Personal Log

[Cdr Alces 0]

Personal Log, stardate 10901.07

 

There were few things that Zar Alces had an aversion to doing in public, much to the chagrin of his travelling companions. Anyone who doubted it had only to check his Starfleet dosier. One would find pictures from when he attended Admiral Janeway's annual New Year's Eve party dressed as a Borg Drag Queen, or transcripts from the court proceedings where he tried to justify his consumption of the 24 cases of Romulan Ale he confiscated from a Smuggling operation (how else was anyone going to tell it was real?). And there were extreamly detailed videos of the skinny dipping affair at the Fontana de Trevi in Rome.

 

And those were just some of the incidents in Federation space. The meer mention of his name could prevent entire cruise ships from docking at Risa. And one of his past hosts was the highest priced courtesan in the history of the Segalian empire, a record that still stands after an indiscrete number of decades.

 

But ever since the live gagh eating competition on Q'onoS, Alces refused to throw up in front of witnesses. This was a rule he was having great difficulty with at the moment.

 

The corridors of Aether filled his heart with dread, and his stomach with unmentionables. He was obsessed with the fact that there weren't really any corridors. The only thing that separated him from the cold vacuum of space was a transparant energy shield, which meant that his fate was in the hands of the most incompetent engineer on the Aetherian staff.

 

His body was buffetted with sensations that his intellect couldn't talk his way out of. He was cold, in spite of the heat. And he felt pulled towards the Aeherian sun, even though the station had it's own gravitational center. And he was embarassed ... embarassed at his lack of control; embarassed that he wasn't more interested in one of the technological wonders of modern civilization; embarassed that his host body still kept secrets from him. He'd lived inside Zar long enough that he should have known it had a glass stomach. What other secrets did it have? What other surprises would he discover at inappropriate moments?

 

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the circutry behind the machinery that kept the energy field in place and prevented him from freezing on his way to a fiery death. That helped. The imagined diagrams in his head helped to ground him, the flaws in his knowledge distracted him sufficiently for the panic to subside and his stomach to settle. He began looking forward to the technical breifing on the station's systems they were about to attend.

 

And then he saw an upside-down Klingon five corridors away eating bloodworm on a stick ...

 

Cdr Alces

USS Arcadia, NCC-1742-E