Judgement – Forward, trusty steed.... nooo, not backwards! Doh!
by Commander Chelsea Dunham & Commander Richard Dunham
Post Details
ON:
OLD: The blue haze of light surrounded them and their bodies dispersed in a beam of energy.
Chelsea felt the familiar tingle as the transporter disassembled them and reassembled them somewhere else, but amongst the usual feelings, there was something that felt like the rush of a soft puff of air on skin, which of course wasn't possible as they had no skin, nor any sensory feelings at all. It could only have been a mental interpretation of something slightly odd in the whole experience.
Only to re-materialise in the blue pulsating glow of a nearby warp core, in what appeared to be a starfleet engineering bay. This however was not the first thing on the mind of Rick Dunham. The first thing on his mind was that they had beamed into the middle of some sort of fire fight.
NEW:
Instinctively Chelsea ducked and threw herself behind a nearby console, dragging Rick behind her by his wrist.
"What the frack? We don't have *that* kind of warp core on the station......? Are we too far into the future? Did the stupid bastards manage to finally blow DS5 out of the sky?" she had to whisper loudly to be heard over the noise but was being careful not to draw attention to themselves.
"What the hell is this!" Said Dunham in exasperation, standing up from behind there cover as annoyance got the better of common sense. He had a quick brief look around before Chelsea quickly dragged him back down to the deck and back behind cover. "I'm sure I just saw the uniforms starfleet had before these ones." he said tugging on his own uniform.
"Rick? Could we have gone backwards? To before DS5 was ever here? I mean this isn't the newest ship of the line, is it? But it sure as heck isn't a starbase...." she asked.
"Please don't stand up and ask someone!" She held tightly to his arm, weighing him down so he wouldn't stand up again in that alarming manner, like a duck popping up on one of those ancient firing ranges that people used to make fun of. Only if Rick got himself shot, it wasn't going to be funny to Chelsea at all. For once, she lost her characteristic sense of humour.
Dunham wasn't really listening he was touching tips of his fingers to the bottom of his nose gently. He pulled them away and looked at them, there was blood. He rubbed his nose clean with the back of his sleeve hoping Chelsea wouldn't notice. Frowned and pulled out his tricorder. He looked at the data then lifted it up over the rim of the cover they were hiding behind like a submarine periscope. He then brought it back down and looked at the data one more. "There is an enormous amount of temporal energy here."
"I don't know enough about temporal energy to know what that means." Chelsea answered. He was wrong, she *had* noticed. She spent her time watching him so intently, partly because he was the centre of her world and partly because she could never get enough of soaking up how just looking at him made her feel. She decided against commenting on the spontaneous bleeding but made a medical mental note of what it might mean.
"How do we find out where we are without getting shot?" she asked, a rather obvious but fundamental question in the circumstances.
"I could go and ask someone" he said rather jokingly. But referencing her banning of said action earlier in the chain of events that had led them to this little predicament. But before the words had left his mouth a lance of green phaser fire passed over their head's. Hitting the force field surrounding the warp core. "All this temporal energy has acted as some sort of magnet to this point in space time."
"Sooooo... does that mean we're drawn here because of this temporal centre or is the centre happening *because* we're here?" Chelsea didn't understand.
"We were......" Dunham was interrupted by another lancing arch of phaser fire across his head. ".....drawn here, something at this point in time and space is crea......." he was interrupted again by shouts and another shot of phaser fire above their heads. "is creating a massive disruption in temporal energy sending out a ph......" another phaser shot drowned his words. "phasic wave through sub-space into non-linear temporal corsality creating...." he was interrupted again. This time it irked Dunham so much that he stood up again and shouted at the top of his lungs rather angrily. "WILL EVERYBODY STOP SHOOTING I'M TRYING TO TALK." Remarkably there was silence. Dunham gave satisfied nod and carried on talking. "...Creating sync on our energy patterns when we got into the transporter, resulting in it dragging us here."
Chelsea didn't know a lot about syncing their energy patterns but she was did understand about testosterone. The way Rick just stood up and stopped the whole incident with one commanding shout and then just went on with what he was saying had melted her completely. He was quite a spectacle to see standing there, tall, dark with that striking white streak in his hair and those awesome fiery eyes that blazed when he was mad. She looked up at him and sighed like a teenager.
