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Spock tilted his head. He had been awarded the title of Grandmaster by the Federation's Three-Dimensional Chess Organization during his tenure at the Academy, and outside of tournament play it was rare that he met someone who could match him. Up until now he would have said that there was no one on the Enterprise who could claim that distinction.

"I'll be damned. Insufficient mate material, isn't it?" Jim looked up with a grin, not waiting for Spock's response. "No one's done that to me in years. Not in a serious game, anyway."

"Indeed." Under some circumstances a stalemate could allow a player of lesser skill to salvage a draw from a clear loss, but in this case he and Jim had held roughly even positions for the majority of the game—there had been several times when he'd thought that he'd caught Jim in a poorly-chosen move only to realize that he had no way to capitalize on the situation without worsening his own standing, and similarly Jim had evaded most of his own tactical gambits—and while one game did not provide enough data for conclusive judgment, he tentatively posited that 'lesser skill' was not going to apply between them. Given their previous matches, however incomplete, he had been aware that Jim played a distinctly illogical game that was taxing to interpret, but he had not been expecting this.

"Okay, well, now we have to go again."

"While I fail to see why we would be required to play a second time, I have no objection." Spock raised an eyebrow in response to Jim's eye-roll and ignored the snicker that followed, helping to reset the board before rotating it so Jim could take a turn with the white.

He immediately nudged a pawn forward with what appeared to be no particular consideration. "You play for real sometimes, right?"

"I require your definition of 'real' as I believe we have just played such a game."

"Like tournaments. Rated competitions."

"Ah. I did while stationed at the Academy, but I have not since rejoining the Enterprise." Spock moved a pawn in a mirror of Jim's.

"Do you miss—" Thunder cracked overhead loud enough to cut him off, and Jim looked up with a glare as rain against the windows picked up again as well. "Seriously? At this point it's a good thing that the plains are mostly flat or we'd all be sliding off down into the Rift."

An exaggeration, of course, but Spock had been under the impression that this latitude was less given to periods of prolonged rain than those further south. "Is this weather typical?"

"Well, thunderstorms in general are pretty normal for this time of year, but usually they're an afternoon thing not part of an all-day downpour." He looked at the window and then shook his head. "With the rain this bad you can't even get a good look at the lightning which is a shame since it's way more impressive out here than anything you'll see in San Francisco."

Spock nodded. He had found lightening across the skies of Vulcan fascinating in his youth, at least once he'd been old enough to understand and tolerate the accompanying thunder, and he could see how the flatlands here might also provide their own unique view rain notwithstanding. Thus far New Vulcan had not provided any sights so engaging.

"Do you miss it?"

The question made him freeze momentarily, but fortunately Jim's attention was back on the board, and he clarified before Spock had to ask.

"Playing in tournaments, I mean?"

Spock pressed a hand against the table lightly to re-center himself. Jim had merely been completing the question that had been interrupted, and Spock had not spent enough time on New Vulcan to appropriately evaluate its weather systems anyway. "Regrets would be illogical, especially given the availability of both computer matches and the willingness of several amongst the Enterprise crew to play," he responded. "Ensign Chekov in particular is rather unrelenting despite the current disparity in our ratings." Spock acknowledged that his strategies had been considerably less polished when he'd been serving on the Enterprise under Captain Pike, but even then he'd noticed a distinct drop in invitations after defeating any given crew member more than three times. Thus far he and the ensign had played fifteen games, eight of them to conclusion even if one discounted the game that the captain had finished, and despite his losses Chekov continued to regularly request Spock as an opponent.

Jim grinned. "That sounds about right. Any chance he ever wins?"

"Assuming consistency in the frequency of our matches, I would estimate an eighty-seven percent probability within the next six months and ninety-five within eight. His openings are quite dynamic and his mid-game is maturing, but in the endgame he is given to impulsivity that has yet to serve him well."

"Hm." Jim advanced one of his knights in a move that—based on their previous match—was almost certainly some form of bait. "Impulsivity has its place."

Spock made a mental note to suggest that Ensign Chekov offer the captain a game at some point if he had not yet done so. It would be instructive for him to see a very different style in action.

