Review Responses!! 'cause I've gotten too lazy to simply respond personally.

anonymous: No, that gets explained here.

CSIvHP11: thanks, and same here, although its 3 for me. Also, I'm pretty sure my declensions are way off, as I haven't touched Latin since around Christmastime.

Dragon Princess Oroch... you know who you are: Well, hey, creative license!! besides, unfamiliar setting, three people trying to cook at the same time... and who said Soleil was the one to actually make the mess? I just said that there was a mess. The perpetrator was unspecified.

Blue: Ehehehe. Um, sorry for the horrible lack of updates, but school has been a bear. I have been working on portions of this in a notebook, so hopefully I won't be making my lovely readers wait so long before an update.

Max's POV

Ella came rushing back into the break room, hat in hand, the tops of her ears and the back of her neck blushing bright crimson. Catherine looked up, one eyebrow arching upwards when Greg didn't walk in behind her. Several pairs of eyes followed Ella as she plopped back onto the couch and attempted to repeatedly smash her forehead against Andrea's shoulder. I heard a few words muttered in mixed Latin and English, and Andrea snorted with a barely suppressed laugh.

"Andy! It's not funny!" Ella smacked Andrea with her already battered hat, glaring as Andrea tried to stifle her laughter.

"Yes it is." Andrea peered around Ella, "Sol, you were right, she is calling Greg Michael." The three of us dissolved into laughter as Ella huffed against the back of the sofa, a frown etched upon her face.

"Girls, we have work to do, if you could finish this later, it would be much appreciated." Dr. Grissom's comment had us all on our feet and moving towards our assigned labs, except for Ella, who rose still blushing to follow Dr. Grissom and Nick back out to the garage, Catherine headed off in the same direction as we saw Greg coming back towards the break room.

"Fortuna" Andy called to Ella, the smug, almost feral grin on her face that said she wouldn't let this go. Ella dejectedly flapped her hand over her shoulder in response.

Grissom's POV

Ella followed us out to the denali, fidgeting and looking rather uncomfortable. Once we were situated in the SUV and had pulled out of the garage, I glanced in the rear view mirror to see her pulling a pair of headphones out of one of the pockets on her cargo pants. She scowled at the tangled mass of cord and earpieces and quickly but efficiently pulled the snarl apart. I turned back to the road, as Nick turned to question her. "Michael?" I glanced again at the mirror to see her ears turn pink.

"Michael is my brother. Greg... ah, really looks like him. Sounds like him too." Ella pulled an ipod from the pocket, pushing the connection into place and putting the earpieces on her ears one at a time as she scrolled through her music. "It's weird, seeing someone who simply looks like an older version of someone you're close too. Kinda creepy." I glance back again as Nick turns to face the road, and I see Ella's head is swinging around, listening to whatever songs she has on her ipod. I watch her long enough to read her lips for a second: "I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies. This is the dawning of the rest of or lives... On Holidaaaaaay!" Suddenly, the almost hour-long trip seemed like it would be in silence.

"Greg's music." I muttered to Nick. "I recognize some of the phrases she's lip-syncing." Nick lifted an eyebrow in my direction and glanced back at Ella for himself.

"I don't know if I can handle two punk rockers. One tends to be enough."

"Hey, I'm more eclectic than single genre," She surprised us both when she spoke up. "Anything that's not heavy metal and most rap I'll listen to. I have quite a collection of soundtracks too." She grinned at us, "I'm what happens when you live in a house where music is a constant thing. I've always got music in my head."

Nick raised his eyebrows at her, and the vehicle lapsed back into silence.

"Why did you ask me to come?" The question came from seemingly nowhere, and I startled. "I could have just stayed at the lab, like I'm guessing you wanted me to, but you invited me to ride along on my first night of work. Why?"

I glanced at Ella's face in the mirror, and the intense curiosity in her eyes told me I had made a good decision to bring her. "Because you brought up a good point, and now was as good a time as any to show you that things aren't always as they seem. And that not everything makes sense the first time." I smiled, and she sank into thought and silence once more.

We arrived at the dam soon after that, and she hopped out next to me, stuffing the headphones back in her pocket with the player as Nick came around from the back with our kits. "You know, that'll just get tangled again if you do that." Nick flashed her a grin that said he was teasing, slipping into the "big brother" mode he seemed to pick up around younger members of the night shift.

"Yeah." Ella shrugged as the two of them followed me towards a waiting security guard. "it gets tangled no matter what. I haven't had a single day where it doesn't."

