Throwing Water on a Grease Fire

Posted on Mon Sep 26th, 2022 @ 12:03am by Ensign Ziahli Lorel & Ensign Kateyo Fenn

Mission: Scylla and Charybdis
Location: Brig
Timeline: MD03, en route
2624 words - 5.2 OF Standard Post Measure

When it was all said and done, the whole thing was pretty hilarious.

Not that incompetence was something to be proud of, and though this particular issue seemed more the fault of an internal error than a botched judgement call, Ziahli still recognised the irony of a junior brig officer having to ask for assistance in being released from her own detainment cell. She also recognised the inconvenience of pulling crew away from the impending mission preparation to deal with a colleague's mishap, despite it not being entirely her fault and the bit that she was probably responsible for being part and parcel of innovative forcefield theory. Rotating the field modulations was part of her job; tinkering with them a little until she encountered a tangled mess of old coding that hadn't been properly purged during subsequent updates maybe fell more under the category of 'pick a better time'.

But she was locked inside her own brig. No matter which way you looked at it, it was funny.

And the bunk wasn't too bad, though it was definitely narrower than she would have found comfortable to sleep on given her capacity to monopolise an entire king-berth over the course of a night. Sat patiently on it, her back up against the bulkhead, the Betazoid still considered the sparse furnishings to be reasonably more comfortable than ought warrant complaint and chalked her current situation up to an impromptu inventory stocktake. One single-berth; check. One impossible-to-deactivate forcefield; check.

Teyo hadn't been down to the brig yet and when he was given the assignment his first thought was that this was some kind of rouse. He could think of a few people who wouldn't mind seeing the young Trill locked behind a forcefield; Finn, Mason, Zade, Dash, even his best friend Xavier. Though in Dash's and Xavier's case it would probably be the start of an epic prank war which would probably result in one of them, most likely himself, getting demoted for taking things too far. The others though, well let's just say they had the motive to want to see him locked away for a while.

It was only when Paxton had offered to come down here instead had Teyo finally relented to the fact that this was a genuine maintenance call. Though now he thought about it, Paxton and Mason were a thing so maybe his original suspicions held some merit. Either way, it was too late now and as he walked into the room through the double sliding doors, he all but prepared himself for some kind of ambush. What he found instead was a dark-haired beauty in a gold uniform looking slightly red in the face. He cautiously stepped further into the room and took another look around, though he was sure they were the only two present.

"You called engineering?" He asked curiously.

Any chagrin Zia might have felt was balanced by a well-developed ability to laugh at her own foibles. Not much embarrassed the Betazoid, though she did consent to a reasonably sheepish grin if only for added affect. "Yep." Spreading her hands to indicate the space around her, Zia added, "I locked myself in."

"And how did you manage that?" Teyo asked a bemused look plastered all over his face.

"Well," the brunette replied, squirming her way forward to regain her footing so that she could cross to where the invisible barrier separated her from her white knight. "It started out as routine protocol, I was just adjusting the field oscillations to a new frequency. You know, to keep the absolute abundance of inmates from premeditating some sort of interference." A glance towards the other empty cells was followed by a wry grin. "I may have encountered a small hiccup when I tried to apply some of Haslow's current theories on dynamic sequencing." The telepath wrinkled her nose. "Judging by the garbled string of errors before the unit completely fried itself, the system here is due an update or three."

Teyo nodded along with the story and fought every urge not to break out into fits of laughter. "You expect me to believe that an officer of Starfleet, had a hiccup with Haslow's current theories on dynamic sequencing? That's first-year academy stuff," he added matter-of-factly. "I think it's more likely," he continued as he shifted his weight over on his leg, one hand placed on his chin, "that you're an actual prisoner who's trying to con their way out of the brig. Tell me, what you in there for?" He asked, the bemused grin turning into a full smile.

The Betazoid folded her arms across her chest. "Right, I'm clever enough to coax the actual brig officer out of her uniform and then cause her to evaporate into thin air, but foolish enough not to wait until I was on the other side of the forcefield before destroying the control unit." A wry eyebrow considered the Trill. "If that were true, I'd probably be serving time for idiocy. And I think," Zia added, the playful twinkle in her eye overriding any real concern that she'd taken actual offense, "you're confusing Haslow's standing theories with his current ones. An easy mistake to make if you fell asleep during fourth year physics."

