Unofficial Medicine
Posted on September 9th, 2015 by T'Lira

Breep!

T’Lira looked up from her rather old-fashioned paper book as her door chime went off.

"Come."

The door slid open and a familiar grinning person walked in.

"Imagine this," Elena Garson grinned, "We’ve finally been stationed to the same place."

"It is just for repairs, Elena," T’Lira pointed out. Elena sat in that distasteful armchair that had somehow found its way into this set of quarters and shrugged.

"But it’s still at the same place. How’s the Atlantis?"

"Still in need of many repairs, although such repairs are progressing well. And the Hoffstaad?"

"I’m going to pay a surprise visit to those engineers later and remind them that if they don’t fix my ship, I won’t let them leave."

"You cannot stop them from leaving."

"After all these years, you still doubt me? I’m going to seal off Main Engineering if they test me. Because it’s not just the station engineers screwing this up," Elena chuckled. T’Lira set her book aside and studied her old friend for a moment.

It was obvious that Elena had suffered wounds during the battle, as she was favoring her right leg far too much. Despite her current lack of uniform, T’Lira caught on to something she had said.

"Congratulations."

"What? Wait, you already… I should have known. Oh well, at least now I can say that Bril owes me some latinum. I just don’t like the way it happened."

"What transpired?"

Elena sighed, "Captain T’l’l’h’o’p’l was hit with a support beam during the last battle. He’s in the station hospital right now, but he decided to retire. That leaves me in command. The official promotion is tomorrow at 0900."

"At least he did not die."

"You always find the bright side, don’t you?"

"On the contrary," T’Lira replied, about to continue, but Elena rolled her eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Yours is acting up too, huh?"

"My what?"

"Your inner pessimist. Mine keeps telling me that I’m going to mess this up."

T’Lira lifted an eyebrow, "If you are referring to your new command, you will perform admirably, as you have in the past."

Elena chuckled, "You sure know how to lift my mood, huh? Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, I can’t screw up as bad as Eddie’s CO."

"It is impolite to speak ill of anyone when they are not present to present a proper defense of their actions."

"What, and you don’t?"

"I prefer to leave my thoughts unspoken and private. That way, I do not need to concern myself with their response."

"Good idea. I might borrow that. Because I’ve sure managed to piss my science staff off by talking shit about one of their ‘heroes’, not that the old git is a hero."

"And who would that be?"

"Remember our old professor? The one who taught the basic science class in such a monotonous way that we all wanted to fall asleep?"

"They see him as a hero?"

"Ever since he messed up that experiment and discovered a subspace pocket by accident. They’ve been studying that thing for a month now and are nowhere near discovering how he messed up so bad as to discover it."

"That is an impressive feat."

Elena struggled not to laugh loudly, "For him, yeah. For everyone else, not so much."

T’Lira stated simply, "I did not clarify whether his feat was good or bad, merely that it was impressive."

Elena burst out laughing, "Yeah, I knew I had a right idea by dropping by. Who knew that a Vulcan could joke?"

T’Lira remained silently confused as Elena continued laughing. Perhaps the human aphorism regarding laughter as a medical treatment was correct. That would be an interesting topic for a later discussion with any of the medical personnel she knew.