"Fair enough." Silence fell once more as we left the lights of the parking deck for the starlit darkness over the ravine.

"CSI Grissom, I'm with the Crime Lab, this is CSI Stokes, and our intern for tonight, Ms Terbot." I introduced us to the guard, and he nodded and led us into the service elevator. "Where are the sheriffs?"

"Already talking to they guy who found the thing. A couple of 'em will meet us down there. They're using the tourist stop part of the facility. Said something about not wanting to mess with the scene for you."

"Good." I turned to Nick as the elevator continued it's slow descent. "I want you to start photographing and taking evidence starting 30 yards from the turbine. Ella, you stay with Nick." I glanced back to Nick, and saw understanding. Ella would not be allowed to approach the body until Nick thought she was ready to see it, no matter what we found.

The elevator slid to a stop and the door hissed open, and we were met with a strange silence and two deputies. "It seems weird, with all the turbines stopped. Last time I was here, you couldn't hear yourself think those things were so loud." I smiled as Ella voiced the same thoughts on my mind, signaling the officers to show us which drum had the bone.

As we approached the machine they had pointed to from a distance, a powerful smell caused one officer to blanch. "You don't mind if we wait back there, Right?" He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, barely breathing.

"No, that's fine." I continued on, noticing that the coroner had already arrived and was checking the body to declare it. "What have we got, David?"

"More than just a single leg, or part thereof. We've got an entire body, minus a few parts, and based on decomp I'd say he's been dead for about three weeks."

"If he's been dead three weeks, why is it that he was only just found?"

"There's very little signs of decay around him, which indicates that he was put here very recently, but the how he got here and what happened is up to you."

"Thank you David."

"Just tell me when I can take him back to the morgue."

I nodded and crouched next to the corpse, setting my kit beside me and pulling on a pair of gloves. I started snapping pictures and collecting any evidence. I worked slowly and carefully, knowing that Nick would be working with Ella as they moved in towards the body.

Max's POV, just after the interns head off to the different labs

I walked into the lab Nick had pointed to as the trace lab during our impromptu tour and looked around for the lab tech. "Excuse me, but I was under the impression that children weren't allowed in the lab." The snide comment came from behind me, and I turned to find a wiry man staring down his nose at me. He held a stack of folders in his hands, a look of bored contempt on his face. "I suggest you leave before you destroy any of my equipment." He studied me for a moment before stalking over to a table and setting down the folders.

"I'm an intern, Dr. Grissom assigned me to this lab. I'm guessing you're Hodges?" I looked him over, and narrowed my eyes at his comment.

"Well assigned or not, just stay out of my way." He pointed at a chair. "You can sit there."

"I have a name, and if you can't respect me enough to ask and use it, it's rather obvious you don't get out much." My sister and I had picked up a lot of character assessment ability from our mother, and I smiled when he stiffened. "So are you anti-social, or do you just not understand social cues?"

He glared at me a moment, struggling with an appropriate response. "Fine. What's your name?" I could tell he didn't really care, but I gave a little smirk.

"Max Anderson. And I'm not here to just sit and watch, or are you not man enough to teach someone how to do this job? Scared I'll be better than you?" I smirked to myself. It was obvious I was getting under his skin.

"No. Of course not." He began pointing at some of the machines. "GC/MS, centrifuges, fume hood…" He prattled on about the equipment, and my mind went on what Sol calls my 'lecture mode' as I stopped paying conscious attention to what was being said. I responded whenever he paused, but most of my mind was on what my friends might be doing at that moment. I continued to vaguely listen as the tech began instruction on how to run specific tests for substances.

"How many samples do you process in the average work day?" I slip easily out of 'lecture mode' into 'learning mode' with the single question.

"Anywhere from 40 on a slow night to well over 200." Hodges looks at me sidelong. "The largest pile I've ever been able to get through in one night was 374. The first 20 or so were left over from days."

"What's the weirdest trace sample you've ever had?"

Hodges pauses, slightly taken aback by my sudden questioning. "Well, I'm not really sure. I've processed some really strange things here. It is Vegas after all."

"Well yeah, but there has to be something that was crazier than anything else you had ever seen come through this lab." I folded my arms and leaned on a counter, waiting intently for his answer. A small smile creased the corners of his mouth, and he began pulling bags of evidence to be tested towards himself and sat down across from me.

