Star Trek: Theurgy

Day 02 [ 1015 hrs ] Calcium Deficiency

August 03, 2026, 06:13:03 AM

[ Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Main Sickbay| Deck 11 | Vector Two | USS Theurgy ] @Ellen Fitz

First impressions had never been Sylvain’s strong suit.

And he was perfectly comfortable admitting that; he wasn’t about to deny it at least...

Like any decision he had to make, Sylvain had drawn his conclusion from the available evidence. After all, he’d spent every waking moment of his life gathering data on how he responded to such situations, and all of the evidence he had accrued on the subject, pointed towards him being utterly incapable of making a good first impression. And he’d made his peace with that.

Why did it always turn out that way? Well on that, he wasn’t quite sure; there were a lot of contributing factors. Firstly, he had his consistently high baseline anxiety when it came to interacting with other people, perpetually worried about what he was going to say, and what they were going to say… Most people were far too unpredictable for him to feel comfortable around. Then, he had to consider that his arms and legs tended to transform into ungainly tubes of flesh whenever he got nervous in a social setting, which turned him into a clumsy idiot that could barely even coordinate his own body. Then there was the fact that he spent more time overthinking every minute detail of the other person’s body language, tone of voice, and expression, that he sometimes forgot that he had to reply to them. And finally, even when he did remember that he existed, and was a sentient humanoid capable of conversation, he had his untrustworthy precognitive abilities ready to give him a nudge in a new direction… Or not…

It really was quite impossible to identify any difference between his precognitive events, and the average day-to-day wanderings of his mind. To everyone else, a stray thought, a phantom itch, a strange craving for paella… They were just what they were. To him, they were possible psionic events that may or may not be revealing insight as to what awaited him in the future. And temporal mechanics gave him a headache at the best of times, so when a premonition of paella made him hungry for paella, cause and effect got a little more muddled, and suddenly he was caught in a chorizo-based time loop… Or, maybe he just fancied paella. Truthfully, it was impossible to tell, and thus when his mind got mired in trying to rationalise every unexpected thought that popped into his head, it made conversation a little more tricky for him…

Other people were unpredictable, and unpredictable situations led to unexpected thoughts, which in turn led to lengthy and necessary pondering and analysis… It was why Sylvain loved being a Starfleet Officer so much; when he was on duty, he didn’t have time to think about what was going on inside his own head…

Still, his biology aside, he could have easily made a list as long as his arm containing all the multitudes of things that he disliked about social interactions, and he had no doubt that his poor performance in conversation, was down to a combination of all of those things, and then some; a cacophony of different issues all screaming at him to say or do the wrong thing at every possible opportunity… Or, maybe his issues had nothing to do with it. Maybe he was just the most unlucky sod in the entire galaxy… It didn’t matter either way.

It was an abysmal picture no matter which way you framed it.

But he had learned to live with it; he’d been dealing with it long enough that it had become routine for him, and as long as it remained routine, he was perfectly content to repeat it. Sylvain would meet a new colleague, they’d have a ‘conversation’, and that unfortunate individual would come away thinking that the Ensign was a incompetent mess. Then, when he got the opportunity to showcase what an exemplary Starfleet Officer he was, if he did say so himself, they’d be all the more impressed by the juxtaposition.

The end result? They thought he was a good officer, but they wouldn’t try to socialise with him outside of duty shifts.

The perfect outcome.

Still, it did sometimes make life on a Starship needlessly complicated. The Bowman had had a relatively small crew complement; he’d met everyone aboard within the first few weeks, and the only time he’d had to meet someone new was when Captain Yume put in a request for new crew members, which had thankfully been a rare occurrence. Plus, being the Chief CONN Officer had granted him the advantage of rarely being sent on away missions, so he didn’t have to worry about meeting someone outside of the confines of the Bowman’s bulkheads either.

The Theurgy however…

Well the Theurgy was a colossal vessel, with a standard crew complement of almost one thousand bodies, not counting civilians that might’ve also been aboard. It would take him months to meet even half of the crew, and with the rate of staff turnover that the Theurgy seemed to have, new arrivals would be cropping up left-right-and-centre! Not to mention all the non-Starfleet individuals that the Theurgy seemed to pick up on their travels; he couldn’t even break the ice with them by asking them about their time at the Academy! He’d never escape the misery of having to introduce himself to someone new, awkwardly trying to keep the conversation as short as possible, whilst being mentally and physically bound by good manners, that prevented him from leaving until the conversation reached a natural conclusion.

Good grief, what the hell had he done in his former life to warrant this torture?

Because it wasn’t like he didn’t put the effort in… Yeah, he wasn’t great at talking to people, but Sylvain wasn’t an unpleasant person by any stretch, at least he didn’t think so… He had always tried to put his best foot forward, remaining pleasant, cordial, polite... He’d really tried. He kept his uniform pristine, he was always well mannered to a fault, he remained honest and forthright as much as was professionally appropriate, he completed all of his reports on time, his grammar was exemplary, and he largely tried to make himself available to be helpful to his fellow officers. So yeah, he absolutely put the effort in…

And where had that gotten him?

