The Screaming Shower

Posted on 04 Nov 2016 @ 12:12am by Lieutenant JG Seras & Master Chief Petty Officer Daytona Ral

Mission: Prelude; Breakfast at Curmudgeon's
Location: Daytona's Quarters
Timeline: Mission Day 0

ON

After a long day of getting situated, Daytona just wanted to take a shower and go to bed. He'd rather not go to bed alone, but he'd resolve that problem another time. He stripped down, recycled his uniform, grabbed a towel and walked naked into the sonic shower, hanging the towel on a hook as he passed by. Daytona closed the door to the shower and turned on the sonics and the mist. The sound slowly built to a soothing hum and, combined with the mist began to sooth his muscles. As a Rigelian, he needed either vigorous exercise, or vigorous sex, on a regular basis. He hadn't had time to make any intimate friends so he'd hit the gym pretty hard. He'd warmed up first and stretched after but he was still feeling the workout. Slowly, his tight muscles began to loosen. After a bit of time basking, Daytona cleaned himself. When he was done, he used the controls that should have turned off the shower. The mist stopped but the sonics began to whine loudly. Sound increased until Daytona had to leap out of the shower before the sound waves shattered his bones. The noise got even louder, until he could hardly hear himself think. He quickly wrapped a towel around himself and used the comm near his bed to call Ops.

"RAL TO OPS!!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, desperate to be heard over the screaming of the shower. "THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY SONIC SHOWER!! IT'S SCREAMING SO LOUD I'M AFRAID IT'S GOING TO RATTLE THE HULL PLATING LOOSE NEAR MY QUARTERS, IF IT DOESN'T DEAFEN ME AND SHATTER MY BONES FIRST!"

The screaming shower could be heard all through the Operations Center as an Officer answered the call. "We'll have someone there to repair it right away!" the Officer yelled in response, then quickly shut off the comm line to silence the painful sound. He then searched the computer for the nearest on duty Engineer and found Seras. "Ops to Seras, we have sonic shower malfunctioning near you, quarters assigned to Daytona Ral on deck 8. Are you able to assist?"

Seras had just started her shift and was better familiarizing herself with the ship's environmental systems and maze of EPS lines. Being a new ship so fresh off her shakedown cruise, it was always good to check for any... what did the humans call them, gremlins? So she was going deck by deck checking for 'gremlins' in these vitals systems and just happened to be on deck 8 when the call came in. "I'm right around the corner from the crew quarters, I'll be right there," Seras responded, closing up a hatch she had been investigating and gathering her tools. With quick sprint, she made it to the designated quarters and rang the door chime. Unfortunately, the chime could not be overheard over the scream of the shower, which was spilling out into the corridor, so the chime went unanswered. Undaunted, Seras looked up and down the corridor for a moment. Hmmm, these were Enlisted quarters, so they were smaller... She paced out a few steps away from the door until she was roughly halfway between Ral's door and the next door.

"Let's see, it should be this one..." Seras mused aloud, taking off a wall panel to access the inner workings. She found plumbing for the bathing and waste facilities, but it seemed the sonic emitter was not here, which meant it was on the other side of the shower. Poop! Well, at the very least she could cut the power to the emitter, which she did by turning a valve on the EPS tap and the dreaded screaming ceased. She left the panel open and returned to Ral's door to hit the chime once again.

Daytona heaved a sigh of relief when the sonic shower finally stopped screaming at him. His ears were a little numb, but he did hear the chime when it made its noise. Still a bit deaf, he crossed is larger than average NCO quarters and, still only wearing a towel, answered the door. When it opened he found standing before him a short and very attractive Cairn in Ops/Engineering/Security gold. She didn't look like anyone he'd seen in security, which made her Engineering or Ops. Probably Ops.

"WELCOME TO MY..." Daytona began. "Ahem. Welcome to my humble abode. Are you my savior? Have you come to rescue me from the evil sonic beast in my bathroom?"

"Ah, yes, I am your- wait, you have a beast in your bathroom? I am not equipped to handle any wild animals," Seras replied seriously. "Why is there a beast in your bathroom? Oh wait, was this another one of those human 'figures of speech', a, uh, euphemism?"

Daytona laughed out loud.

"I was trying to be funny," he said. "Clearly all I did was confuse you. Never fear, I shall straighten you out. The 'beast' in the bathroom is my shower. It attacked me with a horrible sonic assault and, if you hadn't arrived when you did, I think I would have suffered serious hearing loss. So, thank you for rescuing me. Do you think you can do something to make sure it doesn't attack me again?"

