The Search for Gizmo

Posted on 12 Mar 2021 @ 12:05am by Ensign Quinn Mackie & Ensign Kelly Khan
Edited on on 17 Mar 2021 @ 1:50am

3,776 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Extinction
Location: Khan/Mackie Cabin
Timeline: Mission Day 4 at 1730

Kelly felt like something was missing, but she couldn't put her finger on it. She looked around the small quarters that she shared with Quinn and Gizmo, but something felt off. Then she realized that Gizmo's food and water bowl was still full. She went over to it and checked to make sure there wasn't a tiny hole revealing the bottom of the bowl. She had learned that any sized hole in his food bowl meant he was going to starve to death.

"TIger? Have you seen Gizzy?" she asked as she knelt and looked under the bed.

Quinn looked up from the padd he held as he sat in a chair next to the desk. Having shared quarters was nice, but it seemed odd that only one desk had been appropriated to the cabin. Being in Operations, one would think that he would have found spare furniture somewhere, but the last thing he needed to do was to bring his work home with him. He needed those degrees of separation, even now. "Actually... no. I don't even think I saw him this morning now that I think about it."

"I don't think I did either," the petite brunette said as she looked behind the couch. "Gizzy! Here poof ball! Where are you?" she called as she looked around for a minute.

"Is he sleeping under the bed?" Quinn asked. He didn't get up, but he started looking around for any potential hiding spots. Gizmo was still a young feline, twice the size when they'd first got him. Like many cats, he tended to slide into the most unusual of places to sleep or hide.

"Already checked there," Kelly said before she looked in the small wardrobe and pushed stuff aside. "He isn't in here, either. Do you think he got in the vents again?"

"It's always possible." Quinn stood up and picked up a tricorder Kelly kept on the desk. "I tell you though, once we find him, we need to put a tracker on him. Catch." He tossed the tricorder at Kelly and started to look inside the open desk drawers.

She caught it and activated it, then swept their small quarters. "Hmph. Of course he isn't here and you're right about the tracker. I did that for the Captain's twins with those onesies, so it wouldn't be too hard to put on in a collar." She adjusted the tricorder to past traces and scanned. "Geez...he's all over the place," she muttered as she turned in a circle. "Including the right wall..."

"Are you picking up a lifesign, or just his fur?" Quinn asked. He still looked around inside the desk. The drawers were open just enough for a cat to slip in and out. He wouldn't put it past Gizmo to slip into a dark corner just for some shut-eye. The first two drawers came up empty, and Quinn closed them fully to ensure that Gizmo had fewer places to run. Something in the last drawer, however, caught his eye.

"What's this?" he muttered, pulling out a strange picture.

It was a picture of Kelly, but not one he had seen before. In it, she wore an sleeveless white wedding dress that flared out in a bell shape around her feet and a semi opaque front shield revealed her legs a little. She's smiling in the photo and there's roses and creeper vines on a wall behind her.

"What's what?" Kelly asked. "And fur, mainly. There's a paw print halfway up the wall, too. But he isn't in here."

Quinn wasn't paying too much attention to what Kelly was currently saying. In fact, he was a bit taken aback by the image. Was he not on the same page as Kelly? Was there something he had missed? Some sort of signal or statement? "I, uh..." he stammered. "You, uh..."

"Gizzy get your tongue, Tiger?" she asked as she headed towards him from the other side of the room.

"No, uh..." Quinn still couldn't look up from the picture, completely taken aback by how beautiful she looked. "I, uh, found this. You're... stunning..."

Kelly saw what was in his hand and flushed, then looked away for a moment before glancing back. "Thank you, Quinn. It was, uh, a picture from the Academy when I went to a party," she improvised.

"What kind of party do you wear a wedding gown to?" Quinn asked.

"Uh, a masquerade party?" she suggested.

"Where's the mask then?" Quinn was confused by the picture, but he was more perplexed now by Kelly. It was unlike her to hide things from him, and this clearly meant more to her than she was letting on.

Clearly, he wasn't going to let it go, not that she blamed him. "It's a wedding dress, Quinn. I was modeling some i the holodeck before and really liked that one, so I had the computer save it and made the picture. I just wanted to see what I looked like in some. Not that I plan on getting married anytime soon."

Quinn stammered, "You, you, you..." His eyes blinked several times, unable to overcome her explanation. "Marriage? Me? Why.... uh...."

Now Kelly couldn't resist and put on a big happy smile. "Did you just ask me, me, me to marriage you?" she asked.

"Marriage? You? Me?" Quinn continued to stammer. "You? Me? I..." He looked back down at the picture, and then to Kelly, and back down again. "I... Uh... Marriage?"

