s a holosuite program that’s made Markon V a ton of latinum,” Sunek pointed out, “You don’t do those kinds of numbers if everyone’s completing it in one go.”
“And our…opponents will know this whole thing inside and out,” Natasha pointed out, “While we won’t know what we’re doing.”
“We never know what we are doing,” Klath grunted unhappily.
“Exactly,” Jirel nodded.
“He didn’t mean that as a compliment—” Denella began.
“I know. But I’m taking it as one. Cos we always get through these things, right? Hell, since we’ve all been one crew, we’ve seen off angry Jem'Hadar, Vulcan cults, Nimbosian cowboys, murderous Pakleds, a huge mugato—”
“Wasn’t a mugato,” Sunek called out. *
“—time-travelling cranks and all the rest of it, right?”
“Hmm,” Natasha mused as she drained her raktajino, “When you put it all like that, it almost sounds like we’re the ones in the badly written holosuite program…”
After a short, awkward pause, Jirel continued his best stab at a heroic captain’s speech to his crew, standing up from his seat as he did so.
“Well, we got through every one of those adventures, and we’re gonna get through this one as well, I can tell. That Stone of Unity is ours!”
His impromptu speech at an end, he was a little unhappy at the palpable lack of a response it seemed to get from his small audience.
“You gonna pop your shirt off for an encore, Captain Jirel,” Sunek guffawed.
Jirel’s heroic stance wilted slightly.
“Well,” Natasha sighed, “As confident as I’m sure that little display has made us all, I feel like we need a…Plan B.”
“We’ve still got my ‘photon torpedo to the computer core’ idea,” Denella pointed out, only slightly in mirthless jest.
“Tell you what we do need,” Sunek offered as he crunched down on his final bite of food, “Someone who knows the ins and outs of the whole program. So we don’t get any nasty surprises.”
At this, Jirel’s face lit up a little more, as a new idea formed in his head.
“Actually, that’s a good point,” he nodded, “And we might have a way of getting just that…”
As the Trill smiled knowingly, the unimpressed looks made a swift return around the rest of the table.
* - Sunek's right. It wasn't a mugato.
Looks like Jirel has a plan.
Now they're in real trouble...
Thanks!! rbs
Now they're in real trouble...
Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
The trio of Wadi teenagers stared back at the Bounty's crew with profound confusion.
Today was proving to be almost as surreal as yesterday. Except, this time it was their heroes that had eagerly tracked them down. Calla, Devro and Jarro had been mooching around the Markon City promenade when they had been confronted by the familiar figures, who had asked them to join them at a local cafe.
Now, over a round of raktajinos and sodas, they were slowly coming to terms with what they were hearing.
“You want our help?” Calla managed eventually.
“Y—You?” Devro stressed, “Want…our help?”
“Very much so,” Jirel nodded back across the table, “We need the people who know Captain Jirel and the Starship Bounty better than anyone. And that seems to be you.”
He gestured to them with as supportive a smile as he could, but the reactions of the three Wadi seemed to suggest he wasn’t getting through to them. He quickly turned to the other Bounty crewmembers for some additional support.
“Right guys? We need them, don’t we? Remember…what’s at stake here…”
That final comment seemed to galvanise the others, reminding them that as much as they disliked this latest facet to their situation, they very much needed to win. Whatever it took to do so.
Jirel motioned to Klath, who stifled a grimace and glared across the table at Calla. Despite his rather brusque response to her during their previous meeting, she had still spent most of the conversation so far staring in awe at her hero.
“Jirel is right,” he offered eventually, “Your assistance would be…appreciated.”
This seemed to settle the debate as far as the Wadi girl was concerned. And, not for the first time, she took the lead in their side of the discussion.
“Ok. So…what do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Natasha replied, “We’re, um, very interested in the game, you understand. The characters, the rules, any tips or tricks—”
“The exact location of this ‘Stone of Unity’ thing,” Sunek added, “Anything, really.”
After a glance at her friends, Calla shrugged and began.
“Well, I guess we could start from the top. So, um, Captain Jirel is the estranged prince of an ancient Trill kingdom…”
The real Jirel felt several knowing glances being sent his way. He mustered a shrug.
“Hey, I’m an orphan, remember. It’s not impossible—”
“It is,” Denella sighed, nodding at Calla, “Please, carry on. I have a feeling that if we stop every time you say something impossible, we’re gonna be here a while.”
“Um,” Calla continued, “Klath is a genetically engineered warrior from an alternative future timeline…”
This equally impossible explanation was met with a stony silence from the grumpy Klingon.
“…Sunek is an exiled Vulcan mystic with the secrets of the galaxy inside his mind…”
“Not a million miles away from the truth—”
“Shut up, Sunek,” Natasha patiently sighed.
Calla paused and glanced over at Denella, who tensed up at the fresh attention.
“Um,” the Wadi girl continued, “Denella is…a bit of a mystery, I guess. There’s a lot of theories flying around with the fans about her real character.”
“Personally,” Jarro jumped in excitedly, “I think she’s a double agent from the Orion Syndicate. Sent to infiltrate the crew and…seduce them for information.”
“Why?” Jirel asked.
“Um,” Jarro responded, a little more sheepishly, “I…haven’t worked that out yet.”
“But she’s also an engineering genius,” Calla offered, “She’s the best character to have around to break into any enemy ship’s systems. And she designed the entire Starship Bounty herself. Including her…BRL.”
Denella sighed even more deeply and forced herself to ask the obvious question that she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to.
“BRL…?”
“Bikini Replicator Link-up,” Jarro answered, a little too enthusiastically, “Designed to equip her with any one of sixteen pre-programmed bikini designs.”
“Right,” the real Denella simmered through gritted teeth, “How fun for her.”
Jarro shrank back from his own favourite character, as Natasha reluctantly spoke up.
“And what about me?” she sighed in preparation for the inevitable, “What’s my character’s big stupid backstory, hmm?”
The three Wadi teenagers glanced at each other. Then, after a suitably awkward pause, Calla looked back at the doctor and shrugged again.
“Actually…we kinda assumed your character wasn’t based on a real person. We thought the writers felt like they needed another female character, so they just…improvised.”
“Y—Yeah,” Devro added, “All Natasha really does is drop a load of exposition to set up the story and then kinda just…gets kidnapped.”
If Klath and Denella’s unhappy looks hadn’t been strong enough, Natasha’s own glare managed to beat them both.
“Actually,” Calla added, “The feedback from players was apparently really bad early on. But then in Adventure Seven: The Revenge of the Deltan Love Spell, the writers put you in that catsuit, and…the complaints kinda dried up.”
Natasha found herself beating her own record for unhappy looks almost as soon as she had set the new benchmark.
Despite their situation, Jirel couldn’t help but break into a cheeky smile.
“You know—” he began.
“Jirel,” Natasha growled back, “Don’t. If you value your life, just…don’t.”
The Trill didn’t. Instead, he wiped the grin from his face and turned back to the Wadi sitting across from him.
“So, that’s the characters,” Devro concluded, “I—I guess Captain Jirel is still the most popular one to play as. But a lot of people now prefer Klath since they introduced some more fluid attack moves in the last major update.”
“Fascinating,” the Klingon muttered.
“I think we need more,” Jirel said a little more supportively, “Like…what is this Stone of Unity? And what’s the best way to…get it?”
“That depends,” Jarro shrugged, “Are you playing mission-based, or open-world?”
Jirel stared blankly back at the Wadi. Sunek sighed and jumped in.
“Open-world,” the Vulcan answered, nodding at Jirel, “Not that this idiot would know the difference.”
“Hmm,” Jarro mused, “That makes things harder to explain.”
“Why?” Klath grunted.
“Because the easiest route depends on the initial scenario, which is always randomly generated. If you go mission-based, you have the same checkpoints to pass. But open-world can go in any direction the program wants to go.”
“Great,” Natasha sighed, “So we’re screwed.”
Another awkward pause descended. Eventually, Devro offered a thought.
“Um…I—I guess, if you really want our help, there’s something we could do.”
“What’s that?” Jirel asked.
“W—Well, if we know which holosuite you’re in, then we could tap into the audio controls and communicate with you directly. Maybe…give you some tips?”
Jirel instinctively looked over to his engineer to gauge whether that plan was feasible or not, given his own relative lack of knowledge in that area.
“It’s possible,” the Orion woman shrugged back, “So long as they knew the audio frequencies of the holosuite. How come you know about that?”
Devro suddenly found himself under the intense gaze of the Orion engineer, rather than vice versa, and he shrank back in his seat. In the absence of a response from him, Calla rolled her eyes and stepped in.
“Devro’s done that before, when some of our other friends have been playing. He’s getting serious with these little engineering projects."
Denella continued to regard the Wadi, her expression softening slightly.
“I—I guess,” he managed eventually, “I just think it's all…kinda cool.”
“Huh,” Sunek grinned, gesturing at Denella, “See? You’ve got something in common after all. You’re both huge nerds.”
Denella ignored the predictable jibe, and nodded back at the young Wadi boy.
“Well…I guess that could work then. Thanks.”
Devro mustered a hopeful smile back at her. And she was forced to begrudgingly appreciate the fact that, for the first time since they had met, he was doing his utmost to maintain eye contact.
“Ok, perfect,” Jirel nodded, “Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a plan. So, let’s go, my brave and fearless crew.”
He stood from the table and flashed a grin at the others, even as they shook their heads in his direction.
“Um, one more thing,” Calla piped up as the Bounty’s crew began to leave, “Why are you so determined to do well in the program?”
“Um, duh,” Sunek replied, “Cos we wanna get the whole thing—”
“Cos we wanna get a good score, y’know?” Jirel jumped in quickly, “Administrator Trolow’s gonna be watching, and it’d be embarrassing if the real crew of the Bounty got a bad score, right?”
The trio of Wadi youngsters considered this, then nodded in understanding.
As the Bounty’s crew resumed their exit, leaving their fan club behind, Natasha glanced at Jirel.
“Why bother with the lie?”
“Because the truth was that we need to do well in this so we can get their favourite holosuite program deleted forever.”
Natasha nodded back with a sigh.
“Is it just me,” she mused, “Or are we starting to feel like the bad guys in all of this?”
“Just remember why we’re doing it,” Jirel pointed out, “And remember that, whatever plans we’re making, you can be sure that Mazur’s trying to cheat as well…”
****************************
“I was not trying to cheat!”
Martus Mazur groaned in exasperation as Administrator Trolow stared unhappily back at him, evidently unmoved by his defence.
“You were attempting to reprogram the game after I had finished setting the parameters, again. I have to warn you that your continued interference is becoming an issue.”
The El-Aurian glared back across the desk in his own private office in the main administration building of Markon City, unmoved by the appeal towards his sense of fairness.
“And I have to warn you,” he replied with a measured tone, “That you’re seriously starting to jeopardise our fortunes with this whole affair. You’ve had two clear opportunities to rule in Double M Entertainment’s favour already, and you keep giving that irritating lot another chance.”
Trolow stood in front of the desk and folded his arms, shaking his head slowly from side to side in patient frustration.
“For one so creatively gifted, you continue to misunderstand the Wadi way. Games are good, but games must be fair. Latinum is but an afterthought.”
“Huh,” Mazur scoffed, “You’d better not let your Ferengi overlords catch you saying that.”
“Nevertheless,” the stout Wadi administrator continued, gesturing to Mazur’s computer terminal, “I have removed all of your meddling from the program.”
“All of it?! But I wasn’t even really doing anything—!”
“According to my checks,” Trolow cut in, “You had already added a number of new enhancements to the Starship Bounty, and increased several skill parameters across the entire crew. Not to mention adjusting the randomly-generated aspects of the game to tip them in their favour.”
Mazur pursed his lips, a little taken aback at the skill with which the entirety of his efforts had been uncovered.
“You see,” he offered after a moment, “This program is in a state of constant development. I was just sending through a few new updates from the writers—”
“Do not test my patience. Now…shall we go?”
Trolow gestured to the door of the office with an air of impatience.
“You go,” Mazur shrugged, “I’ll catch you up.”
As tactics went, the master con artist conceded to himself that it was a particularly weak attempt to gain a further chance to adjust the program. And as the Wadi administrator remained where he was, gesturing to the door again, he realised that his efforts to fix the program in his fictional crew’s favour would have to wait a little longer. He couldn’t do anything while he was being watched like this.
With a frustrated sigh, he stood up and walked with Trolow to the door.
“If this little game of yours costs us the program, just when we’re on the verge of franchising this across the quadrant and making our fortunes, I’m not going to be happy. Latinum might be an afterthought to you, but it definitely isn’t for me. And I’ve done a hell of a lot to put Markon V on the map with all this.”
“You should have faith in your creations,” Trolow pointed out as they walked, “Surely they will be easily able to win this little challenge.”
Mazur snorted unhappily at this.
“Of course they will. I’m not worried about that part. But I’ve spent enough time with that little crew of Jirel’s to know that they have a way of ruining everything. Just like they ruined everything for me before.”
“I thought they said you shot one of them in the foot—?”
“Technicality,” Mazur grumbled.
The game-loving administrator and the unhappy con artist walked on down the corridors of the main administration building, towards the designated holosuite on the promenade that they had reserved for the final Starship Bounty challenge.
Trolow had already explained the rules of the game to everyone.
The real Bounty crew and the fictional Starship Bounty crew would be dropped in at random points of the program’s open-universe setting, in their respective ships. From then on, with Trolow monitoring their progress from outside the holosuite, it would be a straight fight to be the first to complete the program’s objective and bring the Stone of Unity back to the designated end point.
It would be, as far as Trolow was concerned, a fair and friendly game.
Next to him, as they walked on, Martus Mazur continued to wonder exactly how he was going to tip the odds in his favour.
The trio of Wadi teenagers stared back at the Bounty's crew with profound confusion.
Today was proving to be almost as surreal as yesterday. Except, this time it was their heroes that had eagerly tracked them down. Calla, Devro and Jarro had been mooching around the Markon City promenade when they had been confronted by the familiar figures, who had asked them to join them at a local cafe.
Now, over a round of raktajinos and sodas, they were slowly coming to terms with what they were hearing.
“You want our help?” Calla managed eventually.
“Y—You?” Devro stressed, “Want…our help?”
“Very much so,” Jirel nodded back across the table, “We need the people who know Captain Jirel and the Starship Bounty better than anyone. And that seems to be you.”
He gestured to them with as supportive a smile as he could, but the reactions of the three Wadi seemed to suggest he wasn’t getting through to them. He quickly turned to the other Bounty crewmembers for some additional support.
“Right guys? We need them, don’t we? Remember…what’s at stake here…”
That final comment seemed to galvanise the others, reminding them that as much as they disliked this latest facet to their situation, they very much needed to win. Whatever it took to do so.
Jirel motioned to Klath, who stifled a grimace and glared across the table at Calla. Despite his rather brusque response to her during their previous meeting, she had still spent most of the conversation so far staring in awe at her hero.
“Jirel is right,” he offered eventually, “Your assistance would be…appreciated.”
This seemed to settle the debate as far as the Wadi girl was concerned. And, not for the first time, she took the lead in their side of the discussion.
“Ok. So…what do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Natasha replied, “We’re, um, very interested in the game, you understand. The characters, the rules, any tips or tricks—”
“The exact location of this ‘Stone of Unity’ thing,” Sunek added, “Anything, really.”
After a glance at her friends, Calla shrugged and began.
“Well, I guess we could start from the top. So, um, Captain Jirel is the estranged prince of an ancient Trill kingdom…”
The real Jirel felt several knowing glances being sent his way. He mustered a shrug.
“Hey, I’m an orphan, remember. It’s not impossible—”
“It is,” Denella sighed, nodding at Calla, “Please, carry on. I have a feeling that if we stop every time you say something impossible, we’re gonna be here a while.”
“Um,” Calla continued, “Klath is a genetically engineered warrior from an alternative future timeline…”
This equally impossible explanation was met with a stony silence from the grumpy Klingon.
“…Sunek is an exiled Vulcan mystic with the secrets of the galaxy inside his mind…”
“Not a million miles away from the truth—”
“Shut up, Sunek,” Natasha patiently sighed.
Calla paused and glanced over at Denella, who tensed up at the fresh attention.
“Um,” the Wadi girl continued, “Denella is…a bit of a mystery, I guess. There’s a lot of theories flying around with the fans about her real character.”
“Personally,” Jarro jumped in excitedly, “I think she’s a double agent from the Orion Syndicate. Sent to infiltrate the crew and…seduce them for information.”
“Why?” Jirel asked.
“Um,” Jarro responded, a little more sheepishly, “I…haven’t worked that out yet.”
“But she’s also an engineering genius,” Calla offered, “She’s the best character to have around to break into any enemy ship’s systems. And she designed the entire Starship Bounty herself. Including her…BRL.”
Denella sighed even more deeply and forced herself to ask the obvious question that she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to.
“BRL…?”
“Bikini Replicator Link-up,” Jarro answered, a little too enthusiastically, “Designed to equip her with any one of sixteen pre-programmed bikini designs.”