Daytona realized that he was blocking the young lieutenant's path into his quarters. This violated one of his cardinal rules: never do anything that might prevent an attractive woman from entering your quarters. He also realized he'd not introduced himself and, more importantly found out her name...or if she was single. Well, that last part could probably wait.

"Come in, please," he said, stepping away from the door. "I'm Master Chief Master-At-Arms Daytona Ral."

"Thank you, I'm Lieutenant Seras and I'm in Ops," Seras replied with a nod once she was finally allowed in, heedless of the fact that he was still covered with only a towel. "You do realize you could have saved yourself some distress by waiting out in the hallway?" she continued as she made her way to the bathroom and then into the shower, removing a panel to expose the faulty sonic emitter. She pulled out her tricorder and a scan revealed that there was a flaw in the resonance chamber; ah, so it was just a dud, a manufacturing defect! Simple enough to fix, she would just need a replacement! As she moved about, her perky ponytail swished about in a cheerful manner as a sign of her upbeat state of being. "And it looks like you happened to be the lucky recipient of a faulty emitter. It will just take me a few minutes to pop this one out and get another one for you," she informed him cheerfully.

Daytona watched the perky little woman as she bounced around his quarters and smiled. Lieutenant Seras was really cute. He decided that he'd better slip into some pants or something. As much as he liked being naked, the 'breeze between the knees' was beginning to get to him.

"You know," he said. "You're right. I probably should have waited in the hallway. I probably could have gotten dressed, too, but the noise was a bit mind numbing. I'm not really concerned about people seeing me in without clothes, not the way I was raised, but it makes some people uncomfortable. So...I guess I didn't want to go out in the hall in a towel, for other people's sake, and I couldn't think straight so I didn't get dressed...which I'm going to do now...once I stop rambling. Thanks so much for fixing this thing for me. I know how to blow things up, but fixing them doesn't come naturally to me, not tech stuff anyway. Have you always been a techie?"

As he talked, Daytona grabbed a pair of pants from his dresser, which put him a comfortable enough distance from her that he could put them on without feeling like he was assaulting her with a friendly weapon. He slipped the pants on under the towel and threw the towel over a chair.

He could hear Seras' synthesized laughter spilling out from the bathroom, and it had a musical quality to it, made all the more beautifully haunting with the ethereal echo that accompanied her synthetic tones. "Yes, I've been tinkering with my father's ships since I was old enough to hold a spanner, it's always been something that interested me," she replied as she disconnected the sonic emitter. "What about you? Do you enjoy blowing things up? I can't imagine that you would have much to do if that was your only duty, though..."

Daytona chuckled. He really liked this woman. She seemed to just say whatever came to her mind, public opinion be damned. It was refreshing. He walked into the bathroom to watch her work and took a moment to admire her. Good looking, funny, and she managed to make her mechanical voice sound almost sexy.

Maybe he'd break the shower in a few days and see if he could get her to come back.

"I received demolition training when I was in Starfleet Special Operations Command," he said. "It wasn't my only job, but it was a frequent activity. Actually, I wasn't always Starfleet. I was a civilian cop for over half a century, and before that I grew up on a farm. You said you tinkered with your father's ships. What did he do for a living? By the way, if it's easier for you to 'think' at me, I'd probably be able to handle that. I'm an empath of sorts and I've had considerable mental training."

"Oh, I would never try to communicate telepathically with you, that would give you a worse headache than the shower!" Seras declared emphatically, finally freeing the sonic emitter from the wall. She turned it over in her hands, looking it over. "As for my father, he was a, uh..." She trailed off for a moment as she searched for the right word. "Merchant! He was a merchant, and he owned a number of vessels to carry goods all over our world. They weren't warp vessels, but once our scientific community had mastered a stable faster than light engine, my father was welcomed aboard an interstellar ship in the hope of opening commerce with the Federation when they initiated First Contact. He let me tag along and so we were some of the first few to learn about life other than the Cairn and some of the first to get vocal synthesizers. There were a number of delegations that ended up working with Vulcans and Betazoids to help improve our ability to communicate verbally, but the group my father was with ended up learning a language of hand signs from the humans to help facilitate communication, and then I ended up joining a cultural exchange program where I went to live with a family on Earth to learn about Earth culture." Seras finished looking over the faulty emitter, then abruptly stopped speaking when she realized that she had been rambling on. "Oh, I am sorry, I didn't mean to go on like that," she said with a sheepish smile. "Sometimes I forget boundaries, and you only asked about my father, not my life history."

