Stardate 2262.352

Gem was probably the least likely addition to the Lethal Ladies of Sickbay. An empathic alien and the last known survivor of an unknown race, McCoy had been reluctant to have her so near the hive of a great deal of emotions - mostly negative ones.

While it was true that things did happen in Sickbay that would make her wince, Gem gradually wormed her way into the inner circle of Sickbay. Part of it was her desire to remain close to McCoy, with whom she had a father/daughter relationship. Part of it was a fascination with pain and suffering that the Vians had, most likely unintentionally, instilled in her.

There were those among the crew of the ISS Enterprise that considered Gem to be an easy target. She was small, delicate looking and - most important to them - lacking vocal cords and thus unable to scream. It took three incidents for it to dawn on the bottom-feeders that Gem might have looked harmless, but she was very far from helpless.

The first crewman that touched her inappropriately eventually lost all of his reproductive organs to gangrene when she uses her ability to manipulate bodies to cut off the flow off blood to those body parts. The second crewman developed gangrene on his hands. When a third crewman still attempted to assault her, she stopped playing nice.

Screams weren't that unusual coming from Sickbay, but the screams coming from the corridor outside of it drew attention. While the five Engineers inside Sickbay found their injuries miraculously healed, the man outside had all five sets of injuries transferred to him in a span of seconds. The shock was too much and his suffering short as his body shut down. After one look at the remains, McCoy had them left on display in the corridor as an object lesson to the next person that thought any of his people were fair game. The message took and Gem was given a very wide berth from that point on.

The nurses had been wary of her at first - it didn't take a mental giant to notice the tenderness in the way McCoy treated her and there was the fear that her being aboard the ship would alter the dynamics in Sickbay. It didn't take long before it was clear that McCoy wasn't going to change how he treated his staff and once Gem began to show that she had a talent for dealing with their volatile Captain, her place among them was assured. Very few of the nurses outside of Chapel would willingly deal with Kirk when he was sick or injured.

It didn't take them long to find out how she was able to handle Kirk so well as Gem wasn't stingy in sharing her talents with the nurses once she was accepted by them. Tired feet? Aching back? In a matter of seconds, Gem could have them feeling as if they had just gotten up from a nice nap. She didn't soothe every ache and pain, of course, but when the hours were long and had no end in sight, she could keep the staff functioning far better than any stimulant in their drug inventory without any of the side effects.

Of course, the acid test had come when Gem and Joanna met for the first time. McCoy breathed far easier when the two of them took an immediate liking to one another. As Joanna confessed to her Uncle Jim, if she couldn't be there to guard her father's back, Gem would do it for both of them. Jim felt a brief pang of sympathy for whatever future suitor Joanna might attract. The gauntlet they would have to survive would be daunting, to say the very least.

For Gem, everything she did was her way of contributing to the new family she had drawn around herself - McCoy as the father, Joanna and the nurses as sisters, Kirk and Spock as brothers. The Vians had stripped her of her birth family and had eventually paid the price. Anyone that might attempt to separate her from her new family or attempt to injure them in any way would receive no mercy.

Feeling the warmth that always signaled McCoy's approach to her, Gem looked up from the tribble she was playing with and smiled as he reached out to give her a light hug and began to tell her about his visit to the Yorktown station. She was a Daddy's girl and like Daddy's other little girl (well, actually Daddy's baby sister), Joanna? A force to be reckoned with.