“Right,” the real Denella simmered through gritted teeth, “How fun for her.”
Jarro shrank back from his own favourite character, as Natasha reluctantly spoke up.
“And what about me?” she sighed in preparation for the inevitable, “What’s my character’s big stupid backstory, hmm?”
The three Wadi teenagers glanced at each other. Then, after a suitably awkward pause, Calla looked back at the doctor and shrugged again.
“Actually…we kinda assumed your character wasn’t based on a real person. We thought the writers felt like they needed another female character, so they just…improvised.”
“Y—Yeah,” Devro added, “All Natasha really does is drop a load of exposition to set up the story and then kinda just…gets kidnapped.”
If Klath and Denella’s unhappy looks hadn’t been strong enough, Natasha’s own glare managed to beat them both.
“Actually,” Calla added, “The feedback from players was apparently really bad early on. But then in Adventure Seven: The Revenge of the Deltan Love Spell, the writers put you in that catsuit, and…the complaints kinda dried up.”
Natasha found herself beating her own record for unhappy looks almost as soon as she had set the new benchmark.
Despite their situation, Jirel couldn’t help but break into a cheeky smile.
“You know—” he began.
“Jirel,” Natasha growled back, “Don’t. If you value your life, just…don’t.”
The Trill didn’t. Instead, he wiped the grin from his face and turned back to the Wadi sitting across from him.
“So, that’s the characters,” Devro concluded, “I—I guess Captain Jirel is still the most popular one to play as. But a lot of people now prefer Klath since they introduced some more fluid attack moves in the last major update.”
“Fascinating,” the Klingon muttered.
“I think we need more,” Jirel said a little more supportively, “Like…what is this Stone of Unity? And what’s the best way to…get it?”
“That depends,” Jarro shrugged, “Are you playing mission-based, or open-world?”
Jirel stared blankly back at the Wadi. Sunek sighed and jumped in.
“Open-world,” the Vulcan answered, nodding at Jirel, “Not that this idiot would know the difference.”
“Hmm,” Jarro mused, “That makes things harder to explain.”
“Why?” Klath grunted.
“Because the easiest route depends on the initial scenario, which is always randomly generated. If you go mission-based, you have the same checkpoints to pass. But open-world can go in any direction the program wants to go.”
“Great,” Natasha sighed, “So we’re screwed.”
Another awkward pause descended. Eventually, Devro offered a thought.
“Um…I—I guess, if you really want our help, there’s something we could do.”
“What’s that?” Jirel asked.
“W—Well, if we know which holosuite you’re in, then we could tap into the audio controls and communicate with you directly. Maybe…give you some tips?”
Jirel instinctively looked over to his engineer to gauge whether that plan was feasible or not, given his own relative lack of knowledge in that area.
“It’s possible,” the Orion woman shrugged back, “So long as they knew the audio frequencies of the holosuite. How come you know about that?”
Devro suddenly found himself under the intense gaze of the Orion engineer, rather than vice versa, and he shrank back in his seat. In the absence of a response from him, Calla rolled her eyes and stepped in.
“Devro’s done that before, when some of our other friends have been playing. He’s getting serious with these little engineering projects."
Denella continued to regard the Wadi, her expression softening slightly.
“I—I guess,” he managed eventually, “I just think it's all…kinda cool.”
“Huh,” Sunek grinned, gesturing at Denella, “See? You’ve got something in common after all. You’re both huge nerds.”
Denella ignored the predictable jibe, and nodded back at the young Wadi boy.
“Well…I guess that could work then. Thanks.”
Devro mustered a hopeful smile back at her. And she was forced to begrudgingly appreciate the fact that, for the first time since they had met, he was doing his utmost to maintain eye contact.
“Ok, perfect,” Jirel nodded, “Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a plan. So, let’s go, my brave and fearless crew.”
He stood from the table and flashed a grin at the others, even as they shook their heads in his direction.
“Um, one more thing,” Calla piped up as the Bounty’s crew began to leave, “Why are you so determined to do well in the program?”
“Um, duh,” Sunek replied, “Cos we wanna get the whole thing—”
“Cos we wanna get a good score, y’know?” Jirel jumped in quickly, “Administrator Trolow’s gonna be watching, and it’d be embarrassing if the real crew of the Bounty got a bad score, right?”
The trio of Wadi youngsters considered this, then nodded in understanding.
As the Bounty’s crew resumed their exit, leaving their fan club behind, Natasha glanced at Jirel.
“Why bother with the lie?”
“Because the truth was that we need to do well in this so we can get their favourite holosuite program deleted forever.”
Natasha nodded back with a sigh.
“Is it just me,” she mused, “Or are we starting to feel like the bad guys in all of this?”
“Just remember why we’re doing it,” Jirel pointed out, “And remember that, whatever plans we’re making, you can be sure that Mazur’s trying to cheat as well…”
****************************
“I was not trying to cheat!”
Martus Mazur groaned in exasperation as Administrator Trolow stared unhappily back at him, evidently unmoved by his defence.
“You were attempting to reprogram the game after I had finished setting the parameters, again. I have to warn you that your continued interference is becoming an issue.”
The El-Aurian glared back across the desk in his own private office in the main administration building of Markon City, unmoved by the appeal towards his sense of fairness.
“And I have to warn you,” he replied with a measured tone, “That you’re seriously starting to jeopardise our fortunes with this whole affair. You’ve had two clear opportunities to rule in Double M Entertainment’s favour already, and you keep giving that irritating lot another chance.”
Trolow stood in front of the desk and folded his arms, shaking his head slowly from side to side in patient frustration.
“For one so creatively gifted, you continue to misunderstand the Wadi way. Games are good, but games must be fair. Latinum is but an afterthought.”
“Huh,” Mazur scoffed, “You’d better not let your Ferengi overlords catch you saying that.”
“Nevertheless,” the stout Wadi administrator continued, gesturing to Mazur’s computer terminal, “I have removed all of your meddling from the program.”
“All of it?! But I wasn’t even really doing anything—!”
“According to my checks,” Trolow cut in, “You had already added a number of new enhancements to the Starship Bounty, and increased several skill parameters across the entire crew. Not to mention adjusting the randomly-generated aspects of the game to tip them in their favour.”
Mazur pursed his lips, a little taken aback at the skill with which the entirety of his efforts had been uncovered.
“You see,” he offered after a moment, “This program is in a state of constant development. I was just sending through a few new updates from the writers—”
“Do not test my patience. Now…shall we go?”
Trolow gestured to the door of the office with an air of impatience.
“You go,” Mazur shrugged, “I’ll catch you up.”
As tactics went, the master con artist conceded to himself that it was a particularly weak attempt to gain a further chance to adjust the program. And as the Wadi administrator remained where he was, gesturing to the door again, he realised that his efforts to fix the program in his fictional crew’s favour would have to wait a little longer. He couldn’t do anything while he was being watched like this.
With a frustrated sigh, he stood up and walked with Trolow to the door.
“If this little game of yours costs us the program, just when we’re on the verge of franchising this across the quadrant and making our fortunes, I’m not going to be happy. Latinum might be an afterthought to you, but it definitely isn’t for me. And I’ve done a hell of a lot to put Markon V on the map with all this.”
“You should have faith in your creations,” Trolow pointed out as they walked, “Surely they will be easily able to win this little challenge.”
Mazur snorted unhappily at this.
“Of course they will. I’m not worried about that part. But I’ve spent enough time with that little crew of Jirel’s to know that they have a way of ruining everything. Just like they ruined everything for me before.”
“I thought they said you shot one of them in the foot—?”
“Technicality,” Mazur grumbled.
The game-loving administrator and the unhappy con artist walked on down the corridors of the main administration building, towards the designated holosuite on the promenade that they had reserved for the final Starship Bounty challenge.
Trolow had already explained the rules of the game to everyone.
The real Bounty crew and the fictional Starship Bounty crew would be dropped in at random points of the program’s open-universe setting, in their respective ships. From then on, with Trolow monitoring their progress from outside the holosuite, it would be a straight fight to be the first to complete the program’s objective and bring the Stone of Unity back to the designated end point.
It would be, as far as Trolow was concerned, a fair and friendly game.
Next to him, as they walked on, Martus Mazur continued to wonder exactly how he was going to tip the odds in his favour.
Maybe Jirel et.al. already have...
Part Three (Cont'd)
“Why is it always Nausicaans?!”
Jirel groaned in frustration even as Sunek threw the Bounty into another tight evasive maneuver, allowing the burst of disruptor energy that had been heading for them to skim past the edge of the ship’s starboard wing.
That near miss was only a fleeting respite. Almost immediately, a fresh alert chimed out from Klath’s tactical readings.
“Nausicaan battlecruiser firing again,” he reported urgently.
“Ugh,” Sunek griped as he turned the Bounty into a further hasty change of direction, “I didn’t even think the Nausicaans had battlecruisers. Aren’t they still at the ‘hitting things with clubs’ stage of evolution?”
“Focus, Sunek,” Jirel cautioned as a further flurry of disruptor fire whipped past them.
“Hey! I’m totally focused—!”
The Vulcan was interrupted as the latest shot from their Nausicaan foes slammed into the Bounty’s shields, pitching the entire ship around on its axis violently enough to nearly fling Jirel from his centre seat completely.
“Except for just then!” Sunek added, without a trace of humility, “Cos you distracted me!”
As the pilot steadied the ship, Jirel resisted the temptation to continue bickering, and instead called back to Denella at her engineering console.
“Damage?”
“Um,” the Orion offered, glancing over the holosuite-generated controls, “Shields…at seventy-nine percent.”
Despite the intensity of their immediate situation, Jirel couldn’t help but spin around to regard his engineer. Either side of her, Natasha and Klath glanced up from their own stations.
“What the hell does that mean?” the Trill asked.
“I don’t really know,” Denella shrugged, gesturing at her console, “But that’s all the information the program seems to want to tell me, damage-wise.”
“It’s probably supposed to be dramatic,” Sunek called back.
“Is it?” Jirel asked, still perplexed.
“It is not especially useful information, tactically-speaking,” Klath pointed out.
“I mean, it almost sounds good, right?” Natasha added, “Seventy-nine percent seems pretty high, all things considered?”
“Guys!” Sunek yelled out, as he pitched the Bounty around again, “Sorry to be a pain, but we’re still getting shot at here!”
The other four occupants of the cockpit swiftly moved past all seventy-nine percent of their remaining shields and focused back on the battle.
They had barely started their quest for the fictitious Stone of Unity before the vast Nausicaan ship had dropped out of warp directly in their path and opened fire. Despite the huge size difference between the two ships, and unlike their earlier encounter with the decidedly overpowered Starship Bounty, they were actually holding their own surprisingly well. But equally they didn’t seem to be making any inroads into their enemy’s defences.
“Right, Klath, give ‘em hell,” Jirel called out as Sunek swivelled the Bounty around to face the Nausicaan vessel.
The Klingon’s burly hands danced across his controls. A volley of micro-torpedoes lanced out from the Bounty’s forward launcher and slammed into the other ship’s shields, followed up with twin blasts from the phaser cannons.
“Direct hit,” he reported with satisfaction.
“Damage?” Jirel asked as Sunek banked the Bounty out of the path of a return of fire from the Nausicaans.
Klath paused for a second as he stared at his readouts, before grumbling slightly.
“Their shields…are at ninety-two percent.”
“Right,” Jirel sighed.
“This is so stupid,” Denella groaned, “People actually find this fun?”
Instead of a response coming from inside the cockpit, it came over a static-flecked comms link that flared into life out of nowhere.
“Um,” the awkward voice of Devro pierced through the bursts of static all around them, “Y—Yes. We find it fun.”
“Can you hear us?” the similarly muted voice of Calla joined the impromptu conference call in the Bounty’s cockpit.
“Yes, we can,” Natasha called back.
“And this is definitely not fun,” Denella added.
“Seriously!” Sunek yelled out again from the middle of his latest evasive maneuver, “We are getting shot at! A lot!”
“Who’s shooting?” Jarro’s voice crackled through.
“Sorry,” Devro added by way of explanation, “I—I’ve been able to patch into an audio link, but we’ve got no visual access.”
“Nausicaans!” Jirel called out, “Nausicaans are shooting! And we can’t put a dent in their…shield percentage. Any ideas?”
The Trill felt a little ridiculous asking for help from a group of teenage holosuite addicts. But he got over it by the time that Klath’s latest volley of weapons fire failed to bring down their enemy’s shields and Sunek performed another desperate evasive move.
There was a momentary pause over the comms link, and only static filled the room. Then, Calla’s voice returned.
“The Nausicaan battlecruiser from the Battle of the Opatervea Sector mini-game?”
Jirel looked blankly around the cockpit for some sort of answer. Natasha shrugged and called back to their invisible coaches.
“We’re in the Opatervea Sector, if that helps?”
“Ok, perfect,” the Wadi girl replied, “That one’s easy.”
“Strongly disagree!” Sunek called back.
“You, um, just need to lead the Nausicaan ship into the Opatervea Nebula.”
“Why?” Jirel asked.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Jarro chimed in, “Because the corrosive gases inside the nebula will corrode the Nausicaan ship’s hull.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Sunek shrugged, as he sent the Bounty warping towards a distant reddish nebula, with their opponents in hot pursuit.
“Wh—?” Jirel scoffed in disbelief even as his pilot went to work, “How were we supposed to know that?!”
“It’s easy once you see the clue,” Devro’s voice explained, “Y—You just have to realise that ‘Opatervea’ is an anagram of ‘Evaporate’.”
“That’s a clue?!” a flabbergasted Jirel replied.
“I hate this so much,” Denella muttered to herself.
“Welp, whatever's going on, we’re here,” Sunek reported as the Bounty dropped out of warp directly in front of the Opatervea Nebula.
“The Nausicaans are gaining,” Klath reported with urgency.
Jirel looked out at the deep red cloud that now dominated the view through the cockpit window and shrugged, in the absence of a saner plan.
“Take us in, I guess.”
The Bounty eased forward into the crimson cloud. And despite the fact that they were playing a decidedly silly holosuite program and were in no actual peril, Jirel found himself tensing up.
“The Nausicaan vessel is following,” Klath noted, “It is…”
His report tailed off as he glared at his tactical readouts with confusion.
“What?” Denella asked.
The Klingon re-checked the readings, then looked back up at the Orion.
“It has…disintegrated.”
Jirel swung around again in shock. Denella searched for an appropriate response, then just opted to repeat her previous question.
“…What?”
“He’s right,” Natasha nodded, checking her own readings, “The entire battlecruiser has just…fallen apart. Down to the atomic level.”
“How?” Jirel felt compelled to ask.
“And why didn’t it affect us?” Denella added, before shaking her head and correcting herself, “You know what? Doesn’t matter. Let’s move past it.”
The other four in the cockpit all silently agreed with that plan.
“So,” Natasha offered, “What now?”
Again, the response to the question came from outside of the holosuite itself, as Calla’s voice returned over the crackling comms link.
“You need to head for the secret Nausicaan lair on Argus II and recover the map that contains the precise location of the Stone of Unity.”
The response to this order came from a distinctly unhappy Klath.
“How can it be a secret lair if you know precisely where it is located—?”
“Klath,” Denella sighed, “Let’s keep moving past it.”
The Klingon reluctantly conceded the point with a curt nod, as Jirel gestured to the Bounty’s Vulcan pilot.
“You heard the lady, Sunek. Argus II it is.”
As the Bounty emerged from the Opatervea Nebula and shot back to warp towards its new destination, the fleeting silence that had descended over the cockpit was punctured by a chirp from Denella’s console.
“Huh. Good news, I guess.”
“What?” Jirel asked.
“Our shields are back up to ninety-four percent.”
“Why is it always Nausicaans?!”
Jirel groaned in frustration even as Sunek threw the Bounty into another tight evasive maneuver, allowing the burst of disruptor energy that had been heading for them to skim past the edge of the ship’s starboard wing.
That near miss was only a fleeting respite. Almost immediately, a fresh alert chimed out from Klath’s tactical readings.
“Nausicaan battlecruiser firing again,” he reported urgently.
“Ugh,” Sunek griped as he turned the Bounty into a further hasty change of direction, “I didn’t even think the Nausicaans had battlecruisers. Aren’t they still at the ‘hitting things with clubs’ stage of evolution?”
“Focus, Sunek,” Jirel cautioned as a further flurry of disruptor fire whipped past them.
“Hey! I’m totally focused—!”
The Vulcan was interrupted as the latest shot from their Nausicaan foes slammed into the Bounty’s shields, pitching the entire ship around on its axis violently enough to nearly fling Jirel from his centre seat completely.
“Except for just then!” Sunek added, without a trace of humility, “Cos you distracted me!”
As the pilot steadied the ship, Jirel resisted the temptation to continue bickering, and instead called back to Denella at her engineering console.
“Damage?”
“Um,” the Orion offered, glancing over the holosuite-generated controls, “Shields…at seventy-nine percent.”