Daytona decided that he really liked to hear Seras talk.

"That's okay," he said. "I was rambling a moment ago myself. Besides, I like listening to you talk about yourself. How old were you when you came to Earth? You must have been young."

"Thank you," Seras said with a bashful blush, grateful he didn't seem to mind her rambling. "And I can't remember how old I was when I went to Earth, but I was young. You have to understand, Cairn do not keep time the same way Earth does. It's similar to stardates used in Starfleet, but not quite, and even then we don't track birthdays in this way, so I can't recall how many years I have. Which makes things awkward when people surprise me on my birthday, which I never remember, and they ask me how old I am and I can't tell them without having to do some math," she offered with some amusement.

Daytona masked his smile a bit this time. Seras a was really pretty when she blushed.

"I had no idea," Daytona replied. "I really know next to nothing about the Cairn. Feel free to change the subject if you feel like I'm prying too much. I'm one hundred and sixteen this year. On my birthday I received an electronic card from a human friend with an image of a warehouse full of large crates. The caption said 'your birthday candles have arrived.' I had a good laugh."

Seras gave an adorable little pout as she tried to work out in her head just how old that was in her method of time-keeping. "Wow, that is old for a human, I did not know you lived that long," she stated after a moment. Then another thought struck her. "Wait, candles? Oh right, you humans have a fondness for setting your frosted pastries on fire while chanting."

Daytona laughed. By the Prime Number this little woman was cute.

"I'm not human!" he said. "My father is pure-blood Vulcanoid Rigelian and my mother is El-Aurian! That's ok. I sort of look human, I guess. One of the weird things about me. When I first joined the service and started interacting with humans on a regular basis, attending their parties and such, I found the lighting of cakes on fire, as you so charmingly put it, to be a bit odd. After you spend some time in the fleet, though, you'll start to feel more comfortable with all of the different cultures. It's like the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations."

"I have been in the service of Starfleet for...." Seras again paused to do some mental math, even counting on her fingers to make sure she got it right, "-five years since I graduated the Academy, and even after all that in addition to the time I lived on Earth, I still don't understand some of the strange human cultures! Like the one where you beat a paper animal with a stick until it rains candy. Very disturbing," she added with a shudder. Then she smiled brightly. "But I do enjoy the diversity and learning about other cultures. My people have the most in common with Betazoids, but I find myself most interested in the mental discipline and philosophy of the Vulcans. And I do enjoy sharing about my own people; we share everything, so I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have."

Daytona thought that things were going quite well all things considered.

"So," he said, taking a chance. He looked her in the eye and smiled pleasantly at her. "How does one go about courting a Cairn woman? In case, you know, one happens to come to my quarters some night to fix my shower..."

"Well, I should have this emitter replaced within the hour, and unless the replacement is also a defective part, I see no reason why I would need to return to fix your shower," Seras said seriously, not understanding that he meant the shower line as a joke. "As for courting me, I would not even consider courting you until we've had sex. It is very important to know if there is a workable compatibility there before committing to a courtship."

"Are you free now?" Daytona said with a sly smile. "Because I would happily take you to bed right now and not let you out until sometime next week, though I might be talked in to letting you go to work tomorrow if you promise to come back. Never dare a Rigelian to make love to you, it's what we do."

"It was not a dare, only a statement of fact," Seras replied with a grin. "And I just started my duty shift, not to mention I am overloaded with work in preparation for departure, I don't know when I'll have any free time. Anyway, I have wasted enough time talking, I have to go get a new sonic emitter, then finish my check of the environmental systems, and I need to break down and recalibrate all the transporters... So much fun, so little time!" she said coyly.

Daytona laughed.

"Another time then," he said. "The offer stands.I can even adjust my schedule around yours. I find you fascinating, not to mention entertaining, Lieutenant Seras...or may I call you Seras off-duty? Besides, I want to know more about you and your people, too, so we'll have something to discuss when we come up for air."

Seras giggled. "No need for rank. I'll be back shortly with your new sonic emitter, so try not to die of boredom while I'm gone," she said teasingly, giving him a little wave with a wiggle of her fingers as she left the bathroom.

"Oh, I'll definitely be keeping myself alive and healthy for you, Seras," he said, taking the chance that she wouldn't mind. Prime Number! She might just drive him mad! A simple wiggle of her fingers and she almost had him eating out of her hands. He longingly watched the tiny vixen walk out of his quarters.