trans_9 | The more things change... [OPEN]

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The more things change... [OPEN]

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?"

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"Claro que sí. I did notice," Trudy said. "On the verge of a breakthrough? At least you don't forget to eat." She took in his appearance for a moment - he would be more handsome without the dark circles under his eyes. "Although apparently you forget to sleep."

She moved the papers and sat down, leaning back against the table as she talked.

"Eh, never close enough to a breakthrough to actually get there, it seems," he mock-sighed, and shrugged his shoulders slightly. "I'm just one of those workaholic types."

His eyes darted over to her again, and he smiled to himself. "I'm sure a military woman can probably empathize, right?"

"Up at reveille, and usually we didn't get liberty until a long time after dark. Pandora's night cycle was longer than its day cycle - not that it mattered. Glow-in-the-dark jungles and all." Trudy shrugged. "It was kind of pointless to keep us on a twenty-four hour day after a certain point."

She shook herself out of it. "Still, we're Marines. Sleep is for lesser men," she said with a grin.

"Pandora is that planet that Dr. Augustine was talking about, right?" Luis adjusted his glasses and sat up in his stool. Glow-in-the-dark jungles? They hadn't mentioned that before. Too bad he had no samples of this place.

"I'm probably going to sound depressingly old-fashioned to you. It was 2004 last I remember," he lamented. "All of this space travel stuff really blows my mind."

"It's not all it's cracked up to be. Cold sleep makes me cranky and you wake up with all your muscles and joints screaming at you because you haven't used them in the last six years."

She glanced over at the microscope, propping her chin in her hand. "So, Dr. Sera. What's your specialty?" A light subject change was in order - she didn't like dwelling on Pandora for too long.

Luis was only too happy to talk about his field, as Trudy might have guessed. "I'm a biologist, with an emphasis in microbiology, virology and parasitology," he said. "So I've spent a very long time staring at little things wiggling in dishes. I was a lecturer and a researcher at the Universidad de Complutense in Madrid for several years. I spend most of my time in here, but I help out in medical bay from time to time."

He paused. "Not technically a medical doctor, but I know my way around the anatomy enough to patch things up, you know?"

"Sure," Trudy said, her grin turning only slightly wolfish. She was pretty sure that as tired as he was, he was not intending the double entendre of that anatomy comment - but hey, soldiers had dirty minds. "You get to play doctor for a little while, everyone is satisfied."

The practical side of her that didn't get endless amusement out of teasing the awkward scientists went back to what he had said about his field. "Any vaccines I should worry about getting? Space flu? Mutant slime virus?"

Sadly for Luis, he actually hadn't intended it. Not that line anyway. He was still in transition to social mode after several hours of not talking to anyone, so unfortunately his entendres were a little rusty. He was catching up, though. "Well, Captain, it's not even worth it if nobody get satisfied," he said, in a voice as subtle as a neon sign.

"Stacy has been pretty good about administering the vaccines we do have, and I have been working on a few others I think the crew should be given," he answered. That meant there were only a few horrible zombie viruses that the crew were at risk of catching, now. It was kind of sad that there were even multiple options on that front.

Oh now he was flirting. Trudy had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. "No wonder you're such a workaholic," she said, amused. "Some people aren't as easily satisfied as others."

She was going to have fun with this, she could tell already. Still... "Well if you're doing something important I can always leave you do it."

"Bonita, I am only very rarely doing something that can't be interrupted if somebody needs me elsewhere," he teased, starting to straighten up the piles of papers and the various pieces of whatever experiment he was in the middle of. Not that he was planning on going anywhere or anything. Really. He wasn't ahead of himself at all.

"This is such a stuffy place anyway. If we're going to have a good time, we might as well have a few drinks instead of sitting here watching a bunch of cells culturing."

Trudy wanted to give him hell about assuming they would be going anywhere, but the mention of 'a few drinks' arrested her attention quicker than she thought it would. "That's a beautiful combination of words. I was starting to think I was on a dry boat," she said, and then her slightly wolfish smile turned into a downright smirk.

"You wouldn't be trying to get me drunk, would you Dr. Sera?"

"Of course not, that would be crude. But it would just be mean of me to hold out on you so that you can't get yourself drunk." God bless Kang, that creepy dragon guy, and his crazy renaissance fair alcohol.

"If you're in a pinch you can always go to the sensoriums and simulate inebriation, but that just doesn't cut it for me," he added. "On the rare occasions I do get out of here."