"Well, at one point, Grissom had me examining some hermaphroditic fish, which was quite unusual, even for Vegas." He pulls on a pair of latex gloves, motioning for me to take a pair as well, and quickly begins preparing samples for testing as he lays out the story. "An early-morning fisher spotted a body hanging from a tree out at a 'gray' water reservoir. The CSI's go out and do their thing, collecting evidence," a pause as he points at one of the bottles of chemicals on his work surface and I pass it to him. "After a while, they find out that this guy had excessively high levels of estrogen in his system, and so he had breasts. First thought: he was getting ready for a sex reassignment. Shortly after that, we find out that no, he was perfectly happy being male, and he was helping, i believe, a retired hydrologist who was studying the effects of certain drugs that make it into the water systems. The hydrologist, when the CSI's go to talk to him, ends up being dead. Now this hydrologist had a freezer full of fish. And not the kind you can eat. Grissom brings these fish back, and the first fish he examines has not only testes, but ovaries as well. Grissom then hands off the fish to me, and asks me to look and see if that is the case with all of the fish in this guy's freezer. Turned out that the first victim killed himself because he couldn't stand living with the female figure, his mom killed the hydrologist because she misunderstood what they were doing together, and the mom got off free because she was dying of cancer, which was also caused by the drugs in this so called cleaned water."

"That's crazy." I tried to reconstruct the events in my head, and gave up because of the convoluted story Hodges had told it as. "What else have you done?"

Hodges smiled and began telling me about other strange cases that had passed through the lab.

Several hours later- Grissom's POV again

I stood and stretched from the position I had been forced to take in order to collect some of the evidence left inside the actual turbine. Glancing over my shoulder and visually sweeping the enormous room I was surprised to see that Ella and Nick were only a couple of feet away. What surprised me even more was seeing Ella with the camera, ignoring the stench that had remained even hours after David had taken the body, confidently taking pictures of everything Nick indicated and listening as he explained some of the finer points of evidence collection. "Nick, Ella. Are you almost done?"

"Yeah. Five minutes." I nodded and waited as they finished, carefully watching Ella handle the camera with care, the tip of her tongue peeking from between her lips as she concentrated on every little detail. Finally they finished up and Ella turned the camera off, waiting to hand it back to Nick. "Alright, let's go." We started the trek back to the elevator. "Ella here is a fast learner. And she's really good with the camera." Nick was all smiles as he squeezed her shoulder. "And she didn't even react to the smell."

"Oh come on, I did too react..."

"When?! I didn't see you flinch, and you didn't heave, or have to go get some air."

"I made a face and gagged for a moment. Not many organic decomposition smells get to me anymore. Not after I spent all my Sunday's shoveling composting manure for two years. Now that is some powerful smelling stuff." She laughed at the looks Nick and I must have been sporting, and explained. "I had a part-time job with a gardening center. Basically, my job was to shovel manure, sometimes fairly fresh stuff too, for customers."

By the time we stepped out of the elevator the conversation had shifted back to the corpse, as Ella had asked about how the femur had stopped the turbine. "The turbine had to have been stopped when the body was dumped, and the body was found when the smell got to be too much."

"There you are. I was about to send a search party to find you." Jim's eyes were crinkled in amusement when we stepped out. His expression changed to one of mild surprise when Ella entered his line of sight. "I didn't think you would be bringing one of the interns."

"Neither did I, but Ms. Terbot had some very pertinent observations. What do you need? LVPD has no authority out here, this is under the Sheriff's jurisdiction."

"I need you to report immediately to a scene at the Bellagio. Officer Metcalf and I are here to get you there, and your evidence to the lab, as needed."

I looked behind Jim to see the other officer waiting a ways from us. "There are a few things I have to take care of, then we can get going. And Ms. Terbot will be going back to the lab."

"Let us know when you're ready."

"Of course." Nick and I turned to the deputy waiting to take us to the worker who had found the 'femur' in the turbine.

"Dr. Grissom."

"Yes?"

"Do you mind if I wait outside? I'm guessing I'll just get in the way for this." Ella shifted nervously from foot to foot, playing with the hem of her shirt as I stared at her for a moment.

"I don't think you will get in the way. I'm sure our witness' statement has already been taken, and we won't be too long." I glanced at my watch and then looked at Jim. "Alright. We'll be out in ten minutes or so."

"I'll wait here shall I?" Jim headed outside as I nodded my thanks.

Nick, Ella and I followed our sheriff's deputy guide to the worker who had found the body. "Mr. Martinez, you said you found the body and you're the one who called 911, correct?" Nick addressed the still shocked man. "We need to know what you saw, and if you touched anythin'. If you did, we'll need to get your fingerprints for exclusion. Do you understand?"

