Goo Babies?!

Posted on Sun Mar 9th, 2025 @ 3:41am by Lieutenant Xex Wang & Captain Björn Kodak

Mission: Mean Green Queen
Location: USS Sojourner
Timeline: Mission Day 25 at 1600

[Main Engineering]

“You know,” F'Rar said, peering at the little group of blobs caught in the containment field, “They look much less menacing when they aren't invading your warp core.”

“Yes ma'am,” the ensign given the duty of keeping an eye on the containment-field-caught blobs said, in that way subordinates have of disagreeing while saying words of agreement. The man had some kind of stain across the front of his mustard-colored uniform, and part of his hair had been singed, probably by the same thing that had smeared soot across half of his face.

The desperate battle-- Ensign U'gawe could only really think of it as a battle-- to stop the invading blobs from actually entering the warp core had resulted in some very creative 'alterations' to main engineering. Cut off from comms with the rest of the ship, and given the blobs' nearly infinite ability to change their shape and fit anywhere, frantic soldering, welding, and plasteel-forming had seemed like the only way to keep the invading goo away from the ship's main propulsion and power generation. And then PO Chi had touched one-- or rather, one had wrapped itself around her wrist. In the ensuing odd behavior and subsequent panic, they had all acted in haste to simply kill the intruders. In hindsight, U'gawe wondered if there hadn't been a more peaceful solution. It seemed to him like their immediate jump to violence had, if anything, made the entire situation fall off the rails even faster.

In fact, if Chief F'Rar and and Assistant Chief Parsons hadn't showed up when they had, U'gawe wasn't entirely sure they would have 'won,' in terms of keeping the blobs from their obvious goal of breaching the core. Certainly not with the glitchy computer interaction they were facing. Fortunately F'Rar had had the foresight to send Ensign Balsam to the computer core and with access to the core's kernel and primary subprocesser, the skinny little nerd was able to at least get them access to all central-computer-run functions without any obfuscation. Although the Chief and Assistant had both looked cold and pissed off-- so much so that despite their dire situation, U'gawe had initially been hesitant to approach the woman-- their solution for containment of the blobs had been both timely and elegant.

F'Rar either didn't hear the disagreement in his tone, or chose to ignore it. “The bio lab should be around shortly to pick them up. Make sure they don't cause any more problems in the meantime. Once they're gone, we can start clean up. This place is a mess.”

U'gawe stifled a groan. She wasn't wrong; engineering looked like the warzone it had felt like,with panels pulled loose in an attempt to bypass glitchy computer interfacing, a couple of scorch marks from ill-placed welding torches, and the pool of fluid under the EPS they'd purposefully breached to trigger the emergency close of the core's baffling. Engineering certainly needed clean up, but his watch should have ended at least an hour ago, and he'd been hoping she'd dismiss everyone not on Gamma.

F'Rar didn't seem to notice as she stepped away from the containment field to check on the ever-growing list of reports arriving thick and fast about other areas of the ship that had suffered blob incursions. With a mingled sense of relief and envy, U'gawe watched as she dispatched small teams to check, and in some cases repair, vital systems throughout the ship for any damage other blobby visitors might have wrecked. Eventually as the chaos seemed to abate momentarily, she raised her voice above the din and said, “Parsons has the watch. I'll be in Transporter room two.” And with that, the woman was gone.

U'gawe took another look around engineering and edged a little closer to the containment field. As long as his job was to watch the blobs, he'd take the opportunity for a break. Peering past the glittering field, he squinted and decided that he still disagreed with the Chief. Those little bastards would be haunting his dreams for a while yet.

[Transporter Room 2]

“Look,” the bajoran technician said for what felt like the millionth time, “Chief F'Rar said to wait for her, so I'm waiting for her. He's been in the buffer this long, another couple minutes won't hurt.”