Trudy made a considering noise, pretending to take a long few moments to think it over. "In the state you're in you look like you'd have a couple and then fall right off your barstool," she said. "You think you could keep up? Estás abocado al frasco, churro."

He laughed at that, turning around on his stool and taking off his glasses. "Soy de España, cariña. No te subestimas un hispano con al frasco," he said.

Trudy couldn't help but join in the laugh. "That sounds like a challenge to me," she said, raising her eyebrows. "Where did you have in mind? I know Kang said he had a tavern in the city - but I haven't been."

She got up from the stool and stretched to pop her spine - sitting hunched over in one place made her a little stiff. The fact that her slightly wicked smile never left her face said that she knew exactly how she looked doing it.

No worries. The fact he reacted with a huge grin of his own meant that he definitely noticed and approved.

"I've only been once, but that's where I was thinking," he said, tucked his glasses into his pocket, and then finished stacking up his papers and got ready to go. "Everywhere else is virtual."

"Simulated alcohol? Sounds like it'd taste like gasoline," Trudy said. "Not that I haven't drank some nasty booze in my time but not if I have another option."

She hitched her rifle up further on her shoulder, watching him continue to arrange his papers. "After you, then - you know the way and I don't."

"Oh, it tastes just like ordinary alcohol, actually-- you're just only being made to THINK you are drinking it," he explained. Papers finally organized to his liking, he motioned for her to follow him out of the lab.

"I wish I could say it wasn't a long walk but, well... it'll be worth the effort, if you ask me."

"So you get all the taste of tequila and none of the effects?" Trudy snorted. "That's a waste if I ever heard one."

She followed, matching pace with him with her hands back in the pockets of her plantsuit. Her stride was casual and relaxed. "So how long have you been on the ship?"

"No, it simulates the effects as well. Just until you leave the sensorium, of course." He snuck a glance at her every so often and smiled.

"Oh, a couple of months now," he answered. "I was... surprised, to say the least when I woke up here, but fresh out of the pods I was recruited to command crew as the head of the science department. I've spent most of my time in the lab, sadly, looking into a few small cases here and there. I find having something to do around here makes the whole 'meatship' thing a little more tolerable."

"Sí, exactamente. I can't even begin to tell you how glad I was that there's pilot squadron here - I was afraid for a little while that I wouldn't be doing any flying. My choppers in a pretty sorry state right now - kind of what happens when you get your fool self blown up." She shrugged. "One more reason to be grateful the ship thought I was 'important,' huh?"

She personally doubted that a little, but she wasn't about to contradict the sentient spaceship that saved her life. "Command crew - I guess that means you technically outrank me, doesn't it?"

"I hear you there. It's good that you have multiple skills that way... makes you a lot more useful to various tasks. I'm surprised the ship bothered with me at all, to tell you the truth," he confessed, though he wasn't about to elaborate on that. Let her just think it was because of his nerdy tendencies.

Luis was quick to reply to her other question, too. "Sí, but it's really not that big of a deal," he insisted. "My department operates pretty independently and it's not like I make a lot of the decisions around here. I'd rather work than throw orders around and I'm definitely not the type to narc on people."

Trudy was silent for a moment in the wake of his first statement. "Yeah, same here," she said. "If the ship was going to save someone... I mean, Grace was a good choice." She wasn't going to elaborate on that and she was trying to chase it out of her mind. No sense in getting depressed before going to get drunk. It only made her more depressed.

"The Captain seems like he's got a good handle on everything, at least. I sure as hell wouldn't want his job - not with all the civilians and the kids running around on the boat. No offense on the civilian part, of course."

"As was my friend Leon," he added to her listing Dr. Augustine. "He's so useful he's busy almost all the time. Me, though... eh. I can name a lot of people who deserved it much more than me."

He led her down the corridors that led down into the City, where halfway across the place Kang's tavern could be found. "No offense taken. This ship is just full of people who make it a full time job to be a pain in the ass. You get this many people together and it's bound to happen. I'm just glad my department is self-motivated."

A pause. "Of course then the problem comes when they all want to do things that cause explosions."

"I can name a couple," she said. "Just think that if you're going to pick a 'champion of the universe' or whatever, picking the one who decided last-minute to be a decent person is... eh." She shook it off.

"...I know this goes without saying, but if anyone in your department starts blowing shit up on this boat I am going to kick their ass. You do not cause explosions in deep space, you could breech the hull."

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notlewis - 2010-04-11 18:54 (UTC) - Expand

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fieldpromoted - 2010-04-12 06:07 (UTC) - Expand

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