She wandered through the ship, trying to catch different people with funny faces. "Is this what Quicksilver feels like?" she asked the frozen crewmembers in the hallway. "Or Flash? Is this how fast they go?"

She meandered down to Engineering, hoping to use the Jefferies Tubes as her getaway if one of the Scalosians came looking for her, and the captain passed her at a run. He had Deela's weapon in his hand.

"We have to destroy the device," Kirk snapped as he passed her and she turned on her heel to follow him.

They made it to Environmental Engineering, Life Support section. Kirk put out a hand. "Stay here," he ordered Elle.

She flattened herself against the wall a little ways away from the open door, wary of bouncing stun shots as Kirk charged the room. A stun blast shot out of the open door and dissolved into the wall. There was the sound of another two shots, and something exploded.

"Clear," Kirk called.

Elle headed for the door. "Nice!"

Someone grabbed her from behind. "You shouldn't have done that," Deela said, wrapping her slim hand around the back of Elle's neck, her other hand gripping Elle's arm. "You are very clever, captain. You tricked me. I should've known that you would never adjust."

Elle had the distinct privilege of watching Kirk's vaguely-satisfied expression turn to one of pure icy rage before he smoothed it away into a bland diplomatic smile. "Let go of Elle, please."

"Why should I?" Deela asked. "You won't dare to harm me or risk hitting her. One scratch, captain, and her life flashes away before your eyes."

Kirk's charming smile stayed on. "What do you want?"

"Beam us both down to Scalos."

"No," Kirk said flatly.

"You must," Deela said. "Or do you value the life of your children so little?"

"You know that if you take Elle, Star Fleet will keep sending ships," Kirk said.

Deela gave him a sad smile. "You are very clever," she said again, wistful. "Yes, precisely. Or, we could trade. You could come with me, and your child could stay here."

The captain gave Elle a considering look. Was he actually considering it?

Elle felt something resolve heavily in her chest. Great Bird, let this work... She stomped on Deela's foot as hard as possible with her combat boots, elbowed the queen in the gut with her teenager-y pointy elbow, and twisted out of Deela's grip. She stumbled over to Kirk, safely away from the Scalosians. "Eh? Eh?" Elle said, breathless. "That was good, right?"

Kirk covered Deela with the stun weapon. "Don't even try it," he warned.

Deela smiled sadly. "Of course. Neither of you would accept a fate someone else set out for you." She gave Kirk a supplicant look. "What shall we expect from you now?"

"We could put you in suspended animation until we determine what to do with you," Kirk offered.

"Your survival does not depend on that."

"No, it doesn't. What do you want us to do with you?"

The sad smile turned bitter. "Don't make a game of it, Captain. We've lost."

"If I sent you to Scalos, you'd undoubtedly play the same trick on the next spaceship that passed by."

"There won't be any others. You'll warn them. Your Federation will quarantine the entire area."

"Yes, I suppose it would."

"And we will die and solve your problem that way. And ours."

Kirk lifted his chin. "I will beam you and Rael down to Scalos. Elle, take his stun weapon."

She disarmed Rael and woke him up. "Time to beam down," she said grimly.

They marched the two Scalosians to the transporter room and Rael got on the dais. Deela hesitated. "You could still find life on Scalos very pleasant," she offered.

"And very brief," Kirk quipped.

"It'll be just as brief here. You cannot get back to your own level."

Kirk and Elle exchanged a glance and Elle shrugged.

"No answer, Captain? Do I displease you so much?" Deela asked, pouting.

He gave her a semi-genuine smile. "Oh, no. I can think of nothing I'd rather do than stay with you. Except staying alive." He moved to the console. "Goodbye, Deela." And he beamed them down.

Elle looked over at the captain. "Why didn't we help them?"

He sighed. "Elle..."

"We could've helped them," Elle said. "Accelerated a couple of geneticists, maybe Bones, or M'Benga, and done some IVF or something."

"Would that solve the problem?" Kirk asked gently. "There were only two women, and they said themselves their entire race became infertile. Even accelerated, there's no way the geneticists could create a human-Scalosian hybrid before the Scalosians got too old to care for their babies. And is that any way to live? Would it be right to create children for that environment, for that speed of existence?"

Elle stared at him. "But, their whole culture will die."

Kirk shook his head, still impossibly gentle. "We can't save everyone, Elle. We can try, but we we can't save everyone. Sometimes civilizations just die." He drew her into a hug.

She hid her face in his shoulder and maybe cried a little bit. "So what are we gonna do instead?" she asked, drawing back and wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "How are we gonna get back to normal?"

He shepherded her from the transporter room and they started walking towards sickbay. "Well, if Deela was right about the conversion, that one minute in normal time equals an hour here... It's only been five minutes since you disappeared."

"Five minutes?" Elle gaped. "It can't be... oh man. How long will it take Spock and McCoy to figure out how to make an antidote?"