"Um.... honey?" she offered quietly. "You seem to have an audience..." she stood up too and looked around at all the stunned and curious faces.
"Er... hello" she said a little shy at being stared at by all these eyes.
As they got up from behind their cover and Dunham had clearer and longer look around at their surroundings; he took in the view of a starfleet engineering bay, a engineering bay of one of the older Centaur Class Starships, but this one looked new. The Engineering bay looked like a cross between the constitution class starship and the later intrepid class. But as he took it all in there was no mistaking for Dunham the layout of this ship. This ship that was his father's first and last command. The USS Falkland.
It was surprisingly crowded, starfleet personnel, lay on the floor. Not dead. No he could see their chests moving slightly, indicating they were still breathing. But men in black body glove outfits each ringed with metal strips, stood scattered around the room, all pointing what Dunham assumed was some sort of weapon, weapons that were all pointing at them.
Chelsea looked around too, knowing nothing about the Falkland but very aware that this wasn't right. She instinctively moved closer to Rick and whispered. "Should we raise our hands and show them we're unarmed?"
"I dunno" said Dunham with a little comical shrug of his shoulders. "This is the first time i have been in this sort of situation before". Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. It was just a normal file scrolling up the green page of a monitor. But it was time and date stamped. If Dunham's memory served, it was only a matter of minutes before the ship blew up.
"What? What is it?" Chelsea watched his gaze and tried to guess what he was looking at.
"We have about four minutes until that thing over loads" he said shifting his thumb and pointing it over his shoulder at the warp core. he had always wondered what had done it, and now it looked like all the temporal energy was playing havoc with the ships warp field. Unrecognised, but the moment the ship went into warp it would blow.
"Is this.... your dad's ship??" Chelsea realised what exactly they were talking about now.
Dunham nodded slowly in agreement.
"Who are they?" she pointed to the men in metal with the odd weapons. "Did they make this happen?"
Dunham shook his head; again slowly, "i have no idea," he whispered, "Lets ask them!" he said with a smile and catching her eye with a sparkle in his. "Hello take me to your leader....."
Chelsea got an attack of the giggles. She choked and tried to hide it in a coughing fit.
"This isn't funny!" she managed to protest. "There's no time!" Suddenly she realised the irony of that comment and began to giggle again.
This was met by a small sea of bewildered glares. A man stepped forward he took out a small spherical electronic device. He pressed it. Out from it spread a huge blue energy bubble encompassing the entire room. it spread outward and outward until it despaired through the walls. "There" said the man "We are now within a time void stasis field. We are now out of time with the rest of the ship locked in one second. We can talk freely without any issues. Now who are you and what temporal agency do you represent."
There was a moment's silence and Chelsea looked at Rick expecting him to reply but he seemed lost in thought so she began.
"We don't represent a temporal agency. We just want to go home but as we're here, we'd also like to save this ship or at least the people on her?"
Dunham's head was racing again. He rubbed his temple with the tips of his fingers, trying to work off a pounding headache that had struck there, and with it more thought's, more ideas, that didn't quite seem his own in some way. But they were rushing through his brain like a storm of thought, he wiped his nose again with the back of his sleeve. looking down on it he saw more blood. But he didn't have time for that.
One of the black and metal suited men moved towards them. "I'm afraid you can't save these people. Their time has come, so to speak." he explained gently. "Now, tell me how you came here and who you are?"
"I'm a Starfleet Medical Officer, Lt. Cmdr Chelsea Adams and this is Lt. Commander Richard Dunham, Chief Flight Officer. We're both from a spacestation known a DS5 which i don't think exists at the time that this ship was in existence. Rick was drawn into a temporal anomaly when a space time rift appeared off the station in 2385 and a temporal agency person came to see us and told me to give him a formula to stabilise his temporal frequencies or he'd fade away, literally. I did that and we were drawn back in time, first to the time when the station was under construction, Rick built a time transporter using the temporal flux that was active around himself to get us home but we ended up here. That's all i know." she rattled off the lay-persons' summary as she saw it.
