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Who: Beverly Crusher, Ezri Dax, James Kirk, Leonard McCoy, and Pavel Chekov - and you, should you like to stop by!
Broadcast: video
Action: Málum
When: April 5

[So Beverly may or may not have taken a few tequila shots. And she may or may not be quite drunk and affectionately effusive about... everything. Thus she has something Very Important to tell the Fleet, which she does from inside Málum with some of her Starfleet companions around. Thankfully, one of them is holding the camera or this feed would be a lot more intolerably shaky.

It's also one of the rare times you'll find her in her Starfleet Uniform.]

Today! [Beverly claps her hands together.] Today is an important holiday back home - First Contact Day! It marks the time when humans finally launched the first spaceship powered by warp drive and that was also the same day we met the Vulcans. [She frowns, her thoughts coming more slowly than is usual.] I don't think we've had any Vulcans here in the fleet, unless it was a long time ago before I came. Which is really weird when you stop to think about it, that there's been Humans and Cardassians and Trill but no Vulcans. Or anybody else really. Vulcans kind of look like elves so I've often wondered if maybe they are but just so many universes removed that it's not quite the same.

[Clearly someone is giving her A Look from behind the camera and she points an admonishing finger at them.]

I'm getting there! [She straightens up and pats her hair, getting back into "lecture" mode.] What probably many of you don't know, is that I saw all of this, first hand, the last time I went home. You see there were the Borg - only we're not going to go into them because this is supposed to be a celebration - and they were trying to go back in time to ruin the warp ship so the Vulcans wouldn't come down to see us so of course we had to go stop them even though we're not supposed to time travel - and for good reason too, it's a pain in the ass. One time Mark Twain followed us onto the Enterprise and it was this whole thing though I guess it worked out all right in the end because then he wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court so that's good. And he really was very nice and understanding of why he couldn't tell anyone what he saw.

[Another pause as she tries to figure out why she started talking about Mark Twain. Ah! Right!]

So anyway we had to go back in time to stop the Borg and so we met Zefram Cochrane who invented the warp drive and he was completely not like any of us expected and you know, sometimes they say you shouldn't meet your heroes? We'd all been taught about what a great genius he was, and that's true, but I guess they didn't really want to mention in the history books that he really liked to party and building the ship wasn't some noble, selfless endeavor to advance science - it was a difficult time in human history, and he needed the money. But that's the beautiful thing isn't it? People are complicated and may not always be what you expect but they still can do great things. And that's really what First Contact Day is about, celebrating the amazing things we've already done and the things we'll do in the future too. Together.

[This nerd, y'all. You should come party with her.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, good. It would be awkward if we were having a party and you two were mad at each other.

If we were mad at each other, I wouldn't have come to the party.

You could be friends with someone else here.

_{[ He gave a shrug. ]}

I hope you're enjoying yourself though.

You seriously overestimate how social I am.

[socializing is hard, okay.]

I am, though. I don't really get all the Earth stuff, but the drinks and the company are nice.

You can't be any less social than Fenris - just so you understand where my level of "anti-social" is set.

Guessing that means you're not one of the people from an Earth world then, huh?

Fenris?

[guess who she's never met]

Definitely not. Ashvara native, born and raised in Delwight. Earth is pretty annoying, honestly.

He's an elf on my ship, with a very alarming anger to body-height ratio.

_{[ So angry. But it's charming once you get used to it. ]}

Hah, and what makes you say that?

Bet I can out-anger him.

[she is also much, much smaller than him.]

A lot of reasons. First and foremost that it's always Earth people who try to say there's no such thing as magic.

Also, the fact that I just can't get away from Earth shit. I haven't been home for years, or seen anyone else from my world, so every time yet another Earth person shows up, or we get events here from Earth's calendar, it's just rubbing salt into the wound.

Well, in the Earths Beverly, Bones, Chekov, and myself come from - there is no magic. I suppose you could consider science a sort of magic, though. It's just that the word magic has a different connotation for us - usually mean a trick involving sleight of hand or mirrors, that sort of thing.

