Munro to Kodak

Posted on Thu Apr 23rd, 2026 @ 10:02pm by Andrew Munro & Debbie Gless

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Arboretum
Timeline: Mission Day 6 at 1340

[Arboretum]
[USS Sojourner]
[MD 6, 1340 Hours]

"I'm just saying," Debbie said, her voice carrying considerably more than was probably appropriate for the arboretum's contemplative atmosphere, "if you'd told me two days ago that you were bringing me to look at a plant, I would have said, ‘I run a diner. I look at plants everyday. They're called garnishes.’”

Andrew rolled his eyes. He loved Debbie and her snark but sometimes, she was just a bit…much. “Trust me. You'll want to see this plant. And I promise,” the barrel-chested biologist stressed, “this one’s no garnish.” As Debbie had been the one to procure said plant in the first place, he hoped that maybe she'd have some new detail that might helpfully surface by bringing her here to see it now.

The matron made a noise that suggested she was reserving judgment as Andrew led her around the final bend in the path to the alcove at the far end. He heard her stop behind him — felt the shift in her presence — and knew she'd seen it…knew she was having the same reaction he had initially. Because the plant was no longer upright and tracking movement with its leafy maw. It had become something more reminiscent of a bean pod nestled in wreathes of leaves. And that pod had grown considerably since Andrew’s last visit two days prior.

What had begun as the plant drawing inward—folding its leaves around the maw-pod in a tight, sealed mass—had continued to develop into something that looked somehow…expectant? Like something was about to happen, though Andrew didn’t quite know what. The outer leaves had thickened and darkened, layered over one another in overlapping plates, and the whole structure pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm that hadn't been there before.

"Okay," Debbie said, breaking the silence with a pop of her gum. "I see what you mean. But this doesn’t look like the plant I bought Björn on that station. Are you sure it’s the same one?”

He glanced back at her. She had her arms crossed, head tilted, studying the pod with an expression he recognized from the diner — the one she used when the replicators were on the fritz and materialized chilled tomato soup with a side of mold instead of pepperoni pizza. It was the kind of expression that very clearly expressed “Wut?”

"It started doing this about thirty-six hours after my last visit," Andrew said, pulling out his PADD. "The plant essentially folded in on itself. The metabolic readings are unlike anything in Jyl-eel’s notes or the database." He pulled up the data and held it out to her to reference.

Debbie looked at the PADD with the focused attention of someone who had absolutely no idea what she was looking at. "Mm-hm," she said, in a tone that meant “You better say more if you expect me to even slightly get what’s going on.”

Andrew almost smiled. He tucked the PADD back under his arm. “OK,” he breathed warmly, “let’s take a step back. I know I've asked this before but—”

"The vendor," Debbie said.

"The vendor,” Andrew nodded.

She sighed the sigh of a woman who had been asked this question at least twice and found it only marginally less interesting each time.

"Andrew, honey,” she stressed the term like a weary but patient mother, “I’ve told you everything already. It was a market stall. On a space station I've never been to before and will probably never go to again. He was a little old man with a face like a knee. And he said—" she paused, the way she always paused here, as if the memory required a certain amount of ceremony — "he said that if you take really good care of it, it'll bring you good fortune and happiness." She looked at Andrew, then back at the pod, then at Andrew again. "I thought you bears could use some of that, you know?"

Andrew looked at the pod, then back at Debbie. "Aye," he said quietly. "You might be right about that.” The events between Hukatuse Tagumik—a hidden and seedy smuggler station nestled in the gravity well between two stars—and Subrek’s attack had been a blur; and not a good one at that. He stepped toward the monitoring panel to pull the latest readings, and the pod moved. Not dramatically. Not all at once. It began at the seam — a fine line that Andrew hadn't noticed before, running vertically down the center of the outermost layer — and the edges of that seam began, slowly, to separate. The overlapping leaves, which had been sealed tight, began to peel back one by one, the way a fist might uncurl as someone falls sleep.

Andrew stopped moving. His hand was still outstretched toward the panel, his breath utterly trapped within his chest.

"Andrew," Debbie said. Her voice had changed.

"I see it,” he finally breathed.

"Andrew, sweety—“

"I see it, Debbie,” he replied urgently.

The outermost leaves had peeled back fully now, and the ones beneath them were following, layer by layer, the whole structure opening outward with an almost deliberate patience. The light from the panel above caught the interior and Andrew raised his tricorder without thinking, eyes locked on what was inside, the device trilling softly as it initialized. The leaves had unfolded fully and what was inside the pod caught the light.