The tiny woman in front of him got redder. It didn't seem possible, but her face actually suffused with more blood. A small part of his brain wondered at what point so much blood would be caught in her head that she'd pass out. An even smaller, meaner part hoped it would be soon. The little woman had been berating him for the last quarter hour-- at least-- for doing nothing about her partner's predicament. He'd tried to explain that they weren't doing nothing, they were protecting the ship from potential contamination, and that he would be perfectly safe in the buffer until they could parse the contamination. Given that the transport had been site-to-site on board, the technician was a little mystified about where the contamination had come from in the first place, but the protocol was to hold the transport in the buffer, and in any case, he certainly wasn't going to tell the little woman that. With the comms down, they hadn't been able to get a hold of anyone to authorize a release on the transport; the poor man had been stuck in the buffer for a while, but he should be perfectly fine.

Hopefully. The manuals all said he'd be fine. The technician just hoped the manuals were correct.

Before the reddened woman could continue her tirade, the transporter room doors opened, and the Sojo's Chief Engineer strode through. The tech tried not to look at the suggestion of the spoon on her forehead that pointed to her half-Cardassian parentage, directing his gaze just over her shoulder as she approached.

“What've we got?” F'Rar asked, stepping up beside him to peer at his console.

Pulling up the transport's diagnostic, he pointed out the section of particles the computer had flagged as contamination, although the image would not resolve into anything but a blob.

F'Rar seemed to be trying to hold back a smile. “Yeah, I think I've got an inkling what it is. Let's get a containment field at the ready, and then you'd better finish the transport before--” she flicked her gaze toward the red-faced woman and dropped her voice, leaning in close to finish, “before she explodes.” It didn't seem quite quiet enough for the woman to not hear it, but at least F'Rar's position saved her from further expletives.

The tech leaned away before he could catch himself, then cleared his throat, studiously not looking at her. “Yes ma'am. Computer, initiate containment protocol nineteen delta, receiving.” The computer took an extra half-beat to answer, but then chimed the affirmative.

The transporter pad shimmered, and the poor bastard who'd been stuck in it for the last hour began to materialize. Fingers poised over the transporter control to lock down the containment field, the tech watched closely for his moment, his mind putting aside any discomfort around the Chief Engineer, focusing in on the task at hand.

Here we go...

[Sickbay]

“Just... try not to touch it, okay?” Xex said, patting the engineer on the shoulder as the woman guiltily snatched her hand away from her opposite wrist where she had indeed been just about to scratch the rash that had developed in the wake of contact with the strange blob creatures.

She ducked her head sheepishly and almost whispered, “Yes, doctor. As long as the hallucinations don't continue...” she shuddered the memory of the incredibly vivd vision she'd been subjected to, right there in the middle of main engineering, where everyone could see her. Her only saving grace was she hadn't ended up being the only victim.

Xex's pleasant expression dimmed just slightly and he cleared his throat. “They... shouldn't,” he said, although with rather less confidence than one might like from their doctor. His gray gaze flicked to the other biobed, and beyond to the makeshift ward they'd had to make out of the surgical suite in order to sedate those crewmembers still in the grip of severe hallucinatory episodes. So far, symptoms had not returned to those, like PO Chi here who seemed to be past the actual visions, but who was he to say they wouldn't recur at a later time? “But if they do, please do not delay in calling sickbay. We want to know right away.”

The petty officer bobbed her head in agreement and slid down off the bed and made for the door.

“Zerin?” Xex called after her, and she paused, half-turning only to find him already at her side and pressing a tube of cream into her hand. “Your hydrocortisone. It should stop the itching and help to calm the inflammation. Remember, four times a day and no scratching.” He gave her his best doctorly stare which only succeeded in making her hide a smile.

“Yes, doctor,” she said again, taking the tube and making good her escape.

Taking a deep breath, Xex turned back to sickbay and squared his shoulders. Time for another round to see who might safely be brought out of sedation and just who was going to land in their laps next.

[Biolab]

“So you see, captain, they really don't pose much of a threat once contained,” the scientist was saying to the Chameloid as they both peered into the ever-growing collection of blobs within the containment field. “And they are fascinating, are they not?”

As they watched, the blobs seemed to smoosh into one another, sometimes making larger blobs, sometimes splorking apart into even smaller globules, with no obvious pattern or indeed purpose.

