JDL l CDR Jake Satie (XO) & LT Evan Merlin (CSOO) | "Peculiar and Peculiarer"

Posted on Sun Oct 22nd, 2017 @ 1:11am by Captain Jacob Satie & Commander Evan Merlin

Compared to the average human, he needed absurdly little sleep. This often surprised others because of his regular human appearance. He had to keep finding different roommates in the Academy dorms during his time there because they kept complaining that he kept them awake. Finally, he got paired with a Denobulan and that worked out fine (though after awhile, the Denobulan complained that he was snoring during the four hours a week or so that he actually slept).

It also meant that he had plenty of time to explore the station, the place which had been home before and was now again. He had once known the place intimately, inside and out, but things had changed. Woo, boy, had they ever.

So he resumed his erratic wanderings, reasoning that in order to be able to protect the station from outside threats, he first needed to learn all he could know about the station itself. And now, at the tail-end of the day, he found himself deep inside the belly of the station, in places where even engineers didn't come on a regular basis, one of the older places. On an impulse, he ducked under a beam, turned around a few more corners, and entered one of the downward Jefferies tubes. He removed one of the panels and grinned. Yup. Old Yinn's still was still there. Probably hadn't been used in ages, but it was still there.

A slight noise made him look up in wary surprise. He slid the panel back and crawled on, emerging on the deck below. Before he actually opened the entrance hatch of the tube, he listened, wondering who else would be down here at this time of day.

After his misadventure in the refueling lift with the Captain, Jake had decided to explore the old section of the station. He had been working his way up from the bottom and wondering the maze of Jeffrey's Tubes between deck three ninety-three and three ninety-two when the sound of a hatch popping closed froze him in his tracks. He waited a second until his breath evened out and then said, "Is someone down here?" He moved around the corner of the next junction, the area was not well lit and Jake carried a flashlight which he had switched on. The junction was empty but evidence of recent occupation was at hand. Dust motes stirred by someone's passage swam through the beam of his light and an area where fingerprints had cleared the dust away on a panel in the wall. Carefully, Jake preyed open the panel and saw a contraption that baffled him. Coils of copper tube running alongside two round copper drums and a heating element. Jake had never seen anything like this. It wasn't connected to the station and after a few more seconds of consideration, he decided to tell Engineering to clean it up.

"Why, hello there!" A head popped up from around a corner, surrounded by a halo of wild curls which at some point had escaped from the ribbon which usually kept them in check. A few streaks of dust decorated his forehead, where he had apparently wiped away either hair or sweat with a grimy hand. He wore a Starfleet uniform and a wide grin. "Another intrepid explorer! Ah…" He twisted his head to look at the contraption in the wall. "I see you've found the sill." The man strolled over until he stood next to Jacob and grinned again. "I do wonder if it's still functional after all those years."

The voice in the darkness had caused Jake to startle a bit. The familiar way in which the man had approached and started up a conversation about this contraption hidden in the void between bulkheads put him even more off balance. "What are you doing down here? Who are you?" Jake took a step back not knowing who or what he was dealing with and ran his head into an overhead EPS junction box.

"Probably the same thing you are, exploring the station-" the man began, then winced as Jacob hit his head. "Ouch, careful with that. The ceilings are so low in here you could seriously get a concussion. And with site to site transporters not quite up and running, it's a hell of a walk from here to sickbay…" He waited a few moments to see if Jake was alright, then resumed answering his questions in the exact order in which they had been asked, as if the interruption had never happened. "I'm the new StratOps officer, Evan Merlin… Though I wonder if I should officially add 'Talks With Turbolifts' to my name. It's a fair description, but it would make it a bit unwieldy, don't you think?"

Rubbing the back of his head, Jake said, "Talks with Turbolifts? Who calls you that? You know what never mind. My name is Commander Jake Satie, I'm the Executive Officer. The Captain and I had some issues in the old structure yesterday and I am making a detailed report on the status of this pile so we can begin to correct issues before they lead to injury. Starfleet, in their infinite knowledge, decided to bypass the old station and build new above and below it. My calculations have suggested that there will be a need for this refueling section in the next year or so. I would like to get the old section up and running again before that. I'm not sure how likely that will be though." Jake, still rubbing the spot where he'd hit his head paused. The man had looked human at first glance but something about his eyes told Jake that wasn't necessary true.

