The Secrets Of the Boss Man, Part 1

Posted on Sun Apr 30th, 2023 @ 8:35pm by Lieutenant Didrea Zade & Lieutenant JG Nayisa Wrea

Mission: Wrath of the People
Location: Deck 2 :: Kane's Quarters
Timeline: MD5 :: After 'How Does It Feel To Be A Rule-Breaker?'
1683 words - 3.4 OF Standard Post Measure

On the table, a PADD sat next to an empty dish and cup, signs that he was reading while eating a meal. Was it the last thing he did in his quarters before he got arrested? The intelligence officer could almost envision him sitting there, blissfully unaware of his future as he ate. As nosey as she wanted to be, Nayisa opted to not turn on the PADD to see what he was reading. The man still deserved privacy, even if most of it was nonexistent now. It also wasn't relevant to her search. She scanned the whole dining room, not finding any of the elements.

One room down, four to go.

While Nayisa was roaming around, Zade read the inscriptions on the awards, pausing briefly to tap the button on the PADD. She quickly concluded that the silence meant that Nayisa wasn't going to answer her question. Why would she answer it now if she wouldn't answer it earlier? One of the more recent awards on the shelf was for meritorious service, awarded to one Commander Jacob Kane of the USS Lakota. Recalling what she remembered reading in his file, the award was probably for rescuing the crew, including the captain, after a search-and-rescue gone wrong. She saw other awards from the Intrepid and the Lexington, even seeing an award from when he was an Ensign. It was strange seeing 'Ensign Jacob Kane' inscribed into the metallic surface, and she tried to envision what he looked like as an Ensign. He probably had hair. "Anything I can help with?" she asked, tapping the PADD again. The tension in her voice made her question insincere, as if she were only asking to say she offered.

The faint jingle of the tricorder scanning away trickled into the living room, and Nayisa began her scan with the couch. The tone was not at all lost on her. "Are you actually asking, or making yourself feel better about being here?"

"Since I'm already in about as much trouble as you are simply by being here," Zade muttered, loud enough for Nayisa to hear it. "... I might as well help." It was obvious she wanted to leave, but unless she wanted to alert security and make Zora's day even worse, she had to wait until Nayisa was finished.

Nayisa was about halfway through scanning the living room when the tricorder beeped. She read the result, but frowned when it ended up being a false positive. "I guess look for anything out of the ordinary, then. Anything that tickles your spots or whatever," she suggested, hovering the tricorder over the couch. If someone was trying to frame the Captain, the intelligence officer doubted that it would be made obvious.

Tapping the green button again, Zade rolled her eyes. "My spots are no different than the freckles that some humans have. They certainly can't be tickled."

A chuckle came from Nayisa as she moved to the two chairs across from the couch. Sparing a glance at the coffee table, the handful of items looked like things he may have collected during previous missions, perhaps diplomatic gifts or spoils of war. "I know, I'm just teasing." The chairs yielded a similar lack of results, and she ran the tricorder along the shelving on the walls, over the plants, and over each of the few photos he had. Not finding anything, she moved over to Zade and scanned the shelf and the awards. "Wow. Ensign Kane... that just doesn't sound right," she joked with a grin.

A beep, followed by another tap on the PADD. "Yeah... it's weird to think that he was like us at one point." Obviously, Kane didn't just pop into existence as a Captain, but neither of them knew Kane when he was younger or as any rank other than his current one. "What do you think he was like as an Ensign?"

"Probably as dorky as you were," the silver-haired woman bantered, ignoring the glare she got in response. With no results there either, Nayisa turned and headed toward the bedroom, scanning everything she walked past. In his bedroom, there were some clothes folded neatly on the bed, and she recognized the boring blue-greys of standard issue pajamas. Opting to check out the closet first, Nayisa thumbed the controls for the door with a gloved hand, watching the door slide open. It seemed Kane was using this room for storage rather than for clothes. There were a couple of off-duty articles of clothing to one side, but the rest of the space was barren except for two storage crates.