"But you've got plenty of shore leave if you wanted to keep your rating up," Jim continued. "I know you're about as high as I am on the list of people that Bones is going to start yelling at soon for not using enough, and that's despite the fact that he's worse than both of us. I think only Scotty's got more hours, reference concern number six million or whatever it was this morning."

"Sixty-seven."

"Close enough."

"Several orders of magnitude contradict that statement. However, tournaments were never a particular interest of mine regardless of availability. While chess is an acceptable way in which to engage one's mind during leisure time, I was primarily motivated by the insistence of Professor Encan'nal that I spend at least some number of hours off campus in an activity specifically unrelated to the Academy."

Jim's grin returned. "Didn't want you burying yourself in the labs all the time? Although I don't think I know that name."

"Unsurprising as their final year of teaching was the year before you enlisted. But yes, I believe that was their concern. Misguided though it was."

"Right."

There was a distinct undertone to the word, but when Jim declined to elaborate, Spock followed up with his own question. "Why do you not participate in tournaments? Clearly you're not incapable."

He laughed unexpectedly. "Technically I did play in one once, but I was only six or seven at the time, and I was so busy tearing around the hall poking my nose into other people's games that my teacher had to threaten to tie me to my chair to make me pay attention to my own. I know I got some kind of little trophy thing at the end of it, but that was gone years ago, and I couldn't even tell you how I placed."

Spock must have lost momentary control of his expression at the idea of a teacher saying such a thing, because Jim immediately waved a hand.

"She wasn't—she wouldn't really have done it or anything. She was pretty great. I mean, hell, I don't even know why I ended up at chess club in the first place, but she was definitely the reason that I stuck around."

"It was not an interest in your family?" While his mother had only rarely played and as noted formal competitions had never been of great interest to him, there had been times in his youth when chess had been one of the...less complicated...ways for himself and his father to interact.

"Not likely. I mean, if Mom ever played it wasn't with me, and chess isn't the kind of thing that would have caught Sam's eye either even if we weren't much interested in going home after school." He paused, frowning. "Actually, thinking back, I bet there was some girl he liked who said she wanted to play. That makes more sense than anything else. But anyway, when we got to that first meeting, Sam told me to go find a corner and keep my mouth shut since it was supposed to be for middle and high schoolers, and if I got kicked out he'd have to go with me. What?"

Spock would have held his request for elaboration if Jim hadn't asked, but as he had, "Middle and high as describing an age or skill division, I presume?"

"Age. Say eleven or twelve year olds up to about eighteen." Jim rocked a hand. "It's pretty arbitrary, especially these days with schoolwork tracked individually, but given the size of the buildings they had to pick something to split us up on. Apparently I wasn't very sneaky because before I got more than a few steps from the door Mrs. Peabody called me over, but instead of kicking me out she got me set up with a teaching board." He shrugged. "Turned out that once I got going I could match most anyone there, not that that was saying much, but even though Sam gave it up pretty much immediately it made things a lot easier on him when he could just tell me to go to chess after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And that winter when Mrs. Peabody took all of the kids who were supposed to be there to the regional tournament, she somehow got permission to take me too."

"I assume the behavior that you described is the reason that you did not go again?"

"Nah, nothing like that. Or maybe it would have been, I don't know, but she retired at the end of that school year. I have no idea how extracurriculars work on Vulcan, but with little schools like the ones around here it's kind of, if a teacher wants to teach something extra, like Mrs. Peabody and chess, they do. And if nobody wants to teach something then the job gets assigned or the activity just doesn't happen. The teacher the next year was assigned, and she made it real clear from the start that she was only there because she had to be and wasn't about to waste energy babysitting a little shit like me. None of the other kids liked her much either, and a couple of them used to smuggle me in so I still got to play, but even for them there were no more trips or tournaments or anything like that. Just a half-dozen of us locally and whatever I could convince the computers to do."

Such behavior would be unthinkable from a Vulcan educator, the guidance of intellectual development was considered a critical role in society, but it was obvious that Jim found nothing unusual about it as he continued speaking.

"After a while the rest of the kids stopped showing up, not really a surprise since they were all older and had other stuff going on, and I was never much interested in playing on the Net so once they were done I was too. At least for a while, and when I finally picked it up again it wasn't...I wasn't exactly in a place where I could have gone to any tournaments anyway, but even if I had been I probably wouldn't have. I like to play, but I don't really care about ranking."