It was small. Smaller than Andrew had expected, though he couldn't have said what he'd expected — he hadn't let himself think that far ahead, hadn't let the word form properly in his mind even as the scans had been pointing toward it with increasing insistence. Its skin was half-rosy, half-pale — Andrew's coloring, more or less — but translucent enough that fine green veining showed beneath the surface, threaded through it like the underside of a leaf held up to sunlight. The veins pulsed. Slowly. Steadily. Where hair might have been, there were fronds. Tiny and impossibly fine, trembling slightly in the recycled air of the arboretum. And the skin itself shifted almost imperceptibly as the light moved across it, catching an iridescence that wasn't quite color, wasn't quite not.

Then it opened its mouth…and cried. Sharp, high-pitched, and pleading—the unmistakeable cry of a newborn hungry for…whatever this particular brand of lifeform might eat.

"It's a baby," Debbie whispered, somehow still audible above the crying. "ANDREW!” she grabbed his arm with both hands, shaking the scientist from what looked like a fugue state. "It's a baby!" She suddenly coiled like a lady cheetah ready to run.

"Don't—" he started, because she was already moving toward the alcove, arms out, every maternal instinct she possessed apparently overriding her good sense. “Debbie. Wait! I need to scan it first, I need to—" Andrew was in motion too, his foundational methods as a scientist anchoring his reactions in the need for data before action.

The tricorder was already in his hand as Andrew stepped in front of her — gently but firmly holding up a staying hand — and held the device over the crying infant while Debbie vibrated with barely contained purpose behind him. The readings came through in a cascade that Andrew read once, then again, then a third time in case he'd somehow misunderstood. But as it turned out, he hadn’t misunderstood at all.

The base genetic architecture was the plant's own — whatever that organism was at a cellular level, its biology formed the foundational structure of what lay in front of him. But woven through it, expressed in every system the tricorder could measure, were two other unmistakable genetic signatures. One was human. Scottish, specifically, if you went deep enough into the ancestry markers, which Andrew had not expected a Delta Quadrant plant to be able to manifest. The other signature was Chameloid. And in particular, his Chameloid.

"Symbiogenesis," Andrew said to no one in particular. His voice came out steadier than he felt. The tricorder confirmed it — a new organism synthesized from three parent genetic sources, the plant's own biology serving as the medium through which the other two had been combined. Tor had written extensively about the plant's capacity for DNA replication. She had not written about this, however. But then again, the woman had sadly passed before getting the chance to study the plant more in-depth.

The baby continued to cry.

Andrew stood very still for a moment, tricorder in hand, looking at the infant that was — according to every reading his device could produce — equally and undeniably his and Björn's. Behind him, Debbie had apparently decided that enough was enough and Hurricane Gless was unleashed.

He watched her move. Watched her picking up the child — carefully, Andrew noted distantly, the way someone who has held many babies holds a newborn — and then he heard the cry change, quieted by several degrees as she began to rock the child that had been birthed before them.

“I…I don’t fully understand how,” Andrew began, half-muttering as he reviewed his scans, “but this child is, by all biological indications, a combination of Björn’s DNA and my own.” The utterance of that conclusion resonated loudly in his own half-dissociated ears, caught in the suddenly-skewed connection between his brain and his ear drums. "After attacking Björn in the lab and me the other day," his thoughts flit back to the DNA sampling the plant had done in the dark, "it must have used our genetic material to...kind of birth itself?" He was talking to himself just as much as Debbie, trying to make it all make sense.

"I'm a grandma!!!” Debbie Gless exclaimed loudly, her voice completely wrecked as the science behind the miracle was wholly left behind. "I'm a grandma, oh my God, look at this little face. It’s little hands! OH MY GOSH,” she was pure maternal-light, “it’s little legs!” She was playfully tickling the baby’s little feet, eliciting what sounded like babbling giggles.

Time had slowed considerably during the analysis but now, as full registration kicked in, temporal perspective sped up as reality crashed against Andrew’s awareness. Standing there, looking like she’d been born to caring for strange plant children, was Grandma Gless in full-on care mode. Debbie had tears running freely down both cheeks, and she did not appear to care at all. The infant was cradled against her chest, tiny frond-covered head tucked under her chin, the green veining in its skin catching the arboretum light, the iridescence of its skin shifting as it moved. It had stopped crying. And it was looking up at Debbie with the unfocused, solemn attention of the very newly born.

