The more things change... [OPEN]

[fieldpromoted]

It had been an interesting couple of days. Whatever she had been expecting upon finding herself on an alien spaceship, the chance to meet a good friend she had mourned - alive and relatively well, if also kidnapped by aliens - hadn't been it. Seeing Grace alive, that had been a pleasant shock.

It almost made up for the fact that her Samson would have to be given up for lost until the next time they landed on a planet... if they landed on a planet. The crew had made it sound like that kind of thing didn't happen very often.

Still, it wasn't every day you got to sit down and talk with someone whose funeral you had attended. So Trudy had taken it upon herself to find Grace - and she knew exactly where to look for her. Anything with 'lab' in the title was probably where she would find the scientist. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same after all.

True to her initial thoughts, medical hadn't been very hard to find. And with the help of the directions she'd gotten on the omnicomm, she was able to find the lab relatively easily. Trudy walked in with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her plantsuit, her service rifle still slung over her shoulder. "Hello? Anyone home?"

Comments

[notlewis]

"Nobody here but us nerds," came a voice from one of the work benches, where Luis was deep in the middle of work mode. A microscope in one hand, the other tapping notes in on a keyboard, a few abandoned trays of slop off to the side.

He must have been hard at work not to notice what kind of visitor it was. "What can I do for you?"

[fieldpromoted]

Trudy grinned a little at that - more than familiar, this was comfortable. She wandered over toward the speaker, taking in the mess around his station with a raised eyebrow. "Well I as looking to see if Dr. Augustine was here - but would you have even noticed if she walked in?"

Her tone was light and playful. She'd spent a couple of years making teasing the scientists her hobby, after all.

[notlewis]

"Honestly, probably not," he confessed, sitting up and looking straight ahead for a moment-- then turning around in preparation to have a conversation with another human person an-

Oh. Whoa. Another pleasantly sexy female human person. It was going to take a moment to switch gears here, but the fact this woman was hot had not been lost in the fog.

It was really quite conspicuous. "I saw her earlier today. Must be important if it brings you all the way to this little corner of obsession, sí?"

[fieldpromoted]

Yeah, Trudy definitely notices - it's hard not to. And honestly, it's kind of cute the way he totally did not notice who he was talking to for a minute there.

"Not really," she said. "I just wanted to catch up - last time I saw her was at her funeral, after all, and that's kind of a weird place to leave things if we're going to be seeing each other around the ship all the time."

She looked around the lab for a minute, taking in the surroundings. Some of it was familiar - the microscope, for instance, and a few more of the instruments that she could see. Some of it was considerably more advanced.

[notlewis]

A funeral? Huh. Filed away for later, behind the "BREASTS" notification.

"This place is full of surprises," he said with a little shrug of his shoulders, then turned around on his stool to face her directly. His eyes looked tired behind his glasses, but Luis took special care to sound amicable. "New people, old people, dead people... never a dull moment."

"Dr. Luis Sera, head of the science department. It's good to meet you, Ms...?"

[fieldpromoted]

"Captain, actually," she corrected immediately. Not that she wasn't used to that - Grace got the same thing. "Captain Trudy Chacon. I'm a little surprised you didn't see the dog tags." Since you're staring at my boobs, she added silently with a small, amused smile.

"Well, I would say it's not the strangest thing I've seen on this boat so far... but it kind of is. Not that I'm not grateful - it's just... you bury someone once, you don't expect them to show up again, you know?"

[notlewis]

"Ah, losientos, Captain. I can't read them from all the way over here. Bad eyes," he said, sounding genuinely (jokingly) sorry about it. Distracted bad eyes. "But it is a pleasure to meet you."

He reached up behind his glasses to rub his eyes, sore after... how long had he been staring at that microscope again? Long enough to make colors look a little funny temporarily. "Believe me, amiga, I know exactly what you mean by that," he chuckled, thinking of his own messy demise. At least he was at the point where he could picture the event itself as more of a curiosity than a nightmare. "Sometimes I feel like we are living in a comic book that way."

[fieldpromoted]

"De nada," she said, honestly more than a little surprised to find someone on the ship who spoke her language. The translators, it seemed, didn't feel the need to do anything about a language that the listener knew fluently... which made her wonder for a moment about the intelligence of the translators. "Never was a fan of comics - but there's a lot here that belongs in one or a few of them."

She looked around for a second and then found another stool - covered in notes. "Where do I move these so you don't go nuts trying to find them later and blame me for it?" Yeah, she's had a lot of experience with scientists.

italicsfail

[notlewis]

"Ah, se habla español? Excelente." He hadn't run into anybody who could speak his mother tongue in quite a while and it was always a nice surprised. He kind of missed it after a while.

And Luis did appreciate her asking before she moved his notes. There was always an order to the madness. "You can just set them on the bench right here," he said, showing her where. "It's awfully nice of you not to turn me into a mad scientist. I'm a little too close for comfort already, as I'm sure you have noticed."

[rneville.livejournal.com]

"Just uh...jackasses and microscopes," Robert called back, looking up from the screen he was hunched over to momentarily flick his eyes over Trudy before coming back down to the screen. Double-take, did she...No, of further inspection, Trudy wasn't as familiar as she initially seemed, but Neville took a moment to frown at her armed state.

This from the man that kept hand grenades in the 'clean sharps' drawer, 'just in case.'

[fieldpromoted]

"Microscopes I can see," Trudy said, coming further into the lab. "But I've only met one jackass on the ship and he was whole lot taller and a whole lot uglier."

She stood far enough back from his station that he couldn't claim she was breathing on his experiments or something. "Captain Trudy Chacon - I came looking for Dr. Augustine, but it doesn't look like she's here. I guess miracles can happen."

