Captain Addison MacKenzie - Duronis Kinship

[Addison MacKenzie]

(( Quark’s Bar, Promenade, Deep Space Nine ))

Addison and Hallia sat perched in Quark’s Bar, each enjoying their beverages and the interesting characters that seemed to frequent the establishment. The CO couldn’t help but notice the wandering eyes of the Lurian seated at the opposite end of the bar, but she’d dismissed the lingering stare as she and Hallia exchanged their plans for their leave. The Yelikan engineer had asked her a question about interesting shore leave shenanigans, and had decided Addison should recall the time she and several other members of the Fleet had participated in a bar crawl as junior members on the Veritas.

 

MacKenzie: The Veritas was stationed in a part of the galaxy known as the Shoals – it’s an area of space between the Federation and the Tholian Assembly. It’s treacherous, warp drive is severely limited, and there’s a lot of hostile actors. ::waving her hand dismissively:: Anyway, there’s a world that was frequently part of our stops, and it had a greasy diner that had some of the best burgers in the galaxy. We were spending one shore leave on the planet and organized a bit of bar crawl.

 

Hallia nodded her head and shifted her body to face Addison a little more. Her chin rested in her hands, demonstrating interest in the story.

Yellir: And? How was it? Did you run the replicator’s dry?

 

MacKenzie: It was a night of too much alcohol, awful karaoke, nearly getting pummeled by a gang of drunk soccer hooligans, and Captain Rahman nearly ready to hand it to Captain Teller and Commander Ukinix for disorderly conduct…

 

The engineer’s eyes dropped to the surface of the bar top for a moment.

Yellir: How’d you get out of it? I imagine your CO was inches from popping you all in the brig for a few weeks.

 

Addison offered a dismissive eye roll, thinking about the shenanigans that some of her former colleagues had gotten into.

 

MacKenzie: Well, I suppose that’s the trick – knowing just where the line is, and knowing how not to catch the attention of your CO for the wrong reasons.

 

Yellir: ::slowly nodding:: Good to know, good to know. Although I couldn’t imagine it’s easy to hide a bender like that from a CO. 

Addison picked up her mug and took another swig.

 

MacKenzie: What about you? Anything interesting during prior shore leaves? ::she paused, recalling how many of them they’d been on together:: …that’s outside the statue of limitations?

 

Yellir: Well, with respect to the people we’ve worked with, I think this crew was a bit of a bad influence on me. I was a fairly good noodle before working with you lot.

The red-headed CO offered the slightest smirk.

MacKenzie: I can’t imagine either of those to be totally true… I’m sure there has to be something you can tell me without implicating any of the others…

Hallia chuckled as she sipped away at her drink.

Yellir: Okay— maybe I have one story I can tell you. Not as impressive as a bar crawl in the Shoals. But when I briefly worked on Duronis II’s medical staff, there was a concert that a few of us got invited to. I think it was… KnotSlip or something? I can’t remember, I mostly just went because I thought it would be a lot of fun. I think they’re an Earth group.

Addison nodded along.

MacKenzie: Sounds like the kind of group that would come out of Earth… Did you go?

Yellir: We went, of course it was a good time, but they had this thing… I…I think it was a mosh pit or something? None of us were from Earth and we didn’t really know what it was for, but it looked like fun at the time, so we all went in there. 

The CO kept a straight face. The story of her own mosh pit experience while at the Academy was likely best saved for a later day…

MacKenzie: I’m assuming the… moshing… wasn’t the problem?

Yellir: Well, less than ten minutes go by, a Nausicaan fellow I worked with bumped into this Proxcinian, covered in this big necklace of glowsticks, face full of stickers the band was handing out— and this Nausicaan gets absolutely folded like cheap laundry, lands face-first into a table. Next thing I know, me and a Petty Officer are giving him stitches while the band keeps playing cause he’s bleeding from his head. Neither of us were in the right mind because we may or may not have been incredibly intoxicated. 

Addison found her eyebrows raised, her head now resting on her hands, captivated by Hallia’s encapsulating recollection.

MacKenzie: You stitched him up while you were drunk??

Hallia let out a very reluctant chuckle before taking another sip.

Yellir: Oh don’t get me wrong, we did an awful job at the sutures, but he recovered pretty fine— probably just a very bruised ego from the incident. There might have been an infection, but that's what happens when you get stitches on a concert floor and your doctors took something a Laudean in a coat offered them. 

Addison nodded very slowly.

 

MacKenzie: I can absolutely imagine that to be true… The price when one goes moshing, I suppose… ::brief pause while taking another sip:: You said you served on Duronis II? Were you with the Embassy?

 

Yellir: Response

 

MacKenzie: I served as their Chief Medical Officer for a very brief time before they decommissioned the embassy and I was reassigned to the Thor…

 

It was a very short, very unpleasant assignment. There were a lot of things that she was proud of on her service record, including the work she’d done while serving on the Embassy, but there were a lot of experiences associated with her time there that left a lot to be desired.

 

Yellir: Response

 

MacKenzie: ::shrugging indifferently:: It was not a good time. The Laudeans were great, but there were a lot of problems with the Embassy that made serving there difficult. …it’s one of the reasons why the Embassy was decommissioned.

 

Yellir: Response

 


Tag, and TBC!

 

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Captain Addison MacKenzie, M.D., Ph.D., FASFS
Commanding Officer
USS Artemis-A

Captains Council Member at Large

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