Kirk led the way into sickbay. "Well first they have to find out what happened to us," he said, rubbing a hand over his face. "I left a tape but I don't know if they'll be able to decipher..." He trailed off as he noticed the flimsi with lipstick scattered around the med lab, half the flimsi in the hands of a shocked McCoy. "What on earth- is that blood?"

Elle stifled a hysterical giggle. "No, it's lipstick."

"Lipstick?"

"We needed a low-tech solution," Elle said. "So now they know where we are, how long will it take?"

Kirk grinned at the expression on Bones' face. "Well, knowing these two, they'll knock something out in an hour, hour and a half maybe?"

"Ninety minutes," Elle said, and gaped. "That's three days! What are we gonna do for three days?"

Kirk patted his stomach. "Get something to eat, for starters."

Elle grimaced. "You'll have to swipe something from somebody's plate. Synthesizers don't register us."

Kirk rolled his eyes. "Oh, sure, hotwire all the doors to stay open and rewire all the main systems, but not the food?"

"Can't eat when you're an icicle," Elle reminded him.

"True."

They scrounged up some pizza from the Rec Deck, settled into a sofa, and ate at their leisure, surrounded by the frozen living statues of their crewmates.

"Do you think this is how Medusa felt?" Elle asked. "The real Medusa, not the species."

"No," the captain replied slowly. "She turned those men to real stone, and she was surrounded by her attackers, not friends making odd faces."

Elle considered this. "So we're better off."

"Yes, we are." The captain wiped his mouth with a napkin, set the plate aside and gestured across the room. "Game of chess? It's been a long day."

"Too long," Elle agreed, and stifled a laugh. "If we play like you and Spock do, real slow, will the crew just see an animated chess set moving on its own?"

Kirk laughed. "We'll have to find out."

Elle got the white pieces since she was still a novice and they played. By the time Kirk captured her queen and half of her pieces, Elle was already sleepy. "I think it's bedtime," she said, and stifled a yawn. "I concede."

He walked her to her quarters. "Sleep tight."

She hesitated. "I know the ship's not really haunted," she said awkwardly, cheeks bright-red, "but it feels like it, and um-"

He gave her an understanding smile. "Should I sleep on the couch? In case anything happens."

"If you wouldn't mind," Elle said sheepishly. "Sorry."

He shook his head. "To be honest, I was going to camp out in the hall in case of emergencies. I do not like being cut off from communications."

Elle frowned. "We're not gonna burn out and die, right?"

"Absolutely not."

"Okay, cool."

By the time he went to his quarters for pajamas and back, Elle was already in bed. "Night, captain," she called through the door.

"G'night, Elle." He stretched out on the sofa in the living room.

Elle didn't remember falling asleep.

-/\-

She woke to the smell of coffee. She shuffled out to the living room. "Captain?"

"Stole Scotty's coffee," the captain said, liftig the mug in greeting. "It still had steam."

"Nice." She changed out of pajamas and came back out to the living room. "What are we going to do today?"

"How do you feel about systems repair?" he asked. "The Scalosians very kindly left us glitches in every single system."

"After breakfast, right?" Elle asked hopefully.

"After breakfast," he agreed.

They spent approximately eight hours crawling around the ship, rewiring things and fixing long-range comms, life support, helm control, and a few other things.

"I think we were too efficient," Kirk said, as they swiped a plate of lasagna and spicy ramen, respectively. "That still leaves us two days."

"Vacation," Elle suggested.

"True."

They read the rest of Around the World in Eighty Days together, "talk about speedrun", and then they slept.

After breakfast, Kirk went off to read Crime and Punishment like a nerd, and Elle wandered down to her engineering classroom to find something to do. Maybe she could upgrade Commander Stabby. Give him a claw or something.

She swerved to go around Lt. Riley and Lt. Tomlinson, and had to stop and giggle. They were stuck mid-laugh and had the most hilarious expressions on their faces. "This like catching one of those animation smears," Elle said, who had watched a total of two (2) YouTube videos on the subject. "I need a holocamera."

She went back to her quarters, grabbed her camera, and went to take a picture of them. It took half a minute for the shutter to click and by then it was just a blur.

Elle sighed. "Is there any way to turn up your shutter speed, or whatever passes for a shutter on a holocam?" she asked the device, flipping it upside down to inspect the buttons.

There was only a way to turn it down, for long-exposure.

Elle sighed again. As Scotty was currently playing Weeping Angel on the bridge... she went to find the captain. "Hey, captain? You have a degree in Engineering, right?"

"I do, yes," Kirk said, eyeing her oddly. "Why?"

She handed him the camera. "Is there a way to increase the capture rate so that it won't come out blurry?"

"Why?" he asked, flipping open the camera to scout the components.

"No reason," Elle replied.

"Uh-huh." He connected the holocam to his PADD. "Give me a minute."