Well, since arriving aboard the Thurgy less than a week ago, he’d managed to make a complete fool of himself on a scale that was pretty impressive, by universal standards. He’d  Accidentally thrown a PADD across the conference room when he’d first met Commander Cross, after which he hit himself in the face with it not two minutes later, because he’d gestured too violently. Minutes after that embarrassment, he’d forgotten that he was only supposed to be singing a song in his head, and started singing it out loud, right as he reached the only lewd sentence in an otherwise tame verse, just in time for a seven foot tall Fersan to walk into the turbolift with him. Then, during his first time on the bridge, the first thing that Commander Stark had witnessed him do at the helm, had been him accidentally ramming the Theurgy into a stealthed Romulan Warbird that Tactical had missed on their sensor sweep. And then, as a cherry on top, during his first Senior Staff meeting, not only had he been the only person who’d opted to give his report standing, like some over-eager cadet at an Academy meet-and-greet, but he’d also managed to smack his knee on the underside of the table as he’d done so…

And he just knew that everyone had heard it…

That was all without including his time spent in the Stellar Cartography Lab, which he hadn’t had time to over-analyse yet…

And still, despite the litany of maladies that had befallen him in the last seventy two hours, none could hold a candle to his time aboard the Erudite, where his most benevolent endeavour to offer support to a junior crewman, had been reciprocated with poison, him being knocked unconscious, and a tube being buried half a metre down his oesophagus by some Savi researcher… A Savi researcher who was then almost immediately eaten by the very creature that Sylvain had just spent eighty percent of his morning trying to wrangle into a corner, where he could finally trap it within the only appropriate receptacle in his quarters…

Two wicker plant pots that he was clasping together like an oversized coconut…

And Potato was either really hating it, or having the time of its bloody life, given how it wouldn’t stop writhing around like a targ in heat, chirping for attention, and on seven-separate occasions between his quarters and sickbay, trying to squeeze its entire body mass through the half-inch wide gaps between the bends of wicker. Sylvain had spent most of the journey offering pained smiles to the legion of maintenance officers that seemed to be swarming every deck, whilst giving his best effort to discreetly coax Potato’s mallowy head back inside the container, before anyone saw it and started a panic. Good grief, if Potato managed to escape from his makeshift cage and unleash itself onto the ship, Sylvain genuinely saw a reality where he threw himself out of an airlock…

Were wicker plant pots the most ideal receptacle to contain an over-energetic moopsy? No, of course not. But they were the only things he had in his quarters that were capable of actually holding it in a container small enough to carry, without suffocating the poor creature. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that… The emergency supply cache under the bulkhead was airtight, he hadn’t been confident that putting the creature into a pillowcase was as secure as he was aiming for, and whilst it had happily snoozed inside the tactical pouch he’d used to smuggle it off of the Erudite, he’d returned that to the Security team two days ago. There really wasn’t a better option; he’d created a reference document and everything…

He’d briefly considered replicating something elsewhere, but he figured that trying to replicate a cage in the mess hall would raise far too many questions.

And as such, he endured.

Endured the sheer weight of the distaste that radiated out of the Vulcan woman manning sickbay’s reception console, her grey eyes boring into him for an uncomfortably long amount of time; Sylvain knew that Vulcan’s didn’t feel emotions, but he’d certainly been around enough of them to know disdain when he saw it... He felt her eyes rake across his body, taking in every aspect of the Ensign, from the way his copper hair framed his pained looking expression, to the way his hands so tightly clasped around, what probably resembled some sort of large, rattling, wicker orb. He tried to offer her a smile. It came out more like a grimace.

"Good mo..."

“Do you require immeditite medical assistance?” The officer firmly inturrupted, disregarding his plesantries as her gaze slowly crept up from the wicker orb in his hands, back to his face, without any discernible change in her expression.

“Well, no… But…” Sylvain began to explain, before he was cut off by a sigh of herculean proportion, with intensity enough that the Ensign briefly worried about the structural integrity of the deck.

“Medical emergencies have priority. Please identify yourself, and I shall add you to the list of officers awaiting assistance.”

“Oh, well, I-erm…” Sylvain was somewhat taken aback by how abrupt the woman had been, and his head began spinning a mile a minute, the boy half-choking on the saliva that had suddenly gushed into his mouth, as he realised that he had to improvise some sort of way to explain to the officer that it wasn’t him who needed help, but a genetically engineered moopsy that could have probably massacred the entire deck... Had it not been rendered toothless by the Savi’s genetic tampering, of course... Sylvain could have kicked himself, but refrained from doing so on account of the fact he'd probably end up face-down on the bulkhead; he’d had a whole plan when he'd back in his quarters, but being questioned by a gatekeeper at the threshold had not been part of his preperations, and thus, things were already going dangerously awry....

Sylvain had heard Doctor Leux’s comment during the senior staff meeting, on how he wanted the Savi data for sickbay, and whilst Sylvain knew that it was a long shot, the Ensign needed to find someone experienced with genetics, medicine, and xenobiology, and he’d essentially just banked everything on Doctor Leux’s one comment… Now that he was here, he was suddenly far more keenly aware of the holes in his plan. But either way, he’d put off the uncomfortable conversation long enough; even if Potato’s genetic tampering meant that it wouldn’t pose any danger to the Theurgy or its crew, the poor moopsy had still lost the ability to eat without assistance, and Sylvain wasn’t sure that the bone-broth he’d been replicating was enough to keep it going… At least not from the way it seemed to try and drown itself in its haste to slurp the bowl down every time he brought one back to his quarters…

“It-it’s not actually myself who has the issue…” Sylvain began, using every ounce of his professionalism in an effort not to make a fool out of himself any more than he already had; the wicker orb was doing a lot of the heavy lifting there... "I was wondering if you might have anyone on staff with any sort of interest or expertise in genetics or xenobiology?” He gingerly raised the wicker orb he was pressing together in a death grip between his hands. “My… Pet… Needs to be checked for any sort of genetic anomaly. It… Escaped… From the Erudite, so it’s imperative that we do our due diligence and make sure that there is nothing unsavoury going on in its genetic makeup…”

Lying had never been Sylvain’s strong suit.

And based on the way the Vulcan’s eyebrow nearly scraped the ceiling, that certainly hadn’t changed.

Re: Day 02 [ 1015 hrs ] Calcium Deficiency

Reply #1 – August 04, 2026, 07:08:19 PM

[ Corpsman Ehfva Feynri | Main Sickbay | Deck 08 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] @TWilkins

The elders of Okashii Atama had taught her that silence was not absence but a room with furniture in it, and Ehfva had spent ninety-two years learning to walk through that room without barking her shins. The device had changed the arrangement. Not the furniture — the number of people sitting in it.

