Author's Note: Set in early season 2, sometime between "Dead Stop" and "The Communicator." There are spoilers for episodes before that, and references to things revealed in later episodes.
This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day. Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy the story.
Part 1 - Best of Intentions
"You have to know the things you don't know. You have to figure out what the questions are before you can start looking for answers."
-Tom Clancy (Debt of Honor)
It started out simply and innocently enough. But then, these things always did.
A ship picked up on sensors, a tense moment of silence, a friendly salutation sent out into the void by Ensign Hoshi Sato, another, tenser moment of silence as all aboard wondered if the hail would be met with benevolence, hostility… or complete ignorage… before the answer pinged back that yes, they would open a line of communication. A couple of pings back and forth while the communication systems of the two ships sorted themselves out and figured out how to speak to each other… and then a face appeared on screen, the face of a stranger, whose features were unfamiliar to human eyes, colors and shapes and patterns that the eye tried to take in all at once but failed because so much of seeing and processing was noting only a few details and then filling in the rest with imagination.
Fortunately, they didn't all have to try and see everything. Hoshi was perfectly able to focus on the sounds, the intonation, the variance from the original and translated verbiage, everything of linguistic relevance. Though Hoshi could see perfectly well, she used her ears the way most people used their eyes. To her, every slightest sound carried untold meaning.
Subcommander T'Pol took a scientific view, assessing level and type of technological advancement based on what parts of the bridge were visible, and comparing them to all known races, searching for similarities and differences. Vulcans were not the ideal socializers, but they recognized a multitude of cultures, and had little trouble in classifying them. No doubt, this alien began to find a category in her mind that already housed several other alien species, while at the same time she remained open to the probability that her first impressions were completely inaccurate.
Captain Jonathan Archer tended to be fairly direct, catching mainly broad strokes and not specifics. He tended to evaluate based on human standards of politeness and friendliness, looking for common ground, familiar gestures and turns of phrase that translated easily. He was, in short, a people person. He liked to meet individuals, and come to conclusions based on conversation and interaction. Passive observation was not his preferred method of exploration.
The Vixlettes were somehow not what Jonathan had envisioned when he set out on his mission of exploration. T'Pol would have called it typical human narrow-mindedness, expecting most sentient species to be humanoid in appearance and have very human-like behaviors. And, for the sentient species that didn't look much like humans, he had this subconscious expectation that they really wouldn't have very many human behavioral characteristics or ways of thinking.
But the Vixlettes, despite their rather wildly improbable appearance, behaved a lot more like humans than a lot of the species Jonathan had encountered out here in the last year. It was a little challenging to figure out which head he was supposed to be looking at and addressing, since each of the Vixlettes had two of them and the heads seemed to just take turns speaking, sometimes switching in the middle of a sentence. Jonathan also wasn't sure if Vixlettes was singular or plural.
At first sight, the Vixlettes were actually fairly repulsive. Their hands looked like lobster claws gone wrong, and they had entirely too many of them on each arm, of which they had a rather lopsided three, perhaps to lend a bit of reality to their fantastic heads. Their tails (of which each of them had several) looked more like the arms of an octopus, and it was quickly apparent that they were just as well-designed for grabbing. The Vixlettes were scaly and came in several shades of orange.
However, their little ship didn't immediately upset Lt. Malcolm Reed, who had reported, "No armaments to speak of. It looks like what little they have is just for blasting debris out of the way, not for combat."
Jonathan knew Malcolm would be eager to polarize the hull plating and charge weapons, just in case. Malcolm's first reaction to strangers had always been to presume they were hostile, an attitude that had only grown more marked since the incident in the Romulan minefield. Jonathan wasn't willing to admit it out loud, but he was actually beginning to see Malcolm's point.
The galaxy had proven to be a much less friendly place than Jonathan had been hoping. And the repair station that had been so suspiciously helpful before trying to take one of his crew as payment had just about made a convert of him. What had seemed like full blown paranoia from Malcolm a year ago was gradually seeming to be more and more like mere common sense.