"So what's Crime and Punishment about?" Elle asked.

"This guy kills an old lady," Kirk replied.

Elle blinked. "And?"

"And then goes insane with guilt, I think," Kirk said.

Elle gaped at him. "Why would you read that?"

"To see this author's take on the human conscience," he replied.

"I don't have to read it, right?"

He laughed. "No, you don't have to read it." He unplugged the camera and handed it back. "Here you are. Don't do anything Spock wouldn't do."

Elle almost, almost, made a joke about mutiny, but she physically pushed the thought away. What came out instead was, "So I can go into the reactor core?" Which was, arguably, one hundred times worse.

Kirk's face turned white. "Excuse me?" he said.

Elle stared back at him, the blood draining from her face in equal measure. "I have to tell you about Khan," she breathed.

"Khan?" He pointed to the armchair across from him. "Sit down."

She sat, holocam perched in her lap. "This is a big spoiler," she warned him.

He sat down heavily. "Elle, everything you tell me is a big spoiler."

"True." She fidgeted. "So, you know how you dropped Khan and his people on that one planet? So, the planet next to them blows up and shifts their own planet out of orbit, and they swear revenge on you, and then Chekov ends up scouting that planet, and they take over a Star Fleet ship and come after the Enterprise, and you stop him."

"And at some point during that time, Spock goes into the reactor core?"

"Yeah. To save the ship."

Kirk scrubbed his hands over his face. "Of course he would." He looked down at his hands for a long moment. "When we are back to normal, I will... communicate this to HQ. Thank you for letting me know, Elle."

She gave him a thumbs-up and edged out of the chair. "Can I go now?"

"Go," he said, shooing her away.

Lt. Riley and Tomlinson were still laughing when Elle found them again. She stood a little bit in front of them, made her own funny face, and took a selfie. The camera "shutter" snapped.

The photo was not blurry.

Elle fist-pumped. "Oh yeah, we're good."

She scouted through the ship, looking for hilarious poses or moments, always including her own funny face to make it fair. That only took a couple of hours. She set them all to print on flimsi and left it to do its thing at normal-speed. Whoever checked the copier in the next few minutes was going to find a treasure trove.

She sorted the yeomen's stationery by color and drew a dinosaur on the whiteboard. That only took thirty minutes (the yeomen were extremely organized).

She went to the Requisitions department and did inventory. The two loose pieces of flimsi that didn't fit in the box, she folded into origami ducks. One she posed on Cmdr. Chanax's head and took a selfie with him, and the other she went to place on Sulu's head, on the bridge. She took another selfie. She figured that Chekov, at least, would get a kick out of it.

It was only 1130 when she went to flop on the carpet facedown near the captain's armchair. "I'm bored," she mumbled into the carpet, and realized the captain was wearing non-regulation fluffy dog slippers. "Where did you get those?"

"Secret gift exchange last year," Kirk replied absently.

Elle stayed on the floor and contemplated the carpet fibers. There was glitter in front of her nose. "I'm bored," she said again.

"Go read a book. Draw something."

She flopped over to stare at the ceiling. "Can I use paints and make a mural in the mess hall?"

"If you can finish it before we get decelerated, sure," Kirk said. "Make sure they're washable."

"Awesome." She stayed on the floor. "Can you read out loud?"

He hid a smile behind his hand and started to read out loud.

-/\-

"Day Three of Our Exile into the Speed Dimension," Elle narrated, as she walked through the corridors to the mess hall. "I have played fifty games of solitaire and shuffled the cards too fast, causing them to spontaneously combust. I have therefore been banned from playing soltaire."

Kirk laughed. "Who are you talking to?"

"The aliens in the X Dimension who are watching us," Elle said. "Or as I like to call them, my YouTube followers!"

"You're so weird," he said fondly, and ruffled her hair.

"Oh come on, captain, don't pretend you've never acted like you were giving an interview, or narrated a show, while you were doing stuff," Elle replied.

He grinned. "There may be some home footage of a young Jim Kirk baking cookies, somewhere."

Elle laughed, delighted. "Nice. Next time we're on Earth I need to go visit your parents."

"I'll have to tell her to hide the home videos," he mused.

"No!"

After breakfast, the captain proposed a project. "How about we make a Rube Goldberg machine?"

Elle grinned slowly. "Captain, you are a genius."

Five sets of ping-pong balls filched out of Req, thirty dinner plates, twelve binders, forty railings borrowed from maintenance, and various sundry articles later, they had a Rube Goldberg machine that extended through the length of the ship, from bow to stern in the primary hull.

They tipped the ball, and both of them watched in dismay as it fell forward at a snail's pace.

"We forgot the acceleration," Kirk said, facepalming.

Elle groaned. "All that work..."

"Well, whoever's walking through will get a surprise," Kirk said, shrugging. "We'll do it again when we get back to normal."

They went to get lunch and let the ping-pong ball do its thing.