PLOT

[kentra m. donrav]

The Trill lieutenant stood at the door to the CO's ready room for an extra moment before pushing the button. Having spoken with the ship's Chief Medical Officer, she had hoped that everything involving her joining would have been taken care of. Truthfully she did not understand the doctor's reaction, but then again she knew that even Trills who had grown up their whole lives knowing about the joining and being taught about the symbiots, sometimes had a hard time conceptualizing what this was. Even she herself had not really understood what it was to be joined, fused into one being with another mind like two pieces of latinum fused together to make a bar. Or rather several pieces, since the symbiot was not without its own life(s) worth of experiance and sorting through all of that had been difficult.

However clearly her discussion with McCoy had not been enough, and now she had to speak with the ship's captain. That normally would have been fine, Trills weren't trying to keep a dark secret they just found it was a fact best presented to non-Trills in a much more natural way than being ordered to, but from what she had heared about the captain since coming on board he sounded slightly irrational. A man consumed with certain passions, too young for the job he held though brilliant at being able to save the day. Or at least that was how she had interperted it. Truthfully much like her direct supervisor Commander Scott, she wondered how a man such as this could survive in the semi-military enviroment like Starfleet. Though to be fair she had hardly given him a chance, she had not even met him. For all she knew he was as brilliant at captaining as Scott seemed to be with engines.

Pressing the chime the door slid open and she stepped into his ready room. Not quite standing at attention, her body was rigid as she tried to do everything she could to be within regulations so he had no reason to admonish her for anything apart from the symbiot issue.

"The doctor said you wanted to see me sir," she said.

[james t. kirk]

There was one thing on Kirk’s mind. No, not that. It was the case of the invasion of the bodysnatchers. He’d been reading up on Trill physiology and from what Starfleet had on the relatively recent addition to the databanks, there was no mention of parasites or worms that infected inhabitants. The five year mission hadn’t even begun and Kirk was already sailing into the unknown. Jim, at times, could be very irrational and it had taken all of Bones’ persuasion to talk the captain down from throwing the trill in the brig. Still, a phaser set to stun was concealed in his desk. Just in case the guards posted outside didn’t react quickly enough. McCoy figured these parasites were common on Trill and that she wouldn’t pose a threat to the safety of the crew or the mission. He was inclined to believe that and besides, he was going to have to put some effort into this whole diplomacy thing. He was a captain now; effectively an ambassador for humanity engaging in first contact with who knows how many new species. He couldn’t simply fire a photon and hope for the best anymore; he had to, dare he say it, act responsibly.

He sat behind his desk, the vintage vehicles that weren’t written off on their previous trip to the floor had been hastily shoved back in the cabinet. Alongside then, and making up the space of the six cars that didn’t make it, stood a selection of bottles. Scotch, gin, vodka among others, as old as Kirk could afford. Their purpose was pretty self explanatory; while placed for ‘aesthetic’ appeal, they also suited Jim for when he could have a quick drink while on duty. The display was windowless, the shattered glass from the broken cabinet cleaned away long ago. Not by his PA, the yeoman with a vendetta against him. Even if he wasn’t avoiding her, Kirk didn’t believe in giving women painful manual labour such as cleaning up broken glass. Although…on all fours with a miniskirt…

The door chimed and subsequently opened, clearing those unholy thoughts from his mind. There she was, the alien. His hand twitched absent mindedly, knowing where his phaser was should he need it. He observed those spots, following them down the side of her face with his eyes for a moment. “Thank you for coming so soon.” He spoke politely and civil; there was no reason to get hostile. “Have a seat.”

He found himself distracted by those spots again as she moved. Obviously trills were a known species in federation space and the past couple of hours he’d found himself poring over the data terminal in preparation for this meeting but they were more prominent than he expected; he figured she’d just look like a human with some freckles. “So the doctor tells me you’re fit to serve aboard my ship.” Jim still got an ego rush whenever the ‘M’ word came up, making him stress it with a slight smirk every time. “But there’s this thing…a-a…‘symbiont’ you called it?” he spoke with uncertainty at the term; when McCoy was telling him about, all his mind heard was ‘parasite’.

[kentra m. donrav]

Nodding slowly she wondered exactly how to address this topic. As a species Trills tended to be open and honest about pretty much everything and yet they also understood that the conept of being joined with another creature and sharing a life would be disconcerting to some other races. Their situation was unique in the known universe, and so they had been careful about when they revealed the information, trying to avoid widespread panic amoungst the rest of the Federation who might think of the symbiots as some kind of mind controlling creatures bent on galactic domination. Humans especially had science fiction stories, holovids and even old movies and television shows that addressed the very same topic. In those stories the parasites, as they generally were considered, were never the heroes.

"Yes," she said after sitting down, "it is called a symbiot. It is a being that lives inside of me, and we share an existance. It's not completely unheard of, there are many types of symbiotic relationships even amoungst creatures on Earth. Ours is considered mutualism since both ourselves and our symbiot benifit."

For a moment she wished the Vulcan First Officer was in the meeting. Vulcans had an ability to look at issues like this from a detached perspective. Humans tended to be much more squimish. However Vulcans did intimidate her far more than humans, and so perhaps all things being equal she was glad that Spock was not in the office.

"Physically Trills are quite like humans, though some of our internal organs are different and we have spots. Our lifespans, our physical strenghts and so forth are all very similiar to yours," she explained, "However around twenty percent of our population have the ability to take on and sustain another life form within us. The symbiots dwell in caves on Trill, or did hundreds of years ago. I'm not sure how the discovery was made , but we found that through surgery we could carry and provide nutrition for the symbiots much the same way as we do unborn infants."

"Through us the symbiots are able to experiance life beyond their natural cave enviroments," Kentra said, "They also retain memories of their time joined with us. Since they live centuries, much longer than their hosts, their memories are transfered along with them from host to host."

"That's what we get out of it. After joining we are slightly different, because we now have memories, emotions and skills from what could be centuries of lives," she said. She wondered how far into her record that he had looked. If he had the fact that her last name changed suddenly and for no apparent reason (such as marriage) might prove to be something that he had a question about.