That was not out of character for the captain who, for reasons that Spock was still unclear on, only tended to be vocal about functionally useless skills unless something specific was required.

Jim's eyes narrowed on Spock's bishop, and he brought a rook out onto the neutral board before looking up again. "So if you weren't busy clobbering all of the other little Vulcans at chess tournaments, what were you doing when you were a kid? President of the Science Club? Or your favorite version of such, since I'm guessing Vulcan schools have all the science clubs?"

Spock hesitated, but reticence in answering was illogical when the captain had full access to his records if he cared to look. "The Learning Center did offer what I believe would be roughly equivalent to your extracurriculars, but I was not invited to participate."

"What? Why not?"

Spock glanced across and then returned his attention to his pieces. "You say other Vulcans. I do as well. They did not."

"Wh—oh, you have got to be kidding me." Jim's voice dropped abruptly. "They seriously had a problem with you being half-human? Why? There's no way you weren't blowing the other kids out of the water school-wise."

"The use of a wet navy metaphor is remarkably poorly matched with regards to Vulcan-that-was."

"Yeah, totally the takeaway there." He went quiet for a moment. "Although you know you can tell me to fuck off if you don't want to answer, right? It's none of my business except that I'm curious."

"Leaving aside the unnecessary vulgarity, I am aware." He hesitated for another 1.3 seconds, but Jim was quite literally already painfully familiar with what even a temporary loss of control on his part looked like. "There was an incident," he admitted. "You are correct that academics were not of issue, but three of my classmates repeatedly targeted me in an attempt to elicit an emotional reaction, and on their thirty-fifth attempt they succeeded. I injured one of them far worse than he injured me, and it was some time before the instructors were willing to permit me to interact with the other students without individual supervision again."

"Good," Jim said immediately. "Well, not the supervision part, that's stupid, but three-on-one is straight up bullying, and at that point they deserved to get their asses kicked."

Spock looked up from the board.

"It's also crappy odds, though, especially since you wouldn't have had a strength advantage over them, so nice job with that."

"V'Laac was the only one who escalated to physical confrontation, and I do not believe that anger was the emotion that he was attempting to elicit. And he was not prepared to deal with it when he had."

Jim's eyes narrowed. "Then he really had it coming." A pause. "Wait, did you say thirty-five tries?"

"Yes."

"Who takes thirty-five tries to piss someone off? Or I guess it would have been a hundred and five, wouldn't it, if there were three of them? Were they from the slow class?"

Spock shook his head at Jim's inappropriate focus. "Their intelligence was at levels entirely correct for students of the Learning Center. I would redirect your attention to their success as the pertinent portion of my statement."

"Yeah, no. I mean, I'm not going to argue that you don't have some borderline-terrifying control, because you do, but you still feel stuff, and kid-you wouldn't be any different. So if some little assholes went looking for trouble and found it…." He shrugged. "Speaking as an asshole who occasionally gets punched, I'm pretty willing to say that they had it coming. Or the one of them did, anyway."

"You are not a bully," Spock corrected. Occasionally more reckless and less inclined to think a situation or comment through than Spock might prefer, but his captain was not inclined towards cruelty. "And regardless, the assessment of my father and the Learning Center instructors aligned with my conclusion rather than yours."

"What about your mom?"

He hesitated. "In this instance her opinion was not taken into consideration."

"I'll bet." Jim went quiet for a few minutes as Spock shifted an attack board, bringing his own queen forward before looking up again. "Seriously, though, thirty-five tries just to get someone to take a swing? Like, thirty-five seconds, sure. I can probably do better, but I've had a lot of practice. But thirty-five tries…."

"I require clarification," Spock decided after a moment.

"On what?"

"You believe that they should have been more efficient in eliciting an emotional reaction from me?"

He scowled. "What? No, I think they should have left you alone. Or if they weren't going to someone should have made them since you were a kid and you aren't going to convince me that they got to thirty-five tries without someone being aware of it."

"You have no information to support that hypothesis."

"I don't have any information to not, either, especially if they managed to somehow stick you with extra supervision afterwards."

