Mystery 101

Posted on Sunday, 28 June 2020 - 6:08pm by Lieutenant Alex Kingsley & Lieutenant Ryan Rose MD

Mission: Operation: Iktomi
Location: Sickbay
Timeline: Following Deductions

"Doctor Rose?"

Entering Sickbay, Lieutenant Kingsley paused as she cast her eye over the empty bay. Everything meticulously clean and organised and calm. Turning, she headed towards the office and offered a small wave when she found the Chief Medical Officer at work. "Am I interrupting, Doctor?" she asked, a tiny part wishing he said yes but the probability of that was very low. Non existent.

"Only interrupting paperwork." Ryan looked up. "We'll call it a welcome distraction. What's up Alex?" He asked. She seemed a bit nervous.

"Its... I need to ask for your help but it is... unusual," the young scientist began, wishing she had brought Soral with her. While the doctor had been nothing but kind and helpful - not to mention saving her husband's life only recently - she still felt reluctant to say what she needed to say. "I need you to run a neurological exam."

"Ok. What symptoms are you having that make you feel you need a neurological exam?" Ryan asked, standing up from his desk and coming over near Alex.

She hesitated, confident her next stop would be a padded cell. “My hairbrush?” She replied. She sighed, “I don’t know where to start, I’m sorry. And maybe I’m going insane. Can that happen, if a Vulcan and a non-Vulcan bond? Maybe it’s genetic, I know nothing about the history of my biological parents. But my hairbrush just flew into my hand when I reached for it and Soral has seen things like it happen. Usually if I’m upset. The only common factor is our quarters which I’ve scanned multiple times, Soral who you have examined after surgery and me. So, logically, it is me. So here I am.”

She said it all at a hundred miles a minute, without pausing for breath while starting to pace.

Ryan was suddenly glad he had a sister who could almost match Alex on the 'frantic talking trying to say it all at once without taking a breath' thing. "Come on, sit down." He coaxed gently, motioning to the couch. "So your hairbrush flew into your hand. Were you staring at it, or thinking about it?"

“Both,” she admitted, sitting down. “I was getting ready to brush my hair and I saw it at the side of the sink and then ... it was in my hand. Maybe I’m going insane....”

"Alex, you are not going insane." Ryan assured her. "It could be as simple as muscle memory. You know, you walk into a room, don't remember why you walked in, but suddenly you have a bag of cheetos?" He grinned. "Ok, that's probably just me. But what I mean is it's very common for the brain to skip over the boring parts. You brush your hair every day, it's habit. If you get distracted, you don't need to consciously think about the activity, it's become ingrained."

He had a valid point. Had she just stopped paying attention? Acted without thinking? Very likely. “It isn’t just the hairbrush though,” she admitted with a small voice as she sank lower in the seat. “Soral’s noticed things too. Then again, maybe he’s going insane. Too much matchmaking... it cannot be good for you. I tried to get my roommate a date once and she didn’t speak to me for a month. How was I to know she would be allergic to his cologne?”

Ryan let out a small chuckle before controlling himself. "Ok. Well I'm happy to do a neurological evaluation. If it's something extra sensory though, that's notoriously hard to track down unless we monitor it actually happening. But it will give us a baseline. What I'd like you to do is simply notate any strange happenings that you or Soral notice. Just jot down what happened and how you were feeling at the time."

"I can do that," she nodded, glad to have a task to focus on. She glanced up at him, offering him a small smile, "you're pretty good at the whole bedside manner stuff."

Ryan smiled. "Well thank you for that. Let's go run those scans." He stood up, leading the way. "How are you holding up otherwise? I know it was stressful when Soral was here for awhile."

“It was. I guess it’s been stressful. But he is getting better with every passing minute,” she conceded. “All thanks to you. It was the most unsettling feeling when he was hurt. I didn’t expect to find out so soon what it would feel like if he was hurt. After we bonded he warned me ... but hearing something and feeling it are very different things.”

"That's very true. Sometimes it's not easy to learn something the hard way, even if we intellectually know it's true. I can't even imagine being in somebodies head like that." Ryan spoke as he set up the scanner.

“Neither could I,” she grinned, “but it has advantages. Like that day in the lab. I should have been more scared than I was, more of a panic. But it felt as if he was right there in the room. And he’s a calming influence if I ever need it.”