"What's the point of having executive privilege if you don't even use the extra space?" Nayisa thought out loud. Scanning them, the tricorder detected a trace of one of the compounds from both. Setting the tricorder down, she typed into the panel on the side of the first crate before removing the top. Inside was about two dozen bottles of what the tricorder identified as Kesatian ale. "Captain's secret stash, huh?" Not identifying any of the compounds inside the crate, she replaced the lid and moved on to the one further back in the closet. The second crate looked older, as if it hadn't been opened in a while, so she took extra care as she slid the top of the crate off after the seal on it released. Peeking inside, she chuckled. "No. Way! Who makes these anymore??"

Interested in the sudden outburst, Zade briskly entered the bedroom to see Nayisa looking into a crate in the closet. Holy crap, Kane had a walk-in closet. She watched Nayisa reach in with gloved hands and pull out a sealed glass bottle, a miniature Federation ship supported inside it. Coming closer, the Trill recognized the shape of the ship as the Intrepid. "Is that... a ship in a bottle?" Zade asked, pressing the button on the device in her hand.

"Uh, yeah, it is!" Nayisa replied enthusiastically, closely inspecting it before shifting it to one hand. She was careful to not rotate or move the bottle around too much as she popped the scanning wand out of the tricorder and hovered it over the glass. "Old people like to make these things, but they're usually 19th century sea ships or whatever. Like, imagine captaining a ship made out of wood." Whatever set off the tricorder wasn't present in this artifact, so Nayisa carefully returned it to the crate before pulling out another one. It was a classic USS Enterprise NCC-1701, with intricate details like the tiny antenna sticking out of the archaic deflector dish and the special caps on the warp nacelles. She looked a little closer and gasped, "how did he get his hands on this??? This is one of the models with the small defect in both 'R's of the ship's name! This is super rare!" After a scan of the bottle, Nayisa was almost relieved that it didn't have any of the bomb's compounds on it. It would have been a real shame to take this model for analysis. Looking into the crate again, she saw several more ships from various eras and whistled. "Wow, I did not think Kane was the kind of nerd who kept ships in bottles!"

Zade was trying to gauge how much Nayisa was actually working and how much she was being nosey, and not the intel type of nosey. The 'Nayisa needs to gossip' kind of nosey. "I thought you were trying to find something, not make fun of the Captain's hobbies," she warned.

Nayisa rolled her eyes as she returned the rare model and picked up another, a replica of the infamous Saturn V rocket. The slightly flared base was a dead giveaway, but she couldn't tell which serial number it had without a more thorough inspection. She knew Zade was getting anxious again, anyways. "Can't I do both? God, you're such a doorknob, Didrea. Loosen up." She had explained the human term to Zade during the Academy, and she used it to remind her friend that she was following the rules too rigidly. The scan of this bottle yielded results, showing two of the four compounds of interest, and Nayisa glanced down at the tricorder, her relief at finding what she was looking for vanishing rather fast. "Ugh, not good enough." The concentration of the compounds wasn't high enough to get meaningful results from a decay rate analysis. Carefully returning the bottle to the crate, she refined the search on the tricorder before scanning the crate again, this time not getting any results. Replacing the lid, she picked up the tricorder and stood to scan the clothes.

"No, you can't. You told me you were here to work." It bugged Zade when Nayisa called her a doorknob, evident by the Trill pressing the green button with slightly more force. She thought she was being perfectly reasonable with her reminder. Nayisa always saw Zade as too rigid, and she always saw Nayisa as too relaxed.

"I know, and I am working. No need to pull out the handcuffs yet," Nayisa argued, reminding them both of Zade's own words.

Good to know that Nayisa remembered the Trill's condition to even being in the same room as her. Zade watched Nayisa scan the clothes before asking, "what happens if you can't find what you're looking for?"

"I dunno. We probably get stuck with a new captain," Nayisa responded with a half-truth, the tricorder running down each article of clothing. Getting stuck with a new captain was right, but she also had a pretty good idea of what might happen to Kane if she couldn't find what she was looking for. From what little she was able to gather about the trial, it sounded like things were not looking good for Kane. Not finding anything in the closet either, Nayisa shooed Zade out with a flick of her wrist, avoiding contamination of the gloves by touching her. She then turned her attention to the bedroom.