ten_fwd_ooc | TEST DRIVE #10 - Cetacean Pool and Ten Forward

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test drives

TEST DRIVE #10 - Cetacean Pool and Ten Forward

Option 001. Cetacean Pool/Aquatics Lab: Of all the places in the world, you open your eyes and you find yourself in a medium-sized aquatics laboratory, filled with various living specimens along with various science officers bustling about trying to maintain order. There's much to explore here (and hopefully, in the crew's opinion, not break), but the main attraction is the large pool at the far end of the lab; enormous but tanklike in appearance, it contains several dolphins happily swimming about, seemingly without a care in the world.

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Option 002. Aboard the Enterprise, Ten Forward: You have no idea what just happened. One minute you were home, and now you're on a spaceship, in the middle of a crowded room. It looks like a bar. There are people eating and drinking, some in uniform, others not. Some are clearly aliens.

You've managed to land in Ten Forward a long bar with barstools and a bartender, tables sprinkled throughout, and the far wall is nothing but windows out to space. It looks like a nice lounge, low conversation making the room hum.

Better ask some questions and find out where you are, or just tap the closest person on the shoulder and try to make friends. The bar is open.

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"If I am to be bedridden until my body purges this foul poison, then it seems that I have time enough for a story, little brother."

He gave his brother a small weak smile. It was enough that he was alive, that they both were. The rest they could figure out after. Except... "The crew? They are well?" he asked, trying to sit.

He was a captain. Poison or no, there was no excuse for it, for him to have taken this long to ask about the crew, and about the ship. If he were to die, it should be in defense of the men who served under him and the vessel in his care. What right had he to lay here if they were not warned away from the foul island?

"Don't worry about the crew. Focus on yourself." He'll have to explain it all eventually, he knows, but now is not the time. "Which means you're staying where you are. If you dislodge anything the poison will take over again." He presses down lightly on Liam's shoulder again, trying to get him to lie back down.

How long does the cure take to make?

"After what happened to you, I couldn't serve the king anymore."

He didn't want to give in, to lay back without knowing. He should have trusted his brother. He would do his best to trust him now, as much as it galled to know not the fate of ship and crew.

So he lay back, and he listened, but what his brother said had him trying again to sit. "Killian, it has been at most, what, an hour? That is quite the short time to make such a choice, to so boldly declare such sentiment."

"I agree that what we were sent to do is appalling. I agree that it is not the work of one worthy of the loyalty we have thus far given, but I yet live. Even as we speak, you say a cure is being found. And I was the one who poisoned myself, not the King. We shall work together, brother. We shall yet find a way through this that does not imperil ship and crew, nor dangers your chances of becoming a captain yourself, some day."

"I am a captain, Liam. When the captain dies, the first officer takes his place." This is a conversation he doesn't relish having with Liam, but Liam deserves to know. "That hour for you has been three hundred years for me." Give or take.

"I couldn't serve someone who was so dishonorable. Not in good faith."

"Three hundred... Little brother, I agreed to trust you more, but I do not think it is quite fair to pull the leg of a bedridden man. I am demonstrably not dead, and after three hundred years, we both would be."

He gave his brother a wry smile. "I hurt rather too much to be dead."

"You're not right now, obviously, but you are in the time I come from. Everyone here is from different points in time. Sometimes even different versions of the same world."

He'd never lie to you, Liam, you know that.

"Three hundred, aye. Thanks to the magic of Neverland, where time doesn't move and no one grows old."

"Different points in time..." he repeated. He knew his brother wouldn't lie to him, he did, but this was a rather lot to take in. He was dead but he wasn't, his younger brother was 300 years older than him. Different versions of the world. Magic that brings immortality.

He closed his eyes again. Maybe... Maybe he had died. Certainly life had never been nearly so confusing.

"Aye, that's how I've come to understand it." He's seen evidence of that himself.

"I met someone here who said perhaps people are brought here to save them from something. It would seem that in your case you were."

"You are quite aware how daft this all seems, brother? That one minute I am dying of a poison that our king sent us to fetch as a cure, and then I am here, some three hundred years after I have been dead? I know you, my brother, and I trust you, but this... this is a rather lot to accept."

"I know it is." He's not sure he'd believe most of it himself if he hadn't lived it. "You've been to Neverland. You know what the magic there is like. I needed it."

"We were there ever so briefly, I know little of the land, other than the accursed vines that are doing their best to kill me as we speak."

"Three hundred years... brother. How... ever could that be? What has happened to you in all that time? The ship? The crew?"

"What happened to me is I lost my brother, and then I met someone, and I lost someone. I spent centuries in Neverland trying to achieve the wrong ends, and then met someone else and realized they were the wrong ends." It's a very short version, but they'll have time to go over it all.

"The ship is in the hands of someone who will take care of her." That much, at least, can be said about Blackbeard. "I've changed crews a few times, and did whatever I could to assure their safety."

