Author's Notes- Wow…that last chapter must have truly stunk… thank you Aseawen and emilychristinad for sticking with me anyway.

My computer thought it'd be funny to stop 10 keys from working. I, however, didn't think it was that hilarious… they still aren't working again. I was relying on the Symbol option to type, which is why it took so long. Rrrrrgghh! Stupid keyboard! I finally emailed it downstairs and hijacked my mom's computer.

Also, if I seem to be rushing, please tell me- I have another crossover in the works and I SO want to start it…it's a TNG and- nope, not gonna tell you…mwha ha ha…

Chapter Four: Ahoy, A Plot! …Sort of…

When Harry Kim joined the merry fray, the situation stood thus;

The computer was playing "We All Live In A Yellow Submarine" in the voices of the original singers at randomly varying volumes;

Tom Paris was sitting on a beach chair wearing a bowl over each ear, a garishly colored shirt with no commbadge, and an expression of "not my fault";

B'Elanna was trying to turn three commbadges into a makeshift tricorder with nothing more than natural materials and quite a lot of presumably bad Klingon words that were completely inaudible over a sudden soaring succession of notes;

Neelix was fluttering around twittering anxiously and incessantly about anything and everything that came to mind, including but not limited to Talaxians had sensitive eardrums, and was there no faster way to shut off this infernal noise, and there was no need to snap at him so, and he couldn't believe that the computer had been playing the same music for five minutes, and it was true after all that computers never got bored, and actually the music was beginning to grow on him- and so on.

Harry stood in the archway and blinked hard. Um, did I miss something? he thought, and then said it aloud for good measure.

"Harry!" Tom yelled unnecessarily as the volume dropped abruptly. "Shut off the music! Verbal command inoperative!"

Kim shrugged, shook his head disbelievingly at the sight of his friend with two green bowls over his ears, and tapped a few choice buttons on the keypad installed in the wall. Mercifully, the music ceased, except for Neelix, who was singing along.

"As we live a life of ease
Everyone of us has all we need
Sky of blue and sea of green
In our yellow submar- Hey, what happened to the music? I just picked up the words!"

"Shut up, Neelix," B'Elanna said disgustedly, whacking him with a sharp stick she'd been using to jury-rig her commbadge collection.

"I didn't deserve that."

"You sing like a dying targ."

"Can I ask what's going on?" Kim asked cautiously, entering the holodeck before anyone could stop him.

"Our computer repairs apparently didn't help the holodeck controls any," the half-Klingon engineer said bad-temperedly. "Great, just great- more stinking biogel to adjust."

"Odd, I could have sworn we fixed the holodeck controls as well," he said helpfully.

"I never did anything about the holodeck! I didn't even know there was something wrong with the holodeck! No one tells me anything!" she ranted.

"Oh yeah," Harry Kim said with a look of dawning comprehension on his face. "Sorry. You were in a really bad temper, so I just fixed it myself and I-I-I guess I forgot to t-t-tell you…Don't look at me like that, it's scary!"

B'Elanna growled furiously and stalked over to the volleyball court, where she sat down abruptly on a volleyball with her head in her hands. So positioned, she proceeded to scream very softly. It sounded almost like a coolant leak; sort of 'aaaaaaaaaaa', and was probably just as dangerous.

"B'Elanna? You okay?" Neelix asked carefully, finally tiring of constantly trying to hold his tam-o'-shanter up and wringing it in his hands instead.

"I'm fine," she sighed. "Ok. Holodeck. Starfleet. You. Talk. Now. What was wrong with the holodeck? Before- you fixed it."

Kim screwed his face up and tried to think back, counting something off on his fingers almost absently. "Um, uh…oh yes! It was inserting elements that didn't belong in the currently running program, such as people, things, sounds-" here he looked oddly at the innocent blue sky- "or even alternate places. Naturally, this was inconvenient-" ('Naturally' interrupted Paris, sotto voce.) "…for the crew, but we discovered it was linked to the rest of the computer problems, and actually closely paralleled it." Kim was getting deep into a lecture stride. "Therefore, from the current condition of the holodeck, we can assume that the virus has not been eliminated but merely shifted to a different area of the computer mainframe. Recommendations are as such-"

"Step one, get out of here, step two, fix it." Tom interrupted at full volume.

Kim blinked, slightly thrown. "Well, yes. That was my point."

"Harry, we knew that. We just wanted to know what was wrong with the computer, not a lecture on, well, whatever that was called…"

The ensign reviewed his little speech. "Parallax, I think."

