Um, I don't know what number of logs I'm up too, but two sounds good! Oh, if anyone wants the MP3 to the song, I got it! :) Oh and too those of you who ever watched the X-files episode called "Home" will recognize it and remember how absol-freaking-lutely wrong that episode was. -Mason and friends... 2. Log of the Month By Lt. Samantha Mason [Wonderful, Wonderful! Performed by Johnny Mathis; Words by: Ben Raleigh; Music by: Sherman Edwards] Disclaimer: If sane, do not read. Samantha returned from Shuttlebay 2 hugging herself, squeezing her arms tightly - just like after the first time she had seen Akira and those Borg tendrils licking like loose hair on a breezy day snapping and reaching for her trying to assimilate her. Ed Barth's "grabbin' and a-gropin'" hands had Samantha reliving that near-borgification memory step by drudging step back to Engineering. Since they arrived to DS9 things had been utterly hellish and Samantha was guessing that it was only going to get more hellish. As soon as her foot stepped across the Mason-Dixon line of "The Rest of the Banshee" and "Main Engineering" the panicked screams and running, rolling, and scratching people told Samantha that today was probably, just, really a good day to die. Samantha brushed her slender hand through her blond locks, her hands settling and squeezing her temples as she surveyed the madness. One engineer was on the ground rolling and screaming, "It burns! It burns! Why won't theys stop bitin's me in the hap-Pie Place!!" Another engineer, a busty woman was slapping and beating the hell out of Wallace, who was, trying to with all his might, relieve her of her uniform. She managed to give him a black eye and bloody nose, but Wallace, stubborn like a whole herd of lemmings determined to go off that cliff and into oblivion kept returning for more punishment. Lockheart sat on the console muttering words that went in alphabetical order starting with the letter 'L." "WHAT THE DEVIL IS GOING ON?!" Samantha cried. No one responded to her. Samantha grabbed the first engineer she saw and pulled him close - not close enough since his face was red and raw, and his hands were scratching all over his body. "What's your name?" "Measley!" the boy engineer cried. "Let me go! I can't scratch and they're biting me!" "What's biting you?" "ANTS!!" Samantha let him go. Dear God, she thought. She had let this one go way out of hand. When that glass broke she shouldn't have about-faced and marched to check the shuttlebays. No, she should have turned right around, marched up to Wallace, and planted her foot between the crack of his buttcheeks and told him to "make like an anteater and start sucking up ants." Samantha promptly called sickbay and began to tell them of the situation currently in-progress. "Sickbay," Samantha began. "We have a medical emergency. It appears we have ants loose in engineering and it's causing my engineers to scratch themselves. I need immediate help and probably a lot of ointment." Actually, that's what Samantha thought she said. This is really what she said: "Oh my God!! You have to help me my entire engineering staff is going insane! There are ants everywhere! Oh my god! Get out get out! Get out!!! Get out of my pants! Wallace I'm going to kill you! Lockheart stop doing that and get a bottle of RAID! Hello?? Hello?? We have ants all over the place and my entire engineering staff is scratching themselves bloody! I need help! Help!!! I need ointment! Oh my god!!!-" The response: "Ma'am, ma'am, we can't…ma'am, please calm down, I can't hear a word you're saying, Ma'am, please stop screaming, I know you're hysterical but just calm down…I can't understand what you're saying. Ma'am, what ants? Ants in your pants? I-engineering? Alright, look we'll send a doctor down to engineering, just don't move and don't scratch. Ma'am? Ma'am?? You'd better bring a lot of ointment for this one Jeb." (Yes, we have a Doctor Jeb now who probably specializes in good ole fashioned "hacksaw, pliers, and tongs" medicine.) Samantha waited for "Doctor Jeb" to come, but alas he took too long, and Samantha getting antsy (ha ha) nabbed Wallace by the ear and tugged him forcefully across Main Engineering and across the Mason-Dixon line into "the rest of the Banshee." "Wallace," Samantha said regaining her composure and professionalism. "Wallace." She helped straighten Wallace up too. She brushed his dusty blonde hair aside to reveal his blackened eye and bruised forehead. She brushed the scuffed dirt off the navy blue of his uniform jumpsuit gingerly, like a girlfriend soothing her beau after a tough street brawl. "Wallace." In fact lyrics come to mind: Sometimes we walk hand in hand by the sea And we breathe in the cool salty air (ahh, ahhhh, ahhhh!) You turn to me with a kiss in your eyes And my heart feels a thrill beyond compare (wooo ooooooo!) Then your lips cling to mine It's wonderful, wonderful! Oh, so wonderful, my love! "Yeah hotcakes?" Wallace said unwaveringly. "Oww, you're hurting me." Samantha brushed and brushed and "brushed" the