The first moments after Arven had installed it, every shift had been like stepping into a hall where three arguments were already underway and all of them concerned her. The shape of her ears. The length of her claws. Whether she should be standing at all, or low, or gone. She had thought, briefly, that she was coming apart. That the Savi had reached into whatever held a Vulpinian together and left the seams unfinished.

She no longer thought that. The voices had not gone quiet; they had simply stopped sounding like intruders. Now they sounded like kin waiting at the edge of the firelight for someone to make room — and her grandmother had raised her to make room. You should choose us next. All three unchosen forms. Always.

She still had not been able to shift into all her forms, saving her female form for last as she felt it was the most vulnerable. The form she wore this shift was the male Vulcine, worn at Arven's request — one more configuration, one more confirmation that the biology had translated correctly down to the marrow. It was a broad face, heavier through the brow and jaw, the nose strong, the eyes deep-set and brown and slow to give anything away. Dark hair fell to the line of the jaw and would not stay behind the ear no matter how many times the hand went up to put it there. The hands themselves were large. Warm. Blunt at the fingertips.

Keokuk had known this face. He had known it before he had known the others. He had called them her spirits and said he was honored to be introduced. He had never once flinched, in any of them. But this was the face that he'd preferred, though he'd never said the words aloud, as it was the first he'd fallen in love with.

She adjusted the medical tunic across shoulders and kept moving down the row of biobeds.

The last morning together had been a Tuesday. Replicated tea gone lukewarm because she'd let it sit. Some grain thing he liked, and she tolerated. They had said perhaps forty words to each other, and none of them had been worth writing down — the duty roster, someone's transfer, whether the sonic unit was cycling wrong again. She had finished first. She had stood, and touched his shoulder, and kissed his cheek in the exact place she had kissed it ten thousand times, in the exact way that meant nothing at all because it meant everything and neither of them had ever needed to say so.

Then she had gone to shift, and he had stayed at the table to finish reading his holonovel before heading to his duty station.

She would give a great deal to have that back. Not a speech, not a reckoning, not the words she had assembled since in the long hours of not sleeping. The tea. The grain thing. His shoulder under her hand for four seconds while she was already thinking about something else.

Some wounds did not close simply because the bleeding stopped. But there was work, and the work wanted hands, and the hands still knew what to do. She was halfway through a patient's status review when the conversation reached her from the other side of the ward.

A Vulcan voice, level and headed toward "no." A younger voice, human, pitched high and fast and apologizing before it had finished a sentence. And something else. Something small and alive, shifting in a woven container, its weight redistributing in tiny increments as it moved. Ehfva's ears would have turned if she'd had them.

She did not recognize the creature. She had never seen anything like it — no taxonomy she'd studied offered it a shelf, and she had studied a great many out of curiosity and a love for all creatures. But she did not need to recognize it to recognize the way the young officer was holding it. He had adjusted his grip twice while she watched, both times to spare the animal and neither time to spare himself. He was not afraid of it. He was afraid for it.

Escaped from the Erudite, she heard. Genetic anomaly.

The voices in the back of her mind arrived all at once and, for the first time since Arven had put the device in her, in complete agreement. Small thing. Unknown biology. Investigate. Help it.

The Savi had not hated her. That was the part no one understood when she declined to discuss it. They had cataloged her. They had opened her and made her four things at once and written down what happened, and when she screamed they had recorded the frequency. Something that had been made in a Savi laboratory and had gotten out was, as far as she was concerned, kin.

She crossed the ward before the Vulcan could finish declining.

"Excuse me." Her voice came out lower than her ear expected, with the rumbling growling timber of her species ever at the edges. She stopped a respectful pace short and inclined her head to the Vulcan first, then to the young officer. "Ehfva Feynri. Corpsman. I came off the Erudite as well." A pause she let stand. "I was rescued from the Savi." The container drew her gaze and she let it, without stepping nearer. "I have no xenobiology degree. I have sixty years of independent study in species adaptation, comparative anatomy, and induced genetic modification."

Then she looked at the young man properly. He was attractive, even with the wide-eyed concern he had for the creature. If anything, his obvious care and consideration of the creature enhanced his physical features and brought a ready endearment from her.

"You could have left it. No one would have recorded that you found it, and no one would have asked you about it again." She held his eyes a moment longer than was comfortable. "Such was my possible fate." Her gaze went back to the container. Whatever was inside had gone still, listening. She put a hand over her heart and gave the man another nod. "We thank you for taking notice." Glancing at the Vulcan once, she returned her attention to the creature and the man and gestured in a different direction. "There are unused labs in the medical annex. Full containment, full sensors, no one's shift disrupted. I will examine it with every precaution, if that is your choice."  She extended a hand toward the container — open, not reaching, near enough to be refused. "Let me help."

Re: Day 02 [ 1015 hrs ] Calcium Deficiency

Reply #2 – August 15, 2026, 02:54:09 AM

[ Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Main sickbay | Deck 11 | Vector Two | USS Theurgy ] @Ellen Fitz

The stand-off was intense.