That was not how the scientific method worked, and Spock was quite certain that Jim was aware of that fact, but there was no way in which a satisfactory conclusion to their disagreement could be reached given the information available. Particularly since, to the best of his recollection, his mother's beliefs had aligned rather closely with the captain's. "Irrespective of the appropriateness or lack thereof in the attentiveness of our instructors, you have also stated that thirty-five tries was an unacceptable number to attempt before reaching an emotional reaction."

"Okay, yeah, but I didn't mean you specifically because that part's bullshit. I just meant in general. You'd think a trio of mini-Vulcans could have logicked their way to the fact that they were crap at bullying after the first ten attempts and gone on to become accountants or something, not wasted another couple dozen tries proving their incompetence. By thirty you've pretty much got to figure that they were on the Vulcan version of the Net searching 'How do I bully someone?' and not even doing a good job of translating the results."

Spock tilted his head. His father and his instructors had, of course, focused on his eventual failure and thus their success, and his mother's concerns had, as noted, been primarily about their ongoing harassment and the failure of his teachers to correct it regardless of the result. This was the first time that he had considered that—while their success did indicate an unacceptable lapse on his part regardless of his very much human captain's opinion—the fact that it had taken so long did perhaps also indicate a particular ineptness on their part.

"Spock? You okay?"

He would consider the matter further later. "Are accountants considered particularly inoffensive?"

"Oh, for—it was a random suggestion. Take your turn."

Spock raised an eyebrow but did as he ordered, and conversation fell off as they began to form up their positions in earnest.

By the time the majority of pieces had been removed from the board Jim was failing entirely to hide his yawns, and Spock strongly suspected that his need for rest contributed more than slightly to his final sigh and a muttered 'damn it' as he tipped his king. "Good game."

"Indeed."

"Rematch?"

"I am amenable, however as you began displaying an obvious need for sleep roughly forty-five minutes ago, I would suggest that tomorrow would be a more opportune time."

"Did no—"

His declaration was interrupted by another yawn, and Spock stared pointedly.

"This is why people get pillows flung at their heads. Just saying."

"Goodnight, Jim."

"Fine. Goodnight." He pushed himself up and turned towards the stairs before pausing and turning back. "You know if me or Bones are ever picking on you to the point of getting on your nerves—yeah, I know, illogical, but feel free to rephrase into whatever is Vulcan-ly appropriate for going too far—you can tell us to knock it off with whatever level of vulgarity you want, right?"

"I am aware." Jim tilted his head, and Spock shrugged slightly. "You rarely approach offense regardless, particularly since your habit of name-calling only manifests when you're feeling tired or defensive rendering it more useful as a diagnostic tool than an attack vector. And the doctor is frequently illogical to the point of incomprehensibility in his use of colloquialisms, making it difficult to parse his statements at all never mind find insult in them."

Jim hesitated. "I was going to say good, but now I've got to ask: you're going to tell him that, right?"

"When there is an appropriate opportunity, of course. It's only logical."

A laugh and a yawn overlapped, manifesting in a cough, and Spock stood.

"Captain—"

"It's Jim, and I'm going, I swear," he said, holding up his hands. "Just promise you'll make sure I'm in earshot when you tell him that, all right? Because he's pretty much guaranteed to end up incoherent, and it's going to be hilarious."

An assessment that aligned with Spock's conclusion—with regards only to the incoherence, of course—and he nodded. "Your request is reasonable."

"Good." He waved a hand. "I'm guessing you're not tired yet so help yourself to whatever you want, and I'll see you in the morning."

Spock nodded and spent the time until footsteps indicated that Jim had successfully reached his room resetting the board and synthesizing a cup of tea. When the lights from the top of the stairs went dark, he shut off those in the kitchen and main room as well before retreating to the guest room. He was indeed not yet in need of sleep, but he'd intended to spend more of his leave time meditating than he had thus far.

He hadn't done more than roll up his mat this morning so it was the work of a few seconds to unroll it and settle in, and he had just begun to clear his mind in preparation for reviewing the events of the day when an alarm began to blare. He lurched to his feet automatically.

There were rapid footsteps on the stairs before he could do more than reach the door. "Captain—"

Jim's bag was looped over his shoulder and he didn't even pause as he dashed to the front closet. "Get your bag if it's still packed, otherwise just grab anything you don't want to lose and come on."

Spock's bag was easily reachable, and he left his toiletries and meditation mat behind without a second thought, catching the jacket tossed to him.