dirt off Wallace's shoulders. She "brushed" so hard that her nails were cutting through the fabric and into his skin. She brushed so hard she thought that it might help if she brushed his neck and wrung the dirt out of the pores for him. Samantha withdrew her hands. Samantha grated her teeth and smiled instead. Hotcakes. She could go for some hotcakes right now. She could also go for some Barbeque too, and with any luck, when Captain Morrigan returned, there would be plenty of barbequing to go around when she got her ass roasted. "Wallace, I'm going to give it to you straight. I hate you. If murder wasn't a capital offense I would consider it a viable solution to our current problem, but I know crap runs upstream, which means when Morrigan finds out about this she will roast me, and god help me, I will rain thunder and brimstone down on you, so you'd better shut up and follow me to science." "Cool, we're gonna talk with the hot red head." "I will talk with Lieutenant Calorie." With a forceful tug Samantha pushed her way by an approaching officer, an officer dispatched from sickbay by the name of Doctor Jeb. He tried to inquire from Samantha the happenings across the Mason-Dixon border into insanity, but instead got a cold-shoulder and a shrug. Jeb, we'll get back to Mason and Wallace in a moment, peered into the zany world of Engineering. Crossing the line would be like Alice stepping through the looking glass. Starfleet had prepared Jeb for this moment and with a brisk and lively gait, Jeb, our Starfleet/Country Doctor hero stepped into action. "What might be the problem son?" Jeb asked the first engineer he saw rolling around on the floor. "Dems Ants they're done bore a hole into my thinger!!! I cants gets thems out now!!" The engineer cried with a terrible lisp. "Oh dear God…" Jeb said. His eyes bearing witness to a sight more horrible than he could know. "Whats we gonna do Docta Jebs?" The engineer cried. Jeb pulled from his medical kit a thin straw, a bullet, a spreader, and tweezers, and slapped on a pair of latex gloves. "Now, don't worry. You just bite down on this bullet, ya hear? I done, done this before, and it ain't neutered nobody yet." As we fade away from the Doctor and his quietly screaming patient these lyrics come to mind: Sometimes we stand on the top of a hill And we gaze at the earth and the sky (ahh, ahhh, ahhh!) I turn to you and you melt in my arms There we are, darling, only you and I (woooo Oooooooooo!) What a moment to share It's Wonderful! Wonderful! Oh, so wonderful, my love! To keep things fresh a bit, instead of going "Meanwhile, Samantha and Wallace exited the turbolift onto deck eight where the "general science labs" were…" blah, blah, blah, we'll jarringly shift points of view to a self-proscribed genius named Sven. Sven had joined the Banshee a few months ago only because he too had finished graduate studies at the Daystrom Institute and his professor thought that he needed some "field experience." Sven meanwhile was more than happy just to stay locked in a room with four walls, no sunlight streaming in, and a crapload of mathematical books to keep him entertained. He was the King of the Jacobian Matrix, spending his free moments over a cup of coffee, not swooning over the latest campus sweetheart but watching the seagulls crap on the students in the intramural field whilst solving curved surfaces in ten-dimensional space. Unlike Sven's friend Hans who played the lute in an early music ensemble, Sven choose to harmonize to the strings of the universe and play the C-sharp that was Edward Witten's Membrane theory of the Universe. There was nothing like a quartet of Hawkings, Einstein, Kaku, and Penrose to enliven the firing of neurons, that excitatory and inhibitory network of tendrils hotwiring his brain like a supercomputer giving him the special gift to calculate the grandiose-final-unified-super-quantum-gravity theory or the outlandishly controversial superstring theory that would reunite man with God and bring all humanity to a whole new level of existence never thought possible. God! The sheer thought of it made his manhood bulge and throb in his pants! It was so close…oh, so close… Then Doctor Ressei, his mentoring professor suggested he get "field experience." "Field experience" like feeding Lieutenant Kaelyre's rats - rats she was using for some god-awful purpose and Sven resented it, not because of what she was using the rats for, but because he had to feed them "special" pellets every single damn day. Sven couldn't care more if Cyanah was using the rats to grow extra body organs to sell on the black market or just breeding them to radioactively comic proportions to sell to the Sally Struthers Corporation to help feed starving, third-world colonies out in deep space. If there was anything, Sven just wanted to get back to a library, a room with math books, his own quarters even, and plod away crossing discrete thresholds bringing him closer and closer to the Truth or at least hide in his closet and cry over the miserable