Post by LT. CMDR. MONTGOMERY SCOTT on Jun 5, 2009 9:49:06 GMT -6
DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST
Some days, Scotty thought, just looked like they'd be horrible days from the start. He should have known, he should have suspected the second he fell out of bed, feet entwined in a hopeless knot with his sheets, that the rest of the day wasn't going to get all that much better. He started to realize it, though, when the coffee was lukewarm and watered down, and when three separate people ran into him on his way to Engineering. There weren't even that many people left on the ship; weren't they all supposed to be on shore leave? He'd stayed here because he thought he'd be able to get some things done while everyone was off doing questionable things with landlubbers. But by the time he got to Engineering, he was starting to wish he'd left the ship with the others. His head hurt (possibly a result of his activities the evening before, which had involved a bottle of scotch that had been full at seven last night), and something was buzzing.
"What is that noise?" he demanded, upon entering the room, but there was no one there to answer him. Apparently, most of his engineering staff had left the ship or weren't so inclined as he was to drag themselves out of bed on mornings they didn't have to. Scotty wasn't sure why he hadn't slept in himself, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he'd trained himself to wake up at precisely five thirty in the morning, even when he had a hangover. The aching in his head had allowed him to laze around until six thirty, but after that, he was awake enough that there hadn't been any point in staying in bed any longer. So here he was.
He was in the process of rewiring some of the controls, a pet project he'd taken on and hoped to have completed by the time the ship was deployed again. Dropping to his knees in front of one of the consoles, he reached for his tool kit, grasping for a specific tool, and began to remove the panel covering the inner workings of the console. When he was done with this, the consoles would be much more efficient, by .03%, if his calculations and equations had all been correct, but it was important that he complete it before everyone came back on board and started using the controls again. It wouldn't do to have the controls out of commission when people started poking on them.
As he sat there, doing the thing he did best, he started to relax, and the humming he'd heard (which turned out to be the lighting - never so noisy as when one was hung over) faded to the back of his mind, where it became something of a backdrop, keeping him from sitting in utter silence. After a little while, he started some humming on his own, some off-kilter tune he'd heard on an obscure radio station he'd managed to pick up in his quarters. It was amazing how the high-power frequencies of the ship could disrupt virtually anything anyone would want to listen to coming in on the radio from the planet below.
He eyed a pair of wires, then reached for his wire cutters. He was slightly glad no one else was around; just because he was comfortable enough with the ship's workings to tinker with them didn't mean he wanted some of the younger engineers getting gutsy, following his example and going around cutting on things. The wires he'd pulled out were quickly trimmed and rerouted elsewhere, and he cleaned up the evidence efficiently with the molecular soldering iron, which wasn't so much an iron as it was just called that due to tradition. That was another tool Scotty'd made more useful with his own additions. He could safely say that his own molecular soldering iron heated up faster than any other one Starfleet had ever issued. Granted, it occasionally shot harmless electrical sparks at its user, but that occurrence was so rare that Scotty considered it very much worth the discomfort to have the convenience of an added twenty seconds of free time to work on whatever he was currently doing.
TOMORROW IS CANCELED
