holy rings of betazed

[warpfairy]

Isabella doesn't really like being surrounded by Betazoids. She can ward off the scans - it's barely an effort - but they look at her like she's terribly unfriendly for doing it. Still, she almost never gets verbal complaints for it. She can conduct her shopping while Lalita hires a ship to go get the Harlequin from where he left her, and then they have a week to kill on the planet and its immediate environs while the tugboat goes out and fetches her.

Shopping isn't going to take that long. They should do tourist things!

Comments

[dream_me_up]

"Nah," he says cheerfully.

[warpfairy]

"Okay, I'll take north, you take south."

The species on this planet is nocturnal, so she sets a timer for the earlier sunrise of the two time zones to remind her to start scanning for life signs in the narrow area in question so she can beam down unsupervised.

That leaves a couple hours to draw up the plans in that language, if she wants to get it done today. Out comes the paper and the pens. Blank paper costs, but not all that much - it's compact and easy to make and nonperishable.

[dream_me_up]

Ooh ooh, Lalita can help with that too!

[warpfairy]

He can! He is welcome to. They will get it done faster that way. This will leave time for distraction. Especially since the scientists at that particular physics lab like to put in a late morning, apparently.

[dream_me_up]

Excellent. Time for distraction is one of his favourite kinds of time.

[warpfairy]

Eventually the life signs from the lab are not.

Isabella has a procedure here. She doesn't want to be caught on security cameras. She could just beam the plans down, but it would be hard to get them precisely targeted. She has a nice concealing outfit and a mini-EMP to disable surveillance devices long enough to find someone's desk and plunk down her gifts.

[dream_me_up]

"Oh, don't you just - I guess you can't target the beam that precisely," he says. "I can target the beam that precisely!"

[warpfairy]

"You can? You can land this," she says, holding up the plans, "on somebody's desk and we don't have to go down?"

[dream_me_up]

"Sure," he shrugs.

[warpfairy]

"Well," blinks Isabella. "All right then, that's much safer."

[dream_me_up]

He grins brightly.

[warpfairy]

She hands over the plans and gestures at the transporter pad, smiling back.

[dream_me_up]

First set of plans onto the transporter pad - he operates the transporter, with care and some math - the plans vanish. He repeats with the next set.

"And done," he says cheerfully. "Do we wait around to see what happens, or take off?"

[warpfairy]

"We get out of here and falsify the logs to suggest that we left yesterday," says Isabella, plopping into the pilot's chair and punching up impulse power.

[dream_me_up]

"Sounds good to me," says Lalita. He leans over her chair and kisses the top of her head.

[warpfairy]

Awww!

"And now we go survey some uninhabited systems and a pretty nebula."

[dream_me_up]

"Ooh, pretty nebulas. They're pretty," he says sagely.

[warpfairy]

"Why yes, they are! We can take some pictures and use them as PADD wallpaper," laughs Isabella.

[dream_me_up]

He giggles and leans over the back of her chair again to hug her.

[warpfairy]

Hugs! Isabella likes hugs. She likes having company. This was a good idea.

[dream_me_up]

It was.

He kisses the top of her head again. Mwah.

[warpfairy]

They are presently out of the system and warping along to the next. Isabella falsifies her records. "...Say, do you want to double-check my track-covering? No one's actually dug suspiciously around in my travel logs so I don't know if I'm doing a competent job at making it look like I wasn't around when 'warp was discovered' in the relevant systems."

[dream_me_up]

"Sure," he says, and plops down in the copilot's chair and starts nosing around on the computer system.

[warpfairy]

Isabella's logs show - at least to casual inspection - that while she has visited all the systems that have mysteriously acquired warp (except for El'el Prime, which acquired warp while she was active but is not listed at all), it was never at the right time (except once when it was; it would not do to always be slightly off). Sometimes she finishes her surveys of those systems a week before, sometimes a month later.

[dream_me_up]

"You should probably arrange to not have visited more of them," he comments. "Even with shifting the timing, it's a pattern, and it's not like there's a crowd of other ships visiting these systems that you can get lost in. There's the problem of refueling history, but I'm sure we can figure out a way around that if we try."