"Fools" said the man holding the device. "You are caught up in affairs you cannot begin to comprehend, and you" He pointed at Rick, "Your father warned me about you, said you would be the one to unravel his plans and in Time...How very fitting that your life will end here, where his was supposed to. Time said a Dunham died here and as your father is no longer here then I guess you will have to do."
"Your right dude I have no Idea what your talking about." said Rick with a flash of that Dunham charming smile. "But I tell you what I do know, and on a side note I seem to know an awful lot at the moment. I do know what I like. And what I like is bad guys that monologue and narrate. Because it gives me the opportunity to do this, he pulled one hand out from behind his back, were it had been hidden and working rapidly on a tricorder. He lifted it up for the men in black to see. Smiled a big grin, and promptly pressed a button on the tricorder. All the men seemed to disappear in a swirl of red fog.
Dunham then jumped over the body of one of the starfleet officers on the floor to get to a computer console. "Can't save the ship, but maybe able to delay the processes." he looked at Chelsea, who had a slightly bewildered look on her face "Well!" said Dunham enthusiastically "Ask me what I did."
"I'm not even sure i *want* to know.... i have no idea who you are, Commander but i'm just so glad I'm with you and not against you." Chelsea replied with a smile but her face was pale. This was all getting out of hand and Rick was bleeding openly from his nose now, pupils wide and speaking faster than normal - as if he was on an adrenalin high. She wanted to get him home before that man's prediction had a chance to come true. She was getting really scared now.
"Right!" said Dunham again in that now slightly manic enthusiasm his fingers almost a blur as they worked rapidly stir on the main engineering console. Beneath him starfleet officers began to stir on the floor. Dunham started to talk to himself as he worked "Not sure sure how long I can keep this up......" red lines of electric energy began to crackle around the warp field. "Can't eject......If I re route this......ahhhh" he fell to one knee, shook his head and got up again "....can I transport the warp core.....?.....maybe if I...." Dunham then collapsed to the floor, but not before slapping the console one last time. the warp core then de-materilsed."
Chelsea rushed to his side and turned him over. He was bleeding profusely from the nose now and his eyes had rolled back in his head. "Rick!" she screamed.
"Well not exactly how I thought things would turn out but, fair enough." Said Warren not looking a moments difference from the last time they met. "He'll be fine." said the man as he knelt down beside them, whilst applying hypo spray of some design to Ricks neck and injecting him. "I told him it would be a bad idea to do that, but would he listen?"
"What??" Chelsea was so completely bemused, worried and emotionally traumatised that she had no idea what was going on. She clung to the words "He'll be okay" because none of the rest made any sense to her.
"Never mind.... what about his dad?" she asked in a defeated tone, clinging to her husband-to-be in case someone from some other time came to whisk him away again.
"At this point in time, not good but there is nothing we can do about that right now. Needs to play out. But in my personal time line Rick and Ricks Dad are both fine, in fact he's un-plugging Rick right now. That's the thing with Psychic temporal impression extrapolaters, when you add your own mind to your past self it has a tendency to make thing over crowded in the old noggin" He scratched the stubble on his chin. "Ok lets get you crazy kids home."
He took out a small silver bracelet from his pocket and put it on Chelsea's wrist. "Ok when you're ready just say there's no place like home three times and it will be as if you never left, you know like Dorothy. Oh and one more thing, Rick's not going to remember any of this, at least not for a while, not until he times travels again, which....." he looked at his watch. "Won't be for a good few years yet, so you can't tell him anything. Just put him in bed he will wake up with a headache. That's it."
"That's it?!" she was exhausted. "No place like home? You're kidding me, right? PTIE's aren't possible. People were brain-damaged in the experiments..... unless you guys refined the technique?" She realised it was probably another of those questions her son couldn't answer. Remembering when Rick couldn't was going to cause her some problems though but right now she just wanted to get him home safely.
"Of course there's more to it than that, but do you really want me to explain the finite details of this...." he tapped the silver bracelet on her wrist "...magnificently complicated time travel device, or do you want to go home before these engineers around us get their act together and then start asking questions?"
