Sneaking in the Back Door

Posted on Thu Jan 31st, 2019 @ 8:14am by Commander Liselle Qwyyn & Lieutenant Ian Murphy

Mission: Season 2: Episode 3: Determination is not always a good thing
Location: Shuttle Murphy's Law/Shuttlebay
Timeline: MD1 - 1015 hrs
1660 words - 3.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Blasting through space at a respectable Warp 5, the shuttlecraft [i]Murphy's Law (II)[/i] made its way towards the latest set of coordinates Starfleet had for the [i]Elysium[/i]. The craft was, well, a piece of crap. An old Maquis cargo shuttle that had been impounded back in the days when the Maquis were still a thing, (and not a tragic footnote in the annals of the Dominion War) it had once been loaded with weapons and munitions, but had since been stripped of all but civilian-grade defensive weapons, spruced up and sold at auction by the government of Bajor.

It wasn't the nicest looking (or smelling) ship, but it housed Murphy's smithy rather tidily, and it got along faster than Murphy's previous warp 2 shuttle. If he hadn't upgraded, this trip might well have taken Murphy a fortnight to catch up with his old ship. Fiddling with the Com system as he entered sensor range, he opened up a channel and hailed her, lest he end up on the business end of a volley of photon torpedoes,
=A=Elysium Flight Control, this is Shuttlecraft Murphy's Law. =A= He drawled in his light Irish brogue =A=On approach for docking and embarkation of personnel. Do you read me?=A=

Liselle looked up from the shuttle she had been scanning, her brow furrowed. Lowering her tricorder, she tilted her head to one side, and then the other, as though she were shaking around the words she had just heard, trying to get a better sense of them. Slowly, she reached up and tapped her comm badge, uncertain if she was just falling victim to some wishful thinking. "Ia -- Ian?"

"Got it in one." Ian replied with the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, not that she could see it. "Professor Murphy now. I heard you lot can't manage to keep yourselves out of trouble for even a few weeks, so I decided to take a cushy academy job on the Elysium. Dropping out of warp now... Permission to dock?"

There were procedures to follow, protocols that demanded strict adherence. Regulations surrounding the arrival of any personal clearly indicated that Qwyyn needed to verify Ian's orders and his clearance to board the Elysium. But sheer excitement overtook her. "Yes! Yes, of course!" She jumped up to her feet, and cracked her head on the open door of the shuttle she had been inspecting. Her language was foul. And loud.

"Thank-" Well, now she was cussing like a sailor, and Ian winced a little. It probably wasn't his fault that she was cussing, but you never knew, and with clearance, Ian flew his shuttle adeptly into the Elysium's shuttlebay, passing through the force field that kept the atmosphere from leaking out of the ship and guiding her in to a berthing space not far away from the shuttle Qwyyn was inspecting, his shuttle's wings folding downward and underneath, and its landing struts extending to meet the deck and lock down magnetically. "So, how is everyone? I heard you had some action while I was back at HQ."

His words were barely beyond his lips before Liselle was in his arms, throwing herself against him despite what little amount of self control she had attempted to muster. "It's really you!" she cried into his ear. Her mind (bruised as it had been by the shuttle ramp) told her that she had better let go of Ian and step away, and so her arms clung to him all the tighter to stop that from happening. "I still can't believe you're here! You're staying, right? Right?"

Now, Ian was, by nature, somewhat of a grumpy old bastard, but not at all immune to the charms of getting hugged by pretty women/ "It's really me." He confirmed, hugging her back. Had they had the sort of relationship that made contact like this permissible? Well... He was willing to allow it. "I'm staying. As long as the Academy wants me teaching here, at least. Seems the promotion I went chasing after led me right back here." Ok, not just a promotion, but a change of venue. His encounter with his other self and his other self's children had rattled his cage a little. Especially the girl called Cassandra -- his doppelganger's doppeldaughter. It only figured that fate would throw him right back to the Elysium to face his demons.