Anyway, after a couple of incomprehensible back and forths where it seemed like nobody knew what the other side was saying but were all kind of hoping that none of the remarks being directed at them were hostile and that their own statements would not be translated as something incredibly rude by mistake, the Vixlettes' translator latched onto the new language and started kicking back what the Vixlettes were saying in English.
"Yes, hi, hello, is-" one head said this, then broke off suddenly, and the second head took up the sentence, "-this working now?" the first head resumed, "Is it translating okay?"
"It's translating fine," Jonathan said, "I'm Captain Jonathan Archer of the Star Ship Enterprise."
"Oh that must be very nice for you. I am-" the first head said something completely incomprehensible the translator couldn't deal with making into English, after which the other head took over "-and I am the captain of the-" another thing the translator couldn't cope with at all. Or perhaps the Vixlettes didn't think proper names should be translated into something the other species might be able to say.
Whichever the case, Jonathan hoped not to be asked to repeat it.
"You look very different, quite unusual in fact," the first head said, "We're Vixlettes, if that helps you at all, but somehow I don't think it will because we'd probably remember seeing something like you before."
"We're humans," Jonathan supplied, "On a mission of exploration."
"Oh, exploration. I'm sure that's very fun," the Vixlette(s?) captain said with a soggy wave of his tentacles that probably meant something but Jonathan couldn't guess what, "Just going around-" the first head began, "-and kind of looking at stuff. Very exciting," the second head finished.
Jonathan found himself glancing at T'Pol, trying to judge from her expression if this sounded as strange to her as it did to him. But, as usual, she was maintaining a neutral, rather uninvolved air. So he turned to Malcolm, trying very hard to make it look like this glancing from one side to the other thing was just something he did sometimes that was quite normal, though it did cross his mind that creatures like the Vixlettes might not find this movement at all suspicious, or maybe they'd find it entirely offensive. Who was to say this early in contact?
Malcolm offered a pair of raised eyebrows and then feigned a renewed interest in the readings at his station, though frankly he didn't look more than normally concerned. For just a moment, Jonathan envied Malcolm's position. He could listen to this exchange without having to be a part of it, trying to guess if there was hidden meaning in every word and gesture, worrying if his next words or the tilt of his head was going to set off some kind of conflict.
But this was what Jonathan had signed on for. This was exactly what he'd wanted to, as the Vixlettes had put it, 'go around looking at.' So he took a breath and decided to plunge on with the conversation.
"We think so," Jonathan admitted, "In fact, part of our mission is to meet new races, try to establish a dialogue with them and exchange cultural information. If they want to, that is."
"Oh very enterprising," said one head, and the other chimed in, "Is that why you named your ship that?" evidently their translator had translated the name of Jonathan's ship just fine into their language, even though it had not done that for the Vixlettes' ship into English.
"Not exactly," Jonathan said, "I'd be happy to tell you about how the ship got its name, if you'd be willing to tell us a little bit more about yourselves."
"Oh us? Oh we're traders mostly," the first head said, and the second one, "Mostly traders. Almost entirely. Except for a spot of farming-" the first head broke in, "We actually like farming a lot, farming is very nice-" the second head decided to agree with this statement, "It is very nice."
And now Jonathan was wondering if maybe the two heads were two different beings existing in the same body, which didn't at all explain why they kept finishing each other's sentences. They definitely had his curiosity piqued, but he suspected that it was too early to be asking head related questions.
"You said you like to exchange cultural information," the Vixlettes recalled, "Do you like to exchange other things? We've got all sorts of fun stuff," the one head took over from the other, "Very fun stuff… mostly-" the other head interrupted, "-food. Mostly food. But good food though. We like food," the heads switched again, "Food is very good and we enjoy it a lot. But maybe you don't. I'm sure that-" another switch, "-we could offer you some non-food things you might like. We have some fun medical supplies," switch, "Very fun supplies. And also-" switch, "this little metal cube thing." switch, "We don't know what that does though," switch, "We don't, no. But it could be really cool," switch, "Or maybe it's just good for holding really light stuff down that might get blown away by an air vent," switch, "Very convenient."