"NO" Chelsea replied emphatically but with a smile for her son. "Thank you, but no. And I'll be a little less sceptical about PTIE medical papers the next time i see one on the Lancet Annals channel."
"urrmmm just one more thing." Said Warren a little uncertainly but sensing an opportunity. He spoke with a smile and a slightly tentative tone "If one of your kids accidentally sets fire to the living room carpet when he's three....go easy on him"
Gently wiping the blood from Rick's upper lip, Chelsea cradled him against her and gave one last long look at her handsome son. "Thank you 'Mister Warren' for everything, and I promise to remember about the carpet... " she smiled a warm, affectionate, serene smile. "I can't wait to watch you grow up. I'm a very happy and proud woman already. It's an wonderful privilege to see a glimpse of how well you're going to do and what wonders you're going to create."
Chelsea watched her future disappear as she repeated the phrase she was given to initiate the return to her own time. "There's no place like home" she repeated three times and felt the now becoming familiar buzz of the transporter-like state, with the whisper that the extra time element added.
Within seconds she was back in the Medical Lab on DS5 with all her familiar items around, although fortunately, none of her familiar staff at that precise moment.
Dunham groaned a little on the bio bed as he came around, his eyes flickering open, "I'm hungry" were the first words out of his mouth. Closely followed by one of more relevance "Why I am I in medical?"
"Because you don't eat enough?" Chelsea's flippant reply distracted him back to the subject of food and if that didn't keep him off the subject, she had the ace up her sleeve of reminding him he'd just been promoted. That should keep him busy. This wasn't going to be easy. She rolled her eyes silently and thought proudly of her son and the kind things her father-in-law had said. They helped a little as she began to chatter about Pizza, Rick's favourite food.
"So were good to go and get pizza?" Said Rick with a childish grin.
Off
A JP Between:
Lt Commander Richard Dunham
Wing Commander
&
Lt Commander Chelsea Adams
CMO - DS5
by Commander Chelsea Dunham & Commander Richard Dunham
Post Details
| Title | Forward, trusty steed.... nooo, not backwards! Doh! | |
| Mission | Judgement | |
| Author(s) | Commander Chelsea Dunham & Commander Richard Dunham | |
| Posted | Sun Oct 17, 2010 @ 5:41pm | |
| Location | USS Falklands/DS5 Sickbay | |
| Timeline | SD34 |
OLD: The blue haze of light surrounded them and their bodies dispersed in a beam of energy.
Chelsea felt the familiar tingle as the transporter disassembled them and reassembled them somewhere else, but amongst the usual feelings, there was something that felt like the rush of a soft puff of air on skin, which of course wasn't possible as they had no skin, nor any sensory feelings at all. It could only have been a mental interpretation of something slightly odd in the whole experience.
Only to re-materialise in the blue pulsating glow of a nearby warp core, in what appeared to be a starfleet engineering bay. This however was not the first thing on the mind of Rick Dunham. The first thing on his mind was that they had beamed into the middle of some sort of fire fight.
NEW:
Instinctively Chelsea ducked and threw herself behind a nearby console, dragging Rick behind her by his wrist.
"What the frack? We don't have *that* kind of warp core on the station......? Are we too far into the future? Did the stupid bastards manage to finally blow DS5 out of the sky?" she had to whisper loudly to be heard over the noise but was being careful not to draw attention to themselves.
"What the hell is this!" Said Dunham in exasperation, standing up from behind there cover as annoyance got the better of common sense. He had a quick brief look around before Chelsea quickly dragged him back down to the deck and back behind cover. "I'm sure I just saw the uniforms starfleet had before these ones." he said tugging on his own uniform.
"Rick? Could we have gone backwards? To before DS5 was ever here? I mean this isn't the newest ship of the line, is it? But it sure as heck isn't a starbase...." she asked.
"Please don't stand up and ask someone!" She held tightly to his arm, weighing him down so he wouldn't stand up again in that alarming manner, like a duck popping up on one of those ancient firing ranges that people used to make fun of. Only if Rick got himself shot, it wasn't going to be funny to Chelsea at all. For once, she lost her characteristic sense of humour.