Since he seemed to be stuck on a loop, she reached to take the picture from him and set it face down, then kissed him. "Yes. In ten years, two months, fourteen days, four hours and fifty-one minutes. That's when we will get marriaged."

"Ten... ten..." Quinn stammered, his mental calculator coming back online nice and slow. "Ten. Two. Four... fourteen..." He sighed and shook his head. "That seems like a long time. You're not wanting to wait until... until you're a Captain or something are you?"

"It doesn't matter," Kelly said. "It's just a picture. Let's go find Gizmo before one of those Spidermunks eats him." She was a little disappointed at his reaction, but he was a nervous sort of young man. However, she still loved him and had no plans to force him into marriage with her.

"You think he went into the ventilation shafts again?" Quinn sat at the desk to fire up the desktop terminal. It would take him about a minute to get authorized access to the deck's internal sensors. "And... I don't think that was just a picture. I'd be lying if I said I never thought about it. Marriage that is."

Like stammering when you think about it? she mentally wondered while giving him a smile. "Marriage is hard while in the fleet," she offered. "There's no guarantee that couples will stay together on any given assignment and most commanding officers don't want families on their ships. Now, to find Gizmo. If he's in the shafts, we should be able to find him with no problem. All we have to do is call Security and see if one of their flying doodad things spotted him."

Gizmo could wait a second. Quinn felt like he'd crossed a line thanks to his bewilderment, and he wanted to make sure they were okay. "So you're saying you don't want to get married until one of us can actually settle down?" They'd been lucky to continue serving together for the last two years, but even Quinn thought that those days could end sooner than they'd expected.

Kelly looked at him, then gave him a kiss. "I love you, Quinn, but the blessing of some Starfleet officer means nothing if I can't have you. Of course I'd marry you. I just don't want to be separate from you. I'd give up my career if it meant staying with you."

Quinn scoffed and kissed her back. "Hell, no," he said with a sly smile. "If either of us is giving up a career, it's me. I think the afterlife would tear me apart if I kept Kelly Khan from becoming a test pilot and a Captain."

"Only if you plan on going to Gre'thor and you don't look Klingon to me, and you're honorable," she told him. "Now let's find Gizzy so we can have dinner."

An authorization flashed on the holographic display, and internal schematics of this section, plus four surrounding sections materialized. "All right, I'll work on this. You go ahead and call security."

"On it," Kelly said as she sent a communique to Security and a request for a drone search for the missing feline. She sent the last scan of him that she had from her tricorder, then tossed it aside.

* * *

In Security, an Andorian sat with his antennae nearly folded back. "Do we get calls for intruders or missing crew? No. An Ensign loses a quadruped felinoid and that's what we get to search for. Deploy a Type 1 and hope the creature doesn't eat it."

His companion laughed at the salty tone of his work schedule and launched one. "Drone Twelve away. Targeting Deck Nine vents and tubes."

* * *

Back in their quarters, Quinn shook his head. "There's signs of feline DNA in the surrounding three sectors. I know Gizmo isn't the only cat on board the ship, but I didn't think there were so many. We really need to put an ID tag under his skin when we find him."

"I know Ensign Mitchell has one," Kelly said as she stripped out of her uniform and put on a black one piece. "Well, time to get crawling. I hope Security doesn't think I'm an intruder."

"You know Ensign Mitchell has an ID tag?" Quinn joked. "Why on earth would someone low-jack themselves, especially on a starship?"

"She's Security," she said as if it were an obvious thing to do. "I wanted to low jack the Captain's twins."

"You... what?" Quinn asked, unsure if he should be appalled or not surprised in the least by her admission. He shook his head, adding, "Never mind. It doesn't matter. Let's get going, shall we?" Without waiting for a reply, he slipped into the ventilation shaft.

"I'm kidding," Kelly said as she ducked in after him after hooking her tricorder on her hip. "Which way is most likely for a curious kitten?" She asked while waiting for him to get ahead of her.

"Um," Quinn thought. "I think the little one usually works in left turns and twists at home. We should try left." He crawled forward and turned left at the first possibility, only to be greeted by a bulkhead. "Well, that's not going to work. This way's closed."

"How about the next left?" She suggested as she backed up to give him room to exit.

Quinn nodded as he backed out. "How many cabins are on this side of us on the deck? Five?" Quinn looked down the next several lefts, a choice that was easy since no other right turns existed. At the end of four of them were bulkheads and no loose vents. The fifth, however, was different. "Uh oh," he remarked. Instead of a bulkhead, he was met with an open vent, this one leading right out to the main corridor. "We might have an escape artist on our hands."

