ten_fwd | [Sickbay]: Round Four Scans and Vaccines

Current Location: Section 23 Baker, Room # 1631: Sickbay

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[Sickbay]: Round Four Scans and Vaccines

There has been quite a lot of activity in Sickbay over the last couple of days. In addition to new guests arriving on the Enterprise, all of whom need to be cleared and vaccinated when necessary, there are the wounded who have come back from Alemar III and those looking in on them. Dr. Crusher has never been more glad that she isn't short-staffed.

While Lieutenant Worf and his security detail bring in the new passengers, Beverly ensures those recuperating have enough space and privacy. Beds may be limited, but nobody will be on the floor in her sickbay. For those who haven't been here before, Sickbay is fairly ordinary for a ship's hospital. There are no terrifying devices or humming machines you might see in a sci-fi thriller. The biobeds along the walls are equipped with biofunction monitors, but look fairly standard. Instead of silver trays filled with metal tools and sawblades, there are an array of small devices that look as harmless as cell phones.

As for the staff, they're all well-groomed and friendly. As a matter of fact, all personnel look harmless. Well, perhaps excluding the sun avatar, but Trance Gemini is as skilled as the Starfleet officers.

"All right, come in," one of them calls out as you enter. "Don't be shy. It's just a scan and a hypospray, nothing to worry about."

[ooc: Open log! For new characters (August and September apps), tagging isn't mandatory but ICly going to sickbay is. So if you'd prefer to skip threading with one of our doctors, you can handwave that your character got a clean bill of health and a shot and were sent on their merry way. For those who are tagging, we have Julian Bashir, Trance Gemini, and Simon Tam on deck, with Beverly Crusher by request only. So please specify in the subject line of your tag who you would like. For those returned from the Alemar III plot, if you are not requesting a thread with a doctor but would like your character open for visitors, put "Visiting Post" in your subject line, or specify if it's locked to specific visitors. If you would like more details about sickbay, here's the wiki page. If you haven't made your intro yet, you can assume the doctors will want to see your character shortly after they arrive, and backtagging is love!]

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There is a woman in sick bay now. She isn't very tall but she moves with the air of someone who is usually pretty confident. It is just with everyone milling about she has to pause to take it all in.

Boy. She hates this. Her expression flickers and it looks like she is mostly tempted to turn around and march out of sick bay. She doesn't need to do this with everyone here. She should do this one on one later on. She is about five seconds away from turning around and leaving. No matter what she had said to Worf.

That is when she pauses because she could smell someone. Sure Marion could smell everyone else who had been in here for the past few hours but something about Dylan makes Marion pause, she glances his way silently.

Huh.

"You look like you'd rather be anywhere but here," Marion starts. She feels largely the same really but she imagines being stuck in bed in such a public location can't be fun.

He's good at noticing when he's being watched. Partly it's paying attention to his peripheral vision, partly it's just a sense. Partly it's the fact that in Argosy Special Operations, anyone who doesn't know when somebody's paying them more attention than they should winds up dead.

So even though he's reading vaguely on the PADD, he notices when a woman stops, just outside where his bed is kind of partitioned off.

It's a busy day, it's probably not much use trying to read anything anyway when the medical scans are going on.

The woman looks over at him with a cool sort of interest.

"Pretty much," he says, setting the PADD down, but he smiles at her, because that's just polite, and because her company's welcome, as annoyed as this whole stupid situation has made him. "But I think they'd notice if I tried to break out."

That response gets a lazy half smile out of her. She had been in his place a few times after her side job. Sometimes she had to sit still longer than she would have liked. Injuries got in the way of just moving on.

"Well I'm not going to create a distraction for someone I don't even know," Marion says with a slight shrug. She's not about to cause trouble.

"'Sides. Ain't usually wise to upset the doctors." Her accent rolls out easily. Marion barely notices it is out until she finishes what she is saying. She isn't so happy with herself as she tries very hard to not talk with an accent but most of the time it's very hard to not sound like she's from Texas.

"Shame," he replies, her smile making him tease, just a little. "Probably smart. But shame."

Not that he actually is planning to break out; he might resent being stuck here, but there's a chance that he's annoyed Trance enough already, after she'd told him off down on the planet for holding her up. He's personally of the opinion that he's wasting her time here in sickbay by being here fare more than he did down on the planet by being reluctant to let her treat him.