Dunham wasn't really listening he was touching tips of his fingers to the bottom of his nose gently. He pulled them away and looked at them, there was blood. He rubbed his nose clean with the back of his sleeve hoping Chelsea wouldn't notice. Frowned and pulled out his tricorder. He looked at the data then lifted it up over the rim of the cover they were hiding behind like a submarine periscope. He then brought it back down and looked at the data one more. "There is an enormous amount of temporal energy here."
"I don't know enough about temporal energy to know what that means." Chelsea answered. He was wrong, she *had* noticed. She spent her time watching him so intently, partly because he was the centre of her world and partly because she could never get enough of soaking up how just looking at him made her feel. She decided against commenting on the spontaneous bleeding but made a medical mental note of what it might mean.
"How do we find out where we are without getting shot?" she asked, a rather obvious but fundamental question in the circumstances.
"I could go and ask someone" he said rather jokingly. But referencing her banning of said action earlier in the chain of events that had led them to this little predicament. But before the words had left his mouth a lance of green phaser fire passed over their head's. Hitting the force field surrounding the warp core. "All this temporal energy has acted as some sort of magnet to this point in space time."
"Sooooo... does that mean we're drawn here because of this temporal centre or is the centre happening *because* we're here?" Chelsea didn't understand.
"We were......" Dunham was interrupted by another lancing arch of phaser fire across his head. ".....drawn here, something at this point in time and space is crea......." he was interrupted again by shouts and another shot of phaser fire above their heads. "is creating a massive disruption in temporal energy sending out a ph......" another phaser shot drowned his words. "phasic wave through sub-space into non-linear temporal corsality creating...." he was interrupted again. This time it irked Dunham so much that he stood up again and shouted at the top of his lungs rather angrily. "WILL EVERYBODY STOP SHOOTING I'M TRYING TO TALK." Remarkably there was silence. Dunham gave satisfied nod and carried on talking. "...Creating sync on our energy patterns when we got into the transporter, resulting in it dragging us here."
Chelsea didn't know a lot about syncing their energy patterns but she was did understand about testosterone. The way Rick just stood up and stopped the whole incident with one commanding shout and then just went on with what he was saying had melted her completely. He was quite a spectacle to see standing there, tall, dark with that striking white streak in his hair and those awesome fiery eyes that blazed when he was mad. She looked up at him and sighed like a teenager.
"Um.... honey?" she offered quietly. "You seem to have an audience..." she stood up too and looked around at all the stunned and curious faces.
"Er... hello" she said a little shy at being stared at by all these eyes.
As they got up from behind their cover and Dunham had clearer and longer look around at their surroundings; he took in the view of a starfleet engineering bay, a engineering bay of one of the older Centaur Class Starships, but this one looked new. The Engineering bay looked like a cross between the constitution class starship and the later intrepid class. But as he took it all in there was no mistaking for Dunham the layout of this ship. This ship that was his father's first and last command. The USS Falkland.
It was surprisingly crowded, starfleet personnel, lay on the floor. Not dead. No he could see their chests moving slightly, indicating they were still breathing. But men in black body glove outfits each ringed with metal strips, stood scattered around the room, all pointing what Dunham assumed was some sort of weapon, weapons that were all pointing at them.
Chelsea looked around too, knowing nothing about the Falkland but very aware that this wasn't right. She instinctively moved closer to Rick and whispered. "Should we raise our hands and show them we're unarmed?"
"I dunno" said Dunham with a little comical shrug of his shoulders. "This is the first time i have been in this sort of situation before". Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. It was just a normal file scrolling up the green page of a monitor. But it was time and date stamped. If Dunham's memory served, it was only a matter of minutes before the ship blew up.
"What? What is it?" Chelsea watched his gaze and tried to guess what he was looking at.
"We have about four minutes until that thing over loads" he said shifting his thumb and pointing it over his shoulder at the warp core. he had always wondered what had done it, and now it looked like all the temporal energy was playing havoc with the ships warp field. Unrecognised, but the moment the ship went into warp it would blow.
"Is this.... your dad's ship??" Chelsea realised what exactly they were talking about now.
