A/n: It only took two weeks of social distancing for me to start writing the second draft of my original novel... still writing fanfiction though, it makes an excellent procrastination technique!

"Chiquitita, dime porque," Elle sang softly to herself, staring at the ceiling in her quarters. It was time for bed, and she needed a good night's sleep, but her mom's favorite lullaby of choice was doing nothing but making her homesick. She curled up on her side and grabbed her reading PADD. There were some mystery novels on there from authors she'd never heard of, all of them carefully filtered for content and language by the computer.

She picked something called 'Maisie Dobbs' and started reading. She fell asleep 148 pages into it.

-And woke up five hours later when her alarm went off.

"The time is 0800," the computer announced calmly and let out two soft, yet piercing, chimes.

Elle stared up at the ceiling, debating if she needed to take a shower or not.

"The time is 0801," the computer announced, a minute later. Two chimes floated through the air.

Elle groaned and closed her eyes. She didn't need to shower.

"The time is 0802," the computer announced. Chimes assaulted the air.

"Okay! Okay! I'm up!" Elle flung herself off her bed. "I'll shower!" She grabbed some clothes from the end of her bed and headed to the bathroom.

She was just about to get in the shower cubicle when the computer announced, "The time is 0803." Ding ding.

Elle let out a screech of frustration. "Computer, go away!" she half-shouted at the ceiling. "I'm awake!"

"The time is 0803 point 5," the computer announced calmly, and chimed. Patiently. Insistently.

"Shut up!"

Nothing. The chiming continued. This was worse than her phone's 'increase volume' feature.

"Ok Google, I'm up!" Elle tried.

Ding ding.

"Alexa, stop alarm!"

Nothing.

"Siri, shut up!"

Ding ding ding.

Elle rushed through her shower, thank goodness for sonic, dressed, and was out the door in five minutes, fleeing the endless chimes.

The door to her quarters closed and the hallway was blessedly silent.

Elle leaned against the opposite wall and sighed in relief. Hopefully there was an auto-cancel feature after five minutes. Anyone who slept through that deserved to be late.

Chekov came around the corner and smiled at her. "Good morning, Elle."

"Good morning, Ensign Chekov," she replied.

He glanced down at her feet. "Shoes are required outside of your cabin," he said. "For safety reasons."

Elle's eyes widened. She'd have to go back into her quarters. "Um..."

"Is there a problem?" he asked kindly.

She blushed hotly. "I can't turn the alarm off," she said sheepishly, and triggered the door sensor.

Ding ding ding ding.

Chekov pressed his lips together, trying to hide his amusement. "Computer, cancel alarm and reset," he said.

A short beep signaled acknowledgement and then blessed, blessed silence.

Elle facepalmed. "I'm an idiot. Thank you so much."

Chekov chuckled and patted her on the back. "You do not have to worry. I have done the same thing before when I was too sleepy in the mornings. I will see you for Math later?"

"Yes, sir."

He gave her a smile and went on his way.

Elle left her quarters. She got two doors down before realizing she had forogtten her shoes. "Uggghhhh, woman!" She turned on her heel and went back.

Finally, shoes and sweater on, she got to the mess hall. As she was standing at the slot, she realized, "Oh no, where's my card?" She patted down the pockets on her sweater. Nothing. She looked up at the ceiling in silent supplication. Today was not her day.

"It's okay," she tried to convince herself as she trudged back to her quarters. "It's your first day of school, you're nervous, you've only been on this ship a couple of weeks, it's not like you should have a routine or anything, dork."

The meal card was sitting on her desk. She grabbed it and violently stuffed it into the pocket of her sweater. "Debit card," she muttered under breath as she stalked back to the mess hall. "Pretend it's a debit card, you're not gonna forget it."

She finally got her breakfast - oatmeal with berries and walnuts, orange juice, and a banana. Tray in hand, she glanced around for a familiar face or an empty table. There were no familiar faces since all the Alpha Shift was on duty, so she sat at the nearest empty table.

Elle was two bites into her into her oatmeal when two redshirts from Engineering approached the table, trays in hand. "Can we sit?" the first woman asked. "I'm Melissa. This is Ari."

"Hi," Elle said, giving them a smile.

"You're new, right?" Melissa asked, and took a bite of her breakfast burrito. "Came on with the delegates?"

"Yup."

"Welcome to the crazy," Ari said. "Although, we're gamma shift, so we don't get much crazy."

"You just got off shift?" Elle asked, interested.

"Uh-huh. It's bedtime."

"Doesn't that make you tired?" Elle asked.

"You get used to it," Ari replied, and then yawned. He laughed and amended, "Well, eventually."

Elle nodded slowly. "So what do you do?" she asked. "Can I ask?"

"Sure. Nothing very exciting though. I'm assigned to the plasma intermix console," Ari said.