Despite the intensity of their immediate situation, Jirel couldn’t help but spin around to regard his engineer. Either side of her, Natasha and Klath glanced up from their own stations.
“What the hell does that mean?” the Trill asked.
“I don’t really know,” Denella shrugged, gesturing at her console, “But that’s all the information the program seems to want to tell me, damage-wise.”
“It’s probably supposed to be dramatic,” Sunek called back.
“Is it?” Jirel asked, still perplexed.
“It is not especially useful information, tactically-speaking,” Klath pointed out.
“I mean, it almost sounds good, right?” Natasha added, “Seventy-nine percent seems pretty high, all things considered?”
“Guys!” Sunek yelled out, as he pitched the Bounty around again, “Sorry to be a pain, but we’re still getting shot at here!”
The other four occupants of the cockpit swiftly moved past all seventy-nine percent of their remaining shields and focused back on the battle.
They had barely started their quest for the fictitious Stone of Unity before the vast Nausicaan ship had dropped out of warp directly in their path and opened fire. Despite the huge size difference between the two ships, and unlike their earlier encounter with the decidedly overpowered Starship Bounty, they were actually holding their own surprisingly well. But equally they didn’t seem to be making any inroads into their enemy’s defences.
“Right, Klath, give ‘em hell,” Jirel called out as Sunek swivelled the Bounty around to face the Nausicaan vessel.
The Klingon’s burly hands danced across his controls. A volley of micro-torpedoes lanced out from the Bounty’s forward launcher and slammed into the other ship’s shields, followed up with twin blasts from the phaser cannons.
“Direct hit,” he reported with satisfaction.
“Damage?” Jirel asked as Sunek banked the Bounty out of the path of a return of fire from the Nausicaans.
Klath paused for a second as he stared at his readouts, before grumbling slightly.
“Their shields…are at ninety-two percent.”
“Right,” Jirel sighed.
“This is so stupid,” Denella groaned, “People actually find this fun?”
Instead of a response coming from inside the cockpit, it came over a static-flecked comms link that flared into life out of nowhere.
“Um,” the awkward voice of Devro pierced through the bursts of static all around them, “Y—Yes. We find it fun.”
“Can you hear us?” the similarly muted voice of Calla joined the impromptu conference call in the Bounty’s cockpit.
“Yes, we can,” Natasha called back.
“And this is definitely not fun,” Denella added.
“Seriously!” Sunek yelled out again from the middle of his latest evasive maneuver, “We are getting shot at! A lot!”
“Who’s shooting?” Jarro’s voice crackled through.
“Sorry,” Devro added by way of explanation, “I—I’ve been able to patch into an audio link, but we’ve got no visual access.”
“Nausicaans!” Jirel called out, “Nausicaans are shooting! And we can’t put a dent in their…shield percentage. Any ideas?”
The Trill felt a little ridiculous asking for help from a group of teenage holosuite addicts. But he got over it by the time that Klath’s latest volley of weapons fire failed to bring down their enemy’s shields and Sunek performed another desperate evasive move.
There was a momentary pause over the comms link, and only static filled the room. Then, Calla’s voice returned.
“The Nausicaan battlecruiser from the Battle of the Opatervea Sector mini-game?”
Jirel looked blankly around the cockpit for some sort of answer. Natasha shrugged and called back to their invisible coaches.
“We’re in the Opatervea Sector, if that helps?”
“Ok, perfect,” the Wadi girl replied, “That one’s easy.”
“Strongly disagree!” Sunek called back.
“You, um, just need to lead the Nausicaan ship into the Opatervea Nebula.”
“Why?” Jirel asked.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Jarro chimed in, “Because the corrosive gases inside the nebula will corrode the Nausicaan ship’s hull.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Sunek shrugged, as he sent the Bounty warping towards a distant reddish nebula, with their opponents in hot pursuit.
“Wh—?” Jirel scoffed in disbelief even as his pilot went to work, “How were we supposed to know that?!”
“It’s easy once you see the clue,” Devro’s voice explained, “Y—You just have to realise that ‘Opatervea’ is an anagram of ‘Evaporate’.”
“That’s a clue?!” a flabbergasted Jirel replied.
“I hate this so much,” Denella muttered to herself.
“Welp, whatever's going on, we’re here,” Sunek reported as the Bounty dropped out of warp directly in front of the Opatervea Nebula.
“The Nausicaans are gaining,” Klath reported with urgency.
Jirel looked out at the deep red cloud that now dominated the view through the cockpit window and shrugged, in the absence of a saner plan.
“Take us in, I guess.”
The Bounty eased forward into the crimson cloud. And despite the fact that they were playing a decidedly silly holosuite program and were in no actual peril, Jirel found himself tensing up.
“The Nausicaan vessel is following,” Klath noted, “It is…”
His report tailed off as he glared at his tactical readouts with confusion.
“What?” Denella asked.
The Klingon re-checked the readings, then looked back up at the Orion.
“It has…disintegrated.”
Jirel swung around again in shock. Denella searched for an appropriate response, then just opted to repeat her previous question.
“…What?”
“He’s right,” Natasha nodded, checking her own readings, “The entire battlecruiser has just…fallen apart. Down to the atomic level.”
“How?” Jirel felt compelled to ask.
“And why didn’t it affect us?” Denella added, before shaking her head and correcting herself, “You know what? Doesn’t matter. Let’s move past it.”
The other four in the cockpit all silently agreed with that plan.
“So,” Natasha offered, “What now?”
Again, the response to the question came from outside of the holosuite itself, as Calla’s voice returned over the crackling comms link.
“You need to head for the secret Nausicaan lair on Argus II and recover the map that contains the precise location of the Stone of Unity.”
The response to this order came from a distinctly unhappy Klath.
“How can it be a secret lair if you know precisely where it is located—?”
“Klath,” Denella sighed, “Let’s keep moving past it.”
The Klingon reluctantly conceded the point with a curt nod, as Jirel gestured to the Bounty’s Vulcan pilot.
“You heard the lady, Sunek. Argus II it is.”
As the Bounty emerged from the Opatervea Nebula and shot back to warp towards its new destination, the fleeting silence that had descended over the cockpit was punctured by a chirp from Denella’s console.
“Huh. Good news, I guess.”
“What?” Jirel asked.
“Our shields are back up to ninety-four percent.”
I was a Dungeon Master long enough to know that's a lie... Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
“I don’t see why we can’t watch this properly.”
Administrator Trolow didn’t bother to glance over at the impatiently-pacing form of Martus Mazur on the other side of his office. The Wadi man kept his eyes on the digital readouts showing the progress of the two competing teams inside their impromptu holosuite-based challenge.
“You have already meddled in the game enough,” he offered in response, “In the interests of fairness, I have no choice but to limit your visibility to the basics.”
Mazur paused mid-pace and glowered unhappily at his business partner of convenience.
“Charming,” he scoffed.
Trolow ignored the barbed comment, and instead noted a change in the readings in front of him.
“Ah,” he nodded, “The challengers have passed the Battle of the Opatervea Sector. That means our two teams are neck-and-neck. How exciting!”
Mazur elected not to resume his pacing, and instead stalked over to the desk with a grimace.
“What?! How the hell did they pass that so fast? We had to add a special hint to that level in the regular game because so many players were getting stuck there!”
“Perhaps,” Trolow offered with a casual shrug, “They are more capable than you think.”
“Not possible. They’re idiots.”
“And yet they passed the task with a respectable score. And they are already on their way to the secret lair for the next challenge.”
Mazur stared incredulously at the readings on the screen, which merely corroborated what the Wadi administrator had already reported to him. His eyes narrowed slightly. If there was one thing a con artist could instinctively tell, it was when they were being conned themselves.
“Hmph,” he grunted unhappily, “There’s something not quite right here, don’t you think?”
Trolow’s eyes still didn’t leave the screens, as the game-loving Wadi kept focus on the most important part of the day’s proceedings.
“I think it’s even more of an excellent game than I’d imagined!”
Mazur grimaced again and shook his head. Then, he peered closer at some of the other readings from the holosuite.
“Hang on, what’s this?” he pointed, “It looks like there’s a secondary data link flowing into the holosuite.”
“It’s probably a maintenance update,” Trolow replied dismissively, “We run most of them while the holosuites are in operation now to reduce downtime.”
Mazur kept his focus on the quirky readings, evidently unconvinced by that explanation.
“Hmm,” he muttered, “I might just go and double-check your maintenance schedules, if that’s all the same with you…”
On the other side of the desk. Administrator Trolow barely responded, and instead laughed gleefully as he saw the latest results from the ongoing game, with the two teams in his carefully-planned challenge still neck-and-neck. And while the Wadi man enjoyed his game, Mazur slinked out of the office.
Determined to find out exactly who was trying to con him.
****************************
“Seriously, there are way too many Nausicaans in this game!”
Sunek pivoted the Bounty around on its axis to evade another volley of disruptor fire, simultaneously setting Klath up for a shot of his own at their adversaries. Seconds later, the Klingon’s trigger finger had dispatched another Nausicaan vessel in a fiery explosion.
“Also,” the Vulcan added, “Why the hell are these ones so much easier to beat?”
Sunek and Klath were currently alone in the cockpit of the Bounty, fighting an orbital rearguard above Arvon II from a seemingly never-ending parade of rather more Bounty-sized Nausicaan ships that were constantly rising up from the planet’s surface to attack them.
As soon as they had arrived at the location of the easily-found secret Nausicaan lair, the young Wadi experts had explained that the players had to split up for this portion of the challenge, in order to tick off two missions at once. So, Jirel, Denella and Natasha had beamed down to the surface to locate the map that would lead them to the Stone of Unity, while Sunek and Klath had remained behind to deal with the seemingly endless firefight in orbit.
“Um,” Devro responded over the crackling comms link, “These N—Nausicaans are just a side mission.”
“A…side mission?” Klath grunted unhappily.
“Yeah. But you have to clear both parts of the mission to unlock the map down on the planet. And you need Klath to be aboard the Bounty in order to trigger the Nausicaan orbital attack.”
Klath’s mood darkened a little further, even as his sensors informed him that another enemy ship was approaching their position.
“Why?” he asked eventually, after pausing to fire off another volley of phaser fire to dispatch another underwhelming opponent.
“W—Well,” Devro replied, “To be honest, it’s a bit of a trick from the writers. They keep putting in these Klath-specific side quests to keep him out of the main fight. We assume it’s to keep up the challenge of the program. Cos really, Klath is…too powerful.”
Even as another Nausicaan opponent exploded in a similar manner to the previous dozen or so ships, Sunek glanced back at his colleague from the pilot’s seat.
“You know,” he offered, “This had better not be the thing that finally gives you an ego.”
Klath glowered back at the Vulcan, and grumbled under his breath again. A significant part of him continuing to wish that he was doing anything else right now other than partaking in this insufferable game.
And a small part of him wishing that he was involved in what now sounded like a far more entertaining fight down on the surface.
****************************
“I thought there was supposed to be a fight down here?”
Jirel, Natasha and Denella walked down the dank confines of a corridor inside the compound they had beamed into on the surface of Arvon II. Or, more specifically, under the surface.
The supposed secret Nausicaan lair was, for reasons none of them could quite make sense of, constructed underneath the surface of the planet itself, despite Arvon II being a perfectly habitable Class M world. Not only was it under the surface, Natasha’s ever-diligent tricorder scans had also confirmed that it was entirely contained underneath the dome of a dormant volcano, sitting on a fault line near to the planet’s equator.
Which meant that the lair’s construction now doubly made no sense in the mind of the former Starfleet officer. Something she was eager to discuss with the others.
“I’m just saying,” she continued as they walked down the dull grey-walled corridor, “Not only would it have been easier to build this on the surface, it would’ve been much safer as well. All it would take is a minor geological event in the fault line, and the entire magma chamber could be—”
“Nat,” Jirel sighed patiently, “It’s a holosuite program.”
She took this self-evident remark in her stride and shrugged back at the Trill.
“That’s no excuse for poor planning.”
The Trill shook his head and smiled as they reached a door at the end of the corridor. A door that remained resolutely shut as they got to it.
“Don’t tell me we went the wrong way,” Denella sighed.
“No,” Natasha reported, scanning the door with an ancient Bounty-issue tricorder, “This is the right way. Apparently there are three Nausicaans behind this door. And some sort of security field, which I assume is protecting this map we’re here to take.”
“So we found our fight,” Jirel nodded, sizing up the still-closed door, “But how do we…?”
“You, ah, have to trigger the start of the fight,” Calla’s voice crackled into the conversation over the comms link, “All the playable sections in the program are activated by a certain action by one of the players.”
“How realistic,” Denella snorted without amusement.
“Ok,” Jirel shrugged, “So…how do we trigger it?”
There was a long, awkward pause over the staticky comms link. Eventually, Calla’s voice returned.
“Um, usually for fights like this, the trigger is when…Captain Jirel takes his shirt off.”
Jirel felt two sets of eyes from his two colleagues hitting the back of his head as he stared at the closed door in front of him.
“When he…what?” he managed.
“It’s just how the game dynamics work,” Jarro’s voice chimed in to add, “When there’s a climactic fight, Captain Jirel takes his shirt off.”
The Trill felt his spots starting to itch.
“Come on then, Mr Universe,” the evidently amused Natasha offered to the squirming Jirel, “Let’s see that physique of yours.”
He turned back to her and faced down her mischievous smile with a distinctly unhappy glare of his own.
“I mean…that’s dumb, right? That can’t possibly be—”
“Jirel, seriously, we’re on the clock here,” Denella pointed out, less amused and more impatient, “We need that stupid map.”
“We do,” the smiling Natasha nodded, glancing at Denella as she did so, “You know, I’ve heard he’s been doing a lot of push-ups recently…”
Jirel sighed in defeat, then reluctantly took off his tunic top. A split second later, the doors snapped open, revealing three hulking Nausicaans on one side, and a human, an Orion and a shirtless Trill on the other.
With the program’s coding having successfully established that the fight was now on, and without either side bothering to exchange any pleasantries, battle was instantly joined.
Denella channeled all the anger and frustration that had built up in her since the Starship Bounty program had reared its head, and used her Klath-inspired combat training to deftly sidestep the Nausicaan that charged at her, before grabbing hold and using his momentum to slam the beast into the corridor wall with ferocious force, ending the risk of a follow-up attack.
Jirel put any discomfort he was feeling about his topless state to one side, and used his own bar brawl-honed fighting tactics to evade the swing of a fist by his own Nausicaan adversary, before felling him with a swift kick to his standing leg and knocking him out with a sharp jab from his elbow.
Natasha used her own Starfleet combat training to hold her own against the third Nausicaan, diving away from his coordinated attack before delivering a heavy two-handed punch to the beast’s heavily-armoured back.
Then, as she rushed away from the expected follow-up attack and spun around to face her adversary again, she felt her boot catch on a metal grate in the floor of the corridor. Before she knew it, she was tumbling to the ground.
The Nausicaan raced towards her now-helpless form, and her eyes widened at the sight of her impending demise. Or at least her humbling defeat in a stupid holosuite program.
Then, at the last second, Jirel dived at the Nausicaan's charging form, knocking him down to the ground. Denella pounced towards the two writhing forms on the ground and delivered a stout kick to the side of the Nausicaan's ugly cranium, successfully silencing another non-playable character.
The Orion double checked that all three enemies were fully subdued, before heading further into the room to retrieve the map they had been guarding.
Meanwhile, Jirel extricated himself from his now-unconscious foe, and mustered a knowing grin as he stepped over to Natasha and offered her a hand to get back on her feet.
“Look at that,” he beamed, “You played the damsel in distress after all.”
Natasha delivered an effortless withering look back at him, even as Calla’s voice returned over the top of the scene.
“That’s what usually happens with Captain Jirel and Natasha in these sorts of fights.”
“I just tripped,” the real Natasha pointed out.
“Actually…that’s not all that happens,” Jarro’s voice added, “They usually kiss afterwards.”
Jirel’s grin widened as Natasha finished getting to her feet and found herself standing a little closer to the Trill than she’d been anticipating.
“I mean,” he offered with an innocent shrug, “I’m game if you are.”
She matched his reaction with a palpable increase in intensity of her withering look, and an accompanying roll of her eyes.
“Jirel,” she sighed, “Get dressed.”
“I don’t see why we can’t watch this properly.”
Administrator Trolow didn’t bother to glance over at the impatiently-pacing form of Martus Mazur on the other side of his office. The Wadi man kept his eyes on the digital readouts showing the progress of the two competing teams inside their impromptu holosuite-based challenge.
“You have already meddled in the game enough,” he offered in response, “In the interests of fairness, I have no choice but to limit your visibility to the basics.”
Mazur paused mid-pace and glowered unhappily at his business partner of convenience.
“Charming,” he scoffed.
Trolow ignored the barbed comment, and instead noted a change in the readings in front of him.
“Ah,” he nodded, “The challengers have passed the Battle of the Opatervea Sector. That means our two teams are neck-and-neck. How exciting!”
