STAR TREK: A Long Road (Voyager Fix It Quest)

C'nola scowled. "To the gym then," she said.

Amy's ears perked up at the word 'gym' and she scampered down the corridor so suddenly that C'nola yelped, stumbled, and was nearly dragged around the corner.

"Soooo, uh...the...dilithium processing has started, Torres says...it's...good, and, um the...the Val Jean is almost..." T'are trailed off, biting her lip as she watched Janeway holding up her phaser, carefully adjusting the setting on it, while Harry unscrewed the back of the PADD with his multitool. T'are paused for a long bit. "I'm gonna go help Kes get sandwitched between the Delany twins, okay?"

"Good work, Lieutenant," Janeway said, distractedly as T'are shuffled out of the bridge.

"Captain, I once again must protest," Tuvok said. "If you simply flump the drive-"

"That would take twenty minutes, Tuvok, for a procedure that should take thirty seconds!" Janeway said. "It's absurd overkill."

Tuvok pursed his lips.

As Janeway leveled her makeshift phaser cum duronic screwdriver at the dismembered PADD, who's electronic guts had been spread along the floor of the bridge, Tuvok reached down, then brought up a chronometer. He thumbed in the precise number of seconds since he had begun counting in his head. While he trusted his eidetic memory...he was simply tired of it.

"Okay," Janeway said. "This will be over in a jiff." She aimed the phaser and fired. The PADD began to spark and hiss as she frowned and slowly adjusting her aim, beginning the rewiring process...and then...she shut off the beam and smiled. "Perfect!" She stepped over, then slapped the units back into the PADD, swung the back closed, and started to screw it up. "See, Tuvok. Your old captain knows a bit about jerry rigging here."

"What setting did you put your phaser too?" Harry asked. "There's times where I would kill for a duronic screwdriver and they're just nowhere to be found."

"Oh, just modulate it on the theta theta nine frequency, with a subquantum jiggle," Janeway said, clicking the last piece home. She twirled the PADD in her hand, then tapped it up.

A blue screen flared up.

"What!?"

Text scrolled.

LCARS OS CORRUPTED - SUBSTRATE KERNING STACK OVERFLOW, LEVEL SIX. FLUNT DRIVE A.

Janeway frowned. "Okay, it looks like the CBFCs were just the overlying problem..."

"Captain, flunt the drive," Tuvok said, his voice even.

"I've been handling computers my entire life, I can find the root problem!" Janeway snapped. "I just need to work out the kerning structure."

She sat down at her chair and began to tap furiously with her thumbs at the secondary OS. The screen went from blue to white and black - which did mean she was at least able to input new information into the SOS - but substrate kerning was always an annoying problem

Harry shook his head slowly, then blinked. "Wait, what did T'are say she was going to do?"

V'orak - or...Rak kept her attentive eyes on Brian. It was hard to think of her as anything but Rak right now. Brian's cheeks heated as he remembered the quiet night on the beaches of Aquatain. The feeling of his (at the time, his) tongue feathering along his chest, nuzzling against his belly on a slow, gentle passage downward. Brian's cheeks heated and he looked away. "Uh..."

"Well?" Rak slipped closer.

Brian coughed. His memories were getting...

More...insistent.

"Why do you have breasts?" Brian asked, more to throw out anything but what he was thinking. He...wasn't avoiding Rak because of some absurd concern about how other people would see him - a human male being with a genderqueer Gorn that was...two feet taller than him and could fold him in half. And...topped. But...it was a Captain thing. He might need to give orders that could put Rak at risk to save the rest of the ship! That was the thing.

If he had hoped that the question would make Rak stop sliding her hip closer to him, it didn't work.

"...do you want to really know?" Rak murmured, softly.

Brian looked aside, shrugged. "I asked. And since we're...stuck here..."

Her feathery tongue flicked against his earlobe. "Because I like them. If I'm going to be a girl that entices mammals for a few months...why not lean in?" Her grin was playful and full of very sharp teeth. Brian laughed, despite himself, then turned his head back to look at her - nose to snout.

"So, you're going back to Ssessekh?"

"No, going back to male," Rak said, chuckling.

"Ah." Brian's brain shorted out at the mental image.

"Well, isn't that an interesting reaction." Rak swung her hips around, then before Brian knew it, she was sitting on his lap, her hands on his shoulders. "You know, Captain, I'm beginning to think you trying to keep a respectable distance between us is a post hoc justification for the fact that you can't handle the fact that the big badass Maquis warleader bottoms."

"T-That's...absurd. It's not the dark ages, I don't have anything to prove to my crew," Brian said, his cheeks darkening more as he looked up and up and up the scaled body of Rak, admiring the broadness of her shoulders and feeling the iron hard strength of her hands as she leaned down against him. Her feathers crested up around her head as her tail lifted and began to sway from side to side behind her. Brian recognized that particular predatory trap.

"You do know, if you gave me an order, I can always tell you to jump into a star. I'm an officer of the Gorn Hegemony state department. I technically outrank you."

Brian's hands needed something to do, anything but grabbing her ass.

They grabbed her hips. He now just needed to...push her away. Any second now.

"I'm not sure that makes this any better," Brian said, trying to keep his voice even. "From an ethics standpoint-"

"Bri, shut the fuck up." Rak leaned forward and kissed him.

