A Steamy Encounter - Part 1

Posted on 29 Sep 2025 @ 5:49am by Lieutenant Commander Raviran Dattek-Winters & Lieutenant JG Cajag Lagnas

1,959 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: The Festival of Unity
Location: Ensign Caj's Personal Quarters.
Timeline: After Updating the Brass

::On::

Caj watched on in dismay as his quarters began to fill with hot steam. He pulled at his collar as the heat began to intensify and the steam began to become thicker in the enclosed space. From the growing fog of steam a loud blurring noise could be heard. Caj frowned and tutted to himself. He waved his hand in front of his face to clear away some of the steam and stepped forward so he could more closely examine the cause of the steamy issues.

The Tellarite Organ was a massive musical instrument. One part pipe organ, one part steam engine and one part coral reef. Indeed the pipes of the organ were organic in nature in a form of coral from the underwater caves on Tellar, the classic steam engine not only powered the musical instrument but also made up part of its musical apparatus. Again it made another fog horn like noise and steam spewed forth from the coral pipes.

Caj took off his uniform jacket, the steam heat getting to him. The coral was an off blue colour not the usual red. It did not seam healthy. Caj then smile to himself a little and pressed his comm badge. "Ensign Lagnas to Lieutenant Winters. Medical medical emergency in my personal quarters please."

Ravi was just signing off shift and this was not at all a convenient time for a call out. Ben Kensington was taking over for the next shift and rather than have to answer an emergency call before he'd even finished signing in, he volunteered to finish off the hand over so that Ravi could go. Unsure if this was a favour or a mean pass off so that she would be unable to go back to her quarters in good time, Ravi answered the call.

She flipped her comm badge and answered. "On my way Ensign" and snatched up her med-kit before wishing Ben good luck with the paperwork and initiating a site to site Emergency Medical Transport to Ensign Caj's location. "Probably be back with the body parts if he's been doing one of his notorious experiments" she said to Ben as the blue lights powered up and just as she was shimmering into molecules and disappearing.

As the same blue shimmering reassembled the molecules of the CMO into the location locked in, as sent by the emergency call, Ravi found herself materialising inside Caj's quarters - totally engulfed in steam in such a measure as to resemble a sauna.

"Nature of your emergency Ensign?" she asked, spluttering with the humidity in the room and the change that if initiated in her unaccustomed lungs. "Are you burned?" she waved her hands in front of her face in a futile attempt to clear some steam away so she could see the patient and the problem.

"You got help me doctor. My pipe is a bluey green colour. Not its usual pink. I think its sick" another fog like horn noise came out of the steam.

Ravi, to her credit, was alarmed. "Where is all this steam coming from? I can't see you, let alone help with the problem......." Trying to think this out the CMO decided to try to attack the steam problem first. Nothing could be done about the emergency until there could be at least visual, if not contact with the patient.

"Computer, clear the air in this room" Ravi instructed the computer and immediately the air conditioning cut in and made short work of the accumulating steam revealing a sight that was neither anything LIKE what the doctor had been imagining nor anything at all that resembled the description she had been going by either.

"CAJ!" she spluttered. Part of her was indignant, part of her was shocked, part of her was still holding onto her original alarm. The last part of her felt like she was about to commit violence!

"EMERGENCY MEDICAL CALL OUT?" she didn't know at this moment whether to laugh, cry or have the Trill arrested.

"No look!" said Caj taking her hand and pointing at the Coral flume pipes "They are blue....they suppose to be red. The Coral must be ill."

"No, YOU look, you cute but annoying Trill!" Ravi answered, waving away Caj's pipe problems with her other hand.

"I am a Medical Officer. I don't do Xeno-veterinary ......." she hesitated, not really knowing what it was she was looking at technically. "not domesticated or wild, not sentient or 'challenged'. OKAY? You get it? You can't summon an emergency visit for a ...... a.....set of organic bag-pipes......? I'm not at your beck and call for any of your holistic Llamas, or your musical hermit crabs, or whatever that is.... nor any other weird and wonderful bits of waterborne, airborne or freakin' alcoholically programmed wildlife with or without sick pipes, sick coral or even sick minds!"

"What is wrong with you?" she sank into his sofa, exhausted by the adrenaline of an emergency response, a panic about what he might have done to himself in the middle of all that alarming steam and a mix of hurt and offended feelings about how he seemed to think he could treat her.