Trance appears to be of another opinion, and, particularly in this new, future form of herself, she's a little scary when she's mad. Like the lady says, not wise to upset her.

(He's seen her possessed body take Rommie in a fight, and that's something Dylan sure couldn't do if he tried.)

"Maybe we can fix the not knowing thing. I'm Dylan. Captain Dylan Hunt."

There might be those who'd tell him the use of the title is pointless here, but he's held on to being a High Guard officer as a key part of himself even after the fall of the Commonwealth and the loss of the whole rest of the High Guard.

He plans to do the same here.

He has manners. It's a nice thing to see when she normally ends up dealing with fellow werewolves who have seriously unreasonable sized egos or the publishing house who started picking up her books. Sometimes the people she has to deal with set her teeth on edge.

Not Dylan.

"Marion Scotts." She lets out a low chuckle. "Don't think my work would have been popular enough to last through to this time period. I'm.... a novelist."

Not just a writer but that is left unsaid. She doesn't usually tack on the other things she gets up to in any conversation. She might just refer to it as consulting which is hilarious given the last person she said that to saw her carrying her sword. "I just got here right after ya all had that.... incident Shepherd mentioned."

She notes her accent is out in full force. Might as well just give up and roll with the damn thing.

That makes him chuckle, and he gives her an apologetic smile.

"To be honest? It would have to have lasted a lot longer for me to have heard of it. Sorry."

He's read some Earth literature, but he knows there must be countless things that have been completely lost to time. Especially given the state of Earth after the Fall. He's not much of a novel reader, anyway: philosophy, history, poetry, yes, but not novels, except some of the classics. He knows Beka has a bit of a collection, but he leaves them for her.

"But you wouldn't have heard of the military I serve in, either, so we're even."

He raises his eyebrows when she talks about the incident that someone called Sheppard mentioned. He doesn't know anyone called Sheppard, but he thinks he can probably work out which incident she means.

She's got a heavy sort of accent, but it's not one he knows; unsurprising, since from the way she talks, she's probably from Earth.

"'Incident'? Yeah, I guess that's one way to describe it. You haven't been here long then."

"Then I guess you might not know some of the things I consider classics," Marion hazards a guess. But there is some small hope that a few of her favorite books survived until at least this time period. "Which is a shame. I was pretty fond of Angela's Ashes."

If she ever actually looks she will figure out that some of her favorites aren't in this dimension due to divergent time lines.

"Nah. Barely two days. Haven't gotten used to this place yet.... Didn't want to upset Commander Worf by not showing up here either so here I am." The Texan shrugs her shoulders lightly. She is trying to cope with this place as best she can.

Mostly she is irritated that she missed a very important meeting because of Q.

"I guess not," he says. "I'm from ..." He lifts his hand and waves it, vaguely. "A long way from here."

He's still not sure precisely where they are, but wherever it is, it's a hell of a long way from Tarn-Vedra.

"But I know some things. From, uh, I'm guessing you're from Earth."

And she's right; he hasn't heard of the book she mentions, and she gets an apologetic shake of his head. This whole experience must be a hell of a perspective-changer for the people here from the past. He, at least, deals with different planets and cultures on a just about daily basis.

"For what it's worth, the exams aren't too bad. They're just looking to vaccinate us, check we're not carrying any nasties from other timelines or universes. Scan us so they can treat us if we need it."

Record the genetic makeup of any Heavy Worlders they find.

"Yup. It was 2014 for me," Marion supplies. That means she is fro a time period very different from Dylan or anyone from the Enterprise. She doesn't really seem intimidated by anything here.

Marion wouldn't let it show even if she was. She seems to be holding it together pretty well on the surface. The truth of the matter is that she is angry as hell but can't let herself express that. Letting herself give into anger is just dangerous.

"Uh...." She trails off blinking like a small owl. "It makes sense, sure. I mean my immune system is fantastic but I'd probably be laid flat by whatever equivalent they have for the flu here."

For like a day. Her immune system would chew it up and spit it out,

His smile is a little rueful.

"Then you definitely wouldn't have heard of where I'm from. But there are still some Earth classics around in my time."

