by Vol Tryst and Zanh Liis
80526.22
Following Part One
-=USS Serendipity=-
80526.22
Following Part One
-=USS Serendipity=-
Zanh Liis walked into Sickbay with the barkeep right on her heels. She was relieved to see the Counselor sitting up on his own.
"Counselor, how are you?" She asked from across the room.
Vol did not answer.
"Vol?" Zanh tried again, realizing her optimism may have been premature. Maybe he wasn't as fine as he appeared.
She made a move to go closer to his bedside, but a soft hand held her arm. Trick London looked liked he'd just seen a ghost, and he shook his head, silently advising her to stay put.
But Zanh didn't accept that, she needed to make sure her crew member was alright, and to maybe get some answers as to what Blik had done to him. The sooner she got those answers, the better, so she walked towards Vol. When she neared him, she reached out a comforting hand to rest on his left shoulder.
"Hey, are you---"
If Vol had had an ounce of physical defense training, the swinging arm that came out of nowhere would have smacked her right in the jaw. But Zanh ducked and quickly moved away as Vol simultaneously let out a horrible yell and clumsily staggered from his med bed, backing himself into a corner.
His face was contorted in a terrified grimace, and tears streamed down his face when he finally blinked. Vol could only shake with empty sobs, a mere two hours ago this was a woman whose mind and emotions were vivid to him and extraordinarily interesting. It was like being a child, watching an artist paint something from start to finish with an array of vibrant colors.
Now all he saw was a blank canvas, a shell of the woman he was just getting to know. This is what it would be like with everyone on this ship, he couldn't even sense her presence. If he closed his eyes, he'd never guess she was even there.
"Ensign Tryst!" Zanh summoned her Commanding Officer voice in order to break through to Vol and reprimand him for almost striking her, but to no avail. Vol let out another yelp as he seemed to be going back and forth between rage, depression and sheer terror. London came up from behind Zanh, as the LMH finally made an entrance, approaching his patient with a hypospray.
"No!" Vol was on the ground now, his back against the wall as he directed a swift kick at the LMH. McKay merely blinked, unfazed as he deflected the kick and moved closer to administer the sleeping agent.
"Son, I don't care if I have to hog tie you, you're gettin' this shot! How 'bout a little help here?" McKay sputtered, and London and Zanh immediately obliged as Trick held the Counselor's ankles, and Zanh held his arm and shoulder against the wall. The struggling stopped as soon as the hypo penetrated his neck. Vol's body went limp and the episode was over.
After returning the Counselor to his bed, McKay went back to the view screen on the medical console in the center of the room, and Zanh stood on the other side of the island, glaring him down.
"What the hell, McKay?"
"Believe it or not Captain, he was much worse when I first got him here."
"I can't say I'm surprised..." mumbled Trick.
*What ever happened to straight-forward answers on this ship, are they extinct and no one bothered to tell me?* Zanh Liis thought to herself.
"Exactly what's wrong with him?" she demanded. The doctor sighed before raising his gaze from his work and looked at the Captain.
"Everything that had made him a Betazoid is now gone. The part of his brain that governs his empathic and telepathic abilities has ceased to function."
"What?!" Zanh nearly shouted. "That's not possible."
"That explains it..." Trick looked to Vol, with an obvious sense of sympathy.
"Explains what?" Zanh asked, still trying to process this new information.
"His sudden violence Captain..." Dalton answered. "...I'd imagine you wouldn't react too differently if you had been robbed of your sense of sight or hearing."
As much a part of her existence as music had become throughout the course of her life, Liis was struck by the example, and could hardly comprehend how she would feel if she lost the ability to listen to it.
"It's deeper than that though, Doctor McKay," insisted Trick, as he took a moment to ponder how he was going to explain this to the Captain. "Captain, when you meet a person for the first time, you make judgments immediately, correct?"
"Don't we all to some extent?" As she spoke, Liis considered the fact that every time in her life she'd ever gone against her first gut impression of someone, she regretted it.
"Humans do, Bajorans do, and that's natural for most non-empathic species. You rely on your visual, and other senses to come to a conclusion about the person. You may be willing to change such judgments afterwards, but there's still the initial judgment. You even do it with old friends or colleagues, you judge their mood and their frame of mind by what your vision, hearing, and other senses tell you.
