Sick #3

Posted on Tue Mar 7th, 2023 @ 11:03am by Cadet Freshman Grade Poppy Koppelman & Ensign Syaffia

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Mission 3: The Peace Ship
Location: Lower Ranks Quarters, USS Midway
Timeline: Just after Sick#2!

Poppy jumped up and bumped her head on the upper bunk when the doors to the quarters she shared with Syaffia, Stromi and a'Glosz swished open and her roomie walked in. She had been sitting on the sick girl's bunk wondering where in the world she was: she had left her in bed with her nightie on this morning, saying she was going to call in sick, but Poppy had just come in to find her and her uniform gone.

"Oh Affy! You're back. Where were you? Did you go for your flying lesson after all? Oh come here! How did it go?!!" the younger cadet bleated and thew her arms round the exhausted looking Argelian.

"I was just about to call down to maintenance and get one of the Tellies to do a ship wide scan for you!" she said, releasing the tall blonde girl from her grip.

"Hey, Poppy." Syaffia returned the smaller girl's enthusiastic hug in kind. It was nice, really, to feel the embrace of another who really did care about her - which was something she hadn't had in a while even from some of her (many) exes. With a father dead and a resultingly emotionally absent mother that tends to happen. She almost whined in protest as Poppy let her go; how she did love that hug. Poppy gave good hugs, whether or not she realized it.

"There's a lot to unpack, girlie. Let's sit down so I can talk." Syaffia wrapped her arm round the shorter girl and sat her down on her bunk bed. "The short answers: lieutenant Thraxina's quarters, yes and badly but not as badly. The long answers... well, I'm about to give them to you." She looked exhausted, poor Syaffia, blond hair a little raggedy and eyes just a bit less bright than usual. It was as if the life had been sucked out of her.

"Thraxina's quarters?! Yeeeuk!" Poppy nearly hurled at the nasty and cruel Lieutenant's name. Then, remembering they needed to talk about Syaffia's feelings not her own, patted Syaffia's hand "you just take your time and tell me all about it." she simpered.

"Right. It started when..." The forthcoming story was long and not all that nice to hear, she saw it in Poppy's face as she talked. By the time she was done Syaffia looked a bit less dead inside, like some of the weight had been lifted off her shoulders. "So yeah. That's the long and short of it." She said tiredly. "I'm just glad to be... alive? I guess? I still don't feel myself but I have that at least, right?"

"Oh, you poor thing!" wailed Poppy and threw herself around Syaffia again: she had grown increasingly tearful as her bunk buddy's tale of woe had unfolded, and now she bathed the shoulder of her friend's gold uniform in tears.

"And that horrible b... beast made you fly, after all that. Oh, I hate her, I hate her to bits!" fulminated the young Cadet. "We should get Stromi and Glozzy to fix her some way. I bet they could. They know this ship inside and out."

"And what does that make us? How much better than her would we be then?" Syaffia countered gently. She admired Poppy's spunk, of course, and willingness to stand up for her, but there were lines she knew there were no need to cross.

Poppy drooped "You're right, of course" she sighed "It would just be so nice to see her embarrassed or humiliated once instead of me. Somehow she just always seems to be there too, whenever I do anything wrong, like when i spilled coffee on the Captain's... area. And when Commander Heartfilia gave me that telling off in front of all the senior officers and the Ambassador."

She looked miserable, but Syaffia cuddled her all better.

She wrapped her arms around the shorter girl and nuzzled her hair. "There's no need to hate her, Poppy dear. Let's just move on and focus on my recovery, okay?"

Poppy turned and met Syaffia's eyes and nodded bravely. "OK. So, what happens next?"

"Doctor T'Mora and her assistant are seeing me this weekend; their hands are quite full at the moment. Let's see what they think and what they suggest, okay?" It might take a while for her to regain her old focus, perhaps, but at least she knew she was on the right track.

Poppy nodded again, then something occurred to her.

"Oh gosh! Have you been on the go nonstop since this morning? Have you even had anything to eat? You need to take care of your physical health as well as your mental state, Affy!"