Mazur elected not to resume his pacing, and instead stalked over to the desk with a grimace.
“What?! How the hell did they pass that so fast? We had to add a special hint to that level in the regular game because so many players were getting stuck there!”
“Perhaps,” Trolow offered with a casual shrug, “They are more capable than you think.”
“Not possible. They’re idiots.”
“And yet they passed the task with a respectable score. And they are already on their way to the secret lair for the next challenge.”
Mazur stared incredulously at the readings on the screen, which merely corroborated what the Wadi administrator had already reported to him. His eyes narrowed slightly. If there was one thing a con artist could instinctively tell, it was when they were being conned themselves.
“Hmph,” he grunted unhappily, “There’s something not quite right here, don’t you think?”
Trolow’s eyes still didn’t leave the screens, as the game-loving Wadi kept focus on the most important part of the day’s proceedings.
“I think it’s even more of an excellent game than I’d imagined!”
Mazur grimaced again and shook his head. Then, he peered closer at some of the other readings from the holosuite.
“Hang on, what’s this?” he pointed, “It looks like there’s a secondary data link flowing into the holosuite.”
“It’s probably a maintenance update,” Trolow replied dismissively, “We run most of them while the holosuites are in operation now to reduce downtime.”
Mazur kept his focus on the quirky readings, evidently unconvinced by that explanation.
“Hmm,” he muttered, “I might just go and double-check your maintenance schedules, if that’s all the same with you…”
On the other side of the desk. Administrator Trolow barely responded, and instead laughed gleefully as he saw the latest results from the ongoing game, with the two teams in his carefully-planned challenge still neck-and-neck. And while the Wadi man enjoyed his game, Mazur slinked out of the office.
Determined to find out exactly who was trying to con him.
****************************
“Seriously, there are way too many Nausicaans in this game!”
Sunek pivoted the Bounty around on its axis to evade another volley of disruptor fire, simultaneously setting Klath up for a shot of his own at their adversaries. Seconds later, the Klingon’s trigger finger had dispatched another Nausicaan vessel in a fiery explosion.
“Also,” the Vulcan added, “Why the hell are these ones so much easier to beat?”
Sunek and Klath were currently alone in the cockpit of the Bounty, fighting an orbital rearguard above Arvon II from a seemingly never-ending parade of rather more Bounty-sized Nausicaan ships that were constantly rising up from the planet’s surface to attack them.
As soon as they had arrived at the location of the easily-found secret Nausicaan lair, the young Wadi experts had explained that the players had to split up for this portion of the challenge, in order to tick off two missions at once. So, Jirel, Denella and Natasha had beamed down to the surface to locate the map that would lead them to the Stone of Unity, while Sunek and Klath had remained behind to deal with the seemingly endless firefight in orbit.
“Um,” Devro responded over the crackling comms link, “These N—Nausicaans are just a side mission.”
“A…side mission?” Klath grunted unhappily.
“Yeah. But you have to clear both parts of the mission to unlock the map down on the planet. And you need Klath to be aboard the Bounty in order to trigger the Nausicaan orbital attack.”
Klath’s mood darkened a little further, even as his sensors informed him that another enemy ship was approaching their position.
“Why?” he asked eventually, after pausing to fire off another volley of phaser fire to dispatch another underwhelming opponent.
“W—Well,” Devro replied, “To be honest, it’s a bit of a trick from the writers. They keep putting in these Klath-specific side quests to keep him out of the main fight. We assume it’s to keep up the challenge of the program. Cos really, Klath is…too powerful.”
Even as another Nausicaan opponent exploded in a similar manner to the previous dozen or so ships, Sunek glanced back at his colleague from the pilot’s seat.
“You know,” he offered, “This had better not be the thing that finally gives you an ego.”
Klath glowered back at the Vulcan, and grumbled under his breath again. A significant part of him continuing to wish that he was doing anything else right now other than partaking in this insufferable game.
And a small part of him wishing that he was involved in what now sounded like a far more entertaining fight down on the surface.
****************************
“I thought there was supposed to be a fight down here?”
Jirel, Natasha and Denella walked down the dank confines of a corridor inside the compound they had beamed into on the surface of Arvon II. Or, more specifically, under the surface.
The supposed secret Nausicaan lair was, for reasons none of them could quite make sense of, constructed underneath the surface of the planet itself, despite Arvon II being a perfectly habitable Class M world. Not only was it under the surface, Natasha’s ever-diligent tricorder scans had also confirmed that it was entirely contained underneath the dome of a dormant volcano, sitting on a fault line near to the planet’s equator.
Which meant that the lair’s construction now doubly made no sense in the mind of the former Starfleet officer. Something she was eager to discuss with the others.
“I’m just saying,” she continued as they walked down the dull grey-walled corridor, “Not only would it have been easier to build this on the surface, it would’ve been much safer as well. All it would take is a minor geological event in the fault line, and the entire magma chamber could be—”
“Nat,” Jirel sighed patiently, “It’s a holosuite program.”
She took this self-evident remark in her stride and shrugged back at the Trill.
“That’s no excuse for poor planning.”
The Trill shook his head and smiled as they reached a door at the end of the corridor. A door that remained resolutely shut as they got to it.
“Don’t tell me we went the wrong way,” Denella sighed.
“No,” Natasha reported, scanning the door with an ancient Bounty-issue tricorder, “This is the right way. Apparently there are three Nausicaans behind this door. And some sort of security field, which I assume is protecting this map we’re here to take.”
“So we found our fight,” Jirel nodded, sizing up the still-closed door, “But how do we…?”
“You, ah, have to trigger the start of the fight,” Calla’s voice crackled into the conversation over the comms link, “All the playable sections in the program are activated by a certain action by one of the players.”
“How realistic,” Denella snorted without amusement.
“Ok,” Jirel shrugged, “So…how do we trigger it?”
There was a long, awkward pause over the staticky comms link. Eventually, Calla’s voice returned.
“Um, usually for fights like this, the trigger is when…Captain Jirel takes his shirt off.”
Jirel felt two sets of eyes from his two colleagues hitting the back of his head as he stared at the closed door in front of him.
“When he…what?” he managed.
“It’s just how the game dynamics work,” Jarro’s voice chimed in to add, “When there’s a climactic fight, Captain Jirel takes his shirt off.”
The Trill felt his spots starting to itch.
“Come on then, Mr Universe,” the evidently amused Natasha offered to the squirming Jirel, “Let’s see that physique of yours.”
He turned back to her and faced down her mischievous smile with a distinctly unhappy glare of his own.
“I mean…that’s dumb, right? That can’t possibly be—”
“Jirel, seriously, we’re on the clock here,” Denella pointed out, less amused and more impatient, “We need that stupid map.”
“We do,” the smiling Natasha nodded, glancing at Denella as she did so, “You know, I’ve heard he’s been doing a lot of push-ups recently…”
Jirel sighed in defeat, then reluctantly took off his tunic top. A split second later, the doors snapped open, revealing three hulking Nausicaans on one side, and a human, an Orion and a shirtless Trill on the other.
With the program’s coding having successfully established that the fight was now on, and without either side bothering to exchange any pleasantries, battle was instantly joined.
Denella channeled all the anger and frustration that had built up in her since the Starship Bounty program had reared its head, and used her Klath-inspired combat training to deftly sidestep the Nausicaan that charged at her, before grabbing hold and using his momentum to slam the beast into the corridor wall with ferocious force, ending the risk of a follow-up attack.
Jirel put any discomfort he was feeling about his topless state to one side, and used his own bar brawl-honed fighting tactics to evade the swing of a fist by his own Nausicaan adversary, before felling him with a swift kick to his standing leg and knocking him out with a sharp jab from his elbow.
Natasha used her own Starfleet combat training to hold her own against the third Nausicaan, diving away from his coordinated attack before delivering a heavy two-handed punch to the beast’s heavily-armoured back.
Then, as she rushed away from the expected follow-up attack and spun around to face her adversary again, she felt her boot catch on a metal grate in the floor of the corridor. Before she knew it, she was tumbling to the ground.
The Nausicaan raced towards her now-helpless form, and her eyes widened at the sight of her impending demise. Or at least her humbling defeat in a stupid holosuite program.
Then, at the last second, Jirel dived at the Nausicaan's charging form, knocking him down to the ground. Denella pounced towards the two writhing forms on the ground and delivered a stout kick to the side of the Nausicaan's ugly cranium, successfully silencing another non-playable character.
The Orion double checked that all three enemies were fully subdued, before heading further into the room to retrieve the map they had been guarding.
Meanwhile, Jirel extricated himself from his now-unconscious foe, and mustered a knowing grin as he stepped over to Natasha and offered her a hand to get back on her feet.
“Look at that,” he beamed, “You played the damsel in distress after all.”
Natasha delivered an effortless withering look back at him, even as Calla’s voice returned over the top of the scene.
“That’s what usually happens with Captain Jirel and Natasha in these sorts of fights.”
“I just tripped,” the real Natasha pointed out.
“Actually…that’s not all that happens,” Jarro’s voice added, “They usually kiss afterwards.”
Jirel’s grin widened as Natasha finished getting to her feet and found herself standing a little closer to the Trill than she’d been anticipating.
“I mean,” he offered with an innocent shrug, “I’m game if you are.”
She matched his reaction with a palpable increase in intensity of her withering look, and an accompanying roll of her eyes.
“Jirel,” she sighed, “Get dressed.”
Hopefully they have learned enough from the nerds - I get the idea they're soon going to have to figure the rest of it out on their own... Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
Some distance away from the bank of holosuites, Jarro, Calla and Devro shared a high five.
They sat in a booth in one of the myriad cafes that graced Markon City’s gaudy, advertising-laden main promenade, with garishly-coloured energy-giving sodas in front of them alongside their trio of personal computer interfaces with connected headsets that were patched into the holosuite.
Each screen displayed the progress of the Bounty’s crew inside the game, and even though they still had no visual access, the data they were getting back, alongside the audio reports from the crew themselves, were all positive.
“Ok,” Calla nodded, taking a thirsty slurp from her lime green soda, “They’ve got the map, they’ve defeated the Nausicaans. Now it should be a straight shot all the way to the final location of the Stone of Unity.”
“M—Might not be that easy,” Devro cautioned, as he tapped at the screen in front of him, “The final location is randomly-generated. Which means there’s a chance they’ll cross paths with, um, you know who.”
Jarro set his own bright pink energy drink down and shrugged back at his friend.
“I guess, but they’d have to be pretty unlucky to run into—”
“Hey, we’ve got a problem here.”
Jirel’s voice crackled into each of their headsets over the flimsy comms link that Devro had managed to engineer.
“What sort of problem?” Calla asked, secretly already suspecting that she knew the answer.
“We’ve engaged…the Borg.”
Of all the reactions that Jirel and the rest of the Bounty’s crew might have expected to that piece of news, a trio of healthy sighs of relief was not one of them.
“Ok,” Jarro replied, “That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Devro nodded with a comforted smile, “For a second, we were worried that you’d met the Ferengi.”
“The Ferengi?!” Natasha’s voice crackled in incredulity.
“Scariest enemies in the game,” Calla nodded with a voice of experience, “You run into a Marauder armed with a lightning whip cannon, and it’s as good as a game over.”
“B—But…the Borg!” Jirel argued back, “What the hell are they even doing here?!”
“You’ve got to have the Borg in these programs,” Jarro shrugged as he replied over the comms link.
“I—It’s a sort of rule,” Devro added, “I don’t know why. Most players are kinda over them.”
“Over them?!” Jirel spat out, “You heard me, right? The Borg! Evil scary robot monsters! Great big cube ship the size of a—!”
He was cut off by a sudden harsh monotone voice, loud enough for the trio of Wadi teenagers to hear from inside the program.
“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your vessel. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”
“—What they said!” Jirel added with fresh urgency.
“Ok,” Calla sighed, “We don’t have time to waste on this.”
“Time to waste?!” Jirel’s voice returned, at least half an octave higher, “You are getting what I’m saying, right? Is there a problem with the comms line?”
Devro double-checked his terminal and shrugged.
“Yeah. S—So if you scan their ship, there should be a detectable weakness in the lower-quarter panel of the port-side of the cube. Hit that with a single micro-torpedo.”
“But—!”
“Just do it,” Jarro jumped in, sounding more bored than concerned.
There was a long pause over the static-flecked comms link. Over their headphones, the three Wadi could just about make out the sound of a distant, violent explosion.
“Huh,” Jirel’s voice returned a moment later, “It just…blew up.”
“I’m sure they used to be a lot scarier,” Sunek’s voice added.
“Don’t worry about it,” Calla smiled, “Just get back on course. It looks like the Starship Bounty is right on your tail now.”
“On it,” the Vulcan confirmed.
“A—And watch out for the Ferengi,” Devro added with an edge of caution in his voice, “That’s the real danger.”
From their audio-only vantage point, there was no way for any of the Wadi to be able to see the five unhappy glares that were fired in their direction after that comment. Instead, they smiled in satisfaction at each other as they moved another step closer to their goal.
“Ok,” Jarro said, removing his headset and finishing his drink, “We should have a few minutes, so I’m gonna grab us some refills, and—”
He stopped on the spot as he was sliding his way out of the bench seat of the booth when he saw the figure at the end of the table. Calla and Devro looked over in shock as well.
“Well,” Martus Mazur smiled with his oiliest smile, “Hello, there.”
The three teenagers all failed to disguise their guilty looks. They had no idea who the stranger was, but they all had the same innate sixth sense that every teenager in the galaxy had which told them that they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing.
But Mazur wasn’t in the mood for some sort of angry confrontation. That wasn’t his style.
Having tracked down the source of the strange secondary data stream that he had seen in the holosuite, and having found nothing more than three nerdy teenagers, he decided that it was time to calmly, but firmly, twist the knife.
“Don’t worry, friends,” he offered benignly, gesturing to their mostly-empty glasses, “Let me get you all some fresh beverages. And then we can have…a little chat.”
None of the three youngsters managed to look any less guilty, even as the El-Aurian’s oily smile widened.
“I suspect we have a lot to talk about. But don’t worry, I’m an excellent listener…”
Some distance away from the bank of holosuites, Jarro, Calla and Devro shared a high five.
They sat in a booth in one of the myriad cafes that graced Markon City’s gaudy, advertising-laden main promenade, with garishly-coloured energy-giving sodas in front of them alongside their trio of personal computer interfaces with connected headsets that were patched into the holosuite.
Each screen displayed the progress of the Bounty’s crew inside the game, and even though they still had no visual access, the data they were getting back, alongside the audio reports from the crew themselves, were all positive.
“Ok,” Calla nodded, taking a thirsty slurp from her lime green soda, “They’ve got the map, they’ve defeated the Nausicaans. Now it should be a straight shot all the way to the final location of the Stone of Unity.”
“M—Might not be that easy,” Devro cautioned, as he tapped at the screen in front of him, “The final location is randomly-generated. Which means there’s a chance they’ll cross paths with, um, you know who.”
Jarro set his own bright pink energy drink down and shrugged back at his friend.
“I guess, but they’d have to be pretty unlucky to run into—”
“Hey, we’ve got a problem here.”
Jirel’s voice crackled into each of their headsets over the flimsy comms link that Devro had managed to engineer.
“What sort of problem?” Calla asked, secretly already suspecting that she knew the answer.
“We’ve engaged…the Borg.”
Of all the reactions that Jirel and the rest of the Bounty’s crew might have expected to that piece of news, a trio of healthy sighs of relief was not one of them.
“Ok,” Jarro replied, “That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Devro nodded with a comforted smile, “For a second, we were worried that you’d met the Ferengi.”
“The Ferengi?!” Natasha’s voice crackled in incredulity.
“Scariest enemies in the game,” Calla nodded with a voice of experience, “You run into a Marauder armed with a lightning whip cannon, and it’s as good as a game over.”
“B—But…the Borg!” Jirel argued back, “What the hell are they even doing here?!”
“You’ve got to have the Borg in these programs,” Jarro shrugged as he replied over the comms link.
“I—It’s a sort of rule,” Devro added, “I don’t know why. Most players are kinda over them.”
“Over them?!” Jirel spat out, “You heard me, right? The Borg! Evil scary robot monsters! Great big cube ship the size of a—!”
He was cut off by a sudden harsh monotone voice, loud enough for the trio of Wadi teenagers to hear from inside the program.
“We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your vessel. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”
“—What they said!” Jirel added with fresh urgency.
“Ok,” Calla sighed, “We don’t have time to waste on this.”
“Time to waste?!” Jirel’s voice returned, at least half an octave higher, “You are getting what I’m saying, right? Is there a problem with the comms line?”
Devro double-checked his terminal and shrugged.
“Yeah. S—So if you scan their ship, there should be a detectable weakness in the lower-quarter panel of the port-side of the cube. Hit that with a single micro-torpedo.”
“But—!”
“Just do it,” Jarro jumped in, sounding more bored than concerned.