"What's happening?"

"Tornadoes." Jim yanked the cloak over his head as the pitch of the alarm increased. "Shit."

"Should we not seek shelter?"

"We are, it's in the barn. Blame some genius a couple centuries ago." He pulled the door open. "Ready?"

The rain had turned hard—hail, Spock identified, even as they ran for the other building—but there was no time to comment as Jim tugged impatiently at the door as it started to slide open and then hurried past the exercise equipment, ignoring the alarms that were also sounding in here. He shoved one of the mats out of the way, grabbing for a ring set down into the floor, and as a square lifted away, the top of a ladder rose.

"Go."

Spock had already swung onto the ladder before it occurred to him that he should have insisted the captain go first. Unfortunately given their current positions there was no time to correct, and he let himself slide into the darkness to clear the opening. His feet contacted a solid surface barely two meters down, surprising him, but he stepped away from the ladder immediately.

Something of that must have been visible from above because a moment later the captain landed beside him—he'd clearly known how deep the hole was as he hadn't bothered with the ladder—and there was the scrape of a panel sliding into place as even the very limited illumination was cut off. The alarm shut off at the same time, replaced by the hum of an electrical system coming to life, and Jim sighed as running lights came on overhead. "You can blame the same idiots for internals that only turn on when the locks are engaged, for the record."

"Noted." Spock looked around, resisting the illogical urge to hunch his shoulders given a ceiling less than fifteen centimeters above his head. "What is this place?" 'Inhospitable' was his initial impression despite his relief at the relative silence, given both the low ceiling and the fact that it appeared to be nothing more than an old-style concrete cell not even as large as a holding cell on the Enterprise. Starting barely a meter from them a stack of mismatched boxes and crates split the remainder of the room into two separate sections, although the one on the right was empty except for a bulkhead door—a secondary exit?—while the left held a pair of cots.

"Tornado shelter." Jim shook his head and then thumped a panel beside the ladder a few times before it flickered to life. "What I want to know is how the hell we got to actual tornadoes without a bunch of alerts going off first. I know I turned off the thunderstorm warnings forever ago because welcome to Iowa, but the appearance of funnel clouds should have been enough to set off an alert, never mind funnel clouds while the trigger ships are somehow down."

The screen flickered again and then displayed what was clearly a local emergency broadcast—visual only—with little information beyond that tornadoes had been sighted in the area and that everyone was instructed to take immediate shelter.

Jim frowned and then tapped the screen again to bring up a prompt.

"Trigger ships?" Spock asked as he started typing.

"Automated drones. They're designed to fly into funnel clouds and disperse them before they can reach the ground and turn into tornadoes. Uh, you know what tornadoes are, right?"

"I have a full understanding of the phenomenon, although I have not observed one personally." The atmosphere on Vulcan had been given more towards powerful plains-sweeping dust storms than the types of temperature variations that triggered funnel cloud formation, and even without climate safeguards they weren't typical for the area around Headquarters or Starfleet Academy either.

"Yeah, well, let's keep it that way. Hah."

"That appears to be coming from a private weather services network," Spock said, observing an entirely new—and considerably more detailed—set of data now scrolling across the screen.

"Does it? Weird."

"Captain."

"What?"

"Jim."

He groaned. "Would you relax? I'm not going to do anything, I just want to see what's happening out there beyond 'hey, tornadoes' which we already know. Besides, if people don't want me hacking into their stuff, they should stop writing stuff I can—whoa. Take a look at that."

"That would seem to be the storm front," Spock said. Weather systems were not something in which he claimed particular expertise, but the available data made it the only logical conclusion. "One of three, it appears."

"Yeah. Talk about ugly. I mean, I'm still not happy that we didn't get an alert first, but if that lead front came up as fast as it looks like…." He shrugged. "And according to this the trigger ships are flying, but priority staging is keeping them near the shipyard."

"Does the shipyard have no other defenses?"

"It does, but it's old enough that the shields are all ground-based, and if enough crap gets kicked up to knock a pylon out of place things could get ugly. Happened once when I was a kid, and with everything turned to mud today I can't imagine they're taking any chances." He blew out a breath. "Sorry, I'm afraid we're going to be stuck down here until morning."

