Color Blind

Posted on Sat Sep 19th, 2015 @ 10:01pm by Commander Eliana Masters & Commander Andrew Matheson

Mission: Paradise Lost
Location: Flight Operations
Timeline: Prior to departing for Reneras

ON:

“Wait, what?”

“That’s right, departmental color change.”

“Oh dear, I have a confession to make,” Eliana Masters tugged at the collar of her uniform jacket.

“Ma’am?”

“Hypothetically speaking, I may not have read all of the contents of the PADD that ops sent over. I mean, if it has Mackenzie’s name on it, I usually just sign off on it,” a look of pseudo-realization spread across her face. “Oh god, I didn’t agree to get married too, did I?”

“What? No, just the departmental color redux. Since flight operations isn’t officially recognized by Starfleet…”

“Yeah, like that matters anymore.”

“Right? Anyway, we’re starting to go away from just the basic maroon, gold, and teal.”

“So, um, what color did I sign off for?”

“Grey.”

“Grey!? That’s not a uniform color! For crying out loud, my people are going to get run into by others who can’t see them against the deck plating. Please tell me there’s a chance I can choose something else.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, but command is staying in maroon, the air group is wearing blue, medical is teal, engineering and security are staying in gold. . . the list goes on, but what I’m saying is, the uniforms are already made up and they’re ready for distribution.”

“Oh alright. I’ll let everyone know at the departmental meeting in two days. Thanks for coming by to let me know they were ready,” Masters relented as she retrieved the notice that operations had sent over before. Sure enough, there were several attachments to the notice that contained renders and mockups of her department’s new threads.

“No worries ma’am. For what it’s worth, I saw them sitting in crates and I think you’ll like them more in person. The renders don’t really do them any justice.”

“Let us hope,” Masters nodded in return.

The man from operations left her office, leaving Eliana alone with her reflection in the window. Undoing the zipper on her jacket, she pulled at the hemline and lazily spun around in her chair, modeling the garment to herself. She had always worn maroon since she joined Starfleet, but change was imminent.

“I’m leaving the office early; I have to go to operations for a minute. You know how to reach me,” Masters announced to the desk as she walked out of flight country. Jacket still undone, she had a purpose to her stride and a look on her face that almost dared anyone to say something about the breach of dress code.

The turbolift ride over to operations was a short one. Masters was still a relative newcomer, so very few people even acknowledged her passage as she walked through the double doors and made a beeline for one desk in particular. She sat down on the edge and waited for the desk’s occupant to look up and notice the intrusion.

Mary kept on clicking away at the terminal at her desk, which had an annoyingly large amount of paperwork on it given that there was now no one upstream to actually read it. She was aware that there was someone at the desk, and it was an incredibly short list of people that would confuse the desktop for a Starfleet-approved seating surface. The reflection on the desktop confirmed that the occupant wasn't completely Starfleet standard at the moment as far as dress regs went, which narrowed it to one person. "Something I can do for you, Ellie?"

"I am not who you think I am," Masters shrouded her face with her jacket, attempting to deepen her voice as she did so. "My name is Natalia, Ellie's twin sister, and I'm here to impersonate her and acquire trade secrets so I can take them to the syndicate and live a life of luxury and debauchery."

Eliana waited for a moment to see if there would be any kind of response, but none was coming. She returned to her normal posture, trying to look and see what Mary was working on.

"Your commitment to security and your friendship to members on the command staff is to be commended," the El Aurian deadpanned. "But on a more serious note, when are you done with your shift?"

Mary chuckled. "Seems to me you wouldn't need to steal trade secrets to live that lifestyle, Natalia. Ellie does pretty well with that just being herself." She looked at the chrono display. "As to being off-shift, that happened two hours ago. I was just trying to finish off the last of these Federation-approved checkbox torture devices so that I could have a clean start with whatever will inevitably replace them. And that - " as she emphatically tapped the screen " - was the last of them."

"You're sure I can't steal you for my department?" Ellie asked as she moved behind her best friend's chair and watched as she began to logout of the terminal. Masters pulled up a chair beside Mary's and swung it around so that she was sitting with the back of the chair facing the desk.

"I've missed you," Masters sighed from her newfound perch. "Work, work, work. Seems like I never get to come down here and disrupt productivity anymore. Your numbers must be through the roof this month."

"I'm not sure stealing me would be approved by either Starfleet or the commodore, ma'am. However, if a request for transfer came in from higher up the chain of command, I'd be obligated to give it at least some thought." Mary chuckled. "If your unit has better replicator techs than we do, it's not a hard thought process."