Syaffia opened her mouth, only to realize that she didn't know what to say to that - and then her belly growled, and the girl reddened with embarrassment. "Guess I'd better eat, then!" She laughed nervously and swept strands of long blond hair behind her ear. "I'm feeling a bowl of stew and rice tonight, actually. You want anything, Poppy?" She asked, standing and walking to their replicator.

"I'll just have a candy bar." shrugged Poppy. No wonder she had spots.

"Hey, y'know Affy... you know what the Vulcan lady said about you having magical sort of mystic powers and all that... well: do you think you could do voodoo? I mean, like, if I had something that belonged to someone... something very intimate to them... could you do like a magic spell to make them fall in love with me?" She tried to look innocent "I mean, just, y'know, theoretically."

It was pretty obvious where this was going. The question was, what did Poppy possess that was intimate to this great mystery crush?

"I said empathy and telepathic ability, not magic - which those aren't really! Besides, I don't know any voodoo or whatever you call it. Even if I did possess magic powers I don't know how to use them, dear." Syaffia couldn't help but break into a big smile. "Who's the lucky one, hmm? And what special thing of theirs do you have that you want to use? I'm genuinely curious!"

Poppy looked around the room, as if she expected to suddenly notice a whole crowd of senior officers in their quarters with them, who they somehow hadn't noticed before. When she was triply sure they were alone she jumped up and started to rummage under her pillow.

"It's the Captain!" she gushed breathlessly "I've been in love with Him ever since He came to give a talk at the academy! He signed this photograph for me..." she whipped out a glossy, now dog-eared picture, showing a cheesy grinning Tristan and signed "To Penny, take it easy, F"

Yes 'Penny' not Poppy. He had even paid enough attention to the girl to get her name right. Fair enough, there had been any number of attractive girls there that night.

She handed it over to Syaffia for inspection while she rummaged under the pillow some more for the real Holy Grail of devotion. Finding it, she pulled it out and displayed it with reverence - it was a pair of men's boxer shorts, white, with little pictures of constitution class starships dotted all over them and a rather unpleasant looking brown stain.

"That's where I spilled the coffee on him" Poppy quickly pointed out, lest Syaffia think the worst "Oh, I know it was wrong to take them, but I had to take His laundry down to the lower decks and... I just couldn't let them go!"

She scrunched up the soiled undies and pressed them passionately against her cheek and closed her eyes "Oh I'd do anything for Captain Faust..." Did she mean she would render him any service, or more that she would do anything, even black magic, to get him? Maybe a little of both.

Spilled coffee on him? Syaffia could barely stop herself from laughing as she picked up the pair of white boxers. "Someone's in love~! Oh, my." The Argelian grinned as she returned them to Poppy; wouldn't want to spoil her most prized possession after all! She'd never have forgiven herself for that, silly as the idea was.

Poppy giggled a little and looked down shyly, her cheeks reddening, loving every minute of Syaffia's gentle teasing.

"Well, why don't you try inviting him to dinner at his convenience for a start? Or at least a drink and chat? He's a busy man, but I'm sure he'd be more than happy to oblige." Syaffia's eyes gleamed with mischief. "Or why not put it to him as a chance to learn about the responsibilities of command? I'm sure he'll be more than happy to oblige!"

"Oh no, it'd never work.... I've just got to face facts that I'll always just lve him from afar..." she mooned, misty eyed.

Whereas Cadet Larant's sensible advice that Poppy should find someone more her own age and, perhaps, rank, to pitch her woo unto had caused her anger (Poppy had been actually quite rude to her about it), Syaffia's attitude that, if she played her cards right, the younger girl might actually get somewhere with Captain Faust had a very different effect: Poppy was terrified!

Coming face to face with the fact that she wasn't so much in love with this man she hardly knew, but was more in love with the idea of being in love was too unbearable for the teenager, so instead, Poppy deflected the conversation back to the Argelian.

"So... now you know who I love... what about you, is there anybody you like on the Ship? Like, if you could have a romantic with ANYBODY on the ship, Captain Faust excepted, of course, who would he be??" she asked. It never occurred to her that it might be anybody other than a humanoid male.