[rneville.livejournal.com]

"Oh, so you sayin' I'm not ugly?" no experiments here, Trudy, just a twitchy Robert checking his data. Stacy had been kind enough to allow him the Hard Disks from his home lab, "Nice to meet you, Captain, I'm...ah..."

Hell, what was the harm? "I am Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville. Well, Dr. Neville, ain't as if the army's gonna come lookin' for its due. Dr. Augustine's the slightly terrifying redhead, right?"

[fieldpromoted]

"She makes grown Marines tremble in fear," Trudy said with a laugh. "Unless they're crazy or braindead - but don't worry, she's all bark unless you mess with her projects."

Didn't look like there were any open petri dishes, so she came a little bit closer and offered her hand to shake. "I'm pretty sure they're not going to come looking for me either - but once a Marine, always a Marine as they say." She pulled up a stool and sat down. "Still, it's easier to adjust knowing I'm not the only military on the boat."

[rneville.livejournal.com]

"Seems to me everybody and their mother is military round here," He quipped, shaking her hand firmly— not too firm, since he really wanted to let go rather quickly. Despite the months on re-acclimation, physical touch was still kind of visceral, "Not the best mix, but I'll take what I can get. Hell, 'alive' is a good enough qualification for me, right now."

[fieldpromoted]

The quick handshake, along with the general nervousness of his demeanor, sent up a flag in Trudy's mind. She ever-so-casually shifted back to give the man room - she wasn't sure if he was just one of those people who didn't like people being in their space, or if he really had been in combat too long like her gut instinct would say.

"I know the feeling," she said. "I'm pretty sure I was about half a second from going down in a blaze of glory myself before I woke up in a goo pod. Although... from what the General says, it sounds like the civs might outnumber us. I know I saw a few kids hanging around." Her tone says very clearly what she thinks about children being aboard.

[rneville.livejournal.com]

"Blaze of glory...Yeah, I thought about that," He mused, and rolled his lips in, pressing teeth to thin them until it hurt. Pain was good, it forced you to concentrate, but Robert let it go and shook his head, almost smirking at Trudy's disapproving tone.

"Naw, see...you got it all wrong. See, this here, this is an ark," Robert pointed out with a raised finger. He nodded briefly to himself, "Those children are here because if they weren't, they'd be dead. More I see of 'em, the better."

[fieldpromoted]

That made Trudy fall silent for a minute, thinking. "I'd feel better if the kids were still in stasis, you know?" she said finally. "From what the crew says, this could get pretty ugly - kind of don't want them to get caught in the middle of it."

She reached up almost unconsciously to brush her fingers over the raised lettering on the dog tags. "People like us, we see something ugly and we have to look it in the face and kick its ass. The kids? Need to be able to be kids."

[nerve-pincher.livejournal.com]

Spock glanced up at the newcomer from the biometric readout he was studying. He took note of her appearance, raised an eyebrow at the firearm, concluded she was, in all likelihood, not a scientist, and glanced back at the readout.

"I presume you are seeking someone in particular?" He closed the program, turned and clasped his hands behind his back as he gave her an inquiring look.

[fieldpromoted]

Grace must be having a field day here, was the first thing that ran through her head - she knew that Grace was a xenobotanist and not a xenobiologist, but still, with the amount of alien species around she had to be in geek heaven.

"Yeah, I was looking for Dr. Augustine - I expected to find her in the lab, but I guess she doesn't spend every waking minute here like I thought," she smiled easily at the thought - teasing Grace was a part of life.

[nerve-pincher.livejournal.com]

"I have not yet met Doctor Augustine," Spock said, letting the humor pass by without notice. Humans had the strangest propensity for attempting jokes to, as they put it, "break the ice". "I have spent only limited time, thus far, in this laboratory. No doubt I will soon come into contact with her. I am Spock," he finished, inclining his head politely at the woman.

[fieldpromoted]

His voice was cool, almost emotionless, and Trudy shrugged off the fact that he apparently had no sense of humor. Wasn't the first time she'd met someone socially weird - and who knew about his species?

"Captain Trudy Chacon," she said. She kept her hands in her pockets; if he hadn't offered his hand to shake, it probably wasn't culturally applicable. "Sorry if it's rude to ask, but what is your species called?"

[nerve-pincher.livejournal.com]

"An honest question is never offensive," Spock replied easily. "My people are known as Vulcans. We originate from a planet of the same name, although my mother was human, from the city of Seattle, on Earth." He tilted his head slightly at her. "Are you Captain of a ship?"

[fieldpromoted]

"Captain is my military rank," Trudy said. "I'm a pilot for the Marine Corp - did you say Earth?" Now she was interested - as far as she knew, the Na'vi were the only species humans had encountered.

So many Earths here. Kind of weird.

[nerve-pincher.livejournal.com]

"I see." He was unfamiliar with this 'Marine Corp' she spoke of, but Spock respected anyone with such a background. "I hold - or held - the rank of Commander in the Federation Starfleet. In my universe, Earth and Vulcan were members of the United Federation of Planets, a governmental body dedicated to upholding the rights of sentient life forms, preserving peace with intergalactic neighbors, and expanding our knowledge of the universe."

[fieldpromoted]

"Commander," Trudy said with a nod. "I'm pretty sure we come from different universes - in mine, interstellar travel was really slow and the only other species we've discovered is called the Na'vi." She shrugged. "It'd be a nice planet if we could breathe the atmosphere, and if you didn't have to spend six years in cold sleep to get there. It's kind of strange to hear about such an overabundance of easy intergalactic travel."

Her mouth twisted in a frown for a moment. "Although maybe it's a good thing. I'm not sure humanity in my universe is ready for encounters with other species."