"I'm the watch officer," Melissa said.

"Cool," Elle said. She finished her breakfast and consulted her schedule on the PADD. She had five minutes to make it up to the Anthropology/Archaeology sciences department. "Oh, I gotta go. See you later!" She waved, and bolted.

She made it with a minute to spare.

The A&A department smelled like dust, although everything was scrupulously clean. There were a few piles of things, though, on separate workstations. "Elle Wilcott?" a pile of binders asked, and a head popped up. "Hello, I'm Commander Jaya Samir."

"Hi." She shook her hand and took the offered seat. "So... how is this going to work?"

Cmdr Samir smiled. "Well, the same way all history classes work, essentially. Lots of reading, watching videos, analysis, and some essay writing and presentations. We'll also be building some scale models of historic ships and places, if you'd like. This department has a whole container of building bricks."

Elle brightened. "Like Legos."

"If those are small interchangeable bricks, then yes," Samir said, giving her a smile. She handed Elle a PADD and a binder with physical paper in it. "I don't know about you, but I like to have both hard copy and electronic files, for when my eyes get tired. Whichever you'd like to use."

"Thank you." Elle flipped to the syllabus. "Pre-Warp Earth to the United Federation of Planets," she read aloud. "Cool."

They dove right in to the lesson. It was a broad overview of the first sixty years of the 21st century. It actually picked up in 2002 with the first interstellar probe, Nomad.

"You already encountered this probe, right?" Elle asked. "Earlier this year?"

Cmdr. Samir raised an eyebrow. "Yes, we did, several months ago. "

Elle nodded. "Cool." She kept reading. "Oh, hey, this trip to Saturn, that was that one Air Force captain's kid, right? When the Enterprise went back in time?"

Samir's eyes widened. "That is highly classified information, how do you know that?"

Elle bit her lip. "I just do. I don't know how much you know about me."

"You're from the past," Samir said. "Did you live through this?"

"No, but I would've been two. Oh, that's so weird. I would have been two years old!" Elle stared at the picture of the crew from the Saturn mission. "Man, that's weird."

Samir was a good Star Fleet officer, she knew when not to ask questions. "Moving on," she said.

They covered the briefest of overviews of the Third World War, and then got to 2061. "This is a landmark year," Samir told Elle. "The year that Cochrane invented warp drive."

Elle smiled. "A very important year."

That was when the actual history reading began.

Samir let Elle read at her own pace and started on some paperwork. Once Elle had done the required reading, the commander set up a video, an interview with Zephram Cochrane himself the day after the warp drive and first contact with the Vulcans.

Elle smiled as she watched the (probably hungover) Cochrane answer the interviewer's questions.

"What was the final breakthrough that led to completing the warp drive?" the interviewer asked.

Cochrane shifted his eyes to the right and looked skyward for a fraction of a second before looking back at the reporter. "I, it came to me like a flash of light," he said.

Elle snorted. "Borg disruptors, more like," she said.

"And then the solution was there in front of me," he continued. "I couldn't have done it without the support of my team-"

"The Enterprise-D," Elle supplied, giggling.

"And they reminded me why we built this in the first place," Cochrane finished.

Elle giggled. "The statue!"

"And now you have the honor of making first contact with the aliens known as Vulcans," the reporter continued.

"First reported contact," Elle muttered.

"How do you feel about knowing we're not alone in the universe?" the reporter asked.

Cochrane shook his head. "I don't know. I mean, it's such a big universe that I knew we couldn't possibly be the only ones out there."

Elle laughed. "No kidding."

The interviewer talked about some more things, and then concluded the interview. The video shut off.

Samir gave her a sideways glance. "Your thoughts?"

"I feel bad for him," Elle said. "That was a rough couple of days. It's always hard to know you're gonna be famous, right? That's a lot of pressure."

"He didn't know he was going to be famous," Samir corrected.

"He did though," Elle replied. "They told him."

"Who?"

Elle realized belatedly that everything that happened in the movie First Contact happened eighty years from now. Or however you frame those tenses. "Um... I think it's classified?" she asked.

Samir gave her an odd look. "All right. The captain told me you were from the past, and yet you know things that no-one from 2018 should know. Have you been doing some extra reading?"

Uh-oh. "Um, no," Elle said. "I watched it... in an episode."

Samir relaxed. "A documentary?"

"Sure."

"Good for you." Samir glanced at the clock. "All right. Time to get going. I'll see you day after next. If you have any questions, comm me or leave me a message through the ship's interwebs."

Elle nodded. "Thank you, Cmdr. Uh, do I have homework?"

Cmdr. Samir frowned at her. "Homework?"

"Things I need to study for next class, or like, a worksheet to do?"

Cmdr. Samir blinked. "Not for this level of education. You don't get homework unless you don't understand it, or you want additional study materials."

Elle smiled. "Nice. See you later."