assignment he was given. Sven sang: "The world is full of wond'rous things it's true (do do do!) But they wouldn't have much meaning without you… Yes that's right you, you miserable little miscreant!" Sven said jabbing a pellet down a small pipe into the rat cage, the one labeled "Ernie." "Why must I feed you? Huh? What good will it do me or the rest of mankind if I, Sven Heimenschultzenkrammer cannot reveal the truth of the universe to all people! But Nein, Sven feed the little mices these pellets. Yes, Lieutenant Kaelyre I have nothing better to do than feed little mices crappy pellets!" Ernie, being a rat, didn't understand nor really care since he was busy trying to get his jaw around the oversized pellet. Sven flicked a pellet across the room. "Excuse me!" Sven stopped. A British woman's voice cut the cloud of his dense thoughts like a tornado crushing a small Kansas town. "Where can I find Lieutenant Cyanah Calorie?" Sven stared at the blonde Bristish woman. His mouth agape as his beady dark eyes bored into her large light gray eyes. She brushed a lock of curling hair away from her eye and stared at him with a contemptuous snarl on her lips. Sven didn't notice, he was searching for the Jacobian matrix of partial derivatives to satisfy her lusty curves but they were too perfect to be quantified in Leibniz notation. In fact, Sven was so sure that if he could ever fathom to take the partial derivative of Beauty, she would be included in the gradient but completely unsolvable. He would have to be a modern day Andrew Wiles to come up with the mathematics that would prove their love was true. "Excuse me," Samantha asked again. "Where can I find Lieutenant Calorie?" Behind her boy stood, lanky, thin, with blonde tresses of his own. He looked like the kind of person that could be easily solved by y=mx+b where m=1 and b=0. He snickered every time the woman spoke - perhaps some kind of "boi-toi." It would figure Sven thought - only the beautiful people get beautiful people and the ugly people get ugly people - hence Darwin's theory would simply split the beautiful from the ugly only creating a race of perfect people. Sven ignored the "beautiful people" and returned to feeding the rats pellets. He didn't even want to correct the woman's pronunciation of "Kaelyre." "What is so damned funny?" Samantha said. "Speak, Wallace." "It's Kaelyre, not Calorie." "God-you! Are you Lieutenant KAY-Leer-EE?" You? The woman just called him "You?" As in: "You there, do this for me! You there, you worthless-" "I am not a You!" Sven barked. His eye and finger where twitching. Her personality angered her, but the rest of her he could write equations about all day. "I resent that you speak of me as a 'you' when I am much more than a 'you.' You woman! Do you know who I am?" Samantha shook her head - her eyes had gone cartoony wide and her lips parted with a tinge of fear. Sven sputtered as he continued: "First! I am not Lieutenant Kaelyre. Does it look like I have a girlish figure with a mop of red hair? Is that what I, Sven Heimenschultzenkrammer, look like to you, Fraulein? Nein, Ich denke nicht! I do not have to stand here listening to you 'you'-ify me! I resent it! I resent you! You, you, beautiful person!" "I'm, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bother you feeding your gerbils," Samantha said. "Gerbils? Do these look like furry gerbils to you? These are rats and yes I am feeding them. I, Sven Heimenschultzenkrammer, with the intellect of a super-genius, am feeding rats their daily pellets for what reason, I haven't a clue, whereas I could be better employed trying to solve the most pressing of human issues and bringing us closer to the heavens, to beauty, to truth than we could ever possibly achieve!" Sven raised his hands up and shook them at the fluorescent lamp lights above. "Dude," Wallace broke in. "You're fly is down." Sven looked down at the gaping hole in his pants where the zipper was indeed not in the "fully upright position." He gasped, turned around spilling pellets everywhere and began to tug at the zipper. "Why are you stuck!! Ugh!! Why? Even my pants conspire to destroy my intellect and dignity!" "Look, Ensign Schultzenhammersteinenkaimer, I don't care who you are! I need a scientist. We have a certain type of ant running loose in Engineering, and I need you to help me come up with a solution to contain the buggers before they get everyone on this blasted ship!" "What do I look like a biologist?" "You're feeding those bloody mice!" "I, Miss I-forgot-to-introduce-myself, am a scientist of astrophysics and cosmology! I do not dabble with mices or ants. Now go away, solve your ant infestation yourself." Samantha yanked the pellets from Sven's stubby hands. "WALLACE! FEED THE RATS!" Samantha slapped the small, plastic dish of pellets onto the table behind her. She stepped forward and with each step she took, Sven stepped backwards, his hand anxiously pulling the zipper of his pants up as he hobbled away. "YOU! WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS…I've