Great Underwear Fiasco of 2376

by PairOfSocks

"Whose underwear is this?"

Captain Janeway was staring at three very guilty-looking people lined up in her ready room. Her stern line of questioning yielded only silence. Considering her audience, perhaps it was time to change tactics. She dialed down the Scolding Captain and went more for Concerned Mother.

"Celes," Janeway stepped into the junior officer's personal space. "There were only three of you assigned to the bridge last night. The computer confirmed no one entered or exited besides you three for the duration of the shift. That means one of you left without their undergarments."

Celes bit her lower lip and shook her head in what Janeway interpreted to be a "no". It was more of a tremble, than a clear communication. "No ma'am! Not mine!"

Janeway held her gaze for two seconds, then Concerned Mother went out the door as she flicked her eyes fiercely at Ensign Kim. She took one big sideways stride, and was then directly in his face. "Mr. Kim?"

"Huh?" Harry looked horrified. "But- They're women's underwear!" he sputtered.

Janeway narrowed her eyes slightly. "That doesn't discount the possibility."

Harry's mouth fell open in shock.

Janeway considered for a moment, "However," she conceded "they're not your size."

That left only Seven. She was already back to her calm self. "The Borg do not require undergarments. My abdominal exoskeleton extends until my -"

"Fine, fine! I don't want to know these details!" The Captain slumped onto her sofa and pinched at the bridge of her nose. She felt the beginnings of a headache. Harry saw that the Captain was about to wave them dismissed, and stood even stiffer, afraid to scare his luck.

Seven didn't empathize though. "I fail to see the reason for this interrogation. A misplaced piece of fabrics can hardly cause a ship wide crisis."

Janeway rose to her feet and glared at Seven from the killing range. She emphasized every word: "Tuvok – found – them – at the Tactical station. He gripped his console so hard in attempt to keep his self control, that the buttons for the sensors array were damaged – for the second time this week! The engineers begin to talk!"

" . . . and gossiping engineers can become a ship wide crisis," Harry chirped in too cheerfully, forgetting for a moment that his painful death can be a gossip topic really soon if he doesn't keep his mouth shut. Janeway shifted closer to him and Tal Celes winced at his other side.

The Captain lifted the offending item with her index finger and walked in front of the officers, waving the tiny thong slightly, as though hypnotizing her people with its tiger pattern.

"I ask you for the last time – how was this misplaced on the bridge?" The menace in her voice was palpable, and Tal Celes couldn't stand it any longer.

"They were beamed up!" She peeped, instantly covering her mouth with her hand.

"Beamed?" Janeway's voice revealed a note of triumph at having broken Celes down, but it was tinged with further confusion as to the source of the offending undergarment.

Harry and Seven turned long, purposeful stares in Crewman Tal's direction. Celes had yet to remove her hand from her mouth. Seven raised a rueful silver eyebrow in disapproval. Harry forced out a nervous laugh and cupped his hand down on Celes' shoulder. The outward appearance of the gesture was one of caring support, but unbeknownst to the others, he was gripping her shoulder quite hard.

"Now Celes," he began. "We really don't know-"

"NO!" she squealed. "I won't go down for this!" She twisted from Harry's grasp. "There was underwear EVERYWHERE!" She was a panicked animal now. "ALL. OVER. THE. BRIDGE. Dozens of pairs! Scores. All kinds! Bras too!" She backed slowly away, pointing an accusing finger at the Borg and her newfound partner in crime. "I told you two. I told you we never should have participated in Paris' little experiment! I knew we wouldn't get away with it!"

Harry was shaking his head in the negative, begging Tal to just shut up. Seven noted her intraocular pressure had increased by .03 micropascals. It was a most unpleasant sensation. Janeway detected an imminent escape attempt as Tal backed ever closer to the exit. She decided to save the crewman the trouble of walking out on a superior officer. "You are dismissed, all of you. I've got a bigger fish to fry."

Celes looked as though she was about to faint. Janeway felt the need to add: "Crewman Tal, go visit the Doctor. You look like I am torturing people in my Ready Room even more than I usually do."

Janeway's look at Seven and Harry was less compassionate and clearly conveyed that this wasn't over yet. Even the Borg retreated with less dignity than usual.

Janeway waited for the doors to close, and tapped her comm badge. "Janeway to Paris. My ready room. Now."