Despite his absolute best attempt to skirt around the facts of the situation contained within his hands, Sylvain, even with his woefully inadequate brand of insight, could tell that the Vulcan woman remained unconvinced. Her eyebrow had risen to deck ten, maybe nine, and her lingering silence buffeted Sylvain’s composure like an ion storm; the Ensign was perfectly fine with silence, it was his preference in fact… But an uncomfortable silence was a different kettle of fish entirely… It gave him no distraction as her expressionless stare bore into him like a drill, whilst he stood stalwart, clutching the wicker sphere between his pale hands as though his life depended on it, the Vulcan’s dark eyes remaining affixed, unblinking, upon his honey coloured ones, a silent interrogation that seemed to push through his entire nervous system. It was perhaps only a few seconds of stillness, but it was enough for emotional discomfort to begin to wrack him, his body begging for surrender as it began to writhe under the torture of an unpleasant social interaction... For a few moments, Sylvain began to feel as though his composure wasn’t enough to outlast such adversity…

“That is not the typical function of sickbay. I would suggest that…” The relief of winning his apparent battle of wills arrived, but his hope that the situation would be resolved crashed down all the more violently, as the Vulcan began to decline his reasonable, albeit unusual, request. His mind cried out for mercy, as the conversation now yawned out before him like a stint at warp five; a slow and cumbersome ramble that nobody would be advantaged by. The Ensign knew what was coming. He braced himself for some rather succinct remark about how the Theurgy had a xenobiology lab, for which he had prepared the rebuttal that there was not currently a xenobiologist held within the crew manifest, for which he had no doubt the Vulcan would no doubt have another response about the personnel on the space station beign available to assist, for which he would need to remind her that the creature had been tampered with by Savi technology, and thus the Prime Directive could apply… And the conversation would go around and around until one of them accepted defeat, and despite his adamance that he would get Potato examined today, Sylvain knew that he stood little chance against the tenacity of a Vulcan receptionist... Even pulling rank as a department head would probably fall short; a Vulcan would almost certainly be familiar with some sort of obscure regulation to undermine any authority he tried to exert…

But thankfully, despite the singularity that had erupted within his head, and was rapidly dragging the hope out of his soul, the arrival of a new voice appeared to turn the tide in Sylvain’s favour.

A handsome man approached, the low tone of his voice cutting underneath the otherwise fairly busy sickbay, nodding first at the Vulcan woman who manned their reception desk like Calamity at the gates of the underworld, and then a second time to Sylvain, causing a flop of tousled hair to effortlessly bob upon his head. His facial hair was somehow neat and scruffy all at once, thick and dark against his jawline, whilst his piercing blue eyes stared all-too intensely at Sylvain, who exerted all of his composure not to bawk under their gaze. The man introduced himself with a certain firmness to his words, a timbre beneath his tone, as Ehfva Feynri.

Sylvain felt some of the dread lift up from his shoulders as the stranger began to introduce himself. Ehfva had been recused from the Erudite himself, some time prior, and if the Ensign could have hoped for anyone to be sympathetic to his, albeit, unorthodox choice to rescue a creature from the Savi vessel, someone who had seen their exploitation first hand would certainly have been a stellar choice. Next came a rather heartfelt, if not intense, affirmation that rescuing the creature from the Savi was commendable; the duration of the eye contact made Sylvain feel like someone was trying to push a phaser into his mouth, but he did his best to endure the hardship. Given the options available to him, which was either accept Ehfva's aid, or to continue arguing with the Vulcan receptionist, Sylvain decided that he could endure a little eye-contact. The lack of any sort of formal education in the matter was also neither here nor there, given that the man had allegedly been studying the subject independently for almost triple Sylvain’s lifespan, but it did raise the question of what species he could be… He resembled a human, but even the best Bolian skincare range that latinum could buy, wouldn’t keep a sixty year old looking quite so youthful... But it wasn't as though Sylvain had any room to start questioning the poor man; after all, Ehfva clearly wanted to help, and goodness grief if Sylvain didn’t need it on this particular matter…

Give him a spatial anomaly anyday, over a foot-long white blob that drank bones, and seemed to be both highly intelligent, as well as utterly without thought. At least it has stopped trying to eat him now…

Though Sylvain still closed the door to his bedroom when he slept.

“O-of course, thank you so much.” Sylvain replied earnestly, turning his full attention to the handsome man, adjusting his posture to make himself look as professional as possible. “I’m Ensign Llewellyn-Kth, Chief CONN Officer…” It was somewhat out of character for him to punctuate his position, something he tended to prefer to keep under wraps, lest he face an uncomfortable conversation about his youth vs running an entire department, but a lingering needle of spite for the unhelpful Vulcan couldn’t help but shoot out from his mouth; he doubted that she'd give it a second thought, but at least he felt like he'd achieved some small victory over her maliciousness... “I’d normally shake your hand but as you can see…” Sylvain gestured with the orb held in his grasp, whilst he lied through his teeth; Sylvain would sooner request an emergency transport to the brig than shake a stranger’s hand in public…

“Oh, and this is Potato.” The Ensign added, moving on hurriedly from his meagre feat of deception, gesturing with the orb in his hand once again. “I was admittedly coming off of some rather strong anesthetic drugs when I named him, but it’s very potato shaped… In hindsight Mochi might have been a good fit, but I’ve never been a great fan of the texture…” Sylvain caught himself in his own nervous ramble, before clearing his throat as a pang of awkwardness seemed to catch him in the gut. “But that’s hardly important… Every precaution sounds great.” As always, Sylvain changed the subject with the dignity of a camel in ice skates. “I don’t believe it’s dangerous as an individual due to the Savi’s tampering, but as a species, I do believe that they’re apex predators.”

“Moopsy!” Potato chimed in agreement, from within the wicker orb.

“Ah… Anyway…” Sylvain awkwardly glanced down at the creature contained within the orb, who had clearly gotten excited by the conversation, and was now running around in small concentric circles, drooling enough that Sylvain could feel the liquid begin to drip down through the wicker and onto his fingers. The Ensign considered that a perfect sign that they should make their move, before Potato started leaving a trail… “Thank you for all of your help, Crewman.” He quickly turned back towards the reception desk to express his appreciation before he left, and whilst Sylvain most certainly didn’t mean it, he was polite to a fault, and sass didn’t sit all too well in his stomach, so his thanks, empty as they were, left his mouth regardless. He didn’t need to lower himself to her level, after all.