"And.......... " she began to breathe more slowly as she looked up at him from the sofa. "Apart from all of this..... I heard this morning that you've been telling your fellow new-intakes to this ship that you and I have started a relationship.... and that was presumably the polite version of whatever you told them about our drunken date? Thank you so much for spreading that around the ship." her eyes avoided his to hide the fact that she was getting upset now. The anger and outrage at being summoned for an ornamental musical instrument had gone and she had moved on to the hurt of the betrayal as she saw it, of their private moments together and the odd situation they had found themselves in when they came round the next morning.

"That had been a very private moment." she said, her voice so low pitched that it was barely a whisper. "My last relationship was a very public disaster and all the whole crew were shown how badly I was hurt when Lisalt dumped me with no ceremony nor care for my feelings or trashed self-respect. Now they're getting to have another good laugh at me. It's not my idea of how a friendship should go."

"Anyway, call a Xenobiologist for your sick friend. And just so you know, I'll not be on the next 'emergency team' you call out if you send for one again and if it's another false alarm......"

Ravi struggled up out of the deep and rather too softly upholstered sofa and tugged her tunic down in a way that showed her discomfort. Her voice began to crack just a little at the last words out of her mouth and she failed to finish the sentence, rather distressed that this had upset her so much. Clearly she had some feelings she hadn't acknowledged yet about the report she'd had regarding the gossip in the Shuttle yesterday and now that she was realising them, she wanted to just escape.

"Woah.....Woah....Woah there" Said Caj backing off with his hands out and stepping back to be in the protective space of his tellarite organ. "First of all. First of all " started Caj with growing discomposure. "first of all this. This" he pointed at the part steam engine, church organ part coral reef. "This is genuinely and being part organic. I thought you. You know you being the ships medical doctor could help with what was wrong with it. Its probably got an infection or something. But you know..." he flung his arms up in the guess."Like everything else, i got that wrong too."

Caj slumped down on the swivel stool in front of the organ and played a couple of notes on what looked like bone keys. The organ let out a soft gentle tone. Caj then swivelled on chair, his back facing the doctor. His fingers began to lightly touch the keys. What started off as random keys began to move into Samuel Barbers, Adagio for Strings, composition. "And for the record. I didn't talk about our drunken moment. I was talking with the other junior officers about our moment in sickbay, not our drunken moment. And what I Specifically said was that it was complicated. Because...Oh i dont know we almost Kissed!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQsgE0L450

Ravi hardly heard what Caj was saying because she was transfixed by the beauty and depth of the musical excellence that was emitting from the instrument......? creature...? The sound washed over her and soothed every hurt she had ever felt, or seemed to.

Walking towards it, as if in a kind of trance, the doctor felt pain. Not just her own but it's own as well. She had never been 'clinically' empathic as such but she did have a way to understand the suffering of others which was probably how she came into medical in the first place and as the music played out the emotions that seemed to be coming not only from its own keys and steam pipes, but also seemed to be drawing it out of both of their souls conjoined.

Whose souls though?

Was it the organic creature? Did that have a soul that it was expressing?

Or was it Caj's interpretation of the notes and therefore HIS soul music reaching out.

Ravi's fingers hovered close to the keys, softly coming close enough to Caj's that she was almost touching them.

Mesmerised she stopped just a few mm away from his moving fingers and the soft, sleek keys and she looked him right in the eyes suddenly, some kind of understanding happening slowly.

To bring Ravi back to reality, Caj stopped playing for a moment and the played the beginning notes from the song, 'we could have been anything' from the 1976 movie Bugsy Malone. “Excuse me. Weren’t we arguing?”

The bubble burst and metaphoric foam all over the moment, Ravi flinched and drew back her hand. The intensity of the Adagio and its effect on her already frazzled emotions, followed by the sudden jolt of the jangling little tune that Caj followed it with, all had a jarring effect on Ravi.

She was slapped back into business mode with a smarting that did really feel as if it had been a real cuff to the cheek.

It was now Ravi's turn to retreat into the protective space of the Tellerite Organ. She put an arm out towards it and snapped out of all reverie and straight into Doctor organiser. She slapped her comm badge and ordered the Main Ships' Computer to transfer the Tellarite Organ straight to a vacant holosuite and to set up a program to provide it with seawater that would be exactly the same pH value and saline content as the water in the oceans around the caves where it had come from.

She instructed that oxygenating plants be put into the water and that the organ be semi-submerged. She then instructed that she would be transported there as well. She made no mention of Caj. If he wanted to be there, that was up to him and he would no doubt make his own arrangements. She didn't say that last thought out loud, she seemed to have gone into her automated medical mode and was only focussed on the creature that was in need. Her newest patient.


TBC


A JP by:

Ensign Cajag Lagnas
Science Officer
USS Cygnus

and

Lieutenant Raviren Dattek-Winters
Chief Medical Officer
USS Cygnus

 

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