"Ah, Commander Satie, it's a pleasure to meet you!" The man extended his hand. "As to how feasible getting this old area up and running again, no idea. I did a fair bit of exploring back when I lived on the station and occasionally I gave the chief engineer a hand here and there, but I'm by no means an engineer myself." He looked around, hands at his side. "Looks like they shut this place down cold five, six years back and haven't started it up since, they just bypassed the whole shebang when the brought the new shell online."

He strolled over to another panel, quite close to the still, and opened it. "Hah. They did, got shipped out in a hurry or they would've brought this along." He pulled out a bottle, filled with a transparent liquid. "Genuine Cold moonshine. Also known as Firewater or Sudden Death. This, Commander, is an integral part of Cold Station Theta's history. It explains how the crew managed to hold out here, years ago, when it seemed Starfleet had forgotten them and they were all alone in here, looking at the same faces day after day." His earlier grin had faded and was replaced by a solemn look. "Of course, there are bars nowadays, the Promenade is a full sized shopping center and off duty Starfleet personnel can get the occasional glass of alcohol, provided there's a detox hypo at hand for a quick sobering up in case of emergency." He picked up an old hypo from within the same compartment and showed it to the Commander. "They were fleet enough, even then, to do the same," he said with a faint smile and put it back. "The station's history, and you and I are probably the only ones who know it's here," he said as he closed the panel. He turned to face Jake. "Would be a shame to tear it down."

"Perhaps," Jake thought aloud, "We could create a museum on the promenade for "historical items" such as this old still. I don't think it's wise to leave it set up here, in any case." His eyebrows arched suggesting that if Merlin had any ideas of starting the old moonshine still up again they should wither and die before being voiced. "There are several items left down here that may find new life on exhibition." Jake added. "Well Lieutenant, I am going to head back up and have a bite to eat. Don't drink that all in one place, eh." Jake raised his hand and pointed at the dust covered bottle of aged and potent moonshine. With that he walked past the man and through the nearby access hatch.

As if he could read minds – though it was far more likely that the man just interpreted Jake's look correctly – the man grinned again. "Don't worry, Commander, my interest in both the still and the alcohol is purely academic." Something he knew the Commander himself would realise if he thought about it for longer than five seconds: he would hardly have showed the installation to the Commander if he had planned to keep it secret.

He closed the panels again and followed the XO out. Food actually sounded like a plan.

Jake made his way back to the lift and took it back up toward the Officer's Mess, accompanied by the oddly acting Lieutenant. "I remember reading about you. Weren't you discovered floating in a stasis pod near the nebula?" Jake asked. He had heard the man had suffered some form of amnesia and that he was brain damaged but how much was truth and how much was Starfleet Rumor Mill, Jake didn't know.

The man entered the turbolift behind Jake and touched the side panel, whispering: "I heard what your colleague did. Now behave!" Then he winked – whether at the lift or at the Executive Officer was hard to say – and smiled. "That's right. Trajectory showed the pod actually came out of the nebula. It must've been under way for quite some time before CST's sensors picked it up. They brought it in, unwrapped the package, and there I was." It was a kind of odd birth: his actual first memory was of the stasis pod opening, faint light dimming around him, his limbs tingling all over, feeling curiously elated and exhausted at the same time – the effect of awakening from stasis? And faces bending over the strange chrysalis from which he began to emerge, watching him, both curious and tense at once. Alien faces, all. He hadn't recognized a single one, including his own.

A few minutes later the lift deposited the two men on deck three. "I'm going to check on a few things. I'll catch up with you in the wardroom." Jake had no intention of trapping himself in a conversation with the embodiment of insanity he had just spent the last fifteen minutes talking to. Jake had the distinct feeling that he had fallen down the rabbit hole and was speaking with the Mad Hatter himself. Jake smiled at Merlin and waved as he ducked into his quarters the door hissing shut behind him. He let out a long breath he hadn't realized he had been holding and walked to his couch kicking his shoes off as he went.

The Lieutenant – who would have had absolutely no objection to add the name 'Mad Hatter' to his collection, had he but known – gave a friendly wave back and strolled to his own quarters. There he placed the bottle of moonshine on one of the shelves, dust and all. Another souvenir added to his collection. He looked around and sighed. He still wasn't the least bit sleepy. Ah well, there was always more to explore.

With a faint smile, he turned around and left his quarters once more.

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Commander Jake Satie
Executive Officer
Cold Station Theta, SB-1170

Lieutenant Evan Merlin
Chief Strategic Operations Officer
Cold Station Theta, SB-1170