He's not sure why it is that so many of the people here are from so far from his own time and place. It's isolating, an isolation too familiar to be anything more than just another, deeper layer on top of the isolation he's felt from everyone in his own universe since Hephaistos. Everyone except Rommie, who's still back there.

Nobody he's met here except his crew is from any closer than thousands of years to his time. None of them has heard of the Commonwealth or the High Guard. His whole life up until this point means nothing to them.

"Mine's fantastic too." His also has the added bonus of being boosted by nanobots. He lifts his hands, palm-up, in a gesture at the futility of arguing that particular point when he's the one stuck in bed until Trance lets him out. Because there are things other than his immune system that they recorded in his scans.

Like his metabolism. Which is the whole reason he's in sickbay right now. "Didn't stop me winding up in here."

"But sadly not one of my favorites," Marion teases him with a crooked grin. She has a healthy smile. She also expresses her amusement better than she does the anger boiling deep down inside of her.

Q will get a punch to the face should they ever meet. Or at least she will try.

She won't ask exactly what landed him here. She knows a thing or two about privacy given how much she values her own.

"I've had that happen before." Usually injuries that laid her up. "It just happens sometimes."

She takes a long look around the room. "Do they do private exams by request? Got.... a couple questions I need cleared up."

"Clearly the future has no taste," he teases back. He's used to conversations like this; Dylan's lack of knowledge of things from Earth is a fairly common source of exasperation from Harper, and he's more inclined to accept gentle teasing from Marion than the looks of disgust from Harper.

Marion's amusement's much nicer to look at, for one.

"But you know, there's some pretty good stuff that's not from Earth out there, too. At least, in my world," he adds, aware that much of the literature he likes probably doesn't exist in this world or this time.

If this world will never know Vedran poetry, it's missing out.

He considers her question, head tilting to one side.

"Go talk to Trance," he says. "She's my ship's medic, back in our universe. She can handle just about anything."

Admittedly, she had dragged Julian over in the middle of his exam, but ... that had been exactly what had been needed, at that moment, though he hadn't known it at the time.

He's pretty sure she did, though.

"You can't miss her. She's the one with the gold skin and horns."

"Clearly," Marion agrees with another smile. It gets to the point where her dimples show just a little bit.

"I've started to notice," she agrees. "I started reading up on... everything I could find, actually. I was always good at research..... I do it on the side sometimes."

Marion lets her gaze wander. When she sees Trance Marion nearly double takes. To Marion Trance looks a little bit like one of the shidhe she had briefly seen nearly a year ago. Well at least she knows for sure Trance isn't a fae. That would have been super awkward.

"Good to know. She... should be good for what I need."

"I'd offer you some suggestions, but ..." His hands turn palm-up again in a helpless sort of gesture and he shrugs. "Most of my favorites haven't been written yet."

Assuming they will be, out there, somewhere, and given this is a world with no Commonwealth, that's highly doubtful. Not that he really understands the physics or the possibilities, but ... without Tarn-Vedra as the heart of the Commonwealth, Vedran culture must surely change. If the Vedrans even exist in this world.

Now that's a thought to make him feel even more isolated.

He lets out a small laugh, barely more than a sharp breath, when she sees Trance. She recovers well from the moment's surprise, he'll give her that.

"You can trust her. She's kept me alive through some pretty crazy stuff."

His heart had stopped before Trance and Beka got to him during the Magog attack on the Andromeda. And that's just the start. Whatever other issues he might have with her right now, he does trust Trance with his life.

"Maybe they have something decent in this time period," Marion can only hope. A good book is something that can get her through a bad case of insomnia. She hasn't slept more than five hours a night since after she got out of the hospital following getting mauled by the other werewolf.

Sure, she is mostly fine mentally it's just she gets so damn restless at night.

"She just looked... well. She looked a little bit like a race of people I'm.... vaguely familiar with." She smiles a little more widely and shrugs. "My life just gets pretty interesting when I'm not writing."

It really does. Vampires are a pain in the ass to deal with.

"You'd hope so," he agrees. "I haven't had much of a chance to go looking."

And what time he's had has been spent on other things than chasing up the latest literature from Earth. Once, there'd have been a time when exploring the poetry of this time period, of the cultures he'd never heard of before, would have been a top priority for Dylan.

