SO. Here it is. I know all the readers of my Bleach story Fish In a Net are gonna kill me, but I have been completely unable to write it. Why you ask? Because of this l'il bastard right here. I'm a trekkie okay? Gawd don't rub it in. But I've been able to quote Shakespeare since I was three, and NOT because I read it. Nope. Captain Picard taught me. And I learned my math Vulcan style. So please please please bear with me if you read Fish, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, then enjoy the wonderful fluff to come of the adorable lieutenant Pavel Chekov! (It's the ACCENT! It just makes you want to jump his sexy foreign bones!)

I apologize in advance for the lack of sexy Russians in this particular chapter, but it's the prologue, and I get to do whatever I damn well want. Hell, you don't really have to read it to get the story, but it'll help a lot. This is just the characters background and etc, y'know, the stuff other authors attempt to write into their actual chapters, and your just sitting there going GIMME MY FLUFF ALREADY! I DON'T CARE IF YOU HAD A BAD CHILDHOOD! So. Ahem. Yeah. Here's Veronica in a nutshell.

(A super-secret-special-prize to whoever can guess why her name is veronica! No really, if you can guess it, you seriously get a prize. Leave it in a review!)

Prologue

I never really understood how I did it y'know. The fixing stuff I mean. I just kind of did. I mean, don't get me wrong, that sure as hell isn't false modesty or anything. I'm just honestly as confused about how it happened as the people who walked in and watched.

It was just so…right, you know?

Whenever something broke, it almost hurt me to look at it. I couldn't stand to see it like that. It was so lonely, sitting there without a purpose, no one wanting it anymore, given up as a lost cause. And so I would fix it.

My mama told me that I had been born with a precision laser in one hand and a bag of pixie sticks in the other. From the time I was five, I was fascinated by the very notion that nothing was ever as it seemed. A speaker on the wall, cheerily pouring out children's music, wasn't just the black mesh and silver rings that you saw on the outside. If you ripped it out of the wall, and opened the casing, there was a whole tiny world inside. Self-contained, so small, but so intricate, delicate, and so huge in its complexity that you could easily get lost inside. Every time I dismantle a hovercar or resoupe the warp engines for Scotty, or even whenever I fix somthing as simple as a broken communicator, it's a beautiful feeling. It still is, it always has been, and it always will be.

By the time I was 6, I was breaking my toys on purpose, just so I had an excuse to fix them.

Of course, it's not like there isn't moments when I wish I was a little less of an engineering prodigy.

Mama never did get used to coming home every day and finding another gadget dismantled on the kitchen floor. She almost cried when I broke down Granddaddies antique Tesla 2000 roadster. She stayed mad at me for weeks after that one, even after I put it back together good as new, AND added better hydraulics, AND revamped the engine so it went 50 mph faster. I still don't see what the problem was. Granddad loved it.

I never did have many boyfriends either. I was always just Nic to them. One of the guys, running around in cargo pants and muscle tanks, grease-spotted more often than not. I never got the point of doing the laundry after you'd only worn something once. Really, it was just going to get dirty again ten minutes after I put it on. Mama didn't agree, but hey, I was only trying to spare her some trouble.

My big brother always thought I was a weirdo too. Well, hey, I didn't see what he saw in spending his days rooting around in people guts to 'fix' them. Seriously, how does cutting open an already wounded person help? You'd think that'd just make it worse. Well, either way, I loved him, and I know he loved me, and as long as I didn't track grease and oil and god knew what else into his room, we were pretty good. His friends loved me anyway. His best friend, Jim, one that he met at the academy, always make horrible dirty jokes about how I spent so much time on my back, and I would wonder aloud how many alien STD's he must have picked up by now, and we'd both turn red and pretend to be mad, even though we both knew perfectly well that as soon as the other one couldn't hear, we were both gonna burst out laughing.

I was so glad bones had Jim. He had been miserable after Jocelyn had kicked him in the teeth like she did. Taking Joanna from him had just been the sparkler candles on the cake.

Well, whatever had made him decide that joining Starfleet was a good idea, I was glad. It started something wonderful for me too. I had come to see him to the academy. Sure he was already a doctor, but he only knew about HUMAN disease, and he needed a few xenobiology crash courses. Plus, y'know, I had also wanted an excuse to see the academy, so I shut him up and made him enroll.

Well anyway, while he did that, I somehow, (hint hint) wandered into a mechanics classroom. The rest, as they say, is history. After I showed the professor up in a million different ways, and danced engineering circles around his grad students, I somehow ended up being assigned a dorm and shoved into a cadet uniform. I signed a few papers, shook a few hands, and suddenly I was a Starfleet cadet with a major in engineering and a full scholarship. At the age of 16. Who knew right? And the best part? They skipped me to the grad classes in engineering and math. All I really had to do was pass the science and history courses, and stumble my way through hand-to-hand.

Big brother was OH so thrilled, lemme tell you. He felt a little better after he ended up being the one to give me my entrance physical, and my neck hurt for a week with all the hyposprays he shoved into me. NOONE, I repeat, NOONE, needs vaccines to that many diseases.

Anyway, to finish up a long story made short, Big brother still graduated a year ahead of me, and I missed the huge thing with Nero. Yeah, I was pissed. But as it turned out, I had unknowingly made friends with the engineering chief of his ship in a bar one night, while brother and his crew were on shore leave. Brother was off somewhere attempting to cock-block Jim, and I just plopped down and challenged him to a drinking contest for something to do. Yeah, at 17, I could hold my liquor pretty damn well! Well… I lost, but somehow I let it slip that I was an engineer, and I must have been pretty cocky too, because the next afternoon after me and Scotty were done nursing our hangovers, he showed up at my door with a protesting Brother, dragged me to the shop, and told me I had 24 hours to build him a running hovercar. I did naturally, with my amazing talent and intellect, and not only did it run, but it didn't blow up! I was so proud!

And that my friends, is how I ended up the 3rd in command in the engineering crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Kagome: I really am sorry about the boringness of this chapter, but hey, it DID need to be done. I don't wanna have to write a whole hoopla of chapters to say what I just said in 3 paragraphs, so c'mon. This way we actually get to the smut FASTER!

Lol, just review, tell me how awful it is, and the more reviews I get, the longer the first chapter will be, deal?