"Oh joy," Kelly quipped a bit sarcastically. "Well, we won't have to cut him out of anymore of those spidermunk webs. Left again?"

Quinn slipped out into the main corridor and pulled out his tricorder. He crouched beside the shaft entrance as the tricorder began to scan. His eyes, however, caught something before the tricorder did. "Well, it looks like Gizmo's been here," spotting a corner where a critter of sorts had repurposed for a bathroom. "We've got a little mess to clean up."

"Well, crap. Literally. What happened to the auto cleaners?" she asked. "We'll have to get it on the way back. How old is the spoor?"

"Looks like just a couple of minutes," Quinn said. "Which means he probably hasn't gotten far." He tapped a few buttons on the tricorder, having synced it with the internal sensors. "There are five felines in the surrounding three sectors. Three of them are in quarters, and two are running throughout the hall."

Kelly checked her own tricorder and studied the two feline signs. "Two of them. Great, he found a friend and they're on the run," she sighed before she made an adjustment for Gizmo's signature alone. "He looks to be about forty yards away in Corridor J. The game is afoot!" A part of her mind went back to the wedding picture for some reason and she hoped that both of them would forget it.

"Afoot!?" Quinn asked. "What am I? Holmes to your Watson?" As he took off towards Gizmo behind Kelly, he too drifted back to the wedding photo, thinking of that ultimate partnership. Was he really ready for that? Quinn shook his head, trying to clear the image for now. Right now the priority was Gizmo.

"Yes!" she exclaimed as she ran after him. "You are now Quinn Holmes and I am Kelly Watson or some such." She rounded a corner and nearly ran into a Bolian. "You! Have you seen a small furry orange creature running around?"

The Bolian looked startled at first, then gave an effervescent smile and quick nod of his head. "Oh my, yes," he readily said. "I was on the planet T'chok on a shoreleave back in...oh, what was it....?"

"I meant on the ship in the past half an hour," Kelly said, cutting him off before he could go into more details she didn't need. "Hope you had a great shoreleave, though!" she said as she darted around him.

"There!" Quinn called out, spotting a fast-moving patch of orange fur for just a moment. "Corridor K. I don't think he's running from us, he might be chasing something."

"Onward Tiger!" She exclaimed before she bolted down the corridor. "Gizzzzzy! Gizzzzzmo!"

A loud hiss came around from the next corner. Quinn turned the corner to see Gizmo face to face with a gray cat, twice Gizmo's size. "Hey!" he called out. But what he didn't expect was that the gray cat was the one doing the hissing, clearly on the defense."

"Hey, hey!" Kelly called out and was surprised to see that Gizmo was acting aggressive. "Gizmo! What's gotten into you?" she asked even though she didn't expect an answer as she went to do something very bad, which was the intent to pick up an aggressive feline.

Gizmo looked up at Kelly in surprise, allowing the larger cat to dart away down another corridor. "What was that all about?" Quinn asked aloud, not expecting anyone to have an answer. "I wonder what the little guy was defending."

"Or just feeling his way around other felines," she said as she scooped him up. "What were you up to, bubba?" she asked.

"Did we ever get him fixed?" Quinn asked, looking around the corner to see where the other cat had gone. "He's a feisty little one when he gets agitated."

"Last month." Kelly said. "But he's still a cat and a cat's gonna cat." She looked down at the floor to see if Gizmo had been protecting something the other cat. <-- (miss something here?)

"True, true." Quinn looked around a little more. "Well, I don't see anything. Let's take him back home. I think I'm going to replicate a mesh screen to go behind the vent. That should keep our little Houdini caged."

"Silly boy," she said as she gave the furball a scritch behind the ears and turned to head back. "Maybe we should get him a companion to keep him company."

"Two cats?" Quinn asked. "We'll get ourselves a nice little fur family in no time. We might have to wait until the next time we get to the starbase to do that. I don't think any of the cats aboard are pregnant."

"That and a bigger quarters, but...lower decks and all that jazz," Kelly said.

"Well, one of us will surely get promoted soon," Quinn said. "Lieutenants get access to bigger cabins. And we all know you've got the better chance of getting it before I do."

"I doubt that," she said as she headed back down the way they had came. "Mickey isn't letting me play in his playhouse."

"Mickey? Playhouse?" Quinn asked. There were times he wished he could better follow her euphemisms.

"McCullen and the bridge," Kelly explained.

"He's not much older than us," Quinn said with a shrug as they walked back down the corridor. "From what I hear, he's got a well-known Captain for a father, and scuttlebutt says that he's looking to make his own mark on life. He's probably focused on that before it destroys his career. But, if you want, I can talk to Lieutenant Akorem, get you some cross training in Operations."