"As any good captain would," he said quietly. There was more to his brother's tale, he was no fool, he could tell that much. He wished to know the whole of it, every last bit.

However... it was unlike Killian to hold back the way he was. Liam wanted to respect that, to let his brother come to things in his own time, though curiosity burned a hole in him nearly as painful as the poison.

He closed his eyes, so that he would not press his little brother, even with his expression. He was going to do the best he could by Killian. If this story were true, if he were to believe this... he had abandoned his brother three hundred years ago, because he was too stubborn to listen, because he trusted the wrong person too much and the right person too little.

He had a lot to make up for, and he was not, curse his own eyes, going to let his little brother down. Not again. Never again.

"Liam." He knows no harm will come to Liam while he's hooked up to these things, but he's not ready to be done talking to him yet. They have three hundred years of catching up to do.

"The cure is finished. Drink it and we can leave this infernal place behind and find somewhere more comfortable to go. I have much to tell you."

On the one hand, he doesn't want to trust anything that comes from Gold, but on the other, it wasn't him who asked for this, and he's not the one it's intended for. Gold has no reason to harm Liam. Does he?

He opened his eyes and nodded slightly. "Thank you, brother." he reached for the tonic.

"Well, down the hatch," he murmured, then drank it in a single gulp.

He closed his eyes, feeling the effects spread through him. After a moment he sat up, feeling fit, feeling as good as he did before he picked up the curséd branch.

"Back to my old self, little brother," he said, rolling his shoulders. He stared at Killian a moment, then pulled him into a hug. It had been the longest hour or so of his life, but for Killian... it had been 300 years. On both sides, this was long over done.

He's relieved, incredibly relieved, to see that it's the same cure that David got, and that Liam is fine, he's alive, there's no more poison trying to kill him.

He's never going to let Liam go again. It has been too long.

"We're all in trouble now."

He laughed, giving his brother one more thump on the back, before ending the hug. "Where to, brother? You know this odd place better than I."

Now for the first time he could look around, and strange as this place was, what caught his eye...

"Killian," he said, seeing for the first time the hook. Alarm was in his face, concern in his tone.

He follows Liam's gaze and knows what he's asking about. "I told you that I met someone, and then I lost her. The man who took her from me took my hand as well."

He grips Liam's arm right above the elbow. "I have much to tell you, brother."

"Clearly," he said, his gaze lingering on the hook a moment longer, before he looked up to his brother's face again. So many changes there, a very different man in some ways, than the little brother he set sail with that morning.

However in the face was a message, clear as the skies on a calm day. He was exactly the same.

Liam reached up and patted his brother on the cheek, on the face that was both so different, and yet... not different in the least.

"Yes, come. Let us find a place to sit and talk of all that must be said, all that you wish to say, my brother."

He heads out of sickbay and starts along the hallway, going quick enough that they won't be slowing down anyone who comes up behind them, but slow enough to allow Liam to begin to get his bearings in this new place.

He's silent until they're standing outside the doors of a turbolift. "Some of it won't be easy to hear, brother. I was headed down the wrong path for a very long time."

He clapped a hand on his brother's shoulder. "Whatever the problems may be, there is nothing that the Jones brothers can not over come," he assured up with a warm squeeze of his hand before letting it fall.

"What do you mean by the wrong path, exactly?"

"If it were only that simple, Liam." It does feel wonderful to know that there's someone on his side no matter what, and that he'll have some more support again. It's tiring having to justify yourself all the time.

"Vengeance, brother. I was bent on vengeance for someone I had lost, and it nearly destroyed me."

He shook his head and grasped his brother's shoulder again, firmly. "That's bad form, brother, and you are better than that. So much better than that. Tell me everything, and tell me what happened after. We'll work through everything we have to."

"Even the best ship takes on water now and again. But the best captain, and the best brothers, learn how to plug the holes, and bail out their younger brothers," he said with a bit of a grin.

He wasn't making light of his brother's issues to belittle him, or to make it seem like he did not take them seriously... but to show him that nothing he could say would ever stop him from being his little brother. He counted on his brother to realize that.

"I know I am, and I'm not proud of that man I was then. I'm working hard not to be him anymore."

He leads Liam along another hallway and back into the lounge where he'd been when he arrived. "You find us a table and I'll find us some refreshment. It's not intoxicating, so it won't lead to bad form. You have no need to worry there."

He nodded. "I can't imagine you taking that particular current anyway, my brother," he said with a warm smile. "This is a rather... odd meeting place, but I suppose if they do not sell spirits among the libations this place perhaps is an acceptable establishment for the moment." It still seemed rather too much like a tavern for his liking. However, so long as there were no bar-fights or lewdness, it would pass muster for the time being.

Really though, he would prefer the cabin of a sturdy ship upon the waves.

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