It seemed rather suddenly as if Jonathan was listening to a sale's pitch. Since the Vixlettes were traders, he supposed he probably was. But it was still very disorienting.
"We..." he struggled to find an opening in the Vixlettes' dialogue with itself, "We like food, actually."
"Oh most organic life forms really do," the Vixlettes said, pointing out the obvious, "They really like food. And what they like best-" this time one head actually paused and the other one took the cue to take over after a beat, "-is stuff on their food," the first head was immediately in there again, "Stuff like SPICES," the second head hyped, "Spices are very fun," after which the first head said, "We like spices. And we have some very fun spices we got from some other traders, who got them from these people called the Dolizet," second head again, "The Dolizet are very neat to look at," the first head, "Aren't they, though? Since you like to go and look at stuff, you might really like looking at them," the second, "I don't think they'd mind at all," the first head, "Probably not, no, they're pretty friendly."
Jonathan was a little uneasy about how quick and open these creatures were, but reminded himself that he'd only been out on this mission for about a year, so he really hadn't seen all that much yet. The galaxy was a very big place and there were bound to be all kinds of species living in it. Just because the Vixlettes seemed unusually friendly and in an awful hurry to dispense random information Jonathan hadn't asked about didn't mean they were actually… bad. Just odd.
"If you don't mind," Jonathan broke in before the sale's pitch continued, "I'd like to get to know you a little bit better. Perhaps you'd like to visit my ship."
He could see Malcolm wince out of the corner of his eye, but ignored that. Malcolm would of course read these aliens as being extremely shady. Maybe they were, but Jonathan couldn't refuse to interact with any aliens who didn't act just like he expected or wanted. Then he'd be just as guilty of narrow thinking as T'Pol liked to accuse him of being. Besides, it wasn't really exploration if you were only looking for things that reminded you of yourself.
"Oh we like visiting ships," said the Vixlettes, "Visiting ships is very fun. Every ship is a little different and they all have neat stuff to look at and maybe we could participate in a trade which would be very good," switch, "We'd like to do that very much. Maybe we could bring spice for you," switch, "Spice to try, like on food, to see if you like it," switch, "And then you could trade us something for it," switch, "Seems like a great idea."
Jonathan was pretty sure that the Vixlettes were going to be exhausting to deal with, and possibly not worth it. But they were offering some minor trading, which generally did well for strengthening relations, and they'd offered information about another race somewhere else that might be interesting to meet and it was possible they knew something about this particular sector Enterprise was exploring. Jonathan couldn't afford to just throw away all that opportunity because the Vixlettes were a little hyperactive. Besides, he still desperately wanted to know more about how having two heads worked. It seemed very complicated and confusing and he was hoping to find a polite way to ask about it.
Briefly, he thought about the Kreetassans, who hadn't at all liked seeing people eating in front of them. But he'd come up with a way of trying to reduce the chances of that happening again.
"We have some basic customs and protocols that we like to let any potential visitors know about ahead of time," Jonathan said, "We find it helps to smooth relations."
"Smooth relations are great," the Vixlettes said, "We like smooth relations."
"Yes..." Jonathan persisted, "So if you don't mind, I'd like for my first officer to send you that information so you can look it over. And if you have anything like that which you'd like to send us so you'll be more comfortable during your visit, it would be very helpful for you to send her those."
"Oh we're very open-minded," the Vixlettes said, "You have to be if you want to trade successfully. You'll find we're not easy to offend," switch, "We'd rather you didn't try though. We prefer-" switch, "-for people to not try to offend us. So I guess we might get upset if you did that."
Jonathan offered a strained smile, regretting this arrangement already, "We'll keep that in mind."