<USS Banshee> 2. Log of the Month

  • From: CptHacker@xxxxxxx
  • To: ussbanshee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 03:08:25 EDT

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!!!"

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  • » <USS Banshee> 2. Log of the Month