Dunham nodded slowly in agreement.
"Who are they?" she pointed to the men in metal with the odd weapons. "Did they make this happen?"
Dunham shook his head; again slowly, "i have no idea," he whispered, "Lets ask them!" he said with a smile and catching her eye with a sparkle in his. "Hello take me to your leader....."
Chelsea got an attack of the giggles. She choked and tried to hide it in a coughing fit.
"This isn't funny!" she managed to protest. "There's no time!" Suddenly she realised the irony of that comment and began to giggle again.
This was met by a small sea of bewildered glares. A man stepped forward he took out a small spherical electronic device. He pressed it. Out from it spread a huge blue energy bubble encompassing the entire room. it spread outward and outward until it despaired through the walls. "There" said the man "We are now within a time void stasis field. We are now out of time with the rest of the ship locked in one second. We can talk freely without any issues. Now who are you and what temporal agency do you represent."
There was a moment's silence and Chelsea looked at Rick expecting him to reply but he seemed lost in thought so she began.
"We don't represent a temporal agency. We just want to go home but as we're here, we'd also like to save this ship or at least the people on her?"
Dunham's head was racing again. He rubbed his temple with the tips of his fingers, trying to work off a pounding headache that had struck there, and with it more thought's, more ideas, that didn't quite seem his own in some way. But they were rushing through his brain like a storm of thought, he wiped his nose again with the back of his sleeve. looking down on it he saw more blood. But he didn't have time for that.
One of the black and metal suited men moved towards them. "I'm afraid you can't save these people. Their time has come, so to speak." he explained gently. "Now, tell me how you came here and who you are?"
"I'm a Starfleet Medical Officer, Lt. Cmdr Chelsea Adams and this is Lt. Commander Richard Dunham, Chief Flight Officer. We're both from a spacestation known a DS5 which i don't think exists at the time that this ship was in existence. Rick was drawn into a temporal anomaly when a space time rift appeared off the station in 2385 and a temporal agency person came to see us and told me to give him a formula to stabilise his temporal frequencies or he'd fade away, literally. I did that and we were drawn back in time, first to the time when the station was under construction, Rick built a time transporter using the temporal flux that was active around himself to get us home but we ended up here. That's all i know." she rattled off the lay-persons' summary as she saw it.
"Fools" said the man holding the device. "You are caught up in affairs you cannot begin to comprehend, and you" He pointed at Rick, "Your father warned me about you, said you would be the one to unravel his plans and in Time...How very fitting that your life will end here, where his was supposed to. Time said a Dunham died here and as your father is no longer here then I guess you will have to do."
"Your right dude I have no Idea what your talking about." said Rick with a flash of that Dunham charming smile. "But I tell you what I do know, and on a side note I seem to know an awful lot at the moment. I do know what I like. And what I like is bad guys that monologue and narrate. Because it gives me the opportunity to do this, he pulled one hand out from behind his back, were it had been hidden and working rapidly on a tricorder. He lifted it up for the men in black to see. Smiled a big grin, and promptly pressed a button on the tricorder. All the men seemed to disappear in a swirl of red fog.
Dunham then jumped over the body of one of the starfleet officers on the floor to get to a computer console. "Can't save the ship, but maybe able to delay the processes." he looked at Chelsea, who had a slightly bewildered look on her face "Well!" said Dunham enthusiastically "Ask me what I did."
"I'm not even sure i *want* to know.... i have no idea who you are, Commander but i'm just so glad I'm with you and not against you." Chelsea replied with a smile but her face was pale. This was all getting out of hand and Rick was bleeding openly from his nose now, pupils wide and speaking faster than normal - as if he was on an adrenalin high. She wanted to get him home before that man's prediction had a chance to come true. She was getting really scared now.
"Right!" said Dunham again in that now slightly manic enthusiasm his fingers almost a blur as they worked rapidly stir on the main engineering console. Beneath him starfleet officers began to stir on the floor. Dunham started to talk to himself as he worked "Not sure sure how long I can keep this up......" red lines of electric energy began to crackle around the warp field. "Can't eject......If I re route this......ahhhh" he fell to one knee, shook his head and got up again "....can I transport the warp core.....?.....maybe if I...." Dunham then collapsed to the floor, but not before slapping the console one last time. the warp core then de-materilsed."