Instead of the crisp Yes ma'am she expected, muffled sounds filled the comm link for a second, followed by inebriated singing in the background and finally Tom's voice. "We are sorta busy now. Please leave a message after the tone. BEEEP!" The giggling that ensued wouldn't cut off, and Janeway realized with a frown that she was unable to sever the com link. Technically Paris had the day off, but his startling answer mixed with his implicated guilt in whatever gamma-shift stunt he pulled on the bridge last night ensured Janeway would investigate this personally.

"Computer, locate Lt. Paris."

"Lt. Paris is not aboard Voyager." Giggle, giggle. The giggling didn't add credibility to the unlikely answer. Janeway stuck her incapacitated comm badge into her pocket, muffling the sounds of Row, Row, Row Your Boat now emitting from it, and darted out to the bridge.

She made a beeline for Chakotay and immediately tapped his comm badge, waving off his inquiring eyebrow with an impatient gesture. "B'Elanna, have you seen Tom of late? The Computer can't seem to locate him."

"Try his quarters." By the snarly sound of her words, Janeway guessed the Engineer was more grouchy than ever, and her shift wasn't even halfway over yet.

Three security personnel joined Janeway and Tuvok on the way to the crew quarters – good thing that they did, because the doors had to be pried open. The Computer had answered Janeway's command override request with an oath in bad Klingon sending them to Qa'tar.

Janeway had a feeling that Q himself would have been proud to take credit for the state of Tom's quarters. A loud thudding filled the small room, suggesting that the Computer was sampling through the database of Heavy Metal. The replicator kept spitting out underwear of all colors and shapes. Random fabrics flew on to the bed, thankfully partially covering one very naked Tom Paris spread on top of his sheets, apparently tied by his wrists and ankles.

Tom wiggled his toes by the way of greeting and shouted: "I AM REALLY HAPPY TO SEE YOU, BUT IT WOULD BE LESS AWKWARD IF THE RESCUE PARTY WAS SMALLER."

Janeway politely averted her eyes. Tuvok drew his tricorder but was unsure where to point it.

Tom shouted again: "GO TO THE ACCESS PANEL, I THINK B'ELANNA PLANTED THAT MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES DISORDER GELPACK THERE."

Tuvok was not amused to find a quivering gelpack rocking out in time to the music. He spared no time disconnecting it and the assault on the ears immediately stopped.

"THANK-" Tom cleared his throat, then in a softer voice. ". . . you."

The giggling and singing from Janeway's pocket stopped as well. However, the replicator continued uninterrupted. A security officer took advantage of the heap of undergarments and chose a lovely pair of extra large pink panties to cover Tom's nether regions.

Tom moaned. "Could you please turn it off? It's depleting my rations."

There were so many questions in Janeway's head that she didn't know where to begin. She gestured at the now quiet replicator. "I hope you have a good explanation for all that mess, Mr. Paris."

"Uh, B'Elanna is kinda mad at me. There was, uh, an accident with, uh, undergarments last night. So she tied me to the bed, fetched that malfunctioning gelpack and made sure I would enjoy the variety of underwear styles comfortably and undisturbed." There were hysteric undertones in Tom's voice, and Janeway wondered idly how long he had spent there.

"So you mean there was another heap of underwear somewhere?" That would look just peachy in a report, she mused.

"Well, well. The gang's all here." Everyone in the room turned to the direction of the female Klingon voice in the doorway. "Having a party without me Paris? Tsk, tsk." She sauntered in, arms folded, with an I dare you to challenge me look.

Janeway took the dare. "Lt. Torres! WHAT is going on here? Your treatment of Mr. Paris is extreme. Even for you. What could he possibly have done that would justify this humiliation?"

B'Elanna's eyes seared into Paris. She was fuming. Too fuming to be coherent.

"Answer her Torres!" Chakotay's curiosity had gotten the better of him. He couldn't help but join the shindig.

Paris rolled his eyes and squirmed uncomfortably on the bed. His audience was getting bigger and the room was getting smaller. He nodded at Davies, the security officer closest to him, and spoke in a low tone. "Hey, do you think you could, ah . . ." Tom flayed his wrist around to make the point he would really like to be untied now.