had enough flack from everyone I meet on this godforsaken ship. You will look up Ramsorbtian Biting Ants and TELL ME how to KILL THEM. Do I make myself clear, Ensign Hammerstein?" "Heim, Heim…schultz…" Sven jerked his hand around trying to pull the zipper up. "DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR!" "Jawohl! Jawohl! Mein Furherin!" Sven jerked and jostled the zipper of his pants. "Oh for the love of God!" Samantha pushed his hand away, grabbed him between his legs and pulled the zipper up. Sven screamed like a girl, shaking and making all sorts of choked and stilted noises. He turned around limping toward a console, sat, and went immediately to the ship's Google.com. Samantha turned back to Wallace who had lifted the cage lid up and was trying to feed the rats their pellets with his fingers. "Oww! Oww! Stop biting!" Wallace cried. "Oww! I think these things are rabid!" Wallace continued to feed, the same rat the pellets. "I wonder what these things are." Wallace, in his infinite, sophomoric wisdom flipped a pellet into his mouth. "Crunchy. Kindof…tasty." Samantha cringed, backed away, and decided right then and there she should say something more to Sven, at least something better than yelling at him, because it wasn't his fault, it was the moron chewing on a second pellet and talking sports with the rat. Samantha faced Sven's profile. "Look, I'm sorry for screaming at you and grabbing your crotch. It's just a very tense situation. I don't want Captain Morrigan to glaze us in honey-mustard and flame broil us over this. Just find something for me, anything. I will do anything you want, if you can." "Anything?" Sven and Wallace said at the same time. "Anything, except that." If you don't know what "that" is you'd better go take a refresher course in "what the hell is wrong with you?" That being the thing grown ups do to make babies. That being the decadent horizontal, two-person shuffle, the ole bump and grind, the "doctor's checkup," the "I happened to be in the dentist's chair when I was knocked out and my pregnancy test is positive and I haven't had my period this morning and I was at the dentist's office yesterday" kind of thing. "Not even with a dog?" Wallace pondered. Samantha raised an eyebrow and about-face staring Wallace down with murderous eyes. Did that man have any boundaries when it came to his perversion or was he some black hole of depraved and debauched thought? "You…you're so demented I don't even want to touch that with an eighty foot pole, and there is no way, no how, I would ever give you an offer like that so Wallace just stuff it! In fact, right now, I don't want to be in this room with you filthy people. In fact, I'm going back to my quarters to shower, because I've had enough men drooling, spitting, and dementing me for one day!" "Can I watch?" Wallace asked. "Absolutely not!" Samantha left the science lab walking briskly back to her quarters. We won't really get into describing her actually showering, because that's going a bit far, but you can imagine it for yourself can't you? I mean it's not that hard unless you've never taken a shower before or have no conception of one or are French. About twenty minutes after Samantha left, Sven and Wallace continued doing what they were doing while she was there, but doing it slower, and poorer, and without much care. Wallace for instance started feeding the pellets which were not meant for the monkeys to the monkeys, and Sven, straight and narrow Sven, kept on task but bickered loudly. "…And what kind of jobs do I get to do? What tasks? Please go online and look up this biting ants! It is an outrageous egregious misuse of my scientific prowess! I should be calculating tuples!" "Damn put a sock in a Chubbs." "What did you call me?" Sven spun around in his chair with contempt written into the sneering lines of his face. "Chubbs, like fat, like you're damn fat." "I am not-" Sven calmed himself remembering the social etiquette classes he had taken at a local community college - etiquette he would need if it were ever the case that he might be called suddenly to give an impromptu seminar in Italy on mono-poles or say win the Nobel Prize and have to go to Stockholm to accept his award. He even had the speech prepared and hidden away in a shoebox, one he dug out every night to work on and recite. No, this man would not bring him down any lower than feed pellets to rats. Sven composed himself and returned to his work. "At least I am not demented! With a dog? What were you thinking?" "What's wrong with that? I like dogs." "Mein Gott in Himmel, man! What are you saying! She is a beautiful woman, why would you leave her to a dog!" "WHAT? What's up with you? You thought, that I thought, that a dog?" Wallace made his best disgusted face, screwing his nose up and dropping his jaw. "I just wanted to get a picture of her, with my dog even. You know so I could tell everyone that I knew this hot, sexy blonde and that we were kinda dating but not really dating and that all the guys would be like 'score