Chelsea rushed to his side and turned him over. He was bleeding profusely from the nose now and his eyes had rolled back in his head. "Rick!" she screamed.
"Well not exactly how I thought things would turn out but, fair enough." Said Warren not looking a moments difference from the last time they met. "He'll be fine." said the man as he knelt down beside them, whilst applying hypo spray of some design to Ricks neck and injecting him. "I told him it would be a bad idea to do that, but would he listen?"
"What??" Chelsea was so completely bemused, worried and emotionally traumatised that she had no idea what was going on. She clung to the words "He'll be okay" because none of the rest made any sense to her.
"Never mind.... what about his dad?" she asked in a defeated tone, clinging to her husband-to-be in case someone from some other time came to whisk him away again.
"At this point in time, not good but there is nothing we can do about that right now. Needs to play out. But in my personal time line Rick and Ricks Dad are both fine, in fact he's un-plugging Rick right now. That's the thing with Psychic temporal impression extrapolaters, when you add your own mind to your past self it has a tendency to make thing over crowded in the old noggin" He scratched the stubble on his chin. "Ok lets get you crazy kids home."
He took out a small silver bracelet from his pocket and put it on Chelsea's wrist. "Ok when you're ready just say there's no place like home three times and it will be as if you never left, you know like Dorothy. Oh and one more thing, Rick's not going to remember any of this, at least not for a while, not until he times travels again, which....." he looked at his watch. "Won't be for a good few years yet, so you can't tell him anything. Just put him in bed he will wake up with a headache. That's it."
"That's it?!" she was exhausted. "No place like home? You're kidding me, right? PTIE's aren't possible. People were brain-damaged in the experiments..... unless you guys refined the technique?" She realised it was probably another of those questions her son couldn't answer. Remembering when Rick couldn't was going to cause her some problems though but right now she just wanted to get him home safely.
"Of course there's more to it than that, but do you really want me to explain the finite details of this...." he tapped the silver bracelet on her wrist "...magnificently complicated time travel device, or do you want to go home before these engineers around us get their act together and then start asking questions?"
"NO" Chelsea replied emphatically but with a smile for her son. "Thank you, but no. And I'll be a little less sceptical about PTIE medical papers the next time i see one on the Lancet Annals channel."
"urrmmm just one more thing." Said Warren a little uncertainly but sensing an opportunity. He spoke with a smile and a slightly tentative tone "If one of your kids accidentally sets fire to the living room carpet when he's three....go easy on him"
Gently wiping the blood from Rick's upper lip, Chelsea cradled him against her and gave one last long look at her handsome son. "Thank you 'Mister Warren' for everything, and I promise to remember about the carpet... " she smiled a warm, affectionate, serene smile. "I can't wait to watch you grow up. I'm a very happy and proud woman already. It's an wonderful privilege to see a glimpse of how well you're going to do and what wonders you're going to create."
Chelsea watched her future disappear as she repeated the phrase she was given to initiate the return to her own time. "There's no place like home" she repeated three times and felt the now becoming familiar buzz of the transporter-like state, with the whisper that the extra time element added.
Within seconds she was back in the Medical Lab on DS5 with all her familiar items around, although fortunately, none of her familiar staff at that precise moment.
Dunham groaned a little on the bio bed as he came around, his eyes flickering open, "I'm hungry" were the first words out of his mouth. Closely followed by one of more relevance "Why I am I in medical?"
"Because you don't eat enough?" Chelsea's flippant reply distracted him back to the subject of food and if that didn't keep him off the subject, she had the ace up her sleeve of reminding him he'd just been promoted. That should keep him busy. This wasn't going to be easy. She rolled her eyes silently and thought proudly of her son and the kind things her father-in-law had said. They helped a little as she began to chatter about Pizza, Rick's favourite food.
"So were good to go and get pizza?" Said Rick with a childish grin.
Off
A JP Between:
Lt Commander Richard Dunham
Wing Commander
&
Lt Commander Chelsea Adams
CMO - DS5