There was a long pause over the static-flecked comms link. Over their headphones, the three Wadi could just about make out the sound of a distant, violent explosion.
“Huh,” Jirel’s voice returned a moment later, “It just…blew up.”
“I’m sure they used to be a lot scarier,” Sunek’s voice added.
“Don’t worry about it,” Calla smiled, “Just get back on course. It looks like the Starship Bounty is right on your tail now.”
“On it,” the Vulcan confirmed.
“A—And watch out for the Ferengi,” Devro added with an edge of caution in his voice, “That’s the real danger.”
From their audio-only vantage point, there was no way for any of the Wadi to be able to see the five unhappy glares that were fired in their direction after that comment. Instead, they smiled in satisfaction at each other as they moved another step closer to their goal.
“Ok,” Jarro said, removing his headset and finishing his drink, “We should have a few minutes, so I’m gonna grab us some refills, and—”
He stopped on the spot as he was sliding his way out of the bench seat of the booth when he saw the figure at the end of the table. Calla and Devro looked over in shock as well.
“Well,” Martus Mazur smiled with his oiliest smile, “Hello, there.”
The three teenagers all failed to disguise their guilty looks. They had no idea who the stranger was, but they all had the same innate sixth sense that every teenager in the galaxy had which told them that they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing.
But Mazur wasn’t in the mood for some sort of angry confrontation. That wasn’t his style.
Having tracked down the source of the strange secondary data stream that he had seen in the holosuite, and having found nothing more than three nerdy teenagers, he decided that it was time to calmly, but firmly, twist the knife.
“Don’t worry, friends,” he offered benignly, gesturing to their mostly-empty glasses, “Let me get you all some fresh beverages. And then we can have…a little chat.”
None of the three youngsters managed to look any less guilty, even as the El-Aurian’s oily smile widened.
“I suspect we have a lot to talk about. But don’t worry, I’m an excellent listener…”
Yeah... that's not going to be helpful... Thanks!! rbs
Part Three (Cont'd)
“Is that it?”
Sunek’s underwhelmed question was directed at the rest of the Bounty’s crew, as he pointed at the small dirty brown stone in the middle of the large cavern they were standing in. They had beamed in a few moments ago, having arrived in orbit of the unassuming planetoid that the map had directed them to. And it hadn’t taken long to locate the Stone of Unity.
Such that it was.
“I…guess so,” Jirel shrugged, cautiously stepping up to the small plinth that the stone was positioned on.
He tentatively reached out a hand and then paused when his fingers were inches away from grasping the stone, glancing around the seemingly featureless cavern with an edge of concern.
“Um, this is probably fine, right? Just…picking it up like this?”
“Psh, what?” Sunek yawned, “You think we’re about to trip some sort of dumb booby trap in here? I don’t think the program’s that badly written.” *
Jirel stole a guilty glance back at Natasha, who shook her head in the direction of the Vulcan.
“Not now, Sunek.”
The Bounty’s pilot scrunched up his face in confusion, as Jirel returned his attention to the unassuming Stone of Unity in front of him. He licked his lips, ignored the fresh itching sensation he was getting from his spots, and gently reached forwards and lifted the stone from the plinth, his face contorting into a grimace as he did so, in anticipation of whatever awful thing was about to happen.
But nothing did happen. He just successfully retrieved the Stone of Unity from the plinth, and held it up in his hands.
“Huh,” he said, turning back to the others, “That was—”
The stun blast from the phaser hit the Trill squarely in the back.
He slumped to the ground still holding the stone, with barely enough energy to cough out the end of his planned sentence.
“—Easy.”
A split second later, the five unerringly familiar caricatures that made up the crew of the Starship Bounty emerged from the shadows at the rear of the cavern. The already-shirtless Captain Jirel held a disconcertingly long-barrelled phaser in his hand. Inexplicably, despite the fact that it was a pure energy weapon, a small wisp of smoke snaked up from the end of the barrel.
“Hey there,” the Adonis of a Trill grinned, flashing his pearly white teeth at the other crew, “Don’t mind us, we’re just here for the Stone of Unity.”
Behind him, Sunek stood stoically with his fingers steepled in front of him. The gargantuan armoured Klath growled menacingly with his crimson eyes trained on them. Denella winked lustily at each of the real Bounty’s crew in turn. And the version of Natasha in the silver catsuit quivered in fear at the dangerous situation they were in.
“A trap!” the real Klath growled, baring his fangs and assuming a defensive pose in anticipation of the fight that was surely about to happen.
“What the hell?!” Denella called out into the ether, “Guys? Where was the warning?”
No response was forthcoming from their unseen Wadi guides. Denella felt a sudden unsettling feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Um, guys?” she called out again, “You there?”
Eventually, a reply came. Calla’s voice had a distinctly cold tone to it.
“We know.”
“Know what?” Natasha responded.
“W—We know why you want our help,” Devro chimed in, nervously but equally coldly, “Why you’re so desperate to win.”
“You want to delete the program!” Jarro called out, with angered betrayal.
Denella glanced around at the remaining conscious Bounty crewmates. Klath’s focus was still on their opponents. Natasha couldn’t muster more than a shrug. Sunek was yawning.
Still, it seemed that their secret was out.
“That’s…” Denella began, before immediately finding that she had no defence to offer.
“This guy called Martus Mazur told us everything,” Calla continued, “You’re doing all this because you want the whole Captain Jirel library wiped!”
“All our favourite programs!” Jarro’s voice snapped, “Every last adventure!”
“A—And we need these programs,” Devro added.
“But,” Natasha replied, picking up the case for the defence, “We’re only doing that because we—”
“We don’t wanna hear it!” Calla snapped, “And from now on, you’re on your own!”
“No, wait!” Denella called out, “You don’t need these stupid programs, ok? You’re all better than this, that’s pretty clear. These characters you love? They’re not heroes. They’re just stupid bullies, running around in a great big overpowered spaceship. That’s not heroic!”
“Exactly!” Natasha nodded, “And these stories, they’re contrived, and confusing, and riddled with plot holes that don’t make any sense!”
“And I haven’t worn robes for years! My fashion sense is way better than—!”
“Shut up, Sunek!”
As they continued their ailing pitch to their outside assistance, the comms link went dead with a sudden burst of static. And like that, their eyes and ears guiding them through the fictitious world they were in were gone.
“Mazur,” Klath grumbled.
“No time to worry about that,” Denella sighed, turning her attention back to the swaggering, sneering, winking group of doppelgangers in their midst, “We need to—”
The entire cavern began to shake under their feet. Chunks of rock rained down from above.
“What the hell’s happening now?!” Sunek cried out as he jumped out of the way of a particularly large chunk of falling debris.
“Intriguing,” his doppelganger offered with a significantly more measured tone, “It appears to be a tremor of some kind. Based on the consistent frequency of the energy wave, it is plausible that the source is artificial in nature—”
“I still hate you!” the non-traditional Vulcan fired back at the substantially more traditional one, who merely raised an eyebrow in the direction of this comment.
“Come on team,” the still-shirtless, phaser-wielding Captain Jirel boomed out over the crashes of the falling rocks, “Let’s get what we came for!”
“Klath!” the real Denella called out, “Let’s go!”
With relish, the Klingon raced forwards alongside the Orion. But as soon as they started forwards, the tremors all around them increased in intensity, bringing an enormous chunk of rock down from above, straight in front of them, blocking their path.
Natasha struggled to keep her own footing as the cavern shook more fiercely. She stumbled again as she heard voices crying out amidst the carnage.
“Let’s go, gang!” Captain Jirel called out.
“Help me!” she heard her own doppelganger scream.
“Sunek!” the real Denella bellowed, “Get us the hell out of here!”
Before she could react any further, the ground shook even more. This time, and not for the first time since she’d stepped foot inside the holosuite, she found herself helplessly tumbling to the ground.
She just about managed to look up as she lay prostrate on the ground, in time to see a small piece of rock falling directly towards her head.
And then she left Captain Jirel and the Stone of Unity far behind, as she succumbed to unconsciousness.
End of Part Three
* - Again, you'd never catch something that implausible happening to the real Bounty crew. Ahem. No, siree.
“Is that it?”
Sunek’s underwhelmed question was directed at the rest of the Bounty’s crew, as he pointed at the small dirty brown stone in the middle of the large cavern they were standing in. They had beamed in a few moments ago, having arrived in orbit of the unassuming planetoid that the map had directed them to. And it hadn’t taken long to locate the Stone of Unity.
Such that it was.
“I…guess so,” Jirel shrugged, cautiously stepping up to the small plinth that the stone was positioned on.
He tentatively reached out a hand and then paused when his fingers were inches away from grasping the stone, glancing around the seemingly featureless cavern with an edge of concern.
“Um, this is probably fine, right? Just…picking it up like this?”
“Psh, what?” Sunek yawned, “You think we’re about to trip some sort of dumb booby trap in here? I don’t think the program’s that badly written.” *
Jirel stole a guilty glance back at Natasha, who shook her head in the direction of the Vulcan.
“Not now, Sunek.”
The Bounty’s pilot scrunched up his face in confusion, as Jirel returned his attention to the unassuming Stone of Unity in front of him. He licked his lips, ignored the fresh itching sensation he was getting from his spots, and gently reached forwards and lifted the stone from the plinth, his face contorting into a grimace as he did so, in anticipation of whatever awful thing was about to happen.
But nothing did happen. He just successfully retrieved the Stone of Unity from the plinth, and held it up in his hands.
“Huh,” he said, turning back to the others, “That was—”
The stun blast from the phaser hit the Trill squarely in the back.
He slumped to the ground still holding the stone, with barely enough energy to cough out the end of his planned sentence.
“—Easy.”
A split second later, the five unerringly familiar caricatures that made up the crew of the Starship Bounty emerged from the shadows at the rear of the cavern. The already-shirtless Captain Jirel held a disconcertingly long-barrelled phaser in his hand. Inexplicably, despite the fact that it was a pure energy weapon, a small wisp of smoke snaked up from the end of the barrel.
“Hey there,” the Adonis of a Trill grinned, flashing his pearly white teeth at the other crew, “Don’t mind us, we’re just here for the Stone of Unity.”
Behind him, Sunek stood stoically with his fingers steepled in front of him. The gargantuan armoured Klath growled menacingly with his crimson eyes trained on them. Denella winked lustily at each of the real Bounty’s crew in turn. And the version of Natasha in the silver catsuit quivered in fear at the dangerous situation they were in.
“A trap!” the real Klath growled, baring his fangs and assuming a defensive pose in anticipation of the fight that was surely about to happen.
“What the hell?!” Denella called out into the ether, “Guys? Where was the warning?”
No response was forthcoming from their unseen Wadi guides. Denella felt a sudden unsettling feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Um, guys?” she called out again, “You there?”
Eventually, a reply came. Calla’s voice had a distinctly cold tone to it.
“We know.”
“Know what?” Natasha responded.
“W—We know why you want our help,” Devro chimed in, nervously but equally coldly, “Why you’re so desperate to win.”
“You want to delete the program!” Jarro called out, with angered betrayal.
Denella glanced around at the remaining conscious Bounty crewmates. Klath’s focus was still on their opponents. Natasha couldn’t muster more than a shrug. Sunek was yawning.
Still, it seemed that their secret was out.
“That’s…” Denella began, before immediately finding that she had no defence to offer.
“This guy called Martus Mazur told us everything,” Calla continued, “You’re doing all this because you want the whole Captain Jirel library wiped!”
“All our favourite programs!” Jarro’s voice snapped, “Every last adventure!”
“A—And we need these programs,” Devro added.
“But,” Natasha replied, picking up the case for the defence, “We’re only doing that because we—”
“We don’t wanna hear it!” Calla snapped, “And from now on, you’re on your own!”
“No, wait!” Denella called out, “You don’t need these stupid programs, ok? You’re all better than this, that’s pretty clear. These characters you love? They’re not heroes. They’re just stupid bullies, running around in a great big overpowered spaceship. That’s not heroic!”
“Exactly!” Natasha nodded, “And these stories, they’re contrived, and confusing, and riddled with plot holes that don’t make any sense!”
“And I haven’t worn robes for years! My fashion sense is way better than—!”
“Shut up, Sunek!”
As they continued their ailing pitch to their outside assistance, the comms link went dead with a sudden burst of static. And like that, their eyes and ears guiding them through the fictitious world they were in were gone.
“Mazur,” Klath grumbled.
“No time to worry about that,” Denella sighed, turning her attention back to the swaggering, sneering, winking group of doppelgangers in their midst, “We need to—”
The entire cavern began to shake under their feet. Chunks of rock rained down from above.
“What the hell’s happening now?!” Sunek cried out as he jumped out of the way of a particularly large chunk of falling debris.
“Intriguing,” his doppelganger offered with a significantly more measured tone, “It appears to be a tremor of some kind. Based on the consistent frequency of the energy wave, it is plausible that the source is artificial in nature—”
“I still hate you!” the non-traditional Vulcan fired back at the substantially more traditional one, who merely raised an eyebrow in the direction of this comment.
“Come on team,” the still-shirtless, phaser-wielding Captain Jirel boomed out over the crashes of the falling rocks, “Let’s get what we came for!”
“Klath!” the real Denella called out, “Let’s go!”
With relish, the Klingon raced forwards alongside the Orion. But as soon as they started forwards, the tremors all around them increased in intensity, bringing an enormous chunk of rock down from above, straight in front of them, blocking their path.
Natasha struggled to keep her own footing as the cavern shook more fiercely. She stumbled again as she heard voices crying out amidst the carnage.
“Let’s go, gang!” Captain Jirel called out.
“Help me!” she heard her own doppelganger scream.
“Sunek!” the real Denella bellowed, “Get us the hell out of here!”
Before she could react any further, the ground shook even more. This time, and not for the first time since she’d stepped foot inside the holosuite, she found herself helplessly tumbling to the ground.
She just about managed to look up as she lay prostrate on the ground, in time to see a small piece of rock falling directly towards her head.
And then she left Captain Jirel and the Stone of Unity far behind, as she succumbed to unconsciousness.
End of Part Three
* - Again, you'd never catch something that implausible happening to the real Bounty crew. Ahem. No, siree.
Part Four
“This was a stupid idea.”
Jarro and Devro looked glumly over at Calla as they stood in the bare confines of the holosuite they had all headed for. In front of them, the floating selection screen displayed the full searchable list of Captain Jirel and the Starship Bounty programs. Even though they had played them a dozen times or more each, they usually still found one particular one they wanted to revisit.
Apart from now, it seemed.
Now, even though they had retreated to this sanctuary to get over the shocking information Martus Mazur had given them, none of them seemed all that interested in actually playing any of the programs on the list.
The names of the adventures scrolled past. Captain Jirel and the Bolian's Curse. Captain Jirel and the Seductress of Delta IV. Captain Jirel and the Wrath of the Candle’s Ghost. But none of the teenage trio paid them much attention.
“Yeah,” Devro sighed, “I guess…I don’t really feel like playing this game right now.”
Jarro looked down at the ground and idly kicked at the floor of the holosuite with his sandy brown shoe.
“I…kinda preferred what we were doing,” he muttered at the others, “When we were, y’know, actually helping the crew of the Bounty.”
“But they lied to us,” Calla pointed out.
“T—Technically, they didn’t,” Devro offered with a thoughtful expression, “I mean, they never really told us why they were trying to win. So they never really told a lie.”
Calla shook her head in the direction of her impossibly pedantic friend.
“Ugh. You are such a Sunek.”
“Hey!”
“Still,” Jarro shrugged, even as Devro tried to move past the cutting insult, “It kinda felt more real. What we were doing. More real than…that.”
He gestured at the scrolling list of Captain Jirel adventures in front of them, each title accompanied by a three-dimensional title card featuring the preposterous-looking crew of the Starship Bounty in some sort of vaguely heroic pose.
“A—And they did seem really unhappy with how they were being portrayed,” Devro nodded, “Which…I guess I can understand.”
On cue, the scrolling menu presented a title card depicting the mute, snarling Klath, the shirtless muscleman Jirel, the catsuit-wearing Natasha, the impassive robe-clad Sunek and the barely-clothed Denella.
“Yeah,” Jarro sighed in agreement, “He really hates those robes…”
Calla rolled her eyes, then looked a little more serious.
“But then…now we’ve actually met them, and talked to them, I guess I’ve been thinking about how I’d feel if something like this happened to me, y’know?”
Devro and Jarro looked back at the caricatures in front of them thoughtfully.
“But,” Jarro sighed, “I don’t know if I’d wanna lose all this. We all like this game, right?”
“I dunno,” Devro sighed even more deeply, “I—I guess I used to…”
As they pondered their situation, the holosuite interface seemed to grow tired of simply cycling through the menu of available adventures, and instead moved on to a full three-dimensional holographic advertising pitch at its indecisive audience.
From the gaggle of holographic Starship Bounty crew members, Captain Jirel stepped forwards and struck a particularly heroic pose.
“Hey there, brave space adventurers. Have you got what it takes to be part of this crew?”