The Fall of the Commonwealth and the discovery of the World Ship have changed that. Now his priority is, has to be, his mission. Which means learning whatever he can about the development of the Federation, and which doesn't leave much time for recreational reading.

Not if he's going to do whatever the hell it is he's here to do so he can go back.

He's completely distracted from that by what Marion says next, though. His eyebrows lift, curious, but this isn't the time or place to go into that. Still, it's hard to hide his slight surprise that she says Trance reminds her of a race she knows.

He's only heard anything like that about Trance once, from the Inari, and ... he still doesn't know just what happened then, but he'd been wary as hell after what he'd heard about their civil war.

"Mine gets interesting all the time," he says, ignoring the comment about Trance. For now, but only for now.

"I've just been trying to settle in." Eventually she will have to convince Worf that she can totally have her sword back. She figures she might as well keep training even if this feels like a very weird vacation.

She can't let her skills start to get rusty. Besides the fact that raining helps to work out some of the extra energy she always has.

"Well you do have a very different line of work." She smiles trying to keep the wolf out of it. "I'm just a civilian at the end of the day."

Oh that is a bold faced lie but he won't know that. She's still virtually a stranger to him. There is also the fact Marion wagers that very few people would end up anywhere close to the truth.

Dylan himself hasn't been here all that long, it's just been an eventful last few days. Then again, that's no different to his life back in his own world.

Actually, life aboard the Enterprise has been less exciting than on the Andromeda. Which is just one of the many things Dylan dislikes about being here. Whatever Trance may say, he has things he needs to do in his world, and the time spent away from there is wearing on him.

"So are my crew. But I take your point. And ... it's probably even more interesting than you'd guess." He smiles along with the concession. After all, there are even very few starship crews whose lives get as interesting as those of the crew of the Andromeda, even in the world after the Fall, when 'interesting' is pretty much the default setting on the universe.

The universe has a lot to make up for.

Obviously Dylan needs a distraction of some kind. At least until he can start trying to do something about his situation. That isn't much different from Marion's need to eventually get her sword back. She wants to keep training if she can't do anything else.

Writing on the side is just a thing that happens with her.

"Well I am from a much earlier time period. What would I know about life on board a starship," she points out with a faint smile. She is well aware her life is more interesting than she presents it however she just can't start talking about it with a stranger.

"I'm going to guess your ship is a lot different from this one." She takes another long look around sickbay. Everything about the Enterprise just throws the werewolf off.

"Well," he says, running a sheepish hand along the side of his face until it's buried in his hair, which parts to run between his fingers, until it sticks up at an odd angle. "Life on board the Andromeda Ascendant isn't exactly like life on any other starship."

Once, it was. Once, the life wasn't so very different to life on the Enterprise in many ways. Oh, the details were different: High Guard, not Starfleet; years of technology; size of the ship; details of the service and almost certainly the capabilities of the ships.

There is, though, a certain similarity. The familiarity mingled with the differences haunts him here.

Now, though, he gives Marion a smile.

"Yeah. She's a lot bigger, for one. And she's a warship." His head tips to one side. "With a few thousand years of technology on this one, too."

And he misses her. Misses her like another part of his soul is gone. She's been his home, his comrade, his life, for years.

She's been all he's had to hold onto, and now she's gone. Like everything else.

He has bed hair. It's almost adorable. Marion has to hide a smile but focuses on Dylan. His words come out like he's partly in love with his ship.

Maybe he is? Her Dad had mentioned a buddy of his who ended up in the Navy. That man lovedthe submarine he eventually got to captain.Her Dad had know lots of people in different branches of the military but one things was so very true.

People loved their ships.

"Seriously? This place feels like a city." She lets out a soft chuckle. "I'm usually in... less densely populated areas."

But a war ship? She gets it. Makes more sense to her than this ship."Makes sense she's a warship. I'm... Well. Realistically there are always threats to peace out there. My Dad had been a military man. Most of his friends were in some branch of the service."

She misses her Dad. He would have liked this ship she thinks. She has no idea what he would think about her being a werewolf. Marion still hasn't told her Mom. She isn't sure she can.