She rocked it for a long moment, murmuring softly, and then she went quiet. Andrew watched something move across her face — a recognition, a deliberateness — and she suddenly looked up at him with eyes that were still wet but steady.

"Here," she said simply.

She didn't explain. She didn't need to. She just held the child out to him with the careful, practiced sureness of someone who understood exactly what she was doing and why. And Andrew — who had been standing at a slight distance, tricorder still in hand, scientist-brain still frantically running calculations against the impossible — set the tricorder down on the monitoring panel and stepped forward.

The baby weighed almost nothing as he took it—her? him? they?—into his arms. He'd held infants before: a nephew once, a colleague's child at some departmental gathering years ago. He remembered them as fragile and foreign, small strangers he'd been careful not to break. But this time, it was different. The child turned its head the moment it was in his arms, orienting toward him the way the plant had always oriented toward movement and warmth and presence, and Andrew looked down into its face and felt something in his chest simply give.

The rack. The dark. The sound of footsteps he couldn't see. The smell of the Kordra-Lisrit and everything that had happened on it. The particular quality of fear he'd learned on that ship, the kind that didn't announce itself but just lived inside you at all times, stored in the hinge of your jaw and the set of your shoulders, waiting for the worst moment to come out. All of it was still there — he knew that, Qo had told him it would be there for a long time yet — but for this moment, standing in the quiet arboretum with this small impossible creature in his arms, that fear had moved to somewhere very far away.

The baby's eyes — golden and sharp with the faintest iridescent quality at the edges just like Björn's — found his face and stayed there. A sub-conscious question played across the child’s face, a clear indication that at some level, this being was questioning its own parentage and starting to imprint on him. And the gush of warmth filling Andrew’s chest, lungs, and head told him that he was imprinting on it, too.

"Hello," Andrew said softly. Looking into the child's eyes now, science had abandoned him, too. He'd had so many questions and, even as he'd read the data, knew there were many hurdles between knowing and accepting what was happening. But suddenly they'd all disappeared and grief or love or whatever just made it all click. “I…I don’t know what to call you yet. But I'm — I guess I’m your dad." His voice broke on the last word, only slightly, and he didn't try to recover it. “Well, one of them at least.”

Behind him, Debbie made a sound that was half laugh and half sob and she pressed her fingers to her mouth and looked away to give him a moment that she absolutely did not have to give him and he loved her completely for it. But then the moment passed, the way those kinds of heart-exploding moments eventually do, and Andrew suddenly looked up as if remembering he’d left the sonic shower on for the last several hours.

"I have to call Björn!” he exclaimed. Little hands reached up to tug at his soon-to-be-much-grayer beard. As he looked down at the human-like fingers drifting through his beard, Andrew was sure this unexpected little one was going to prematurely age him, though he didn’t care in the slightest.

Debbie nodded slowly, her face and whole body filled with the once-again restrained force of a literal hurricane of love. She knew that this was Andrew’s moment, not hers. Andrew’s and Björn’s. And this moment meant their lives would never be the same again. Because at this point, there was no sending this little miracle of symbiogenesis back. They were Dads now, whether they liked it or not. Though Debbie suspected — as unexpected as this development was — the two bears she’d brought together on Risa were more than up to the task.

“Um…” Andrew’s face suddenly winced as the baby tugged his whiskers with surprising force, “how am I going to explain all this to him?”

“Baby,” Debbie grinned, tear-streaks shining under the arboretum lights, “I have a feeling you’ll find a way. And if not,” she clucked audibly, “just put that little darling in his arms and let it do the talking for you.”

The baby almost seemed to understand as it giggled with delight and softly clapped its little hands on either side of Andrew’s neck.

“We’re dads,” the biologist croaked, his own eyes shining now. “Wait…” he stiffened, a worried look crossing his face. “W-we have no idea how to be dads,” he admitted to Debbie, suddenly so far out of his depth he couldn’t even register it.

“No one ever does. But you’ll figure it out, honey,” Debbie blew and popped a bubble, returning to herself. “Now, hand that baby over. If I have to contain myself one more moment, I will literally explode. Call your beau, let’s get him in on this, hmm?”

Andrew kissed the child’s head and passed it over, then reached up to tap his combadge. “Munro to Kodak. We uh…we need to talk,” he laughed.


=/\= A post by... =/\=

Debbie Gless
Diner Matron

Andrew Munro
Civilian Biologist...and Newly-Minted Dad