He gestured back at the familiar group of teeth-snarling, hip-shimmying, eyebrow-raising, catsuit-wearing individuals behind him.
“Because Captain Jirel and the Starship Bounty needs you!”
The muscly Trill in the cheaply designed advert pointed straight out in front of him, which was just to the right of where the three teenagers were actually standing. Martus Mazur hadn’t seen the need to pay the extra latinum for the intelligent sensor add-on which would have allowed the holographic advert to track the audience’s exact position.
“We need people who are willing to challenge themselves,” Captain Jirel continued, “To defeat the most dangerous of enemies. To solve the most unsolvable puzzles. To face down the worst that the galaxy has to throw at them. And, along the way, to always…get the girl.”
He flashed his perfect teeth at the empty space he was facing, as the holographic Natasha stepped forwards and draped herself lovingly over his arm. Calla’s eyes rolled for the second time in quick succession.
“So,” he added, “Will you answer the call? Have you got what we need?”
He paused again for effect, and jabbed his finger out into the vicinity of a location nearby where his audience were standing.
“Have you got what it takes…to be a hero?”
As the holographic advert concluded and the five Starship Bounty crew members froze in their positions, Calla, Devro and Jarro all considered his oddly prescient final words.
****************************
Natasha regained consciousness to find her world still in chaos. Up seemed to be down, down seemed to be sideways, and all the while she was being bounced and wrenched from side to side by her own momentum.
It took her aching brain a moment to figure out what was happening.
The last thing she remembered, she had been inside the unimpressive cavern of the Stone of Unity, which had been in the middle of some sort of destructive tremor. But she slowly came to realise that her current chaotic state wasn’t being caused by any seismic activity.
She was bouncing around on Klath’s left shoulder, where she had been unceremoniously flung over in an improvised fireman’s lift, as the Klingon warrior paced down the Bounty’s main corridor towards the cockpit.
It appeared that, despite her state of unconsciousness, they had made their escape. And, without even meaning to, she had once again been playing the damsel in distress.
“Hey!” she cried out, thumping Klath squarely on the back a couple of times, “I’m awake! Let me down!”
Feeling more irritated than hurt by the thumps to his back, Klath momentarily paused in order to set her back down on the deck of the corridor.
“I don’t need rescuing, ok?” she snapped at the Klingon as she smoothed her tunic top down and attempted to reclaim a modicum of dignity.
“You were unconscious,” Klath pointed out flatly.
“I was—!”
Natasha stopped herself, realising that she was running the risk of appearing ungrateful. Not to mention that she didn’t really have a retort to Klath’s rather logical point.
“What happened?” she settled on eventually, electing to quickly change the subject.
The response came from Denella, who stuck her head out of the Bounty’s cockpit at the top of the steps ahead of them.
“We lost that stupid Stone of Unity. And that stupid captain of ours.”
“How?” Natasha asked.
“The Bizarros took him,” Sunek called out from inside the cockpit, “And they’re already on their way to the finish line.”
Natasha’s eyes widened as the full details of what she had missed began to dawn on her. Then, just as she was about to rush towards the cockpit, she was interrupted by a new voice.
“Unhand me, you brute!”
For the first time since regaining consciousness, she looked over to see the catsuit-wearing version of her dangling precariously over Klath’s other shoulder. Having now regained consciousness herself, she was now helplessly kicking her legs in the air in a tragicomic attempt to fight back.
“Wh—? What the hell is she doing here?!” the real Natasha snapped with fresh indignation.
“She was also unconscious,” Klath offered, ignoring the flailing red-haired woman writhing impotently on his right shoulder.
“She got cut off from her crew as the cavern collapsed,” Denella added for clarity, “And then she fainted. So, seeing as they took Jirel, we figured we could use a…hostage.”
Natasha glared at the Orion, then the Klingon, then the still kicking and screaming woman over Klath’s shoulder.
“I’m not sure how comfortable I am keeping…myself hostage.”
“You’ve made a big mistake!” her doppelganger suddenly blurted out, “Captain Jirel won’t stand for this! He’s the bravest captain in the galaxy! He’ll save me!”
The real Natasha’s glare strengthened in intensity.
“At the very least, can I give her a sedative?”
“Guys!” Sunek called out again, “I really, really don’t like being the one saying that we need to do some work, but the Bizarros are getting away!”
The rest of the Bounty’s crew snapped back into business mode, and Natasha and Klath raced to join the others in the cockpit, where Sunek was already piloting the Bounty at warp. Natasha and Denella immediately took up position at their stations, while Klath dropped the other version of Natasha to her feet and pointed for her to sit on a fold-out seat at the back of the cockpit, with a stern enough look to convince her to do it without further complaint.
“We’re really screwed here guys,” the Vulcan continued, “Not only did they get the jump on us back there, that big stupid ship of theirs is way faster than us. And they’re heading straight for the coordinates of the finish point.”
Denella grimaced in renewed frustration, even as Sunek swung around in his seat and idly gestured to the heavens.
“Guess we really shouldn’t have pissed off the only folks around here who actually knew what they were doing, huh?”
“That’s not helping,” the Orion sighed back, as she watched any hope she had of winning disappear off into the distance on sensors.
“Either way, they’ve won,” the Vulcan shrugged, “We’ve got no cards left to play.”
Natasha suddenly snapped her head up from her own instruments.
“Wait, no, we do have a card left to play,” she retorted, “We’ve got something they’ll need before they finish their mission.”
“What?” Klath grunted.
“We’ve got her,” Natasha pointed at her quivering alter ego, “And we’re dealing with such a cliched mess of a program that there’s no way that heroic all-action crew are going to let the damsel in distress remain un-rescued.”
“You sure about that?” Denella asked.
“As sure as this is the worst-written holosuite program I’ve ever come across,” she nodded with certainty, “So, let’s open hailing frequencies and…bait the trap.”
From the fold-out seat she was sitting on, the other Natasha called out in a rare show of defiance.
“Yes! That’s right! Captain Jirel will rescue me, you’ll see! Because he loves me! And I love him! Despite all those times he went with that filthy Orion temptress! And that time he went with those Betazoid twins! And that time he went several times with that group of Dabo girls!”
The four members of the Bounty’s crew stared back at her as she completed her unnecessary speech. And then the real Natasha elected to respond.
“Shut up, Natasha.”
“This was a stupid idea.”
Jarro and Devro looked glumly over at Calla as they stood in the bare confines of the holosuite they had all headed for. In front of them, the floating selection screen displayed the full searchable list of Captain Jirel and the Starship Bounty programs. Even though they had played them a dozen times or more each, they usually still found one particular one they wanted to revisit.
Apart from now, it seemed.
Now, even though they had retreated to this sanctuary to get over the shocking information Martus Mazur had given them, none of them seemed all that interested in actually playing any of the programs on the list.
The names of the adventures scrolled past. Captain Jirel and the Bolian's Curse. Captain Jirel and the Seductress of Delta IV. Captain Jirel and the Wrath of the Candle’s Ghost. But none of the teenage trio paid them much attention.
“Yeah,” Devro sighed, “I guess…I don’t really feel like playing this game right now.”
Jarro looked down at the ground and idly kicked at the floor of the holosuite with his sandy brown shoe.
“I…kinda preferred what we were doing,” he muttered at the others, “When we were, y’know, actually helping the crew of the Bounty.”
“But they lied to us,” Calla pointed out.
“T—Technically, they didn’t,” Devro offered with a thoughtful expression, “I mean, they never really told us why they were trying to win. So they never really told a lie.”
Calla shook her head in the direction of her impossibly pedantic friend.
“Ugh. You are such a Sunek.”
“Hey!”
“Still,” Jarro shrugged, even as Devro tried to move past the cutting insult, “It kinda felt more real. What we were doing. More real than…that.”
He gestured at the scrolling list of Captain Jirel adventures in front of them, each title accompanied by a three-dimensional title card featuring the preposterous-looking crew of the Starship Bounty in some sort of vaguely heroic pose.
“A—And they did seem really unhappy with how they were being portrayed,” Devro nodded, “Which…I guess I can understand.”
On cue, the scrolling menu presented a title card depicting the mute, snarling Klath, the shirtless muscleman Jirel, the catsuit-wearing Natasha, the impassive robe-clad Sunek and the barely-clothed Denella.
“Yeah,” Jarro sighed in agreement, “He really hates those robes…”
Calla rolled her eyes, then looked a little more serious.
“But then…now we’ve actually met them, and talked to them, I guess I’ve been thinking about how I’d feel if something like this happened to me, y’know?”
Devro and Jarro looked back at the caricatures in front of them thoughtfully.
“But,” Jarro sighed, “I don’t know if I’d wanna lose all this. We all like this game, right?”
“I dunno,” Devro sighed even more deeply, “I—I guess I used to…”
As they pondered their situation, the holosuite interface seemed to grow tired of simply cycling through the menu of available adventures, and instead moved on to a full three-dimensional holographic advertising pitch at its indecisive audience.
From the gaggle of holographic Starship Bounty crew members, Captain Jirel stepped forwards and struck a particularly heroic pose.
“Hey there, brave space adventurers. Have you got what it takes to be part of this crew?”
He gestured back at the familiar group of teeth-snarling, hip-shimmying, eyebrow-raising, catsuit-wearing individuals behind him.
“Because Captain Jirel and the Starship Bounty needs you!”
The muscly Trill in the cheaply designed advert pointed straight out in front of him, which was just to the right of where the three teenagers were actually standing. Martus Mazur hadn’t seen the need to pay the extra latinum for the intelligent sensor add-on which would have allowed the holographic advert to track the audience’s exact position.
“We need people who are willing to challenge themselves,” Captain Jirel continued, “To defeat the most dangerous of enemies. To solve the most unsolvable puzzles. To face down the worst that the galaxy has to throw at them. And, along the way, to always…get the girl.”
He flashed his perfect teeth at the empty space he was facing, as the holographic Natasha stepped forwards and draped herself lovingly over his arm. Calla’s eyes rolled for the second time in quick succession.
“So,” he added, “Will you answer the call? Have you got what we need?”
He paused again for effect, and jabbed his finger out into the vicinity of a location nearby where his audience were standing.
“Have you got what it takes…to be a hero?”
As the holographic advert concluded and the five Starship Bounty crew members froze in their positions, Calla, Devro and Jarro all considered his oddly prescient final words.
****************************
Natasha regained consciousness to find her world still in chaos. Up seemed to be down, down seemed to be sideways, and all the while she was being bounced and wrenched from side to side by her own momentum.
It took her aching brain a moment to figure out what was happening.
The last thing she remembered, she had been inside the unimpressive cavern of the Stone of Unity, which had been in the middle of some sort of destructive tremor. But she slowly came to realise that her current chaotic state wasn’t being caused by any seismic activity.
She was bouncing around on Klath’s left shoulder, where she had been unceremoniously flung over in an improvised fireman’s lift, as the Klingon warrior paced down the Bounty’s main corridor towards the cockpit.
It appeared that, despite her state of unconsciousness, they had made their escape. And, without even meaning to, she had once again been playing the damsel in distress.
“Hey!” she cried out, thumping Klath squarely on the back a couple of times, “I’m awake! Let me down!”
Feeling more irritated than hurt by the thumps to his back, Klath momentarily paused in order to set her back down on the deck of the corridor.
“I don’t need rescuing, ok?” she snapped at the Klingon as she smoothed her tunic top down and attempted to reclaim a modicum of dignity.
“You were unconscious,” Klath pointed out flatly.
“I was—!”
Natasha stopped herself, realising that she was running the risk of appearing ungrateful. Not to mention that she didn’t really have a retort to Klath’s rather logical point.
“What happened?” she settled on eventually, electing to quickly change the subject.
The response came from Denella, who stuck her head out of the Bounty’s cockpit at the top of the steps ahead of them.
“We lost that stupid Stone of Unity. And that stupid captain of ours.”
“How?” Natasha asked.
“The Bizarros took him,” Sunek called out from inside the cockpit, “And they’re already on their way to the finish line.”
Natasha’s eyes widened as the full details of what she had missed began to dawn on her. Then, just as she was about to rush towards the cockpit, she was interrupted by a new voice.
“Unhand me, you brute!”
For the first time since regaining consciousness, she looked over to see the catsuit-wearing version of her dangling precariously over Klath’s other shoulder. Having now regained consciousness herself, she was now helplessly kicking her legs in the air in a tragicomic attempt to fight back.
“Wh—? What the hell is she doing here?!” the real Natasha snapped with fresh indignation.
“She was also unconscious,” Klath offered, ignoring the flailing red-haired woman writhing impotently on his right shoulder.
“She got cut off from her crew as the cavern collapsed,” Denella added for clarity, “And then she fainted. So, seeing as they took Jirel, we figured we could use a…hostage.”
Natasha glared at the Orion, then the Klingon, then the still kicking and screaming woman over Klath’s shoulder.
“I’m not sure how comfortable I am keeping…myself hostage.”
“You’ve made a big mistake!” her doppelganger suddenly blurted out, “Captain Jirel won’t stand for this! He’s the bravest captain in the galaxy! He’ll save me!”
The real Natasha’s glare strengthened in intensity.
“At the very least, can I give her a sedative?”
“Guys!” Sunek called out again, “I really, really don’t like being the one saying that we need to do some work, but the Bizarros are getting away!”
The rest of the Bounty’s crew snapped back into business mode, and Natasha and Klath raced to join the others in the cockpit, where Sunek was already piloting the Bounty at warp. Natasha and Denella immediately took up position at their stations, while Klath dropped the other version of Natasha to her feet and pointed for her to sit on a fold-out seat at the back of the cockpit, with a stern enough look to convince her to do it without further complaint.
“We’re really screwed here guys,” the Vulcan continued, “Not only did they get the jump on us back there, that big stupid ship of theirs is way faster than us. And they’re heading straight for the coordinates of the finish point.”
Denella grimaced in renewed frustration, even as Sunek swung around in his seat and idly gestured to the heavens.
“Guess we really shouldn’t have pissed off the only folks around here who actually knew what they were doing, huh?”
“That’s not helping,” the Orion sighed back, as she watched any hope she had of winning disappear off into the distance on sensors.
“Either way, they’ve won,” the Vulcan shrugged, “We’ve got no cards left to play.”
Natasha suddenly snapped her head up from her own instruments.
“Wait, no, we do have a card left to play,” she retorted, “We’ve got something they’ll need before they finish their mission.”
“What?” Klath grunted.
“We’ve got her,” Natasha pointed at her quivering alter ego, “And we’re dealing with such a cliched mess of a program that there’s no way that heroic all-action crew are going to let the damsel in distress remain un-rescued.”
“You sure about that?” Denella asked.
“As sure as this is the worst-written holosuite program I’ve ever come across,” she nodded with certainty, “So, let’s open hailing frequencies and…bait the trap.”
From the fold-out seat she was sitting on, the other Natasha called out in a rare show of defiance.
“Yes! That’s right! Captain Jirel will rescue me, you’ll see! Because he loves me! And I love him! Despite all those times he went with that filthy Orion temptress! And that time he went with those Betazoid twins! And that time he went several times with that group of Dabo girls!”
The four members of the Bounty’s crew stared back at her as she completed her unnecessary speech. And then the real Natasha elected to respond.
“Shut up, Natasha.”
Classic.
Part Four (Cont'd)
Jirel slowly regained consciousness to find that he wasn’t in the cavern of the Stone of Unity any more either.
It didn’t take long for him to take in his situation. This wasn’t the first time he’d had to wake up from the aftereffects of a stun blast, after all.
He was sitting, shackled to a chair. In the middle of a huge expansive room, with dark metal walls adorned with all manner of seemingly useless jutting sharp edges, panels and control surfaces.
It equally didn’t take an expert on starship aesthetics to realise that he must be onboard the oddly inefficient Starship Bounty.
He pushed through his post-stun grogginess, making a mental note to at least congratulate the program’s designers on a thoroughly realistic stun effect, and began to wrestle with the restraints binding his wrists behind his back. As he worked, he heard a door open behind him, and several sets of footsteps enter the room.
“Ah, good, he’s awake,” the improbably deep voice of his doppelganger boomed out as they approached, “Maybe we can get some answers from him.”
“I doubt it,” Jirel called back, meeting the evident bravado of his opponent with his usual levels of faux bravado, “I’m kinda stupid.”
He continued to work on his bonds, even as his captors emerged from behind him and into his eyeline. The quartet of now unerringly familiar characters lined up in front of him, with the beaming face of Captain Jirel at the forefront.
“I can definitely believe that,” he replied, “Because you and your crew just did something really, really stupid.”
Pausing his efforts to free himself, the visibly scrawnier Trill scrunched up his face in thought.
“You’re gonna have to narrow it down,” he replied eventually, and with total sincerity.
“They just took my girl from me,” Captain Jirel responded darkly, before pausing for a moment to strike a heroic pose so extreme, it looked like he was about to strain a muscle or two, “And when someone does that, which they very often do, we stop at nothing to rescue her!”