C'nola stumbled into the gymnasium with a grumble, dragged there by an excited Amy Strong, who immediately began to jog towards the track, wagging her tail. C'nola let her go, then closed the door behind her so Amy couldn't escape from the room. The gym was arranged into a running track in the middle, with a gantry along the second floor that had all the weight training machines. The gravity controls were right on the wall for easy adjusting, and there was a section of the floor that could be opened up to reveal the swimming pool. It was...you know, a gym. Fortunately the Doctor had been right, and not D-91.

Kes was here, punching a bag as hard as she could on the second floor. C'nola stepped back, sprinted forward, sprang to the curved edge of one of the lockers on the first floor, back flipped, grabbed onto the edge of the railing on the second floor, then threw her legs upwards to accentuate the momentum of her trajectory, swinging herself around and so she landed on the second floor with a soft thump. She stood, while Amy started to chase her tail on the lower floor.

"Hey, Kes-"

"Why-" Kes snarled, punching the bag so hard that, if it had been a person, bones would have cracked. "Are-" she slammed in a knee. "Men-" Another knee. "So-" a knife blow to roughly throat level. "Fucking stupid!" She leaped and crashed her ankle into the back of the bag, which swung wildly as she landed, panting.

"...is this a multiple choice question?" C'nola asked.

Kes turned to face her, scowling. Then her scowl softened. "No, uh...are you okay?"

C'nola blinked, then remembered her current state. She plucked the twig from her hair, brushed it back, and then tried to pretend like the red and brown stains over her uniform just weren't there. "Amy took the long way," she said. "My girlfriend is currently a dog, can you help?"

"...I...excuse me, Amy is a WHAT!?" Kes asked, rushing to the railing on the second level, looking down. "How did that happen?"

"Oh, uh, Amy's from another universe. In that universe, she was able to shift between two forms using her psychic powers," C'nola said. "But see, back there, it was cool cause she shifted between being my girlfriend and being my girlfriend but like, nine feet tall and able to throw a Lemun Russ main battle tank at daemons."

"At...is that...an alien?"

"No, it's complicated and stupid," C'nola said, waving her hand. "Just like most things from the Evil Universe."

"Ooh, the evil universe, right," Kes said. "I...I was told it's kind of impolite...to...you know..."

"Impolite, fuck, it's a wild understatement!" C'nola said, shaking her head. "That place fucking sucked. Wait till I tell you about her Dad! Or her adoptive Mom."

"Well, at least her bio-Mom was nice, right?" Kes said, hopefully.

"No, her dad made her in a lab," C'nola said, scratching her chin. "Her and her...like...twenty of them?"

Kes' eyes boggled. "Twenty!? And they all can become dogs?"

"No, most of them never figured out shapeshifting cause they were assholes too," C'nola said, shrugging. "Anyway, she's a dog now, please help."

Kes frowned. "I...I'm no good at helping people today," she said, looking down at Amy. "Or anything. For that matter."

C'nola sighed. "Listen, if whatever happened involved men, just remember my maxim: Men are bad, girls are soft and pretty."

Kes frowned harder. "That doesn't sound like it'd have helped much." She sighed. "But if it is a psychic thing, I do have training. Come on." She started towards the stairs that led down to the first level. As she walked, C'nola looked at her expectantly. Kes didn't need to use her psychic powers. She sighed. "S-So, it all started at the Orion's cabins."

"Oooooooh..." C'nola said as Kes explained, using hand gestures for relative positions, exactly how T'are's attempt to help her lose her virginity with the Delany Twins had ended up - specifically, without her losing anything but a lot of time. "I just felt so...ignored and useless."

"Yeah, that was your first mistake: T'are is really bad at...what's the word...focusing," C'nola said, as she whistled. "Amy! Here!"

Amy padded over, happily.

"Doubly so when she's high on other Orion's pheromones," C'nola said. "Believe me, once she comes down, she'll be all apologies."

"Yeah. But...I still feel like such an idiot," Kes said, blushing. "It was supposed to be...like...special."

C'nola cocked her head. "Right, you've never...been with...anyone before, huh?"

"Yeah," Kes said, blushing. "You two are like, dimensionally crossed lovers refugees, I bet your first time was so romantic."

Amy woofed.

"IN A BROOM CLOSET!?" Kes asked, sounding faintly horrified.

Amy woofed again.

"Oh..." Kes blinked.

"AMY!" C'nola shouted, her cheeks burning. "Don't just TELL her...details, is she using details?"

Amy woofed again.

"What's a sound marine?" Kes asked C'nola.

"Turn her human right now, when she's human, she has a FILTER!" C'nola shook her fist at Amy.

Amy licked C'nola's hand and wagged her tail.

---
VOTES! PLANS! It's time for more of them!

JANEWAY
[ ] FLUNT THE DRIVE, JANEWAY
[ ] Ah, yes. Substrate kerning is just annoying and fiddly...for a human. We'll write an algorithm that redoes the kerning FOR us!
[ ] Wait, you can do a workaround by just hacking in another PADD's memory circuitry!

BRIAN
[ ] ...fine, you were just embarrassed about being...you know...Torres would literally not let you live it down. (Get pegged.)
[ ] Bottom? Bottom!? You'll show Rak who bottoms here (attempt to top, badly, get pegged.)

C'NOLA
[ ] "Don't worry, C'nola. I got this!" (Amy becomes a Lyindal omniphage.)
[ ] "Don't worry, C'nola. I got this!" (Amy becomes a Karakian titan lion)
[ ] "Don't worry, C'nola. I got this!" (Amy becomes an even bigger golden retriever)
[ ] "...I can't do this, C'nola." (Kes and C'nola have a heart to heart. Amy plays matchmaker!)