Teyo's eyes narrowed as he considered her answer. "You might be right," he confessed, a slight shrug of his shoulder, "there were the cutest pair of twins in that class, I can't promise I always paid attention." He moved closer to the lip of the holding area and studied the panel. "Shame that you're just another foolish officer, I rather fancied planning a jailbreak, we could have gone on the run, been galactic outlaws," he added with another grin.

A pair of very dark eyes regarded the Ensign for a moment, squinted slightly in pensive evaluation. The curve to the side of her lips suggested Zia had approached something of a private conclusion, though whatever it might be wasn't something she chose to share right away. Instead, she feigned dejection. "I'm already unjustly incarcerated, do you have to drive the knife quite so deep?"

"Unjustly?" Teyo repeated, scoffing slightly. "Hardly. In fact, I think you could argue that if you're foolish enough to do the crime, the crime in this circumstance is you locking yourself in, then you must do the time." He smiled at his own genius, clearly unaware that he hadn't just coined the phrase. "Never fear, I'll be your dark knight," he added with a playful wink.

"My hero." A quirk of the brunette's lips suggested she was doing her level best not to grin. Instead, arms folded across her chest, Zia leaned against the wall to watch him work. "Out of interest," she eventually asked, "if I were in possession of a more chequered past, is there anything in particular that would be more likely to appeal to, say, a noble-minded adventurer? I would assume acts of violence would be clearly sanctionable. Grand larceny, perhaps?" Zia angled her chin in whimsical consideration. "A string of high profile art heists, perhaps."

Teyo flipped open his tricorder and scanned the panel that controlled the force field that was currently holding the Betazoid beauty. It appeared to be a burned-out relay, nothing too technical, something anyone could fix. He was about to pull a spare one out of his kit but thought better of it, dragging the job out did have a certain appeal right now.

"You actually don't want to know how low I'm willing to stoop," he said as he idly pressed a few buttons on the flashing device. "Let's just say, give me a shout when you have enough gold-pressed latinum to buy a planetary body, nothing smaller than a class-four moon," he quickly added, he didn't want her to think him cheap or easy.

Like every diligent Academy graduate, Zia had done her time with Engineering Basics. She'd been decent enough at it for suspicion to narrow her eyes briefly, her gaze tracking his difficulties, but she wasn't in enough of a hurry to actually mind his stalling. If her calculations, her deductions, were correct then she had her own reasons for entertaining this particular conversation for a while longer.

She feigned a moment of thoughtfulness.

"I'm afraid all I can offer is a one-third share in a vineyard back on Betazed. And a beach house," Zia added, reeling off the family's assets in her head. "And possibly a couple of ancient relics, provided my grandmother ever figures out where she put them."

"A vineyard?" Teyo repeated, his eyes widening, "now you have my attention." He pulled the broken relay out of the panel but instead of discarding it, he twirled it in between his fingers. "I could be swayed with some land, though I gotta say, Betazoid wine, not my favourite. It's so... spicy."

"Worried by a little spice?" The implicit tease of the Betazoid's tone spared no mercy. "If it eases your concerns, the estate's vintage, whilst its primary focus, is not its only success. The nectar stills produce a line of liqueurs that do quite well, if you've a sweet tooth." Zia considered the broken relay a moment and then blinked slowly to redirect her gaze upwards to meet her apparent-saviour, current haste notwithstanding. "The restaurant onsite could probably manage some gruel though, if you absolutely insisted."

"Gruel? My options are spice, sweet, or gruel?" Teyo rolled his eyes in a mocking way. "You thought-thieves really do know how to party," he mumbled as he threw the broken relay in his case and pulled out the spare one. "Personally I think you're just trying to con me out of that moon I requested," he said with a smile as he inserted the relay and watched as the panel lit up like a pulse star. He pressed a few buttons and grinned as the force field shimmered and faded away. "Your knight has provided."

"Just offering suitable alternatives while I figure out how to secure one." As much as there had never really been any moment of panic, Zia was grateful that she hadn't needed to request a site-to-site transport to rectify her slight misstep. She already got the feeling that a great deal of time was going to have to pass for her to be allowed to live this down.