Mary stood up, trying not to have her spine sound like a deck of tongo cards being shuffled and mostly succeeding. "So, which trade secrets am I to be asked to reveal first, Commander?"

"Well, actually, I have a secret to tell you first. It's not really a secret, but only about four or five people on the station know about it, so that's kind of a secret, isn't it?"

Ellie stood up, swung the chair back around and returned it to the desk from which it had originated.

"Anyway, my department is getting new uniforms and uh, well, I signed off on the whole thing without really ever looking at a draft of anything. So, whether or not you realize it yet, you're going to come with me and we'll open Pandora's box together. Unless..." Masters paused for a moment.

"You haven't seen the unis already have you?!"

Mary chuckled. "I know they're here, but I haven't actually seen the ones for your department. The ones I've seen floating around have had some... interesting... colors." She looked over at Ellie. "So which one of your colleagues got you to sign off on fuchsia without looking?"

"Oh no no no, you can't fool me this time Mary Ashcroft, I know for a fact that I signed for grey," the tip of Eliana's finger wagged back and forth with each no. With a decidedly despondent look on her face, Masters looked very much like a woman who was very anxious about the next half hour or so.

"Let's do this."

"Grey? Of the entire spectrum of colors, you manage to sign yourself up for multiple years of grey? You really are starting to slip a bit, ma'am." Mary caught the look and decided that it was time to give Ellie a little bit of a break. "It could always be worse. Given some of the scuttlebutt I've heard about that new diplomat getting almost blown up and almost shot on his first two walkabouts, I'm surprised he didn't fight to get away from purple."

Tapping her PADD, it was the matter of a moment for her to locate the proper storage crates and a couple minutes walk back through the storerooms to the crates in question. "Your destiny awaits, Ellie."

A series of eight button presses were required on the digital keypad in order to unlock the crate. Each department had their own combination. They were supposed to be secret in theory, but just about everyone knew a few, if not all, of the other departments' codes. It was hard to avoid, especially since everything from replicator access to travel benefits depended on the system.

Inside the crate, there were boxes arranged neatly into rows. Each successive row was a various size of a particular piece of the uniform whereas each column was a different style. This crate in particular contained shirts and jackets. Gone were the days of everyone wearing the same uniform style. In fact, if one were to get creative and find a good tailor, he or she could almost make a standard uniform fit comfortably.

"Oh, that's not so bad really," Masters quipped as she reached for the newest version of the jacket she was currently half-wearing. Quickly swapping the new for the old, she spun around and did her best model walk in order to show off the new design.

"I sort of like the greyscale. Makes it look like we're permanently in dress uniform, doesn't it?"

"That may be the first time where I've ever heard the dress uniform invoked in a positive fashion, ma'am." Mary took a close look at Ellie. "Are you sure you aren't your evil twin?" She was quietly impressed with the color scheme. Whoever had decided on this color scheme for the department had actually made a good decision.

"That said, this would also be an inducement for that stealing to your department, ma'am. Those do look nice."

Masters only reply was a nod of satisfaction before removing the jacket and resealing the box from which it had come. She then proceeded to dig through a few of the adjacent crates, amassing a collection of garments that would suit the pilots, mechanics, and line staff through their normal shifts, as well as any special occasions that might arise.

"Fancy stitchwork, this," Ellie emitted a low whistle as she held up the newest edition of the flightsuit. "Here, hold these, I gotta try this on."

Removing her uniform and handing the pieces for her friend to hold, Masters stepped into the flightsuit and began to zip it up. As she stretched to do so, her undershirt lifted momentarily, revealing a jagged scar that very few people knew about. Even Eliana herself had forgotten most of the associated story, but she could tell by the look on Mary's face that she had yet to share it.

Mary involuntarily winced at the sight of the scar. "Klingon mating ritual gone awry, ma'am? That looks... distressing." There wasn't much else she could do at the moment while doubling as a clothes rack, although in hindsight flippancy was probably not the best tack to be taking on this topic. "You do pretty well for yourself blindly signing requisitions, if I do say so myself."

"Oh that?" Masters glanced down at her right side. "I know it looks awful, and it hurt like a sonuvabitch when it happened, but it's nothing more than a story to tell now. I guess I never really told you, but I used to lead a more dangerous life as, well, basically as a pirate on the frontier. When you're able to fly, own your own ship, and can apply the right combination of flirtatious behavior and elbow grease, it's pretty easy to make a living. I've got plenty of stories to tell Mary, and the great thing is that most of 'em are true!"