“Right then…” With etiquette out of the way, Sylvain turned back towards Ehfva with a less uncomfortable expression than he’d wielded before. “Lead on, I’m sure Potato is as eager to get out of this makeshift container as I am to stop holding it; I’ll have wicker-marks burned into my hands for days at this rate…” He attempted to politely joke as he turned back to the man, and began following close-in-step, as they departed for whatever destination Ehfva had in mind.

Re: Day 02 [ 1015 hrs ] Calcium Deficiency

Reply #3 – August 20, 2026, 03:32:16 AM

[ Corpsman Ehfva Feynri | Lab 4 | Deck 11 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] @Twil

The man almost smelled like a cornered animal. Not fear of her. Ehfva knew that scent well enough; she was now wearing a shape that most people found handsome or unremarkable, and neither reaction had ever protected anyone from her. This was something else. Adrenaline with nowhere to go. Cortisol laid over a body that had been at attention so long the muscles had forgotten there was another setting.

He had been braced when she introduced herself. He was still braced now, walking a half pace behind her down a corridor where nothing at all was happening.

Among the Okashii Atama the eyes were where you put your respect. You did not look away from someone you were taking seriously. To glance off was to say I am not certain you are worth the whole of my attention. Ninety-two years old, and she was still assuming her manners translated. When she keyed the lab door and turned back, she put her gaze on the wicker sphere instead of his face and left it there.

"Set him on the containment plinth. Center, if you can manage it. The field generators are edge-mounted, and I would rather not reach past him to correct the placement." As he worked to comply, she pulled out a scanner and almost as soon as he'd finished his work with the creature and turned back towards her, she was in his space, leaning close. "Your hands. Palms up, both."

She did not wait to be granted them. She took his wrists the way she took any patient's, one hand under each, thumb along the pulse point, a grip firm enough to be a decision and brief enough not to be a question, and turned the palms toward the light. Reddened along the finger pads. The skin shiny in the way that meant the outer layer had been chemically insulted.

"It has been drooling through the weave onto you, Ensign. I would like to know what its saliva does in response to your flesh." The dermal scanner went across both palms twice. She swabbed the residue from the base of his left thumb, sealed the swab, released him cleanly, all at once, no lingering. She fed the swab into the analyzer and set it against the dermal read. "Your skin is a data point now. I will be looking at the reaction alongside the sample." She paused, then looked back over her shoulder at him, almost apologetically. "Thank you."

The containment field came up at low power, a shimmer at the plinth's edge like heat off sand. She unlatched the sphere and lifted it away. Potato sat in the open air, white and round and improbable, with eyes far too large for anything that had ever needed to hunt in daylight.

"Moopsy," it said.

Evhfva smiled. "I have no idea what that means. But I heard you."

Full spectrum, no contact. The creature tolerated it for eleven seconds. Then it launched. She had time to be impressed. It came off the plinth flat and fast, faster than anything shaped like that had business managing, and hit her forearm mouth-first hard enough to rock her back a quarter step. She felt the jaw hinge open against her skin. Felt something in it open far past where the face suggested a face ought to end. Felt the pressure of teeth that were, structurally speaking, magnificent.

Nothing punctured. It worked at her arm for perhaps three seconds. Then it made a sound she could only call bewildered, let go, and sat down on her boot.

"Moopsy," it said, much smaller.

Ehfva crouched and left it where it was as she wiped the slobber off on her trouser pantleg. Then she began to hum. Low in the chest. Three notes that folded over on themselves and resolved a half tone under where any Federation ear would expect them to land. The colony had a hum for every kind of hurt: one for the wound that would close, one for the wound that would not, one for the fever, one for the kit who would not settle. This was the oldest of them, the one you gave a body while you were still deciding which of the others it needed. Her grandmother had hummed it over her when she was small and could not yet hold one shape through a whole night. She had hummed it herself across two wars, over people who could not hear it any longer. She had not made the sound aloud since the Cayuga.

It came out of this throat lower than she remembered. The bones of this chest carried it further.

The creature's head came up. It tracked her, not her hands, not the instrument in them, her throat, and its whole body dropped by a fraction, the way a thing drops when it decides it is not currently required to be a predator. She kept the tone going and worked one-handed, picking the creature back up and placing it back in the containment field. The creature stayed where she had put it.

"I gather this is something it has done to you before?" Ehfva glanced at Sylvain, a hint of a smile tugging at her lips. She turned her forearm over, glanced at the fading dents, and let the sleeve fall back. "It went for the ulna." The creature began to stir uncomfortably and she resumed her humming, speaking around the rhythm. "Now let's see what the scanners say."

The lab took some minutes to tell her the rest, and she narrated as she went, because the alternative was silence and she had already learned what silence did to him. The hum went underneath, picked up in the gaps.

"Dentition intact. Fangs retract into a sublabial sheath. That is what makes it look harmless." She rotated the internal scan. "Two paired glands at the base of the sheath. Venom, bone-specific. It does not chew. It injects, the venom liquefies the skeletal matrix, and it drinks the result. Not a figure of speech. Its digestive tract has no capacity for solids at all." She magnified. "Glands present. Ducts present. The neural pathway that fires them is severed at the ganglion. Clean cut, cauterized. And here. Second lesion, parathyroid analog. Its calcium metabolism. It could not process what it drank, even if it could drink."

The image sat on the screen between them. She ran the database query on the second screen while she took a marrow-analog sample the creature did not appear to notice.

Thin records. Thinner than she expected from something that had evidently terrified everyone it ever met. One Federation incident report out of a private menagerie in the outer arm: a collector, a containment failure, a casualty list that included the proprietor and a number of Pyrithian swamp gobblers rendered, per the attending officer, structurally unsupported. No homeworld. No genome. One line in an appendix noting the specimen had reached the facility's control room and been observed operating the interface. She read that line three times.