Stepping out, she moved beyond into the main administrative area of the brig and, arms outstretched, turned a slow circle. "Ah, freedom." Twirling to face the engineer, Zia paused a moment and allowed her arms to drop to her sides. "Much obliged, my good sir." Dark eyes twinkled knowingly. "Might I know your name?"

"You are very welcome," Teyo said as he bent into a low bow. "Kateyo Fenn," he said rather proudly, "though my friends call me Teyo. Couldn't you have just pulled that information out of my head?"

Of all the comments that had transpired so far, that one seemed to pull the Betazoid up fast, her frown of consternation the first genuine emotion outside the spectrum of general amusement that Zia had demonstrated. "Firstly, no," she said after a palpable pause, "Secondly, you have other telepaths on board. I know because I've met at least one of them and heard about others. Surely they don't..." She raised her eyebrows. "I don't just take information from people. That's a huge violation of trust and would be considered exceptionally unethical back on Betazed." She blinked several times at him. "To the point of being illegal."

"Cancel red alert, Ensign," Teyo said as he held up his hands in a mock surrender pose, "I come in peace. My best friend is Betazoid, I mean was Betazoid... well he still is technically, oh that's a long story. My point is," he continued, more coherently "I'm used to him just diving in and taking what he needs. It saves a lot of time and is great when we're planning...things. Hold on, you're not going to arrest him now or anything?" He added, a smile creeping on his face as he lowered his arms.

Her brow still knitted, Zia closed her eyes a moment and then shook her head as if to clear it. "Consent is the crucial element here. If he's your friend and you have an...arrangement, then that's not the same as some random damsel in distress helping herself to pieces of personal information." As curious as the cat who refused to learn its lesson, however, the Betazoid adjusted her focus ever-so-slightly. Typically speaking, on a ship filled with non-telepaths, her meditative routine promoted a very trimmed-sail approach to the psionic traffic that passed through her mind. Relaxing her discipline to allow for better reception was just asking for a head full of garbled imagery but they were alone and her training was precise enough to pinpoint if she had to.

The immediate wave of distortion made her wince.

Surely one Trill, even an infamous one, couldn't exist that chaotically?

A worried look crossed Teyo face as his eyebrows pulled into one. He couldn't quite vocalise the sudden look she had just shot at him but he had seen it a few times on Xav's face; when he had been rummaging in someone's head and didn't quite like, or understand, what he had just felt. Was that what had happened here? He took a step forward, almost ready to catch her if she was to stumble or faint. Playing the hero twice in one day with the same damsel? He had had worse maintenance calls. "Are you okay?"

Zia, not at all of a disposition that was inclined towards panic, held up a hand, index finger poised, as a silent entreaty for him to remain quiet. The narrowed squint of her concentration betrayed an element of discomfort but factored in a considerably larger helping of investigative zeal. Head turned as if seeking an elusive sound, Zia turned and immediately took a stumbled step backward as what had been a distant threat became a sudden psionic tsunami.

Teyo took another step forward, now within grabbing distance of the Betazoid. This was more than not liking what she had sensed, this was something else unless the inside of him was truly a dark place. "Seriously, are you okay?" He asked again, ignoring her request for him to stay quiet.

"Something's going on," Zia murmured faintly, still distracted. Having managed to avoid ending up on the floor, the brunette still seemed a shade paler as she turned back to face him, though the frown of consternation on her face was more indicative of puzzlement than fear. "Give me a minute."

Betazoids, as a species, were naturally interwoven. From the earliest days of conception, they developed as part of a familial network, and with the paracortex partially active from the moment it finished growing, an unborn child was capable of registering a psionic signal by the latter stages of gestation. Maturity and telepathic sensitivity flourished during puberty but Betazoid children were never completely detached from the planet's interconnection. As they grew and extended their social networks, so too did they merge their psionic signatures with a wider community.

Zia, always a proficient and particularly controlled telepath, knew the difference between her own distress and someone else's. The headache lingering in the back of her head was her own problem, but somewhere, not very far away, another telepath was struggling. Telepaths plural. Her gaze finally met Teyo's.

"I think we'd better contact Sickbay."