"I'm happy to hear that," Qwyyn assured him, finally stepping out of his personal space. She showed him her hands, as though assuring him that he was safe from any future physical assault. "After we found that planet, and our alternate selves, a lot of our crew left. In a hurry. It's been a lot to adjust to," she explained. "Gods, I even thought about leaving! Somehow having familiar faces back here again...it makes me feel like maybe things have a chance of getting back to normal again."

Ian smiled a little more than he usually did, although it faded away quickly when she mentioned the planet of their evil twins, and he searched her eyes for a moment or two. It was almost as if she'd tuned into his thoughts just then. "Normal? I'm pretty sure that's a myth at this point." he said, reaching out to give her shoulder a gentle squeeze, both to let her know there were no hard feelings about the surprise hug, but also as a gesture of solidarity. "I don't think we're meant to confront harsh truths about ourselves in such a manner. It was like looking at a reflection of ourselves in the surface of a pond and then dropping a stone in. Everything was warped."

Qwyyn found herself nodding slowly, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. "Yes. Yes, that's exactly it," she said. "Gods, Lieutenant, are you sure you aren't here to teach poetry or something? I think I'd like to sign up."

"Oh, pretty sure." Ian said, his hand slipping away and a casual smirk replacing his smile. "My last attempts at poetry, back when I was a cadet wooing my future wife, have been sealed away by the Fleet as potential breaches of the Khitomer accords regarding anti-personnel weaponry that causes too much pain and suffering to the victims."

Her laughter took her so quickly that she found herself unable to suppress a rather loud snort. Nonetheless, she brought the back of her hand up to her nose, as though it somehow wasn't already much too late to hide. She realized then how little she actually knew Ian Murphy. Professionally, she was quite aware of his abilities, and he was most certainly a capable officer. But she had spent very little time with him outside of the bridge. In fact, this was probably the longest conversation they had ever had that didn't involve someone saying 'yes,sir.'

Qwyyn looked at him from over her hand, only now trusting that the unexpected outbursts were gone from her. "I'm sorry," she said, her embarrassment plain.

Murphy's eyes crinkled with merriment for a moment. The temptation was there to tease Liselle for the unladylike snort, but then, it seemed somehow in-character for her. "It's alright." He said, dismissing it. And then, after a few moments, he sobered. "So, am I to take it that things have not been easy while I was away?" He asked, cocking his head slightly to the side and studying her. Maybe he was opening up a whole can of worms by asking, but that never stopped him before.

"Well, as I was saying, ever since we came upon our duplicate selves things around here have been a little...tense," she said. "You pass people in the corridors and you see people that died in that other reality. People that you hardly know over here, but apparently were your best friend over there. People that you're close to on this side who are your greatest enemy on the other side. Or you find out that your alternate self had a lover..."

"Or you find out that your other self had children with someone you're not terribly fond of in this reality." He responded wryly. "And then, because you're a horrible hobgoblin of a person, you scan that someone and yourself and find out that there's a slight, but dwindling possibility that you could actually create that child in this reality... But you let the moment pass, and that child is never conceived." He reached up to scratch his temple. "You can't judge yourself on the reflections you see in the ripples of a pond."

"That's true," Qwyyn agreed. She had a notion of stretching his metaphor, but her grasp on Human expressions was not one of her strongest traits. Pushing aside her doubt, she decided to go for it. "But you also shouldn't be afraid to jump in the water every once in a while." Only then did she realize that their conversation had brought them from the shuttlebay and to the turbolift at the end of the hall. She nearly started at how completely her lips had put her legs on autopilot. She reached forward and pressed the call button.

"Perhaps, but not before putting a toe... You know, I'm not even going to complete that metaphor. That's what's wrong with metaphors. They almost always turn vaguely sexual." He said with a shake of his head and a chuckle. "I should let you get back to testing the structural integrity of shuttlecraft bulkheads... Hopefully without using your skull to do it."

She rolled her eyes in humor, remembering her own foolish clumsiness, as her hand once more tended to the part of her head that had struck the shuttle. "It's really great to see you back here," Qwyyn assured him. "Welcome home."

OFF

Lieutenant Ian Murphy
Academy Vice Commandant, Science Instructor
USS Elysium

&

Commander Liselle Qwyyn
Chief Flight Control / Second Officer
USS Elysium