"No taxonomic record at all. One incident, one specimen, no origin world. Someone wrote up the encounter, someone else filed it under invasive fauna, and that was the end of the Federation's curiosity. Presumed apex, which you were right about. Presumed non-sapient, and the same report has it working a control panel." She looked at the plinth. "It says its name when it is addressed."

She shut off the scanner and leaned back in her chair, and let it settle, sitting still the way she had been taught to stand still, attention pointed inward. And only then did she realize she hadn't bothered to see if the lab had any other chairs or options for Sylvain for comfort. No matter now.

She angled her head towards him. "My species has more than one form. What you see now is but one of them, and I can shift into others. The Savi merged them, all at once, into one shell that was none of the forms and yet all of them." The analyzer ticked over to a second pass. "What they did to me they did to your creature. They took the function and left the animal. It still knows how to hunt. It still intends to. Every instinct it has fires correctly and hits a wall." She looked at the small white thing, sitting where it had been put, waiting for someone to say something to it. "And it is starving. Its calcium reserves are drawing down against a metabolism with nowhere to put a replacement even if we offered one. Weeks. Perhaps eight at this rate. It will get quieter, and then it will stop."

Re: Day 02 [ 1015 hrs ] Calcium Deficiency

Reply #4 – August 23, 2026, 08:02:59 PM

[ Sylvain Llewellyn-Kth | Lab Four | Deck 11 | Vector Two | USS Theurgy ] @Ellen Fitz

As Ehfva led him through the seemingly labyrinthine corridors of Deck Eleven, Sylvain found himself comforted in the realisation that the hustle and bustle of the ship was less pronounced than it had been yesterday; at least, it seemed to be as the pair walked across Deck 11, corridors absent of the constant banging, clanging and whirring noises that had accompanied his travels yesterday. The corridors were pleasingly quiet, especially so compared to the din of sickbay, and the absence of noise helped ease some of the stress that the Ensign could feel crawling underneath his skin. It helped him further still that Ehfva  at least punctuated their journey with silence, instead of trying to fill the walk with small-talk like most Starfleet personnel usually preferred to… Sylvain appreciated that, even if Ehfva was a little more intense than Sylvain was especially comfortable with.

As if to prove the issue of his intensity, as they approached the lab in question, the man affixed his gaze to the wicker orb in Sylvain’s hand, leaving it affixed as he entered the room, maintaining a level of eye contact that was frankly upsetting, as he strode into the room and requested Sylvain to set the subject of their investigation on one of the central examination tables. It took the Ensign a moment to register the request, on account of the disturbing levels of eye-contact, but complied as promptly as he registered the command, stepping himself through the doorway to the room with a quiet ‘thanks’, that fled his lips on instinct, before moving to the workstation in question, holding the wicker orb over it as though he were preparing to crack an egg.

“Okay little guy, please don’t get overexcited… Just relax… Easy does it…” Sylvain muttered comforting little words, more to himself than to Potato, as he eased open the two halves of the wicker clamshell he’d created, slowly waiting for Potato to emerge, one paw at a time. Of course, Potato did not elect to emerge paw-first, but instead waited until his full head could fit through the gap, splodging down onto the workstation with a soft ‘plap’ sound, as its wide eyed expression locked with Sylvain’s own brown gaze.

“Moopsy!”

“That was not my fault, and you know it…” Sylvain complained, gently moving the wicker plant pots in such a way as to help ease the moopsy down onto the workstation without causing any further distress to the creature. Unfortunately, Potato had apparently decided that it now wanted to be contained within the wicker orbs, a surprising development, given how it had spent all morning relentlessly fighting to get out of them, and despite Sylvain’s best coaxing, the creature withdrew back into the orbs with a defiance that Sylvain did not have the energy for. “Oh, now you want to be inside them…” The Ensign added with no small measure of exasperation in his voice, deciding to leave the creature within the plant pots and simply withdraw his hands instead, breathing a sigh of relief as he passed the force field emitters, and could finally be confident that Potato was contained behind something more sturdy than wicker.

Unfortunately for Sylvain, any ease to his stress was quickly ignited ten-fold, as Ehfva  suddenly appeared in the Ensign’s personal space, far too close, far too intense… The man commanded him to present his hands, and then almost immediately proceeded to start manhandling them when Sylvain didn’t comply within a nanosecond, taking a physical grip on Sylvain’s wrist and forcefully manoeuvring them into some desired position. The Ensign was the taller of the two men, but the few inches that he could see above Ehfva’s luscious hair didn’t provide the pilot with much comfort, as two firm grips encircled his wrists, thumbs digging into his skin with a pressure that made his entire body shrivel in discomfort.

It took most of what Sylvain had to resist the urge to scream at the arrival of such intimate physical contact with a stranger, his synapses firing wildly, activating an intense fight-or-flight response that sang as though he were being attacked by a Borg drone… His back clenched as though he intended to throw the other man across the room, Sylvain’s muscles hardening like iron as Ehfva spoke away, either oblivious or uncaring as to the Ensign’s state of distress. Something about drooling? Flesh?

The pilot barely had the wavelength to acknowledge Ehfva words, hearing them enter his ears as though they were muffled, as though the pair were trying to have a conversation underwater, his brain thrumming as though it had been stuffed full of cotton wool. Whilst Ehfva’s words were muffled, the soft bleeping of a dermal scanner running along his palms was not, its subtle noise sounding akin to the screams of the Andorian Paresis Squares team he’d found particular issue with back at the Academy; loud and threatening, their volume scratching behind his eyes like dust and broken glass. Something brushed across his hands like a scalpel, cold and sharp, and then the pressure upon his wrists was gone, abandoned as though it was nothing.