"That sounds nice." Ryan started the scans. Just to refresh his memory, he pulled up her medical file as the scanner did it's work. "Do you know of any neurological issues with your mother or father?"

“I wish I did. I was adopted as a baby. My biological mother died in childbirth and my father was never traced,” Alex told him. She had said it often enough that the words didn’t have the same impact on her. They were just facts. “My mother was El-Aurian but there isn’t much else known about her.”

Rather than give his condolences, which he always hated when it came to dead mothers you'd never known, he just smiled and said. "We've got things in common there. My mother died in childbirth, and I was adopted, though not as a baby." It wasn't something he normally shared without directly being asked, but the similarities were so close, he couldn't help but share.

“I was fortunate to have found two incredible parents,” she reasoned with an affectionate smile, “I hope you found that too.”

Ryan smiled and nodded. "Yes, and a sister who gives her teenage brother large stuffed alligators." He moved to her other side to finish up the scans.

She laughed, "here I thought you were just into alligators... I didn't have any siblings but that was okay, it never felt like anything was missing, you know? My mother was crazy enough to be like a hundred people, she is still stuck at one hundred and fifty percent and that is her calm."

Ryan chuckled in return. "Yes. My adoptive mother is still convinced that all the universes problems can be solved with baking, the only problem is, she's a horrible baker. But we never had the heart to complain. I still don't think cookies taste right if they aren't burnt around the edges."

"Sounds like my kind of baking," Alex grinned. "If you ever feel homesick, I can totally burn cookies. Thankfully, replicators are easy to work and Soral is good in a kitchen. I know it is a long shot but... do you know much about the Vulcan bonding, Doctor? Soral said something after our guided meditation. I don't know if it's relevant."

"Personally no. It's a very private matter, and I've never been in a situation where I needed to press for the information. I do have contacts though." Ryan shut off the scanner, now done. "What did he say?" Ryan asked.

"That our bond is stronger than it should be, than is normal for Vulcan and non Vulcan, or non telepath," she confided. "He said that the bond should allow us to feel emotions, or when either of us hurt - which it does - but I've also been able to hear his thoughts. To speak to him. Not all the time. That would be awkward."

She paused, reluctant to think on the guided meditation Soral had done. But equally she knew Doctor Rose could be trusted to keep things private, it was after all a fundamental principle of medicine for centuries... nevertheless she didn't divulge details of everything that happened. Like the glass.

"Soral had noticed things, like with the hairbrush. A lot of it could have been coincidence. Vibrations in the ship making things fall over.... but other things I can't explain away. Soral led me in a guided meditation and thinks it is all tied into how I'm feeling, but I just don't understand how it can be possible. Going insane seems a much easier explanation. Although if I am, I've started affecting Soral too. Could that happen? Could I be sick in some way and affect him?"

It was a possibility she hadn't considered. What did happen to a bond if one person went a little crazy?

"Let's not jump to that conclusion just yet." Ryan replied. "There is a lot about El-Aurian we don't know. There is a lot about Vulcan and non-Vulcan bonding that we don't know. I think the best course of action is to continue with your guided meditation with Soral, see if that provides any insights. I have your neurological scans, and I'll study them in depth. I also have your DNA on file, has that every been studied? There are a few alleles and chromosome traits that we know are linked to certain neurological issues, extra sensory phenomenon, etcetera. I'd like to do a full DNA sequencing if you don't mind, there may be a clue there as well. Right now I'd say we have a mystery, not a case of you going batty." He grinned, trying to ease her worry.

"Not that I know off, beyond trying to find a match for my father when I was born," Alex told him, "my mother said it just showed he was a human man but there was no match found. And my mother they knew next to nothing about. I imagine her records must be stored somewhere, even if is just from the day I was born. I don't even know her name... So no, I don't mind. I'd rather have answers so maybe this will work."

"It's worth a try anyway. I'll start that research. You just keep a good log of anything odd or unusual happening, and anything you and Soral discover with guided meditation. We'll get to the bottom of this." Ryan assured her

“Thank you,” Alex said with a warm smile. “Sorry to give you more work to do.”

Ryan waved off the apology. "It's what I'm here for. I'll let you know what I find."


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