Masters zipped up the rest of her flightsuit and slowly turned around to face her friend.

"Well then, how do I look? Perhaps more importantly, would you hit on me if you saw me in it?" Eliana flashed one of her signature, mischievous smiles.

"Pirate on the frontier... So not much of a job transition moving to flight ops for this starbase, then." Mary chuckled and looked at her friend in the flightsuit. "As to the hitting on you - I wouldn't, personally, but that's nothing against you or the flightsuit. However, if I also happened to be cruising the same bar you were, I'd send every guy that wasn't interested in me and wasn't a total waste of chemicals over to you - if only to hope one of them would run off with you and up my odds." A quizzical look crossed her face. "So is the pirate part one of the true stories?"

"Well, it's a slight exaggeration I guess. My sister and I ran a charter company out of Cairo colony for a while. She took care of the business side of things and I took take of the logistics and flying. She's my identical twin and in the business world, you can work that to your advantage. You see, we had a reputation for being everywhere at once, and no one could really ever tell if they were dealing with me or with Natalia. But, we weren't pirates. We just carried stuff in freighters around the area, that's all."

Boxes were put back into their places and the crates were resealed. Walking over to a nearby terminal, Eliana accepted the delivery of greater than ten thousand pieces of uniform and associated accessories. As soon as the computer had verified her identity, the station's site to site transporters got to work delivering the crates to the flight operations storage facilities.

"That said," Masters continued, "we were constantly running from the real pirates and eventually we had a big enough convoy that the Federation started to take notice. That's when we got out of business and joined up. They'll deny it to this day, but I'm convinced that the Federation was annexing colonies in the area. I can't get a straight answer out of anyone," she shrugged before adding, "and it's probably why I'm still only a O-5 after all this time."

Mary nodded. "The Federation was looking for all the resources it could get after the Dominion and Borg issues. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the more unscrupulous diplomatic types weren't rattling the sabers about the next boogeyman under the bed in order to convince people that the Federation they know is safer than the Romulan they don't." She sighed, frustrated. "It's not supposed to work that way, but we both know better. That previous idiot Admiral out in the Briar Patch that the Enterprise had to stop... Everyone has their games, I guess."

Looking over at Ellie, she smiled. "As to you still being only an O-5, there's an old Earth saying that might explain it too. Heaven won't have you, and hell's afraid you'd take over."

"Don't be ridiculous, I frequent both locations on a weekly basis," Eliana laughed. "Even if they tried again, I'd never let them promote me away from this job. I like to hang on to my idealism and the thought that people are still capable of some good out here. I'm glad you still have a little bit of that too."

Masters leaned over and gave Mary a big, suffocating hug. As they separated, the last of the crates was being transported and the room that they had been standing in was empty once again. The two women started to walk back towards the entrance of the storerooms.

"I'm thankful each and every day I get to call you friend Mary Ashcroft. One of these days, I'll shape up and be a better friend to you, I promise. But for now, I have to resort to bribes so we're gonna have to settle for lunch at our favorite spot."

Mary smiled. "If you changed things up, Ellie, you'd run the risk of losing that vital quality that makes you so good of a friend. Besides - you give impeccable bribes." As they headed out of the storerooms, she decided to go with her gut on something she had been considering. "As it stands, I'd been hearing rumblings that there were likely to be too many people filling out checkboxes in Ops with the changed status out here. If my options are something over in your department versus a lateral shift where I might actually have to do work... Who would I need to send a transfer request to for consideration?"

"Well, normally, I'd say you would have to go through the official channels, but then what would be the use of having friends in high places, right?" Eliana thought about the process for a moment, listing out in her mind the official process and where shortcuts could be taken. "Basically, if you can get approval from your department head, I'll take care of everything from there. I don't think MacKenzie will care much, but when it comes to things like this, it's always better to ask permission."

Mary nodded. "That shouldn't be too difficult. I already overheard some grumbling about how it was going to be unfair to force someone into another department just to keep everyone optimally utilized, so getting a volunteer will probably brighten their day. I'll look over your department roster, find a niche that I could justifiably fill, and get that rolling. AFTER you make good on the previously aforementioned lunch bribe, of course, ma'am."

"After you, mon amie."

OFF:

Eliana Masters

and

Mary Ashcroft (written by Matheson)