To his credit, Ehfva at least afforded Sylvain a glance that suggested some sort of apology, perhaps a response to the fact that the Ensign was practically trembling from undesired adrenaline, and that he’d let out a gasp for air as though he’d just been submerged in iced-water as soon as the hands that had gripped his wrists had abandoned him… He felt hot… He was sweating, in fact; his back hot and sticky against the material of his uniform, as he found himself panting as though he’d just ran two miles through a Vulcan desert. His fingers clenched around themselves as though he’d lost all circulation, and his wrists felt dirty, as though he needed to run himself through a decontamination shower immediately, or he’d catch some sort of epidermal infection…

It took Sylvain a moment to get back to reality, taking a pointed step backwards, away from Ehfva, stumbling slightly as he pressed his arse into another workstation, before he moved his hands pointedly behind his back.

He didn’t smile when Potato launched itself at Ehfva just a handful of seconds later, he was too busy mentally dwelling on the mental pain that was currently echoing throughout his psyche, but he wouldn’t deny the small bead of amusement that swelled up in his chest at the sight of it. Sylvain was a little less amused by how effortlessly Ehfva seemed to handle Potato’s attack, humming a deep rhythm from somewhere deep within his chest, picking the creature up one-handedly and returning him to the confines of the plinth. Worst still, Ehfva seemed almost amused by the attempt, turning to Sylvain as he delivered a series of questions, which the Ensign did his best to answer.

“We encountered him aboard the Erudite." Sylvain began to explain, any dregs of casualty abandoning him as he spoke with the formality of a court martial. “It escaped containment after a power conduit was disrupted, killed one of the Savi researchers, and then attacked myself and another officer in a maintenance access corridor; thankfully it didn’t do me any harm, but it continued trying for a good while.” Sylvain paused, watching as Potato rolled onto his back and waggled his tiny paws into the air, before they fell flat to its sides. “It’s largely stopped trying to eat me now; I think it's become accustomed to the idea that I'm not food... But you, on the other hand, are the first other living thing it’s interacted with since I got it off of the Erudite, so it seems that it at least has enough knowledge to differentiate individuals.”

If Ehfva had noted Sylvain’s explanation, he didn’t show it, instead burying himself in the scan data, and whatever other information that the lab was presenting to him. Sylvain’s scientific expertise stopped at astrophysics and stellar phenomena, so he didn’t even attempt to engage with what the consoles were telling them, instead positioning himself on the opposite side of the plinth to Ehfva, so that the man would face more of an obstacle if he attempted to get ‘handsy’ again.

Sylvain did listen to Ehfva’s explanation, but didn’t have much of a hope of understanding; most of the man’s words were too medical for the pilot to keep much of an understanding of, and whilst Sylvain understood some of the terms, Ehfva was talking a mile a minute, and he couldn’t keep track of everything. He expected that Ehfva might’ve had the same issues keeping up if Sylvain had descended into a tirade about advanced warp field theory… From what he could make out of the man’s delivery, however, was that apparently the Federation’s contact with the creature consisted of one single incident, aboard a menagerie, the outcome of which consisted of a rather gristly slew of deaths, and the apparent revelation that these creatures were allegedly capable of working control panels… Sylvain glanced down at Potato with a world of horror and confusion in his eyes. Potato looked back.

“Moopsy!” It replied, with indiscernible intention.

Ehfva collapsed back into the sole chair that occupied the room, whilst Sylvain stood straight, hands firmly behind his back, as though he were standing to attention to meet an admiral. It was a juxtaposition of two personalities, a moment of silence only broken as Ehfva angled his head towards the Ensign, and began speaking. He spoke of his own species, and what the Savi had done to them; merged multiple forms into one shell. Sylvain didn’t truthfully understand, and any interest he had in doing so was transported into the void as Ehfva’s next revelation came from his lips.

Whatever the Savi had done to Potato, was killing him.

It had weeks left before it starved to death.

“Wait, what?” Sylvain’s word left his mouth as though he had been punched in the stomach, breathless and tight across his chest, his eyes turning towards the small white creature with a brow that was furrowed in disbelief, watching as Potato bobbed its head once or twice, looking back between the two officers with an undefinable expression; did it understand them, or was it just responding to the aural stimuli of a conversation?. “No, I… There must be something that we can do?” Sylvain moved forwards towards the dias, hands abandoning their protected space in the small of his back as he placed them on the console, looking first at Potato, and then to Ehfva, his eyes wide and full of alarm. “I’ve been feeding it bone-broth, which it has been…” Eating? Sylvain thought back to the shallow bowls of broth that Sylvain had been providing the creature for the past couple of days, which it usually submerged its head in, as opposed to lapping like a typical mammalian quadruped. Was it actually drinking it, or was it just spilling the stuff all over his quarters…?

“No… No, the Savi were conducting experiments on them, they had thousands of them in tanks, they were experimenting with their genome… This isn't a natrual change, it was created, so we have to be able to solve it; we’ve got the…” Sylvain’s hand moved to the Savi-datapadd that had spent almost three days secreted upon his waist, which had of course been passed off to Doctor Leux two days prior… Shit...He didn’t know if the contents of that datapad were common knowledge yet, or whether Doctor Leux was still analysing it… “We…” Sylvain pivoted his augment, not wanting to risk any sort of animosity with the Doctor unless it was absolutely necessary. “We have the most advanced ship in Starfleet…”

The distress hit Sylvain harder than he would have ever anticipated, his fingers suddenly bringing up displays of information that he couldn’t quite comprehend, as Potato shuffled around on the plinth before him, laying down flat on its belly, and then rolling onto its back, and then back again, round-and-round in concentric circles. Sylvain couldn’t quite map where this sense of affection for the creature had come from, but he only knew that he had to save it… Perhaps it was the only way he could excuse his efforts in putting the Savi-Theurgy alliance in jeopardy? Perhaps it was because Sylvain was his own flavour of genetic misfit, and he wouldn’t see Potato die for the same crime?

