Disclaimer:  I do not own many of these characters.  The story is mine, and is for entertainment purposes only.

Author's Note I:  I chose this P.O.V. specifically because Hess is a character mentioned, but never seen or heard doing the show.  I wanted to have some fun.  For those of you reading my other stuff, I AM continuing with it, and this.  I'm writing both concurrently.  You will get the full stories.[1]  Oh, yeah.  It may be inconvenient in this format, but any readers unfamiliar with the writing of Terry Pratchett or Jasper Fforde:  it's better when you read the footnotes.

Author's note II:  For anyone who is curious about the change in tone between my previous work, and this one, please consider the following.  When Ryan Gosling finished working on The United States of Leland, he went to his doctor, as he found himself suffering some strange sickness.  The doctor listened to his symptoms, then asked him what he'd been doing lately.  Gosling told him about his work on The Believer, Murder by Numbers, and the film he'd just finished doing.  The doctor thought for a moment, then wrote something on his prescription pad and handed it across:  Try a light comedy.

            Not one to ignore doctor's orders, here goes…

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            Zero hour.  0335.06 to be specific, but I'm not counting.  If I've calculated correctly, he should have just settled nicely into deep REM.

            "Crewman Bitten!  Where the fuck are you?"  I've cranked the intercom so that a dead, deaf person couldn't sleep through it.

            "Huh? What?" His confused response mixes with the angry comments of his bunkmates.  They're unhappy about being woken up for someone else's mistake.  It's theirs too, for going to sleep.

            "You're late, mister.  You were supposed to be on duty fifteen minutes ago!  Unless you want to go on report…"

            "But I'm not supposed to be on shift right now."  There's no confidence in his voice; he doesn't know for sure.

            "I'm looking at the duty roster right in front of me, mister.  Are you calling me a liar?"  Actually, it's tomorrow's duty roster, but technically it is still a duty roster.

            There's some mutters and thumping from his end, followed by a loud thud.  Sounds like someone trying to tie their bootlaces and run at the same time and not quite succeeding.

            "Oh, Bitten," I say it as sweetly as I can; it's a tone which shouldn't be used on diabetics.  "April Fools."  Let the games begin.

            You've got to get up pretty early to beat me.  Honestly, it's probably a better idea if you don't go to bed at all, because I don't tend to on this day either.  April first and October thirty-first have to be the most important days on an engineer's calendar, if only because they're the only days where we're allowed to pull all the nasty little tricks we think of during the rest of the year.  There are rules of course; there have to be rules.  Left to our own devices (and boy do we love devices), engineers would probably reconfigure the universe, which isn't a good thing even on the best of days.  So, in the spirit of human survival, certain commandments were hammered out, and have been handed down to every engineering class since. 

I. Thou Shalt Be Creative

            This is implicit in the whole thing.  The whole point of having engineers is to have people who figure out how to do things in an entirely different fashion.  You think Orville and Wilbur invented flight?  No, they just built a machine that formed a less fatal alternative to jumping off cliffs.  You think Zephram Cochran invented FTL travel?  No, he just found a way to allow superatomic particles to what certain subatomics had been doing since the universe first blew up (and you thought God wasn't an engineer).

            The point is, even if the idea isn't original[2], the execution must be, or else it simply doesn't count.  Take what I just did:  despite the fact that it could be considered cruel; it's not all that unusual.  Rather it's a prank passed down in my family for generations – I just use it for a warm-up.  On the other hand, the time somebody (yeah, whatever Mister Smarty Pants, Commander Tucker) made half of Starfleet Headquarters disappear with the use of a holographic generator does actually count, because no one had done it on that big of a scale before.[3]

II.Thou Shalt Not Cause Bodily Harm

            Inflicting mental harm is okay[4] (otherwise how could you prank?) but any intent to commit bodily damage is strictly verboten.  What constitutes bodily damage is a point hotly debated (don't even get me started on what constitutes intent) but the spirit of the commandment is this:  if it breaks a bone, draws blood or causes life threatening adverse reactions, and the result could have been foreseen, then it contravenes this commandment.

III. Thou Shalt Not Involve The Innocent

            Exactly what constitutes as innocent is hard to say.  Certainly, children are included in this group, as is the general public, insofar as it does anything to them (they are certainly welcome to observe).  But does a non-engineering commanding officer count?  What about non-engineering sub-ordinates?  The general rule of thumb is to tailor your response to these questions to the individual.  In other words, don't prank someone like Captain Archer or Sub-commander T'Pol because they aren't likely to see it as a joke.  On the other hand, if you leave someone like Ensign Mayweather out of it, he's liable to be insulted.  As for anyone else:  if they know about this day (who doesn't?) and have not specifically requested that they be left alone… well, we can't be responsible for other people's stupidity.[5]

IV.  Thou Shalt Not Endanger Others

            If this seems to echo Commandment II, it is because we sometimes need to be reminded of minor details such as this.  Actually, it's an expansion on II, because while II deals with the specific, IV deals with the general.  In other words, setting up a prank that would ultimately disable the warp engine, or the weapons?  Not considered to be a good idea.

            Oh, did I say those were commandments?  More like guidelines, really.  After all, you're hardly a good engineer if you're always following the rules, right?  April Fools.


[1] Well, maybe not the FULL stories.  After all, we don't really know what the ant was thinking, when, returning with it's spoils from the giant's foodstores, this big black thing came out of nowhere and squashed it flat.  But as close to the full stories as I can get.

[2] Simply switching from Volkswagon Beetles to shuttlecraft hulls in odd places doesn't count as something new.*

[3] The funny thing is, it took over two hours for anyone to notice.  If Tucker hadn't taped the thing, we'd never know.  Which lead to another debate:  if you pull a prank and nobody notices, is the prank any good?

[4] Well, not Grievous mental harm.  Giving someone a nervous breakdown is not nice.

[5] One person who is definitely on the DO NOT ATTEMPT list is Chef.  While engineers have been known to survive for decades on a diet of soda pop and potato chips, it is actually not the diet of choice.

                *(I've asked for help from a friend of mine at the University of British Columbia when it comes to ideas, but unfortunately for the last few years everything has tended to be a variation of the Beetle in high places theme.  So anyone with ideas… I will accept them gratefully, my email is listed, just say it's a prank idea in the subject box.  Thank you.)