Davies looked like he was about to oblige. "Not so fast!" Janeway barked. That stopped Davies dead in his tracks. Tom groaned and lost all inclination to keep his head upright. He let his head fall back against the headboard with a heavy thud. "Nobody goes anywhere until we figure this out."

B'Elanna found her voice. But she didn't have much to say. "Why don't YOU tell them what happened last night, Tom?"

"It was really all very innocent." Tom slowly lifted his head. "An experiment. With scientific value. Really . . . future away missions . . . could . . . you know, benefit. Covert operations may need the ability to-"

"Oh, cut the crap Paris. Stray underwear plus gamma shift equals practical joke. Cut to the chase, or I'll have Tuvok hook the defective gel pack back up and I'll arrange to have Neelix deliver your meals to your bedside for the foreseeable future." As if for emphasis, the affected gelpack chose just that moment to burst open. Dark, diseased neural goo slimed down the wall and landed on the floor with a splat. In a rare emotional outburst, Tuvok's cheek twitched slightly at that. Torres looked triumphant. Davies snickered.

"Et tu, Davies?" Tom was resigned. "Ok, look. Everybody knows the holy grail of practical jokes using the transporter is to beam somebody somewhere and yet keep their clothes trapped in the pattern buffer, so they arrive naked . . ." Tom paused to swallow. The collective expressions of the room's occupants hardened slightly. Oh, yes. They knew that joke well. It was every cadet's worst nightmare. "So, I, ha ha, thought I might take it one step further. Fine tune the science to an ultimate precision that no one had ever been able to achieve before." Paris took a deep breath. He hoped the dramatic pause would help them to appreciate the artistry of his plan. He delivered it in a rush. "Use the transporter to remove someone's underwear, but not their outer garments."

Paris waited for the ooh's and ahh's. None came. All seven occupants just stared at him blankly. Philistines, Tom thought morosely.

Janeway crossed her arms and raised a curled finger to her chin in thought. "So, you of course, recruited willing volunteers to help with this little experiment of yours."

"Ah . . . Not exactly. That's why I needed to do it during gamma shift. I needed my . . . test subjects to be . . . sleeping."

"Tom, you didn't!" Chakotay didn't like where this was going.

"Oh, he did." B'Elanna assured him with a curt nod.

"You see, like any good scientist, I knew I needed to be able to reliably reproduce the results. Not just once or twice. I figured 30 repeats of de-undying would be enough to prove success. But when programming the transporter, I goofed. I meant for the automated program to choose one victim- ah, hem, I mean test subject at a time, and then return their underwear accordingly. They'd sleep through the whole thing, see. No harm done." Tom flashed his toothiest smile.

"But . . .?" The rising tone in Janeway's voice warned he better get to the point quickly.

"But, I forgot to include pause breaks after each line of code specifying the transporter routine. The computer executed all thirty transports at once."

"THAT's what Celes was babbling about in my ready room!" That earned a questioning look from Chakotay, her only response was a look that said to him I'll tell you later. "And your destination point was the bridge."

"Yes. Of course when Harry comm'd me and said there were 30 pairs at once . . . Well," Tom let a little bit of a hysterical laugh seep out. "There was just no way to tell whose was whose . . ." his eyes darted nervously around the room. "I mean. I did my best to return the garments to their rightful owners, but there were the inevitable . . . inaccuracies."

"INACCURACIES?" Torres bellowed. "Is THAT what you call what I woke up in this morning?" The engineer charged the bed, Tom reflexively tried to curl into a ball. The security officers caught her before she could reach him. Just barely. She let loose a slew of Klingon phrases about the underwear. None of them polite. She continued to squirm against the officers.

"B'Elanna" Janeway tried to calm her down. "Easy. It's ok. I'm sure whatever you woke up in couldn't have been all that bad."

"Not all that bad?" Torres stopped struggling and indicated to the men that she would remain under control. They let her go. She straightened her uniform. "Not bad?" she repeated. "Well, let's just say what I was wearing this morning had a decidedly Talaxian motif." She tossed some hair out of her face with a vicious flick of her fingers.

A unanimous "Eww . . ." haunted the small room. Janeway's face filled with sympathy.

"Oh." Something of clearly great importance just dawned on Chakotay.

Janeway turned to him. "What?"

"That explains why I woke up in a bra this morning."