"An apology is unnecessary given the near impossibility that anything that you have done recently has had direct effect on the local weather. However, I would request that since you have acquired the information you sought, you cease your most-probably illegal intrusion into a private computer network."

Jim grinned and shook his head. "All right, all right, ceasing." He shut down the console and the screen once again displayed only the public announcement. "That should let us know when we're clear, but given the alarms that didn't go off remind me to double check, would you?"

"Certainly."

Jim blew out a breath, running a hand through his hair as he turned to survey the room and then grimacing as he looked up at a ceiling that was clearly closer to his head than he preferred as well. "So, good news or bad news?"

"As I assume that all of the information is pertinent, the ordering is irrelevant."

"Fair enough. Facilities are there," he said, nodding to the door. "But aside from running water they're pretty primitive. There's a secondary entrance through there too, if the barn comes down on top of us and blocks the hatch, but let's hope it doesn't come to that because it's a tunnel and it's pretty damn tight. There are no environmental controls down here, but there should be plenty of blankets, and there's food too although it's all insta-meal stuff so no promises taste-wise."

Entirely reasonable for an emergency shelter. "What do you estimate is the likelihood that a tornado will strike this property?"

Jim rocked a hand and then shook his head and after another glance at the ceiling went to sit down on the cot set up against the wall of crates. Spock followed him to take the other.

"Realistically probably pretty low," Jim said, letting his bag slide off his shoulder to the ground and shrugging out of his cloak as well. "I can't do your trick with percentages, but the last time that I know a twister did serious structural damage to anything around here was when one ripped the second floor off Toby's place maybe ten years ago. And before that it would have been when one of them mangled that shipyard pylon. But they're stupid things to take chances with if you don't have to, because however many stories you might hear about cows getting picked up in one place and set down in another still munching on the same mouthful of hay, if you do get hit you're a lot more likely to get dead than anything else. And having a building come down on top of you doesn't generally improve those odds."

Spock's knowledge of cows had not increased substantially since last night, but the rest of the explanation was entirely logical. "Understood." He removed his jacket and bag as well, setting them beside the cot. "How specific was your alarm with regards to tornadoes in the vicinity?"

"The first alarm was for a touchdown within thirty clicks, when it switched to that higher pitch it meant fifteen. There's a version for 'on top of you, hide under a table if you can find one,' too, but you really don't want to hear it."

"Noted."

Jim stood again, pulling down one of the crates and sliding it over to Spock before retrieving a second, and Spock nodded in understanding at the pair of pillows and several folded blankets inside.

"If you want more there are a couple others packed with sleep stuff," he said, waving at the crates at his back. "Or if you want some privacy we can drag one of the cots to the other side of the box-wall. That's where Mom and Frank used to set up, but..." He shrugged.

"If you have no objection, I find the current arrangement sufficient." Presumably the cot that Spock was sitting on had once been used by Jim's brother, but it was of an acceptable length and sturdiness, and he arranged his blankets as Jim did the same.

"I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that I should have grabbed the chessboard too since there's no way I'm sleeping anytime soon after that adrenaline blast," Jim said with a sigh, even as he rolled onto his back and tucked an arm behind his head.

Spock had long since mastered the discipline to meditate under almost any conditions, but recent events had rendered his mental state less than optimal, and after a moment he folded his legs under him and leaned against the wall at his back. The two of them had never had cause to discuss the Kobayashi Maru after the initial interrupted hearing; Spock had dropped his complaint upon their return to Earth as obviously Jim had not been unfit for command, and while he'd still had some personal concerns about academic dishonesty, pursuing it solely on those grounds when it could reasonably have been argued that Jim had done nothing more than pursue a logical path to a solution would have been nonsensical. He presumed that the admiralty had declined to follow up for similar reasons although he'd obviously never asked. And after making his application to rejoin to the crew of the Enterprise...initially, despite Jim's welcome, he'd been unsure how any reference to such might be received, and after some amount of time it had been if not entirely forgotten then certainly superseded by far more relevant information.

Perhaps the computer skills portion would be a worthy topic of conversation, though, as while Jim's transcript did indicate a more than marginal facility with programming, it was distinctly devoid of anything related to code-breaking, and given the events of this evening it was clear that they were among skills that he retained.

"Hm?" Jim asked, looking over at him.