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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.]

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[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.

[There's a pause, and then.]

Why are you tasting plants on a foreign planet?! Does the term 'biochemical barrier' mean nothing?!

[WHY IS THAT WHAT YOU FOCUSED ON, NIGHTINGALE.]

_{[ He blinked. ]}

It's not like we go down and start picking berries and just tossing them in our mouths, you know. We do chemical analysis and tests on them before anyone is allowed to ingest them.

Populated planets make this go a lot faster, but we've never run into to many problems.

_{[ Giving you such a flat look, Nightingale, because really? ]}

Mention that part sooner.

[in her defense, you were just talking about not being able to understand everything from screens.]

_{[ It's true, he said that, but it didn't mean they were unsafe about
it all. ]}

Have a little faith that an organization that's been doing this for a hundred years or so might have some safety protocols.

[She snorts.]

I used to regularly spar with a thousand-year-old vampire. Just because someone's been doing something for a long time, doesn't mean they're not dumb about it.

Besides, if you're going to crack on me about eating food from foreign planets - what do you think we've all been doing this entire time, waltzing from planet to planet like this, filling out ships with fresh food rather than the gels whenever we can?

_{[ LET'S POKE HOLES IN THIS UNIVERSE THEN, SHALL WE? ]}

As in they do dumb things or they're still bad at fighting after all that time?

I mean, apparently a lot of this stuff on our trip came from Earth, and the Atroma are deciding all our destinations... It'd be bad for their ratings if we all died of food poisoning.

Oh, she was very good at fighting. But she never learned how to not be reckless, especially when trying to approach a mage.

A lot, but not all, and while Atroma can pick, doesn't mean something can't kill someone. I have allergies, for instance.

_{[ A shrug. ]}

Sometimes reckless pays off. People aren't always sure how to deal with it in fights.

The augments can probably do something about that...

No way. Reckless is how you die pointlessly.

Could, and haven't. Trust me.

Reckless has paid off plenty of times for me. Especially when you know the enemy's attach patterns and they think they know yours.

That's something I'll ask the Atroma about next time. If they're willing to talk to me, after last time.

[She shrugs.]

It's not really reckless if you're planning around the enemy behavior. I agree it can pay off, but recklessness is always a last resort.

If it's for yourself, that's fine. But not for me. I really don't want them messing with me more than they have.

Suppose it depends on the amount of risk you're putting into it, and the enemy you're up against. Sometimes reckless is all you got.

I mean... It's a bit late for that for me. I'm pretty sure I made their spokeswoman cry last time.

[She hopes she did, anyway.]

I'm the strategist for my party back home. If reckless is all we have, then I've done something very wrong.

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universal_charm - 2017-04-27 06:31 (UTC) - Expand

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