"Hard to believe all this," Kodak whistled lowly through his short-bearded lips, "came from one jelly-like alien shapeshifter." He was peering closely into the tank, once again down in the bio-lab, only this time it wasn't because of a mean green plant from who-knows-where that had gone on the attack. No, this time it was due the way in which a strange intruder aboard the Sojo had recently been subdued.

The science team's scans of the blobs had, indeed, confirmed that they had come from the alien posing as a Starfleet officer who'd come aboard the ship some days prior. Upon arriving at its assigned quarters to bunk with Irynya, Balsam, and Parsons, a sideways social interaction had apparently caused the jelly-in-human-disguise to transform and try to consume the trio in their own pajamas.

"Could have been a lot worse though," Kodak said, eyeing the blobs in their weird little dance of combining and separating over and over again. Looking up, he noticed the scientist quirking a curious eyebrow his way.

"Our Second Stringers," he began again but then, just as suddenly, stopped. Subconsciously chewing at the inside of his cheek, his inner monologue commented that, with Irynya's promotion to Chief Flight Controller and Parsons' to Assistant Chief Engineer, that particular term didn't exactly fit anymore. "Our officers," he began a second time, correcting himself, "burned most of the thing up. But what if more of it had survived?"

"Ah yes," the scientist nodded, suddenly understanding. "Actually sir, it wasn't about the volume of the creature that went unburnt. It was about how pregnant the creature was when it was attacked." They beamed at Kodak, rather proud of the conclusion the team had come to.

"Preg...nant?" Kodak asked in stunned staccato, rising back to full height and backing away from the tank in alarm. "Those things are its...its..." he struggled to find an apt term, "its goo babies? And if unchecked, they'd become more of those aliens?"

"Mmm," the scientist nodded. "Our theory is that the gelatinous shapeshifter was actually a budding-queen of its species. When Ensign Parsons started burning the creature with that flamethrower, it ejected its gestating babies onto the floor, where they blended in with other left-behind residue from the creature. My guess," a hand went up to thoughtfully stroke their chin, "is that no one noticed that some of that residue had gone missing when clean up efforts began in earnest."

"Ah," it was the Captain's turn to understand. "So a lot of the leftover goo was the creature's remains but those," he gestured back to the blob tank, "were offspring that slimed themselves into the walls or something and then went on a tear?" Kodak shuddered then, thinking back to the chaos that had unfolded on the bridge when four of the things had suddenly poured out of the ceiling.

One of the creatures had engulfed Ensign Nevek, causing the Andorian to see Kodak as one of his co-husbands. It'd been rather awkward for the Chameloid to explain the ensuing kiss to Andrew. Even though their open relationship allowed extra-relational contacts, Kodak had noted that kissing his subordinates was not typically something a Captain did. And, even worse, Ensign Nevek seemed especially terse and uncomfortable with him in the hours since.

"Yep," the scientist nodded, unaware of what had transpired on the bridge. "I'm sure you and the senior staff will come to the right decision but, if it were up to me," they explained compassionately, "I'd drop them on some harmless planet we eventually come across. In the meantime, though," they assured, "we can keep them well-fed and happy down here. It's easy enough to isolate them in a lab environment. The warp core? Maybe not so much," they chuckled, remembering how irritated Parsons had been when the team had come to collect the goo babies from Engineering.

"I will take that under advisement," Kodak replied, a smirk coming to his recently Andorian-smooched lips. "Well, thank you very much for the hard work from you and your team. Commander t'Nai will let you know how we decide to proceed but please," he held up two human-looking hands -- suddenly reminded of his own shapeshifting-origins -- and not-so-mock pleaded, "do everything possible to keep those things out of the bowels of my ship?"

"Done, sir," the scientist nodded back, their eyes returning to the blobs in the tank. Interest held, they didn't even notice the Captain leave, only looking back once they heard the hiss of the lab's door closing. "DNA eating plants, shapeshifting jelly, and curious little goo-tots...this ship can't catch a break, can it?" they asked themselves with a smile, completely unaware of just how right they were about to become...

A post by:

Lieutenant Xex Wang, MD
Chief Medical Officer

Captain Björn Kodak
Commanding Officer