All eyes were on Chakotay. Janeway did a double take. Concerned, she leaned in close to him and lowered her voice. A useless tactic in such a small space, but nonetheless, "And you didn't think that was weird enough to mention to me at breakfast this morning?"

"I," Chakotay thought about it for a moment. " . . . assumed it was one of yours."

Snickers came from somewhere. Janeway's hands went skyward in confusion. "And how is that LESS WEIRD?"

The holodeck was filled with the typical odors of a fish market in medieval Venice. Harry, Tal and Seven stood in the narrow gangway between tuna and swordfish while the Doctor was fumbling with their costumes. Tal and Seven wore a dress of a maid from a good house. To Harry's dismay, he wore a dress too.

"Why exactly are we doing this?" Harry's voice was muffled by a ginourmous wig.

"The fisher is back in the sea. He has no time to sell his catch. You pose as his wife." The Doctor shoved a basket with fish heads into Harry's lap and took a step back, looking appraisingly at his handiwork.

"No, I mean why couldn't you program the models for your picture instead of doing that to your fellow crew members?"

"Captain Janeway told me you volunteered," the Doctor said sweetly. "Besides, I don't want to waste my holodeck time on programming. I'm an artist, not an engineer!"

The Doctor moved swiftly to his easel and donned a weird looking hat that he had probably borrowed from Da Vinci's workshop. He began painting, and the feather on his hat was bobbing every time he turned his head to look at his models.

"Don't lower your hand, Tal! You want to buy those squids! Wait, even better – take one in your hand."

Tal closed her eyes and approached the pile of moving tentacles. She smiled weakly at Harry's reassuring They are not real and took the smallest squid in her hand.

"Where is Paris, anyway?" she asked under her breath. "It would be only fair if he was here with us."

Harry waited for the Doctor to look away again and whispered. "He's still looking for the owner of that tiger thong. They say he's been through all female quarters by now and that he will have to begin asking in the male quarters after this shift."

"Ouch."

Seven lifted her head from the padd she was hiding between the bread loafs in her basket and shhhh'd at them. Tal rolled her eyes. "At least somebody's getting work done today."

A nearby tent suddenly disappeared showing the sliding exit doors and the Voyager corridor behind them. Captain Janeway strolled in.

"Ladies, gentlemen. I see everybody's having fun." She casually came to stand next to the Doctor and glanced over the trio before them warningly.

The Doctor was clearly pleased. "Yes, Captain. Four more hours – and I will have one more submission ready for the exhibition in the Historical Museum for the time when we are back."

Tal Celes and Harry paled.

"Four hours!"

"Exhibition!"

Harry began tearing off the wig, standing up to escape. Janeway was at his side immediately, putting a reassuring but firm hand on his shoulder.

"Now Mr. Kim, no need to worry. Your masculine features are well hidden beneath the wig." Janeway's low voice lost its menace when she had to wrinkle her nose at the smell of the fish heads. "I'd love to stay and chat but I have another interesting matter to attend to."

Janeway's comm badge chirped and began singing in Chakotay's voice.

Are you lonesome tonight,

Do you miss me tonight?

Harry, Tal and Seven exchanged meaningful glances. Harry's eyes widened in realization and he whispered to Tal: "I think I know why Tuvok broke his control panel first time."

Janeway fought not to turn red. "It's . . . the malfunctioning gelpack!"

Seven quirked her eyebrow. "I thought it burst open yesterday?"

"Uh, it's another one."

Janeway gathered all her dignity to go out of the holodeck slowly while accompanied by Chakotay's lovely, but off-key singing. For a short while there was only the sound of the Doctor mixing colors at his easel, looking all too smugly. Then he began singing.

There was an accident on gamma shift
That scared the skeleton crew
Great many panties and boxers and bras
Appeared out of the blue.

Captain Janeway did look into matter
And although it looked like a joke
She noted only transporter malfunction
On that day in the captain's log.

Wise was the diplomat Janeway's report
On the misplaced panties issue
The admirals would want to know otherwise
Why none of them were Starfleet issue.

"And I thought it couldn't get worse," Harry said under his breath.

The squid in Tal's hand chose this moment to plop back to its cousins, leaving a puddle of goo in Tal's palm. She wavered slightly. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"Here," Harry said gloomily. "You can take my basket."