"Betazoids don't experience it like that at all. We just know, right off the bat. Our empathy tells us exactly what a person is like as their emotions are like an open book to read."
"Also..." Dalton continued, "...empathy isn't exactly a robotic sense." Trick nodded in agreement, and Zanh raised an annoyed eyebrow as she crossed her arms and silently urged the LMH to explain himself.
"Androids can hear and see Captain, but very rarely are they made with the function to process touch, taste, and smell. Think of hearing and seeing as robotic functions; in a lot of ways organics depend on them the most, but in some ways the remaining three are more tragic to lose."
Zanh understood that it is tragic to lose any sense, but she had seen people do so and, for the most part, recover. Jariel had lost his ability to speak, and he had adapted, she wondered why these two were acting as if someone had just died, instead of looking at this as a challenge that Vol could adjust to, and work around. Her frustration grew as it became obvious that there was some reluctance on the part of both gentleman to continue.
"I am in a bit of a hurry, so if you could just cut to the chase, boys," Zanh clarified, and Trick rolled his eyes and bit the bullet.
"The senses of sight and hearing aren't the primary senses used when interacting. . .intimately with other people, Captain."
*Oh.* Liis' eyes widening was her only outward reaction, as she grasped the full implications of what Vol had lost.
The LMH signaled for the Captain to stand beside him, and she circled the console and looked at the view screen he'd been looking at. There was a computer diagram of the inside of Vol's brain, with blood vessels and neural pathways.
"See this?" Dalton pointed to what looked like a tiny micro chip. "This gadget has attached itself to the wall of the blood vessel in his paracortex, and it's acting like an electromagnet."
Zanh looked up suddenly into the eyes of the hologram, that did not sound good.
"All the naturally occurring electricity that normally operates in that part of the brain is instead going directly into the foreign body. What's worse, is that's what is continuously supplying the machine with energy to work."
*Not good.* Thought Zanh, maybe there was a reason why straight-forward answers were a rarity on the Sera, it made bad news easier to deliver.
"So, the electrical impulses of Vol's brain are serving as this thing's battery?" Trick asked, dumbfounded.
"As long as Vol's brain is working, this thing will keep on sapping the necessary electricity in his paracortex."
"What if you were to induce a coma? Or to put it bluntly, what if you were to cause brain death to occur, and then revive him?" Asked Zanh plainly, but Dalton shook his head.
"This is a sophisticated piece of technology Sir, it would be like turning off the switch, and then just turning it back on again."
"So there is no way you can remove it, or turn it, and only it, off?"
"The device has embedded itself in the wall of a blood vessel. It's small enough not to cause a clot, but big enough to cause a hemorrhage if I remove it, I'd be ripping open a blood vessel in his brain, and it would most certainly kill him. As far as the device specifically..." The doctor pulled up some documents on the viewscreen.
"I've compared it to some similar known devices. . ." he mumbled beneath his breath, "all outlawed in the Federation, by the by, and I'm willing to bet that our bad bug is similar, if not identical."
"The Romulans have been known to possess technology of this sort, wonder where they got it." Zanh growled sarcastically. Now she knew full well where they'd gotten it; from the Strasa.
"There is no 'off' state for this thing, as far as I can hypothesize. It's made to be on and stay on, and inhibit brain activity indefinitely." McKay concluded.
"Damn," Liis whispered, softly shaking her head. She stepped slowly forward, and reached gently out toward the young Counselor's face. She hadn't known Tryst very long, still he had managed to work his way into her mind and heart from the first day, and seeing him like this was, for her, physically painful.
She brushed the tracks of Vol's tears away, the back of her hand softly touching his cheek in a much more gentle gesture than either the LMH, or London, thought her capable of.
"We're going to hang Blik for this, Vol, I promise you, and what's more," She looked up at Trick and Dalton, just the slightest glimmer of tears in the corners of large blue eyes which could not conceal a rage fathoms deep.
"We're going to find out how to get this thing out of your head, if I have to wring the information we need out of Blik with my bare hands."
Ensign Vol Tryst
Ship's Counselor
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
-=/\=- Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Ship's Counselor
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
and
-=/\=- Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012