For further effect, he ended his short speech by heroically pulling off his top.
“Oh, come on,” the restrained Jirel tutted.
After a short round of heroic flexing for further effect, Captain Jirel pointed a finger squarely at the real Jirel.
“And I think you know what their whole dastardly scheme is. So, time to tell us everything. If you know what’s good for you…”
“Honestly,” Jirel sighed back, “I don’t know…anything, really. What they’re doing. Where they are. Why I’m in this stupid program. Why the hell you keep taking off your—”
“Captain Jirel,” the robe-wearing Sunek interrupted, stepping up to his shirtless captain, “I suggest that the logical action is for me to perform a mind meld on our prisoner, in an attempt to ascertain whether he has the information you require.”
“Hrm,” Captain Jirel mused thoughtfully,” If I recall, a Vulcan mind meld on a Trill is an exceptionally painful and invasive experience.”
“Quite painful, and deeply invasive,” Sunek nodded dispassionately.
Jirel mustered an audible gulp, and began to work twice as hard on his bonds.
“Or maybe,” Captain Jirel continued, with a flash of his pearly-white teeth, “We should see if Klath can…extract the information from him, hmm?”
Behind the Trill and the Vulcan, the eight-foot armour-plated Klingon growled with furious relish at that potential course of action.
Jirel’s second gulp was significantly more audible than his first.
“No,” the seductive voice of the final member of the group cut in.
The bikini-clad version of Denella slinked forward towards the restrained Trill and smiled with a look of undisguised lust.
“Leave him with me,” she purred at her crewmates, “I’ll have him talking in no time…”
Jirel’s third gulp was audible all the way across the sector.
****************************
“It’s practical.”
“Practical?! Tell me, ballpark figure, roughly how long does it take you to go to the bathroom with that thing on, hmm?”
The real Natasha stood her ground in front of her doppelganger, gesturing at the constricting silver catsuit the other red-haired woman was wearing.
Denella emitted yet another frustrated sigh as the somewhat derailed debate between the two versions of Natasha continued to fill the Bounty’s cockpit. Their efforts to get some useful information out of their fearful accidental captive in order to try and find a way to catch the other Bounty had somehow quickly turned into a clothing-based semantic argument.
“Um,” Sunek chimed in from the pilot’s seat, “It’s a holosuite, doc. They don’t go to the bathroom.”
“Can we at least try and focus?” Denella managed, trying to keep her exasperation in check, “We’ve got bigger problems here. The other Bounty is getting away, we’ve lost our guides on the outside who actually know what the hell this game is all about, and clearly she doesn’t know anything that’s gonna help us. She’s just a floozy in a stupid outfit!”
“Hang on,” Sunek couldn’t help but grin, gesturing to the two Natashas in turn, “Which one are we talking about here?”
The real Natasha glanced at the smiling Vulcan with her usual level of withering disdain.
“Shut up, Su—”
“Hello?”
The unexpected, and yet familiar, voice that came out from the static-filled comms link brought the developing argument to a sudden end. Denella’s eyes lit up.
“Calla?” she called out, “Is that you? Are you back?”
“Yes,” the response came, “We’re all back.”
“W—We thought about it,” Devro chimed in,” And…we wanna help you. Help you win.”
“Even if it means…losing our favourite program,” Jarro concluded.
“Why?” the Orion felt compelled to ask.
There was a long pause. Long enough that Denella began to worry that she’d just managed to talk them out of any more help with one inquisitive question. Mercifully, Calla’s voice finally returned.
“Because…I guess you were right. Captain Jirel and his crew kinda are bullies. And we don’t wanna be that. We wanna be heroes. Even if…we’ll never be warriors.”
Klath snapped his head up from his console, suddenly feeling the eyes of the rest of the crew on him, and recalling his harsh words to Calla earlier.
“Thank you,” he grunted back, with a modicum of reluctance.
Denella managed a patient smile and a shake of her head at the ever-uptight Klingon, then turned her attention back to the more pressing issue.
“I’m afraid you might be too late,” she called back to the Wadi youngsters, “The other crew have the stone, and our Jirel, and they’re a hell of a lot faster than we are.”
“They will be at the designated final location in one point two hours,” Klath noted.
“Huh,” Jarro’s voice tutted over the comms link, “Interesting.”
“Any ideas?” Natasha asked, “I mean, what normally happens in these programs when the characters are up against this sort of problem?”
“W—Well,” Devro replied, “I guess…usually, someone comes up with some clever engineering solution. And it just sort of…works.”
That seemingly unhelpful suggestion nevertheless provoked a sudden cackle of laughter from the cockpit, as Sunek jumped up from the pilot’s seat and raced over to Denella’s engineering console, his eyes twinkling with understanding.
“Of course!” he laughed, “That’s it!”
“What?” the Orion engineer shrugged back at him, “There’s nothing we can do. That other ship’s travelling at Warp 97 of something stupid. I can’t change the laws of physics!”
“Yes, you can,” Sunek countered, “Cos you’re not in the real world. You’re in a dumb, badly-written holosuite program!”
The others continued to stare blankly at their excited pilot.
“I…do not understand,” Klath offered, on everyone’s behalf.
“Ugh. It’s simple! Just, I dunno…reroute auxiliary power through an iterative feedback circuit and then channel that burst of energy directly into the warp core!”
Denella’s blank stare remained definitively in place.
“Those words in that order don’t make any sense,” the engineer replied eventually, “What are you even talking about?”
“I dunno,” Sunek shrugged, “But I’m pretty sure that’s what this stupid program will think we’re doing. So just start pressing buttons!”
The Vulcan’s wiry fingers darted across one side of the engineering panel, perplexing Denella even further.
“But those controls are for the environmental systems in the cargo bay—”
“Don’t think, just press buttons! And while we're at it, I’m gonna run a recursive algorithm through the warp engines. Should boost their efficiency even further.”
He paused for a second and glanced at the perplexed Orion to his side.
“Just so you know, this is how you engineers sound to the rest of us all the time.”
“He’s right,” Jarro’s voice jumped in.
“Hey!” Devro retorted.
Denella looked back at Natasha, who just shrugged in acceptance. With another sigh, the Orion dutifully began to tap her bank of controls without any clear rhyme or reason.
“Our speed is increasing,” Klath reported immediately, “We are gaining on the other vessel.”
“Perfect, see?” Sunek continued to grin, “And while we’re at it, we’re gonna need something to take them down when we get there. So, Klath, you should couple a theta-band energy matrix to the phaser cannons. Should give ‘em some extra punch, right?”
The Klingon’s rigid brow furrowed even more than usual at the Vulcan, who appeared to be spouting even more nonsense than usual. But he eventually shrugged his burly shoulders and pressed a single button on his console with a thick finger.
“Done,” he reported with a nod.
“See?” Sunek persisted, gesturing around their holographic environment, “We’ve been acting like we’re still out in the real world. But we’re not! We’re in a dumb holosuite adventure written by idiots! Which means we can do what we like!”
“It will not be enough,” Klath growled as he checked his console, “Even at our new speed, the other Bounty will reach their destination twelve minutes before we intercept them.”
The excitable grin on Sunek’s face vanished in an instant.
“Welp,” he shrugged, setting a new record for how quickly he had given up on something, “We tried our best. Guess we’d better get used to being galactic celebrities—”
“Not if I can help it,” Denella growled, calling out to the comms link again, “Hey, Devro, you wanna use that engineering skill of yours for a little heroic mission?”
“Um,” the nervous reply came, “Like what?”
“Like something we should have done a long time ago. Call it…Plan B.”
“You gonna get him to shoot a torpedo into the computer core?” Sunek smirked.
“Not quite,” the Orion countered.
“Hang on,” Natasha jumped in, gesturing to Sunek with renewed urgency, “Can all this nonsense you’re talking work on the transporter as well?”
“I guess so,” he shrugged, before his eyes lit up, “Hey, wanna see if we can get it to make us switch bodies so we can both learn valuable lessons about each other’s challenges in life, while also totally checking out each other’s—”
“Ok,” Natasha continued quickly, “And we just need to slow the other Bounty down.”
“You got a Plan B as well?” Denella asked.
“I have. I think that…if we run the pattern buffer of the main transporter circuit through a tertiary power compiler, and then use the electromagnetic field of a nearby neutron star to boost the signal range of the main transmission matrix—”
“Absolute gibberish,” the Orion sighed to herself.
“—we should have just enough to beam someone all the way over to their ship.”
“Ok,” Sunek shrugged, buying the technical nonsense without question, “And then?”
Natasha looked over at the feeble version of herself quivering in her silver catsuit. The other Natasha’s eyes widened in fear as she saw the other woman’s dark glare.
“And then,” the real Natasha replied with a hint of discomfort, “We can send that other crew a little surprise…”
Jirel slowly regained consciousness to find that he wasn’t in the cavern of the Stone of Unity any more either.
It didn’t take long for him to take in his situation. This wasn’t the first time he’d had to wake up from the aftereffects of a stun blast, after all.
He was sitting, shackled to a chair. In the middle of a huge expansive room, with dark metal walls adorned with all manner of seemingly useless jutting sharp edges, panels and control surfaces.
It equally didn’t take an expert on starship aesthetics to realise that he must be onboard the oddly inefficient Starship Bounty.
He pushed through his post-stun grogginess, making a mental note to at least congratulate the program’s designers on a thoroughly realistic stun effect, and began to wrestle with the restraints binding his wrists behind his back. As he worked, he heard a door open behind him, and several sets of footsteps enter the room.
“Ah, good, he’s awake,” the improbably deep voice of his doppelganger boomed out as they approached, “Maybe we can get some answers from him.”
“I doubt it,” Jirel called back, meeting the evident bravado of his opponent with his usual levels of faux bravado, “I’m kinda stupid.”
He continued to work on his bonds, even as his captors emerged from behind him and into his eyeline. The quartet of now unerringly familiar characters lined up in front of him, with the beaming face of Captain Jirel at the forefront.
“I can definitely believe that,” he replied, “Because you and your crew just did something really, really stupid.”
Pausing his efforts to free himself, the visibly scrawnier Trill scrunched up his face in thought.
“You’re gonna have to narrow it down,” he replied eventually, and with total sincerity.
“They just took my girl from me,” Captain Jirel responded darkly, before pausing for a moment to strike a heroic pose so extreme, it looked like he was about to strain a muscle or two, “And when someone does that, which they very often do, we stop at nothing to rescue her!”
For further effect, he ended his short speech by heroically pulling off his top.
“Oh, come on,” the restrained Jirel tutted.
After a short round of heroic flexing for further effect, Captain Jirel pointed a finger squarely at the real Jirel.
“And I think you know what their whole dastardly scheme is. So, time to tell us everything. If you know what’s good for you…”
“Honestly,” Jirel sighed back, “I don’t know…anything, really. What they’re doing. Where they are. Why I’m in this stupid program. Why the hell you keep taking off your—”
“Captain Jirel,” the robe-wearing Sunek interrupted, stepping up to his shirtless captain, “I suggest that the logical action is for me to perform a mind meld on our prisoner, in an attempt to ascertain whether he has the information you require.”
“Hrm,” Captain Jirel mused thoughtfully,” If I recall, a Vulcan mind meld on a Trill is an exceptionally painful and invasive experience.”
“Quite painful, and deeply invasive,” Sunek nodded dispassionately.
Jirel mustered an audible gulp, and began to work twice as hard on his bonds.
“Or maybe,” Captain Jirel continued, with a flash of his pearly-white teeth, “We should see if Klath can…extract the information from him, hmm?”
Behind the Trill and the Vulcan, the eight-foot armour-plated Klingon growled with furious relish at that potential course of action.
Jirel’s second gulp was significantly more audible than his first.
“No,” the seductive voice of the final member of the group cut in.
The bikini-clad version of Denella slinked forward towards the restrained Trill and smiled with a look of undisguised lust.
“Leave him with me,” she purred at her crewmates, “I’ll have him talking in no time…”
Jirel’s third gulp was audible all the way across the sector.
****************************
“It’s practical.”
“Practical?! Tell me, ballpark figure, roughly how long does it take you to go to the bathroom with that thing on, hmm?”
The real Natasha stood her ground in front of her doppelganger, gesturing at the constricting silver catsuit the other red-haired woman was wearing.
Denella emitted yet another frustrated sigh as the somewhat derailed debate between the two versions of Natasha continued to fill the Bounty’s cockpit. Their efforts to get some useful information out of their fearful accidental captive in order to try and find a way to catch the other Bounty had somehow quickly turned into a clothing-based semantic argument.
“Um,” Sunek chimed in from the pilot’s seat, “It’s a holosuite, doc. They don’t go to the bathroom.”
“Can we at least try and focus?” Denella managed, trying to keep her exasperation in check, “We’ve got bigger problems here. The other Bounty is getting away, we’ve lost our guides on the outside who actually know what the hell this game is all about, and clearly she doesn’t know anything that’s gonna help us. She’s just a floozy in a stupid outfit!”
“Hang on,” Sunek couldn’t help but grin, gesturing to the two Natashas in turn, “Which one are we talking about here?”
The real Natasha glanced at the smiling Vulcan with her usual level of withering disdain.
“Shut up, Su—”
“Hello?”
The unexpected, and yet familiar, voice that came out from the static-filled comms link brought the developing argument to a sudden end. Denella’s eyes lit up.
“Calla?” she called out, “Is that you? Are you back?”
“Yes,” the response came, “We’re all back.”
“W—We thought about it,” Devro chimed in,” And…we wanna help you. Help you win.”
“Even if it means…losing our favourite program,” Jarro concluded.
“Why?” the Orion felt compelled to ask.
There was a long pause. Long enough that Denella began to worry that she’d just managed to talk them out of any more help with one inquisitive question. Mercifully, Calla’s voice finally returned.
“Because…I guess you were right. Captain Jirel and his crew kinda are bullies. And we don’t wanna be that. We wanna be heroes. Even if…we’ll never be warriors.”
Klath snapped his head up from his console, suddenly feeling the eyes of the rest of the crew on him, and recalling his harsh words to Calla earlier.
“Thank you,” he grunted back, with a modicum of reluctance.
Denella managed a patient smile and a shake of her head at the ever-uptight Klingon, then turned her attention back to the more pressing issue.
“I’m afraid you might be too late,” she called back to the Wadi youngsters, “The other crew have the stone, and our Jirel, and they’re a hell of a lot faster than we are.”
“They will be at the designated final location in one point two hours,” Klath noted.
“Huh,” Jarro’s voice tutted over the comms link, “Interesting.”
“Any ideas?” Natasha asked, “I mean, what normally happens in these programs when the characters are up against this sort of problem?”
“W—Well,” Devro replied, “I guess…usually, someone comes up with some clever engineering solution. And it just sort of…works.”
That seemingly unhelpful suggestion nevertheless provoked a sudden cackle of laughter from the cockpit, as Sunek jumped up from the pilot’s seat and raced over to Denella’s engineering console, his eyes twinkling with understanding.
“Of course!” he laughed, “That’s it!”
“What?” the Orion engineer shrugged back at him, “There’s nothing we can do. That other ship’s travelling at Warp 97 of something stupid. I can’t change the laws of physics!”
“Yes, you can,” Sunek countered, “Cos you’re not in the real world. You’re in a dumb, badly-written holosuite program!”
The others continued to stare blankly at their excited pilot.
“I…do not understand,” Klath offered, on everyone’s behalf.
“Ugh. It’s simple! Just, I dunno…reroute auxiliary power through an iterative feedback circuit and then channel that burst of energy directly into the warp core!”
Denella’s blank stare remained definitively in place.
“Those words in that order don’t make any sense,” the engineer replied eventually, “What are you even talking about?”
“I dunno,” Sunek shrugged, “But I’m pretty sure that’s what this stupid program will think we’re doing. So just start pressing buttons!”
The Vulcan’s wiry fingers darted across one side of the engineering panel, perplexing Denella even further.
“But those controls are for the environmental systems in the cargo bay—”
“Don’t think, just press buttons! And while we're at it, I’m gonna run a recursive algorithm through the warp engines. Should boost their efficiency even further.”
He paused for a second and glanced at the perplexed Orion to his side.
“Just so you know, this is how you engineers sound to the rest of us all the time.”
“He’s right,” Jarro’s voice jumped in.
“Hey!” Devro retorted.
Denella looked back at Natasha, who just shrugged in acceptance. With another sigh, the Orion dutifully began to tap her bank of controls without any clear rhyme or reason.
“Our speed is increasing,” Klath reported immediately, “We are gaining on the other vessel.”
“Perfect, see?” Sunek continued to grin, “And while we’re at it, we’re gonna need something to take them down when we get there. So, Klath, you should couple a theta-band energy matrix to the phaser cannons. Should give ‘em some extra punch, right?”
The Klingon’s rigid brow furrowed even more than usual at the Vulcan, who appeared to be spouting even more nonsense than usual. But he eventually shrugged his burly shoulders and pressed a single button on his console with a thick finger.