one for Wallace!' I'd be in the club! No more standing outside and looking around because I would be in…Um, in a sense." Sven swiveled his chair around again. "You, my friend, are pathetic. We should drink to it!" "Hey, I'm a cool guy. By the way, what're these pellets for? They're kinda minty?" "Oh, we were doing some experiment were we would try to get the rats to live in a platonic society, so we decided to use an inhibitor to keep the animals from producing sexually urges or semen." Wallace stared at the pills as he downed another one of the minty flavored pellets. "Here's a crazy question…" "It affects humans. I suggest when you start lactating you get a bowl." As the boys continued to work (or hardly work) on their solution, we catch Samantha naked in the shower singing off-key remembering better days, days when strange men named Ed weren't lying drunken on the ground like some kind of bear trap where when you get to close they spring up, grope you, and then slobber all over you, then start chewing tobacco and spitting it all over a yellow tarnished trashcan used as a makeshift spittoon. No, these were better days, days where she wasn't stuck in engineering doing a lot of dirty and boring work, days where guys named Wallace weren't acting like complete idiots and dropping their ant colonies in engineering or for that matter, bringing their ant colonies to engineering. I digress, this is what she was singing while shampooing her hair with that herbal ecstasy stuff: …Some quiet evening I sit by your side And we're lost in a world of our own (ahh, ahh, ahh!) I feel the glow of your unspoken love I'm aware of the treasure that I own (woooo Oooo!) And I say to myself "It's wonderful, wonderful" "Oh, so wonderful, my love" Samantha sighed and rolled her eyes into the back of her head. The water from her showerhead bounced off her naked body and she hoped that at any moment she too would dissolve into a puddle and be taken away into the drain, through the pipes, through the reclamation system and be purified of all the disgusting things she had to put up with on this ship. She opened then to be spit out into space where she would become a billion little droplets sailing through the heaves, only to have someone collect them all, realize what treasure he held and reassemble her amino acid by amino acid until she was free, free of Wallace, those horrid ants, and the eventuality of her being grilled like a black angus at a luau. "Heimenschultzenkrammer to Mason, I have found the answer to your ant infestation problem!" "Excellent! Excellent work!" Samantha said grabbing her combadge from the sink. In fact she was so happy, she started to sing: And I say to myself "It's wonderful, wonderful!" "Oh, sooooo wonderful, my loooove!" Hooooooooray! No longer did the water pelting her feel like bullets but now like a warm, massaging hand lifting her up. "So, what's the plan?" A half hour later, Samantha stood in science lab one again dressed in a new uniform and smelling like jasmine. The exuberance she had experienced wore off to the grim reality of what she was about to do. "Let me get his straight, the ants are semi-intelligent, intelligent enough that simple ant hotels won't do, we'll have to manually hunt them down." Sven and Wallace nodded. "Alright, I understand that. I understand the spray bottle with the pesticide. What I don't understand is the spandex suit." Sven and Wallace eyed one another. Wallace began: "Well, we thought, that you'd wear it, because that way, I mean it being skin-tight, would mean that the ants couldn't…bite you." His explanation devolved into snickering and laughter. "I'm just kidding, I don't know if that'll work, we just wanted to see you dressed in spandex." Wallace slapped Sven in the gut. "Werd up." "You said that was the secret reason!" Sven yelled. "We are to tell her only the useful…r, reason," Sven glanced between Wallace's mirthful laughter and Samantha's stern face and jasmine smelling flowers. "Meinen Furherin." "And why do I have to do this?" Samantha said. Wallace said between laughs: "Because Chubbs here…he's too…fat! And…you… you're…" Wallace keeled over and kept laughing, slapping the ground with his hand. Samantha took the opportunity to kick him in the side with her boot. "Bloody Hell! Give me the suit!" Samantha grabbed everything from Sven's hands. Relay me coordinates, I'll go find the ants and kill them once and for all!!" Samantha walked toward the door and faced them. "Perverts!" She left. Wallace kept laughing and slapping the ground. Sven started thinking dirty thoughts in Chomsky normal form and dream of what he and she would do together. Even with a dog, and Sven started to sing: And I say to myself "It's wonderful, wonderful" "Oh... sooooooo Won-der-ful, MY LOOOVEEE!!" Oh, let's visit in on Doctor Jeb just one last time before we hit the road with this jawn. "How do you feel, there? I bet that feels mighty good now, don't it," Doctor Jeb said putting down the tweezers and pliars. "OOooh nooos! I can'ts feels my legs!!!"