"Andromeda was always a little less like a city. Fewer civilians and recreational facilities." He shrugs. Like he'd said, warship. The Enterprise does have the feel of a city around her, with the bar and gymnasium and who knows what other facilities that he hasn't explored yet. There are very few purely recreational areas on the Andromeda beyond the observation deck. Dylan and his previous -- and current -- crew have very much claimed the hydroponics garden, but it has a vital role in the functioning of the ship as well as being an area where the crew can be surrounded by the garden, green and alive and providing them with oxygen and food.

"But ... we're running on a skeleton crew, so she's not very densely populated anymore."

He misses his crew, still. Andromeda's corridors are too empty, her capabilities underutilized, and they'd been good people, people he cared about.

He keeps himself smiling at her, trying to ignore the swelling ache that's always there, in his heart, since Hephaistos.

She gets it. Not everyone does, especially not in the time he's found himself in when life is harder and the militaries of, for example, the Drago-Kazov, are used to oppress and attack, not to protect.

"Even in times of peace," he agrees. "We were always needed. We did a lot of humanitarian work, too, but you ... always need the capability to protect the peace."

And enforce it. Much of the later part of his career was spent in and out of the Quarantine Zone protecting Commonwealth interests from the Magog. Sometimes ... quite aggressively.

If Marion knows enough to read that in what he's said, then she'll understand. If she doesn't ... he's not planning to elaborate. Una salus victus runs deep.

"Makes sense. War ships ain't exactly equipped to carry the things a civilian population would need for the long term," Marion said with her accent slipping in like a dog through the kitchen door. Her accent was always in the background when she spoke and tended to slide forward when she was feeling relaxed.

"Must be strange. Not having a full compliment." Marion sounded like she understood the strangeness of it.

"Sometimes ya gotta be the shield as well as the sword. Just the way things are," Marion agrees. Something about her expression speaks of experience. Something she hasn't brought up. Marion knows what it's like to fight to save people.

She also gets there is so much more to what he is saying. He has hunted too in his own way. Huh. She blinks forcing her wolf far away from the front of her mind. Marion so doesn't want to explain everything about herself.

"Exactly." The facilities on a High Guard ship always tended to be more ... practical in nature. The Andromeda had a larger crew complement than the Enterprise, but that crew was military. Over 4,000 of them, the crew needed to run the ship, the specialists to carry out her missions, a lancer regiment and two fighter wings.

Soldiers, on a warship, even in a time of peace. And her facilities and crew were there to support her capabilities as a warship. An extremely powerful warship.

He nods in acknowledgement of her words about his crew complement, his gaze resting on her face for a curious moment at the understanding in her words.

"I'm not sure I'll ever be used to it. I have an excellent crew, but ... it's not the same."

He still misses every one of them. He'd prided himself on knowing them all, by name, at least.

"Someone has to do it," he agrees. "And that was us."

His smile is grimmer than it had been. He'd always preferred to be the shield over the sword. Protecting people. Helping them. Defending them. Holding the line against the darkness that was out there, beyond the Commonwealth's borders.

Sometimes, though, that protection means taking the fight to the enemy. Especially since the Fall, when there is no High Guard left but him and his ship.

"The Enterprise feels a little bit like a research vessel." Marion smiles slightly at the thought. That really wouldn't be so bad. She had loved science once upon a time and part of her still has this stray urge to balance chemical equations now and then.

Marion gets it on a level she just cannot explain. Werewolves are not meant to be solitary creatures. At least not her kind of werewolf. They do better with others around what Marion doesn't realize is that she doesn't have to limit herself to other werewolves should she give into the need to have others she can let herself trust.

"I get that." She really does. Marion may try to hide it but with Dylan's background he might as well have her pegged as some kind of soldier. It may not be what she really is but it's certainly how she is reacting.

"I've..." She trails off and stops herself. She nearly opened up a can of worms that she was not prepared to touch. Holy shit, she never opens up to anyone this quickly.

Not since that night. No one gets this kind of trust from her. What the hell. It's like a sucker punch to the gut. The reaction isn't obvious she just shuts down verbally for a moment.

"Sorry." For what? Being the way she is? Maybe. "I just..."

Shit. Her poker face starts to slide into place. "Outside work. I don't talk about it. I'm an outside consultant hen I'm not writing."

[Sickbay]: Round Four Scans and Vaccines

Obviously takes place before her medical thread

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