Or perhaps it was because Sylvain was suffering from such a harrowingly deep sense of loneliness, that losing this small little creature that had forced its way into his care, would break his heart in a way that Sylvain didn’t think he could bear…

“So, it can’t metabolise calcium anymore…” He heard Ehfva’s words in his ears as the Pilot’s eyes followed through the complicated medical jargon that the computer was presenting him, picking out key-words here-and-there that he understood enough to follow. “...but we can’t safely reverse the genetic tampering without giving it the ability to kill everyone aboard the ship…” Sylvain didn’t even question if it was possible; feasibility wasn’t his priority right now… He paused his thinking aloud for a moment, brows furrowing deeper at the information presented to him, the mind that had previously been addled and dull from Ehfva’s touch suddenly sharper than a razor as it ploughed through every possibility that his expertise in astrophysics and advanced astral navigation could find.

“Perhaps there’s some sort of way that we could introduce some sort of new enzyme to its system…” Sylvain might as well have been talking in Orion slang for how much he understood his own words, but they were flowing from his mouth regardless of how much his brain could keep up. “...to allow it to metabolise an element with some sort of similar alkaline structure?” He brought up the periodic table in his mind’s eye, thinking back the chemistry lessons he’d had back aboard the USS Boleyn as a teenager, and revisited the list of alkaline earth metals. “Maybe magnesium or bohrium? I’m no chemist but I know they share similar chemical properties to calcium…”

His words were desperate, and they lacked the knowledge to see any such plans through, but he felt a determination in his gut that he would save this poor creature… He didn’t steal it from a Savi research lab, liberate it from the Erudite, and secret it aboard his possessions aboard the Theurgy, just so it could slowly starve to death in his quarters… No, he would find something that would keep Potato alive… He’d be damned if he let the poor creature die because of the Savi.

Sylvain hadn’t experienced much hate before in his life, but he was suddenly becoming acutely aware of why the crew of the Theurgy held the Savi in such contempt…

Re: Day 02 [ 1015 hrs ] Calcium Deficiency

Reply #5 – September 01, 2026, 07:05:56 PM

[ Corpsman Ehfva Feynri | Lab Four | Deck 11 | Vector 02 | USS Theurgy ] @TWilkins

He had come off the far side of the plinth. His hands were on the console now, spread flat, and she doubted he knew they were there. Whatever fence he had built after she took his wrists, he had walked straight through it without noticing, and she filed that away with the rest: he was not fragile, he was fenced. Different construction entirely. She had been reading bodies for ninety-two years and she had still gotten his wrong within four minutes of meeting him.

Among the Okashii Atama you took a patient's hands without discussion, because discussion was slower than helping. Ninety-two years, and she was still handing people buckets they had not asked for. She would ask next time. That was cheaper than an apology and considerably more use to him.

"Bohrium," she said, and let it sit in her mouth a moment. "There may be a hundred loose atoms of it between here and the Beta Quadrant, and every one of them will be gone before you finish saying the word. If you fed it to your creature you would only kill it faster."

She stood, and put her boot against the chair, and rolled it across the deck plating toward him so that it arrived on its own and nothing of hers had to come within reach.

"Sit down, if you like. You have been at attention since the corridor." She took a deep breath, catching the lingering scent of his earlier anger. “I will not approach.”

She turned back to the display and pulled the internal scan up, rotating it until the second lesion sat center-screen. Her hand went to her hair, tucked it behind the ear, and the hair came loose again before she had finished the gesture. This shape had never cooperated on that point.

"Strontium is the element you were reaching for. Group two, one row below calcium. It deposits into skeletal matrix in a dozen species. If the problem were only the material, strontium is where I would begin,” she angled a look at him and gave a respectful nod, “and you would have found it yourself if you’d been looking at the chart, no doubt." He could take the compliment or leave it; she did not intend to dress it up. "The problem is not the material."

The pointer moved up the throat, to the pale seam of cauterized tissue.

"This is the regulator. It tells the body where to put what it drinks and when to stop putting it there. The Savi took a very small knife to it and were very careful about where they set the blade. Pour strontium down that animal's throat until the tank runs dry and it will sit in the gut doing nothing at all. It would starve with a full stomach."

Potato had rolled itself upright while she spoke and now sat facing the display, head canted, its enormous eyes tracking the rotation of the scan.

"You may ask me next whether we can put the regulator back. The answer is no. Eight centimeters separate the two lesions. Repair one and you are working within a hand's width of the other, and the other is the trigger for the fangs, I know that much as least from the incident report. I will not hand that back to it; three bulkheads from a hundred people."

She reached over and tapped the plinth's edge control twice, dropping the field to its lowest cycle. The creature lifted one paw and tapped the inside of the field. Twice. Ehfva did not remark on it. She logged the time, the sequence, and the interval by hand on her PADD rather than dictating them, and decided she would think about what that meant later.

"There is a third road, Ensign. You stop trying to repair the animal and you replace the function beside it."

She unfastened her collar and drew it down two centimeters. Below the notch of the collarbone, riding the muscle, sat a raised surgical line no longer than a thumb. They’d left it like that for easy access should repairs be required later on.

"Arven put a device in me. My forms did not come back because he mended what the Savi cut. It cannot be mended. The bioengineer, Hirek tr’Aimne, built me something that does the work the cut part used to do, and now I have my shapes again." She refastened the collar. "It requires recharging before I can shift to other forms, meaning I can’t shift as readily as I used to, but at least I can shift."

She let it go at that and turned back to the analyzer.

"A regulatory shunt is a smaller problem than a genome. It has to sit somewhere the creature cannot reach with its own mouth, which, given that mouth, is a genuine engineering constraint, and it has to be calibrated against a metabolism no one in the Federation has troubled to chart. Eight weeks is enough time to chart it and devise the shunt, though I will need to request support from Specialist tr’Aimne in that area. I do not intend to lie to you. This may not work."

Potato tapped the field again. Once. Then it lay down flat with its paws tucked beneath its chin and watched the pair of them with an expression that could have meant absolutely anything.