"Oh no, he's living in daddy's shadow!" she said in mock horror. "What about the rest of us who are trying to climb the ladder the old fashioned way?" She came to their quarters and entered the unlock code.

"I can't answer that," Quinn replied. "But, I have to ask. Your goal is two fold. Test pilot, and captaincy. The helm of a starship only answers one of those paths. But, there's plenty of support craft aboard, and there's the squadron. What about putting some time in over there and pursue the other path for a while?"

"Who said a Captain couldn't be a test pilot?" Kelly asked as she set Gizmo down once the door closed behind them. "There are Captains of Engineering and everything else."

"True," Quinn admitted, sitting down on the bed. "But I'm just saying there's more than one path than through the ship's helm."

"You know my first love is Flight, Quinn," she said as she went to sit on the bed. "I seconded in Engineering so they couldn't sandbag me."

"That's why I say it's work seeing if the squadron will give you some flight hours, or at least simulation time. You've already got one brief stint in command, not to mention some time on the bridge. Shoot, we could even commandeer a shuttle and see what sort of performance modifications we can make. Make you a test pilot of our own."

"I was on track to do that with the fighters under Rocco...er, Commander Walsh's tutelage, but you know how things get sidetracked around here," Kelly said. "Then he got made Executive Officer and can't do it anymore. I flew a runabout through the warzone at Deep Space 11 during the final battle of the Consortium and...you know happened."

"Have you even asked Commander Alexander?" Quinn countered, trying not to remember the Battle of Deep Space 11. Escaping a burning ship was frightening enough. "She seems like someone who would be happy to keep that tutelage going."

"I guess I could," the little brunette said thoughtfully. "I haven't really talked to her."

Gizmo brushed up against Quinn's leg before jumping up onto the bed. He forced his way between Quinn and Kelly before sitting and purring. Quinn reached down to pet Gizmo. "What about you, little one?" he asked. "Any ambitions you need to prioritize?"

"Other than escaping and using the floor as a toilet," Kelly amended.

The cat simply purred and rested his head on Kelly's leg.

"I, for one," Quinn said, "am going to work on securing the ventilation system." In fact, Quinn stood and replaced the ventilation cover, and immediately covered it with a dresser. "It might get stuffy in here, but it'll keep Gizmo contained until I can get a mesh backing for the vent."

She gave Gizzy a pet and watched him. "We could request a force field for it so we don't have to worry at all."

"As many times as the Black Hawk's been known to lose power, that's not the best idea," Quinn countered. "Besides, I can make sure it's done first thing in the morning. But we probably should get him tagged, or at least a collar with a tag. I can probably even rig up a sensor alert to let us know anytime he leaves our room."

"You have a point," Kelly said. "Can you take him or should I?"

"Doesn't matter to me," Quinn replied. "Tags are handed out by security, and if Commander Di Pasquale is there, she might not give it to me. You'd have a better chance."

"Tiger," she said softly. "No one can blame you for that. She has a job to protect the crew and Gizzy is crew. 'nuff said."

"It's fine," Ensign Mackie sighed. "A couple months ago, no one wanted anything to do with me. It's a good thing I've got people like you and the Captain in my corner. Otherwise, I have no idea what I'd do."

"Quinn, look at this," Kelly said and raised her right hand.

He looked up at her, then over at her hand. Quinn wondered what she planned to do with it.

"If you don't stop bemoaning what happened, this hand will meet your face. Hard," she told him. "Now stop it. Please," she added softly.

In that moment, Quinn immediately understood. "Right," he admitted, albeit softly. "I'll stop bemoaning, and you've got to stop complaining about McCullen. There's more than one way to skin a cat... so to speak. We've both just got to find ways to work around or through our problems."

"Okay, okay," Kelly said and lowered her hand. "I wasn't actually going to slap you, you know. I just...yeah. I'll go talk to Commander Alexander."

"I know," Quinn admitted. "You've never tried to hurt me, and I know it's not something you would ever intentionally do."

"I couldn't if I wanted to, Quinn," she said. "I love you."

Quinn leaned in to kiss her as his left hand slipped up to cradle her neck. "I love you too, Kel."

For a moment, Kelly flinched as she remembered the last time he had put his hand on her neck in the holodeck before the Dolmoqour took her will. She forced herself calm and kissed him, but was sure he had noticed the flinch.

Kelly was correct in her assumption; Quinn did notice the flinch. Given their conversation from moments ago, he chose not to draw attention to it. The time had come to move forward, and move forward they would.

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