"Parallax!" Tom said with a snap of his fingers, as though he'd just thought of it all by himself. "Now how do we get out of here?"

"Maybe we should all just lounge around in the sun until someone comes to rescue us," Neelix suggested. "Someone will definitely notice if I'm not there for dinner."

"Yeah, and we'll get yelled at," B'Elanna said gloomily.

"Maybe there's some way to play the program through to the end," Tom suggested. "If we reach the end, it'll shut down automatically. Like a video game!"

Blink. "Video game?"

Double take. "Video game?"

Glare. "Video game?"

Tom sighed. "Let me guess. None of you have any idea what a video game is. Right?"

"Right." This in three-part chorus.

Paris smiled winsomely. "PADD games?"

"Oh," went the three-part chorus.

"Unfortunately, we didn't program this to be a game, which means my idea is shot straight into the ground," he shrugged. "Never mind."

"Back to square one," Kim said unhappily. "Wait a second…who the-"

The quartet followed his gaze -stare- and stared too.

Standing ankle-deep in the waves was a person dressed in the cliché-est pirate outfit ever invented (which is completely indescribable- imagine something Jack Sparrow-like, only worse), hands behind his back, staring in their general direction. However, he was profoundly cross-eyed, so it was rather hard to tell.

"Elements that don't belong," Harry said, looking rather pleased with his own diagnostic. Suddenly his face fell. "Unless of course you programmed people into this?"

"We didn't," Tom said. "I told you- pure landscape and props."

"Then I was right." Harry's self-confident look returned.

"Um, hello?" Neelix started cautiously, addressing the hologram.

"Ahoy," it replied in a raspy voice.

"Man, is anything about this guy not a cliché?" Tom asked rhetorically.

"Tom."

"Yeah?"

B'Elanna glared at him. "Of course it's a cliché. This is one of YOURS."

"It is?" He stared at the figure, which had resumed staring off into space because no one was talking to it, for a second before his whole face lit up like a light bulb. "So it is! This is from my pirate program! I tried to write in as many clichés as I could without making it look stupid." He paused for a moment. "I got the clichés," he said reminiscently. "But I think it ended up looking kinda stupid anyway. But that was sorta the point, so it doesn't really matter."

"Ok, Tom, it's your hologram; you talk to it."

He didn't even bother to argue, just stepped a little closer to the decidedly seedy pirate. Its lopsided eyes turned in his direction.

"Ahoy," it repeated.

"Um, 'ahoy'. Tell me, how do we get out of here?"

The hologram stared off into space again.

"AHOY!" Tom shouted to get its attention.

"Ahoy!" it bellowed back. "Get through the maze, ahoy! In a submarine, ahoy!"

"What submarine?" Paris asked and added, "Ahoy," before the pirate hologram could zone out again.

"Ship ahoy!" it replied, and pointed out to sea. Right on cue, an old-fashioned, rather chunky submarine emerged and headed towards them, stopping some way out before it beached itself.

"It's yellow," Neelix commented with a perfectly straight face.

"Um, I still don't understand…ahoy?" Tom addressed the hologram, to no avail. It had gone into sleep mode.

"Stupid thing," muttered B'Elanna, standing up. She brought her volleyball up with her and threw it hard at the pirate's head. What's more, she hit it. Unfortunately, all it did was repeat 'ahoy!' again, and shut back down.

"Computer, discontinue pirate image," Kim tried. To everyone's surprise, it shimmered out, with a last shout of 'ahoy!', which wasn't so surprising.

"Computer, end program," he tried.

No reaction.

"Oh well, it was worth a try. So now what?"

With the sense of the ridiculous that pervades the universe and especially the holodeck, it almost immediately changed locations on its own- to the inside of the very yellow submarine. Not only was it yellow on the outside, it turned out, it was also banana-yellow on the inside, broken only by the blue-green sea outside, a handful of assorted black levers, and the sand clearly visible from the portals- which was yellow anyway, so didn't really need to be mentioned.

Tom laughed delightedly and broke into off-key song, closely followed by Neelix.

"We all live in a yellow submarine,

A yellow submarine, a yellow submarine

We all live in a yellow submarine,

Yellow submarine, yellow submarine!" they both yodeled.

"Shut up! Both of you," B'Elanna shouted and lashed out at both of them indiscriminately. They both yelped and leapt away, avoiding her fists but managing to run into various pipes and unidentified components that clung to the ceiling with two loud clunks.

"Ow!"

"Idiots," said Torres with some satisfaction, and let it lie.