"Yeah." Mr. Martinez swallowed thickly. "Can I get some water? I'm really thirsty." I signaled to another deputy to bring a glass of water. "OK. So earlier, I come in like usual, head over to the turbine, 'cause we were goin' to be working on it, and pull the access door open. When I open the door, this disgusting smell comes out, and I nearly hurl. I look inside and after a moment, I see this big thick object stuck between the edge of the door and the turbine blade. I leant over to get a closer look, and I suddenly realize that I'm staring at a piece of human body. So I run and tell the foreman, and then I call 911 to report it."

"So you only touched the outside of the drum?" I watch his reaction as Nick gets his fingerprints, throwing a quick glance at Ella, who is scrutinizing Mr. Martinez.

"No, I touched the inside of the access door and the front of the gasket seal, where it and the door meet, and I didn't even try to get closer than that to the thing."

"Were you wearing gloves?" Ella shoots the question at Mr. Martinez, who startles.

"Yeah, we're required to wear gloves at all times."

"We're going to need to take them in for evidence, Mr. Martinez." His focus swivels to me and I explain. "You and your gloves came in contact with the crime scene, and so your gloves are evidence."

"Alright." He pulls out an old battered pair of gloves and hands them to Nick, who bags the new evidence.

"Done. Thanks for your help, Mr. Martinez." Nick stood and shook hands with him, gathered his things and the three of us left the room, heading outside to find Brass. "How did you know he would have work gloves?"

"Easy. His hands. They weren't that badly calloused from lots of tough work, and using equipment like the things I saw near the turbine is rough on bare hands, and if he hadn't worn gloves, his hands would be horrendously calloused."

"Huh. I wouldn't have thought of that."

"Course not, you're a guy." A slightly lopsided teasing grin spreads across her face. "I wouldn't expect something like that to register right away to any guy."

"Nick, will you take Ella and the evidence back to the lab? I'll ride with Brass to the Bellagio, meet me there later, unless something else has come up." We headed toward the vehicles parked in the deck.

"Sure, shouldn't take too long to log the evidence in."

Ella silently looked up at the stars, and after a moment she started humming a soft, slow tune.

I glance sidelong at her and impulsively ask; "It's rather the wrong season for that, isn't it?"

"Maybe." A small smile curled the corners of her mouth upwards. "But it's stuck in my head."

"Can you sing it?" Nick challenged her, and smiled when I raised an eyebrow at him.

Without any kind of preamble, she simply began to sing, and her voice was strong and clear as she continued to look at the stars:

"I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus our savior, Did come for to die.
For poor orn'ry people, like you and like I,
I wonder as I wander...
Out under the sky."

When she finished, she smiled broadly and looked away from the open sky. "Definitely the wrong season, but I can't get it out of my head, what with being able to see so many stars. They aren't nearly as bright back home." She brushed some stray hairs back from her face and looked me straight on. "Back to Vegas?"

"Yes. Nick will be taking you back to the lab, and he'll show you how to enter evidence in. Then you'll be staying there for the rest of shift." She nodded and followed Nick to the SUV. "What have I gotten us into, Jim?"

"Beats me, but it looks like we're in for one crazy ride."

A/N

Andy says "Good Luck" in Latin near the beginning.

And most of the stuff about Hoover dam's turbines and such, that's made up. I have no idea what the things look like from the floor. I've been there once a couple years ago, and it was really dim down there, so I couldn't see much.

Blue: I love reviews by the way.

Soleil: That's a blatant hint.

Andy: In other words, the more reviews, the faster we get our chance in the spotlight. Soleil and Andy begin attempting to try and make Blue write chapter seven faster.

Max: 'cause Blue is too lazy to get all four of our experiences first night in one chapter.

Ella: Watches Blue get beat over the head with a giant pink inflatable dolphin. Also, any suggestions for chapter seven would be much appreciated.

Blue: manages to evade the dolphin Because I have some trouble connecting the beginings of my stories to the rest of the story.

Andy: Also if Blue owned CSI, Sara would not have left, and Warrick would still be alive, although she does like the newest CSI quite a bit.

Soleil: So review, and don't attempt to sue her,

Ella: 'cause she can barely afford gas for her clunker of a minivan,

Soleil: Although she can use flames to make herself some tea, and grits, and a nice hot southern meal in general.

Max: continues to attack Blue for Andy and Soleil And showers. Don't forget the showers.

All: THANKS!!