But I can see your frustration with the latter part.

Why don't you share some of the holidays from your world? Maybe we could do the math and work out when they fall on the Earthian calendar and celebrate them too.

[She shrugs, and holds out her arm.

Her arm suddenly is coated in crackling electricity, sparking and popping.]

Next person who tells me there's no such thing as magic is going to get slugged in the face by it.

[And then the electricity fades, and she takes a sip of her drink like nothing unusual just happened.]

... I've thought about it, but it doesn't really work. Full Moons' Night needs both moons to be full at the same time, which we can't do in space. Children's Day is embarrassing, so I'll pass. The Day of Peace... I doubt we can find people willing to dress up like dead gods so people can fight them. And that's not even getting into the headache of trying to convert them from my calendar to Earth's.

_{[ That got a raise brow, but he's been around Fenris and others long
enough now to kind of accept things like that. ]}

I can't deny you can do that, for sure. I think the problem is the word itself - the meaning is being missed by whatever is translating for us. The connotation of the word is different between our worlds. Humans can produce electricity too, but we call it science, not magic.

_{[ A shrug. ]}

You would be surprised. If it's really important to you, your friends should want to help you celebrate, even if there's a bit of modification needed to make it happen. And I know of a couple of people who would find the challenge of the conversion fun.

We have science, too. And magitech. Magic is just any effect caused by the aspecting, conversion, or expenditure of mana.

[She shakes her head, taking a much longer drink before continuing.]

I don't really care about the holidays themselves. I'm just homesick. I haven't even seen anyone from my world in a couple of years now.

_{[ He chooses to leave it, because she could say it existed all she
wanted, but it didn't exist in his world. ]}

I'm sorry. But if there's anything we can do to help with that, you should let us know.

[She tilts her head, very clearly confused.]

... Um. Are you sure? I mean, we just met, so...

Yes, but you're Beverly's friend and we're all stuck in the same mess together. Seems to me we should help each other out when we can.

[She squints suspiciously, like she's trying to see if he's messing with her.]

... Okay, but I'll warn you now, trying to help me can be kind of a pain.

You really have no idea what I do for a living then.

_{[ Seriously. Helping you cannot be as bad as some of the other shit
he's done. ]}

[She has to consider.]

Actually, I don't?

[... you say that now, but it absolutely can be.]

Hmm? Beverly didn't say?

Oh, well, I'm in charge of a five-year mission back home that involves going into unknown space to discover new planets and hopefully new peoples.

[She tilts her head, thinking.]

... If you have advanced technology enough for space flight, enough that five years is a short enough period to count as a mission, why would you need exploration vessels? Wouldn't it be easier to just scan from your own planet or outposts, and then just send ships to places that look likely to have life?

[nightingale stop poking holes in other people's series premises, you're a JRPG, you don't have room to talk here.]

Hmm, we do a bit of that, absolutely, but sometimes you run across disturbances or obstacles that stop those signals like nebula clouds or there being to much debris. Sometimes the signals can't reach that far in a timely manner. Sometimes the only way to find out what's there is to just go yourself. And my job often means going out beyond the reach of these outposts and planets.

I'm the vanguard, you could say. Our ships have their own sensors, so we're not aimlessly wandering, of course.

_{[ Plugged that hole nicely, didn't he? ]}

Seems to me like I'd rather upgrade sensors than send people out there blind...

We're not going out there blind. We can get readings and what to expect, but ultimately you don't know how things will go until you actually go to the place. You can only learn so much from readings on a screen.

If you can only learn so much from readings on a screen, then you need better readings and better screens.

[omniscience is the only way to go.]

_{[ He shook his head. ]}

You can watch from a screen all you want, but that won't tell you anything about the people, if there are any. It won't let you feel for yourself what a planet is like - what the air smells like, what the plants taste like, what the sunset looks like and the sunrise. You can't replace those things with machine readings, and they are essential for forging new understandings and relationships.