Paramount owns it
I do not, please do not sue
I have no money
TRADING SPACES
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"Mr. Reed, can you understand me?" asked the doctor for the fifth time that day, staring his patient in the eyes. Blue-gray met sky-blue without a hint of recognition, and Phlox sighed. He could not figure it out, this strange condition of the lieutenant's. According to T'Pol and Hoshi, who had returned from the surface a little while ago, Reed had been exposed to a mysterious radiation combined with a powerful electric current.
"Not a word?" He switched to Denobulan and even threw in a Vulcan phrase or two that he'd picked up on his travels. ">"
Nothing. The lieutenant looked away, clenching his fists and closing his eyes. He muttered under his breath in a garbled mess of syllables, as if just getting the words out were difficult. Phlox strained to understand anything, anything at all.
He swept the diagnostic sensors over Reed's body once more, noting the
irregular impulses in the man's brain yet again, but still in the dark as to
what to do about it. Despite the odd wave patterns Reed should still be able
to speak; there was nothing damaged showing in any of the speech areas.
His eyes fell on a patch of the cortex with a particularly eccentric wave
pattern and he wondered if perhaps the motor skills allowing the lieutenant
to speak were damaged.
"I wonder..." said Phlox. "Stay there, Mr. Reed," he admonished the patient (needlessly, of course, since the man was still in restraints) and went over the comm link on the wall. "Phlox to Ensign Sato."
A minute passed before she responded with a breathless, "Sato here. Go ahead, Doctor."
"I believe I have an idea to help Mr. Reed, but I need your assistance. Are you free right now?"
She called to someone else in the room, then said to Phlox, "I'll be there in a few minutes, okay?"
"That will be fine," Phlox replied, and switched off the comm link. Reed, from the biobed, watched his every move with anxious eyes and pulled against the restraints angrily. Carefully, Phlox loosened them, just enough to be more comfortable. "It's all right, Lieutenant, no one will hurt you," he said in a soothing, calm voice. "You're among friends here."
Reed growled and spat at him, and Phlox, ruefully, tightened the straps again, saying only, "I'm sorry, Lieutenant."
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Hoshi turned away from the comm, wondering what the doctor had in mind. "How are we doing, Trip?"
"I've got it almost all scanned into the computer. We'll be able to read it pretty soon, Hoshi," he replied, moving the ultraviolet lamp back and forth over the ancient pages. "There's quite a bit of writin' here even though most of it's not real legible."
"T'Pol says that the leather on the outside and the plant fibers in the paper have genetic strains native to this planet. So whoever wrote it, wrote it there," Hoshi said.
"What does the doc want?" he asked, not even looking up.
"I don't know, but you've got everything under control, right?"
"Yeah, go on, Hoshi," Trip said. "I only got a few more pages to go. I'll see if I can start readin' it, too."
She smiled and slipped lithely through the doors, leaving him alone. He rubbed his eyes, flipped a page, and kept scanning until he came to the end of the writing, about halfway through the book. "Ha! All right, time to see what's up," he told the book. He tapped the display on the computer, and a reconstruction of the original text popped up on the screen, nicely blacked in and easy to read, unlike the source material.
"I don't know how many days I've been here," he read. "Too many, to be certain. I spent a while recovering from illness and I don't really remember the passage of time. The medicine on this planet is rather primitive. Dr. Phlox could have patched me up in a minute, no doubt."
Trip stopped, goggled at the sentence, read it again, and started coughing. He read it several more times before he could go on. The next sentence didn't help anything, either.
"I suppose as a Starfleet officer I should describe my surroundings. It should come in handy since we are explorers, aren't we? Right now, I am in a house that looks something like a medieval cottage. The floors are made of roughly planked wood, something fragrant almost like cedar but not quite. The clothes I wear, the blankets on the bed, and the rugs on the floor are all woven from animal fibers and dyed different, bright colors. If I had not seen the people I would swear I were back in the Middle Ages.
"They are something like humans, bipedal, but they only have four fingers and four toes, not five. Three long fingers, rather, and a thumb. The ones I have seen are rather homogenous in skin color, sort of a pale green. There are a few dark forest green ones, but I believe they are traders and not local. Most of them have dingy golden hair but there is the occasional blonde and brunette among them. My own body seems to have changed. I'm not sure how to explain this. I know that I was a human at one point, but I am no longer one... I look down, and the hand writing this is not my own. It should be rose pink, not green. It should have five fingers. It should be on Enterprise, around the handle of a phase pistol and not a fletched quill pen."
Trip stood up, looked at the book on the table, walked around the table quickly, and sat back down, head spinning. "Malcolm, good lord..." he said. "What on earth?"
"I haven't been able to really learn any of their language yet. Hoshi would have been fluent by now, but I am forced to struggle along at my own pace. I wasn't very good at languages in school and I am little better now. Madelaine, my sister, used to try and tutor me even though she was years behind me, I was so bad. They call me Tobin, and the woman who takes care of me... of Tobin, really, I suppose, since I can't tell them who I really am... her name is Mayla, I think. And there's an older woman named Kodeeya. Spelled phonetically, of course. They provided me with writing materials and seemed rather disappointed when I could not make the symbols of their alphabet, but luckily, they didn't take them away. I've tried talking with them in English but I can't even make the sounds come out right, and Mayla seems frightened when I try.
"I am frightened myself. There is nothing in any sort of training I've
received, not in military school or in Starfleet, to indicate how I should deal
with a situation like this. How does one react to wake up and find yourself in
a different body? I don't even know how it could have happened. The closest I
can come to a reaction is how to behave as a prisoner: your first duty is to
escape. I think I must return to the caves; that is the last thing I remember
before this happened."
Trip took a deep breath, realizing that he had stopped taking in oxygen
without noticing. He needed to talk to the captain, show him this, talk to
someone, because he sure as hell didn't understand what had happened.
He wasn't even sure that he believed it. Someone else had better look at
this, just to make sure. Tuckers usually didn't go crazy, but then again, no
other Tuckers had gone this far into space.
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Tobin clutched at the straps. He could just reach them...nearly, nearly...
The two demons standing near him glanced his way, and he relaxed, trying to make it look as if he had just been stretching. The female demon spoke to him, but he could not understand her.
"Let me go, treacherous scum!" he railed, shaking and shivering. She stepped back, a touch of concern in her eyes, and he felt suddenly guilty at causing a woman, even a demon woman, sadness. But his desire to escape did not diminish, and when she turned around again, he reached for the straps once more.
He almost had them loose enough to escape when she turned around again, and her next words startled him into dropping the straps.
In perfect idun'yll speech, she said, "Don't worry, Malcolm. We can understand you now. The translator was able to decipher your words, even if you can't make them correctly." Tobin dropped the straps and sank back against the bed.
"Demons!" he cried, and closed his eyes against the terrible magic, sure that he would never, ever escape this horrible place.
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What did I tell you? Sunday!! I actually got something done on time... now if that only extended to schoolwork... more to come later, review!