"Well..." Syaffia had to give that a little bit of thought. "There's this hot Orion nurse in sickbay, and a couple other cadets who aren't too bad looking."

Poppy frowned, she had seen a female Orion nurse down there from time to time, but never a male one; she'd have to check that out next time she was at work in the personnel office. You weren't really meant to look at other crewmembers' files unless it was for the purposes of 'ship's business', but everyone did it. Many a hour she'd pored over the record of Tristan Stefan Faust, Captain, Age 31, weight 185 pounds, height...

She snapped out of it, Syaffia seemed to have a whole list of 'hotties' on the ship.

"Ensign Lefton from Engineering is cute but he's really, really misogynistic." Syaffia made a face. "Ew."

"You mean he wants you to put him across your knee and spank him?! Ewwww" cried Poppy, not just ignorantly (the dumb cluck didn't know the difference between being misogynistic and masochistic) but hypocritically - she had fantasized many a time about the Captain doing exactly that very same thing to her.

In fact, she had nearly built such a scene into her Wild West fantasy module for the holodeck; and it would have been a little bit embarrassing, when she'd played the thing through with Commander Stryker, if "Tex" Faust had warmed her nether regions in front of the whole saloon, as she had planned.

Phew! Phaser blast dodged.

"But you know, I'm just a cadet. I don't think anyone's gonna go for me, really."

"Are you kidding me?!! You're gorgeous!!" Poppy gushed. "Do you really think that when boys look at you they're staring at your rank insignia?!" the innocent girl yelped, trying not to inadvertently glance at where she thought they might be looking "... I mean, they're being wowed by your beautiful face!"

Syaffia laughed. "Poppy, dear. I've seen people of basically every gender looking at me in the hallways - and I'd be happy to explore something with someone, regardless of whether they're a boy or not."

Poppy was speechless, but her face spoke a thousand words and she rather tellingly crossed her legs and folded her arms defensively.

"I don't know if Pluto's as open about relationships as the rest of the Federation."

"I don't think it is!!" Poppy said quickly, at least it wasn't in the interplanetary Junk Yard where she grew up and where her mother locked her and her sisters in a back airlock whenever customers flew in from other parts of the solar system or beyond.

"Just... you know." She shrugged her toned shoulders. "Well, I suppose we'll see! I'm inviting Nurse Ovala - that's the Orion I was talking out from sickbay - to play volleyball later this week in fact! I can't wait."

"What, the... the girl one?!" asked Poppy worriedly, realising that there only was a girl one after all, and, her mind racing, wondering if the carefree hugs that she had bestowed upon her friend might have been misinterpreted in any way. She had to say something.

"I ONLY LIKE BOYS!!!!!" she blurted loudly, terrified that Syaffia was suddenly going to jump on her and kiss her and... stuff. What that stuff might be was well beyond her ken, of course, but no less terrifying for that.

"Poppy, relax. I'm not going to try and date you." Syaffia burst into a giggling fit. Poor girl. Maybe she'd been raised to believe that you could only date the opposite gender, she reckoned, hence her lack of awareness when it came to relationships.

"Oh... good. Cause they don't really do that sort of thing on Pluto." she assured her roomie. About 3% of the planetoid's sparse population were gay or questioning, including at least one member of her own family, but nobody had ever told her that, of course. It had been a taboo subject, along with anything else vaguely sexual, in her strict family upbringing.

"You're already head over heels for the captain and I wouldn't want to get in the way! Besides, A'glosz and Stromi might find it a bit weird, huh?" She patted the shorter girl on the shoulder and squeezed gently. "Don't worry about it, girl. I'll let you know how the date goes."

Poppy tried not to visibly wince when Affy touched her. Logic told her that she was silly to worry: the tall Argelian girl was unlikely to hit on an unattractive, spotty, straight girl when there were other gorgeous and potentially more compatible female crewmembers on board, right? Also they were friends - sisters in fact, according to the rules of the the porcine sisterhood - and she knew in her heart of hearts that Affy would never knowingly do something to upset or alarm her.

That said, she'd be sleeping with her onsie zipped up to her neck tonight!

 

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