Inventory

[Guest Natalie Harris]

Shore leave, Natalie noted with some regret, was over. It hadn't lasted anywhere near long enough (did it ever?), and she was having a moment of "would rather be anywhere than back in Sickbay". It was a common feeling after a vacation, of course, but it did little to make the return to duty any easier.

 

She nodded towards one of the nurses, accepting a handful of padds with updates from while they'd been parked at Pacifica. The usual shore leave-related calamities; broken bones here and there, a few mysterious bruises, strange rashes resulting from frollicking through fields with urticating-leaved plants, but nothing especially serious. A few of the crew had managed to get themselves arrested, she also noted, but apparently they'd been cleared of whatever charges they'd been hapless enough to accrue, so Sickbay wouldn't be prepping for surgery to reattach a guillotined head back to the body.

 

On the bright side, a few crewmembers had actually volunteered themselves for physicals while they were gone, as well as some "nutritional counseling". That too, Natalie supposed, was fairly typical. One could delude oneself on "in-shape-ness" while on a starship, but beachwear was moderately unforgiving. She paused for a moment, smirking to herself as she scheduled them during Juno's open-Sickbay hours, his reward for his mockery of her reading material back on the beach.

 

Natalie grinned at that, bypassing her momentary feeling of guilt for foisting off the crewmen on the chief, her thoughts wandering back to said reading material. It was particularly amusing that the new enlisted doctor (and, she recalled with even more entertainment, Anastasia's husband) was a fan of the same novels as she. The thought also made her feel better about her own, guilty, dirty little habit. After all, every girl (or maybe she should have thought of it as "every doctor") was allowed an escape. If hers happened to be lurid romance novels... well, there were worse habits out there, even if they were easier to kick.

 

She relaxed as much as she could against the short back of the lab-stool, looking over the supplies in the transparent-doored cabinets over her head. They needed to get a new inventory started, she knew; their supplies had already been in disarray before the doctors took leave, and now with the orderlies having had run of the place for a good length of time, it was in utter chaos. The side of Natalie that just wanted to leave things that way was quickly overruled by the guilty side that knew it'd be best for everyone if it got straightened up and catalogued. Besides, if ship's rumors were true and they had a distress-call case coming up, they stood a good chance of needing things quickly and without hunting-and-fetching for supplies in the shambles of the cabinets.

 

With a long sigh, she grabbed a blank tablet and one of the enlistees (who wasn't busy pretending to be working and in fact reading a book, she noticed with a smirk), starting in the far set of cabinets. It might be a long task, but they had a good amount of time before getting to whatever freighter found itself having troubles...