“Done,” he reported with a nod.
“See?” Sunek persisted, gesturing around their holographic environment, “We’ve been acting like we’re still out in the real world. But we’re not! We’re in a dumb holosuite adventure written by idiots! Which means we can do what we like!”
“It will not be enough,” Klath growled as he checked his console, “Even at our new speed, the other Bounty will reach their destination twelve minutes before we intercept them.”
The excitable grin on Sunek’s face vanished in an instant.
“Welp,” he shrugged, setting a new record for how quickly he had given up on something, “We tried our best. Guess we’d better get used to being galactic celebrities—”
“Not if I can help it,” Denella growled, calling out to the comms link again, “Hey, Devro, you wanna use that engineering skill of yours for a little heroic mission?”
“Um,” the nervous reply came, “Like what?”
“Like something we should have done a long time ago. Call it…Plan B.”
“You gonna get him to shoot a torpedo into the computer core?” Sunek smirked.
“Not quite,” the Orion countered.
“Hang on,” Natasha jumped in, gesturing to Sunek with renewed urgency, “Can all this nonsense you’re talking work on the transporter as well?”
“I guess so,” he shrugged, before his eyes lit up, “Hey, wanna see if we can get it to make us switch bodies so we can both learn valuable lessons about each other’s challenges in life, while also totally checking out each other’s—”
“Ok,” Natasha continued quickly, “And we just need to slow the other Bounty down.”
“You got a Plan B as well?” Denella asked.
“I have. I think that…if we run the pattern buffer of the main transporter circuit through a tertiary power compiler, and then use the electromagnetic field of a nearby neutron star to boost the signal range of the main transmission matrix—”
“Absolute gibberish,” the Orion sighed to herself.
“—we should have just enough to beam someone all the way over to their ship.”
“Ok,” Sunek shrugged, buying the technical nonsense without question, “And then?”
Natasha looked over at the feeble version of herself quivering in her silver catsuit. The other Natasha’s eyes widened in fear as she saw the other woman’s dark glare.
“And then,” the real Natasha replied with a hint of discomfort, “We can send that other crew a little surprise…”
Love the doubledown on Treknobabble... Somebody has GOT to reverse the polarity in all of this...
Thanks!! rbs
Thanks!! rbs
Part Four (Cont'd)
“Mmmmwmmrph!”
It was the best retort that Jirel could get out under the circumstances. Even as the twisted seductive temptress version of Denella continued to have her way with his prone and restrained body. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. As cliched and offensive as this version of Denella was, there was no doubting her skills in this particular area.
Before he could prepare himself, she devilishly lined herself up for another blow.
And thumped her balled-up fist straight into his stomach.
“Grmmwmmrph!”
Despite the presence of the holosuite safeties, each punch he had been subjected to was connecting well enough to cause him plenty of pain. He tried to focus his vision back on her as he gasped desperately for air.
“Y—You know,” he managed to cough, “I was expecting your interrogation technique to be a bit less…punchy than this—Brmmwmmrph!”
The bikini-clad Denella’s mouth curved into a satisfied smile, as she licked her lips and looked him up and down with relish.
“Mmm,” she purred, “If you don't like it, then just say the word and I’ll…spice things up a bit.”
With that, she extended one of her arms out, baring her long fingernails with relish. Before Jirel had a chance to prepare himself, she slashed at his face with precision aim, breaking the spotted skin with a quartet of slash marks.
“Ow!” the Trill winced as the pain registered, “Ugh, ok, I actually preferred the punches!”
“I do hope that means you’re still not prepared to talk,” the Orion temptress replied, “Because I’m really starting to enjoy this…”
For a moment, she simply stood in front of him and shimmied her hips slightly. Then, just as Jirel was recovering from the latest assault, another fist slammed into his midriff.
“Hmmmwmmrph!” he choked, “Ok…I kinda don’t…prefer either of them…”
His tormentor simply chuckled back at his discomfort, as she idly pulled out a small implement from somewhere on her scant outfit and began to file her already-sharpened nails.
“You don’t need to play so hard to get you know,” she offered, “Just give us the information we need and this'll all be over, honey.”
Jirel gasped a few more times to catch his breath, then focused back on her.
“Look, I’m telling you, if I knew anything, at all, about anything, I’d have told you already. Believe me, I’ve caved under a lot less torture than this.”
“Is that the truth?” she asked with an arched eyebrow as she buffed another nail.
“One hundred percent,” the bleeding Trill nodded back, “Space scout’s honour!”
The Orion woman paused in her impromptu manicure to consider his plea for a thoughtful moment, before she spirited the file away as quickly as she had produced it.
“Hmm,” she mused, “I think someone’s just playing hard to get, aren’t you?”
“I’m really not.”
“Such a naughty, naughty boy…”
“And please stop saying th—Shmmwmmrph!”
The latest punch was delivered with extra relish, and enough force for Jirel’s vision to briefly flare with white heat, holosuite safeties or no holosuite safeties.
Just as he felt as though he was about to lapse into unconsciousness for the second time since the game had started, he caught the sound of a familiar voice.
“Hey now, go easy on him, Denella. There’s no need for all that, after all.”
The Orion paused, just as she was readying her next attack. Her hungry expression turned into something closer to a frustrated pout.
“But I’m really enjoying myself,” she replied.
Jirel managed to shake himself back into full cognisance as the now mercifully fully-clothed Captain Jirel arrived in his eyeline, with the unexpected form of Natasha, catsuit and all, now hanging off one of his enormous arms.
“Yeah, but we don’t need that info after all,” the overly-muscled Trill smiled, gesturing to his lover, “Because look who we got back.”
He smiled lustfully down at the fragile woman on his arm, and she smiled back with wide, welcoming eyes.
“How did she get back?” Denella asked, reluctantly taking a step back from the bruised version of Jirel tied to the chair.
“The other crew beamed her back over. Tried to make it look like they were giving up, sending her back over as a peace token.”
“How did they manage to complete the transport from such a range?” the bikini-wearing engineer felt compelled to ask.
“Unclear. But Sunek has a theory that they must’ve run the pattern buffer of their main transporter circuit through a tertiary power compiler, and then—”
“Used the electromagnetic field of a nearby neutron star to boost the signal range of the main transmission matrix,” Denella gasped, completing her captain’s sentence, “Of course!”
“My head hurts,” the real Jirel moaned from his incapacitated position.
“But,” Captain Jirel added with a slightly more tensed jaw, “However they did it, they also beamed over something else.”
“I had no idea what it was,” Natasha meekly offered as she clung tightly to her lover’s bicep, “They told me it was a lovely present. For all of us.”
“Well,” Captain Jirel chuckled, nodding a patronising look at the woman on his arm, “It’s a good job that Sunek is a little less naive than this sweet little thing. Took that Vulcan brain of his about five seconds to figure out that it was a bomb.”
Without warning, Denella stepped back over to the real Jirel and slapped him sharply across his already-bloodied face.
“Ow!” he cried out.
“That’s for your crew being so naughty!” the Orion growled at him.
Before the increasingly disorientated Jirel could muster any sort of response, his doppelganger stepped over to him triumphantly, his version of Natasha still submissively hanging off his arm as he moved.
“Still,” he beamed through his perfect teeth, “Looks like we’ve bravely and heroically won this little adventure. We’ve got the Stone of Unity, we’re almost home, and I’ve even got my woman back just where I like her to be.”
The red-haired woman smiled coquettishly as Captain Jirel took a moment to look her up and down with ill-concealed desire. He placed his hand on her hip and pulled her in closer.
“Um, guys,” the tied-up Jirel coughed, “If you’ve won, any chance you could let me get out of here before the orgy starts?”
Captain Jirel ignored him, and focused on leering at his woman. Natasha allowed herself to be pulled in closer, and gently ran a hand up her man’s bulging chest.
“Oh,” she replied breathlessly, “Just hearing you say that, it makes me want to…”
The crunching sound of Natasha’s knee impacting between Captain Jirel’s legs echoed around the expanse of the room with enough volume to make both the real Jirel and the fictional Denella wince in sympathetic unison.
The previously confident and lustful expression on Captain Jirel’s face contorted instantly into one of intense, searing pain. And, slowly but surely, the huge, proud, musclebound captain of the Starship Bounty sank down to the deck below, exhaling a whimper all the way down.
The attack had been so sudden that Denella was still staring in shock when the feeblest member of the ship’s crew launched her second attack.
Natasha sprang at the bikini-clad Orion, knocking her to the ground. For a moment, they grappled together on the ground, but it didn’t take long for the human to land a strong enough blow to knock the other woman out cold.
Without taking a breath, she jumped back to her feet and raced over to the real Jirel, quickly working to untie his bonds.
It only took a few more seconds for the truth to finally make its way to Jirel’s punch-drunk brain.
“Nat?!”
“Yep,” the real Bounty’s real medic affirmed.
“Wh—? What the hell are you doing here?!”
“Rescuing an idiot,” she replied, as she finished untying his bonds, “Then, finding this Stone of Whatever and finishing this ridiculous game.”
As she helped Jirel to his feet and saw his expression as he finally took in the sight of her dressed in her doppelganger's uniform of choice, she pointed a deadly serious finger at him, and then back to her own unhappy face.
“Two things. One, eyes up here, all the time. And two, you even think about making any clever comment about this, then what I do to you in response will make what I just did to the other Jirel over there look like a love tap, ok?”
She gestured to where Captain Jirel was still moaning quietly in a foetal position on the ground. The real Jirel quickly nodded back in understanding.
“Now,” she continued with evident determination, “Let’s go find this stupid stone before it’s too late…”
With that, they took off towards the exit.
And Jirel kept his eyes resolutely on the back of Natasha’s head.
“Mmmmwmmrph!”
It was the best retort that Jirel could get out under the circumstances. Even as the twisted seductive temptress version of Denella continued to have her way with his prone and restrained body. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. As cliched and offensive as this version of Denella was, there was no doubting her skills in this particular area.
Before he could prepare himself, she devilishly lined herself up for another blow.
And thumped her balled-up fist straight into his stomach.
“Grmmwmmrph!”
Despite the presence of the holosuite safeties, each punch he had been subjected to was connecting well enough to cause him plenty of pain. He tried to focus his vision back on her as he gasped desperately for air.
“Y—You know,” he managed to cough, “I was expecting your interrogation technique to be a bit less…punchy than this—Brmmwmmrph!”
The bikini-clad Denella’s mouth curved into a satisfied smile, as she licked her lips and looked him up and down with relish.
“Mmm,” she purred, “If you don't like it, then just say the word and I’ll…spice things up a bit.”
With that, she extended one of her arms out, baring her long fingernails with relish. Before Jirel had a chance to prepare himself, she slashed at his face with precision aim, breaking the spotted skin with a quartet of slash marks.
“Ow!” the Trill winced as the pain registered, “Ugh, ok, I actually preferred the punches!”
“I do hope that means you’re still not prepared to talk,” the Orion temptress replied, “Because I’m really starting to enjoy this…”
For a moment, she simply stood in front of him and shimmied her hips slightly. Then, just as Jirel was recovering from the latest assault, another fist slammed into his midriff.
“Hmmmwmmrph!” he choked, “Ok…I kinda don’t…prefer either of them…”
His tormentor simply chuckled back at his discomfort, as she idly pulled out a small implement from somewhere on her scant outfit and began to file her already-sharpened nails.
“You don’t need to play so hard to get you know,” she offered, “Just give us the information we need and this'll all be over, honey.”
Jirel gasped a few more times to catch his breath, then focused back on her.
“Look, I’m telling you, if I knew anything, at all, about anything, I’d have told you already. Believe me, I’ve caved under a lot less torture than this.”
“Is that the truth?” she asked with an arched eyebrow as she buffed another nail.
“One hundred percent,” the bleeding Trill nodded back, “Space scout’s honour!”
The Orion woman paused in her impromptu manicure to consider his plea for a thoughtful moment, before she spirited the file away as quickly as she had produced it.
“Hmm,” she mused, “I think someone’s just playing hard to get, aren’t you?”
“I’m really not.”
“Such a naughty, naughty boy…”
“And please stop saying th—Shmmwmmrph!”
The latest punch was delivered with extra relish, and enough force for Jirel’s vision to briefly flare with white heat, holosuite safeties or no holosuite safeties.
Just as he felt as though he was about to lapse into unconsciousness for the second time since the game had started, he caught the sound of a familiar voice.
“Hey now, go easy on him, Denella. There’s no need for all that, after all.”
The Orion paused, just as she was readying her next attack. Her hungry expression turned into something closer to a frustrated pout.
“But I’m really enjoying myself,” she replied.
Jirel managed to shake himself back into full cognisance as the now mercifully fully-clothed Captain Jirel arrived in his eyeline, with the unexpected form of Natasha, catsuit and all, now hanging off one of his enormous arms.
“Yeah, but we don’t need that info after all,” the overly-muscled Trill smiled, gesturing to his lover, “Because look who we got back.”
He smiled lustfully down at the fragile woman on his arm, and she smiled back with wide, welcoming eyes.
“How did she get back?” Denella asked, reluctantly taking a step back from the bruised version of Jirel tied to the chair.
“The other crew beamed her back over. Tried to make it look like they were giving up, sending her back over as a peace token.”
“How did they manage to complete the transport from such a range?” the bikini-wearing engineer felt compelled to ask.
“Unclear. But Sunek has a theory that they must’ve run the pattern buffer of their main transporter circuit through a tertiary power compiler, and then—”
“Used the electromagnetic field of a nearby neutron star to boost the signal range of the main transmission matrix,” Denella gasped, completing her captain’s sentence, “Of course!”
“My head hurts,” the real Jirel moaned from his incapacitated position.
“But,” Captain Jirel added with a slightly more tensed jaw, “However they did it, they also beamed over something else.”
“I had no idea what it was,” Natasha meekly offered as she clung tightly to her lover’s bicep, “They told me it was a lovely present. For all of us.”
“Well,” Captain Jirel chuckled, nodding a patronising look at the woman on his arm, “It’s a good job that Sunek is a little less naive than this sweet little thing. Took that Vulcan brain of his about five seconds to figure out that it was a bomb.”
Without warning, Denella stepped back over to the real Jirel and slapped him sharply across his already-bloodied face.
“Ow!” he cried out.
“That’s for your crew being so naughty!” the Orion growled at him.
Before the increasingly disorientated Jirel could muster any sort of response, his doppelganger stepped over to him triumphantly, his version of Natasha still submissively hanging off his arm as he moved.
“Still,” he beamed through his perfect teeth, “Looks like we’ve bravely and heroically won this little adventure. We’ve got the Stone of Unity, we’re almost home, and I’ve even got my woman back just where I like her to be.”
The red-haired woman smiled coquettishly as Captain Jirel took a moment to look her up and down with ill-concealed desire. He placed his hand on her hip and pulled her in closer.
“Um, guys,” the tied-up Jirel coughed, “If you’ve won, any chance you could let me get out of here before the orgy starts?”
Captain Jirel ignored him, and focused on leering at his woman. Natasha allowed herself to be pulled in closer, and gently ran a hand up her man’s bulging chest.
“Oh,” she replied breathlessly, “Just hearing you say that, it makes me want to…”
The crunching sound of Natasha’s knee impacting between Captain Jirel’s legs echoed around the expanse of the room with enough volume to make both the real Jirel and the fictional Denella wince in sympathetic unison.
The previously confident and lustful expression on Captain Jirel’s face contorted instantly into one of intense, searing pain. And, slowly but surely, the huge, proud, musclebound captain of the Starship Bounty sank down to the deck below, exhaling a whimper all the way down.
The attack had been so sudden that Denella was still staring in shock when the feeblest member of the ship’s crew launched her second attack.
Natasha sprang at the bikini-clad Orion, knocking her to the ground. For a moment, they grappled together on the ground, but it didn’t take long for the human to land a strong enough blow to knock the other woman out cold.
Without taking a breath, she jumped back to her feet and raced over to the real Jirel, quickly working to untie his bonds.
It only took a few more seconds for the truth to finally make its way to Jirel’s punch-drunk brain.
“Nat?!”
“Yep,” the real Bounty’s real medic affirmed.
“Wh—? What the hell are you doing here?!”
“Rescuing an idiot,” she replied, as she finished untying his bonds, “Then, finding this Stone of Whatever and finishing this ridiculous game.”
As she helped Jirel to his feet and saw his expression as he finally took in the sight of her dressed in her doppelganger's uniform of choice, she pointed a deadly serious finger at him, and then back to her own unhappy face.
“Two things. One, eyes up here, all the time. And two, you even think about making any clever comment about this, then what I do to you in response will make what I just did to the other Jirel over there look like a love tap, ok?”
She gestured to where Captain Jirel was still moaning quietly in a foetal position on the ground. The real Jirel quickly nodded back in understanding.
“Now,” she continued with evident determination, “Let’s go find this stupid stone before it’s too late…”
With that, they took off towards the exit.
And Jirel kept his eyes resolutely on the back of Natasha’s head.
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