Mission T11: A New Beginning
I think this mission gave me the most difficulty in regards to how pendantic am I going to be about how to do it right. The fic starts with a suicide attempt and I didn't want to be accused of telling people: suicide, this is how you do it.
A/N: Protectors of the Plot Continuum was founded by Jay and Acacia. Excerpts in italics taken from A New Beginning by Rachel Evans. This mission was chronicled by IndeMaat.
-oOo-
"I really wish you'd stop saying yes to every agent that tries to rope you in to doing a mission for them," Emma said as she looked over the black and red jumpsuit that was her disguise. "If they want to be rid of it, that usually means it isn't any good."
"The fact that it qualifies for a PPC mission means it isn't any good," Tasmin replied. "Besides, you'll like Star Trek Voyager. Lot's of men for you to ogle."
"Not really." Emma turned up her nose. "Tom's a pretty boy, but to me he's too much wholesome American apple pie. Tuvok, Chakotay and the Doctor are too old, and Harry's too sweet. Can't ogle a guy who's just sweet."
Tasmin briefly shook her head to shake off her partner's comments. She carefully opened one of the doors that faced the landing. She shushed her partner. "The Sue's in there. She's taking an overdose."
The young girl softly cried as she swallowed the 246'th pill. She was attempting to end her short, young life by overdosing on pain killers.
"By taking 246 pills? Shouldn't she be throwing up long before that? Or is it just me who has to suppress her gag-reflexes to swallow just the one pill?"
"That may just be you." Tasmin briefly turned her head to her partner. "But 246 pills is unnecessary. For instance, if she's taking acetaminophen or paracetamol, those 500 milligrams tablets, she only needs to take about forty or fifty for the dose to be lethal. Less, judging from the weight of her."
She had decided that 250 pills would be enough. Each pill had 200 milligrams in them, so she decided to take 5000 milligrams.
"Bad math," Tasmin said.
Emma pulled her notepad from her shoulder bag. "She's about to kill herself; math was probably the least of her worries." She made the note. "A question: if she dies, wouldn't that make this mission pointless?"
"Obviously, she doesn't die," Tasmin replied.
Using pain killers also seemed the best thing to do. She never liked pain
"Overdosing on painkillers can cause serious pain." Tasmin chuckled. "That's the irony."
"Wait a minute, I don't really want to die." she shouted.
No one heard except for the agents.
"Should we try to save her?" Emma asked. "It could prevent the rest of this story from happening."
Tasmin nodded. "That would be the best option." She threw open the door further and the agents entered the room.
"Where is she?" Emma looked around. She even checked under the bed and inside the wardrobe. "Empty pill bottles are still here." She picked up one of the bottles.
"I think she was just missed her. She's been transported to the Delta Quadrant."
"Never mind a logical explanation for that one." Emma dropped the bottle on the bed.
Tasmin pulled the remote activator from her duffel bag. "Let's go see about that."
-oOo-
The agents arrived on Voyager in the Transporter Room. Neelix had gathered an away team to go on a harvest trip to an uninhabited m-class planet.
There were four people who would be accompanying the Talaxian. Lieutenant Tom Paris, in case there were any problems medically. Tuvok and another security officer were also there, just in case they were needed and Seven of Nine knew a little bit about Delta Quadrant vegetation, so she was also coming along.
"Don't they have any ensigns that can do the actual berry picking?" Emma asked. "Two people for security on a planet without intelligent life seems a bit much."
"I guess that's where we come in." Tasmin grinned.
The agents stepped up to the plate with the away team and were transported to the planet's surface.
Neelix led the way to a large field with plants bearing edible fruits. There Seven found the Sue.
With the chapter break the agents were transported to Voyager's Sickbay. The Doctor had just finished treating the Sue and sat down to write a report on the case. Janeway walked in and he briefed her on the girl.
"I found an enormous amount of ibuprofen in her blood stream and a little more in her stomach still. Apparently she tried to kill herself by overdosing on it, although I'm surprised she used that specific medication. I'm not even sure how she got it. I doubt a normal replicator could produce such an old medication."
"Rather than wondering where she got the meds, shouldn't you wonder about how a human girl ended up on an uninhabited planet in the Delta Quadrant? If she's not from Voyager, then where is she from?" Tasmin glared at the Doctor and Janeway.
Janeway seemed to take the cue and asked if the girl was human. The Doctor confirmed this. Janeway decided to send another away team to the surface to search for any clues about how the girl got there.
"I guess their sensors are broken?" Emma said. "Aren't they supposed to be able to pick up if there's another space ship in the region?"
"They are, unless that one's cloaked. Perhaps their readings already told them there weren't any space ships near enough."
"Their readings also told them this planet was uninhabited."
"Point. That must by why Seven is sent to the surface again: surface scanners are no good. Write that down."
-oOo-
The Sue awoke from her overdose induced coma a few hours later, saw she was in unfamiliar surroundings, jumped off the biobed and cowered in a corner.
The agents had changed their disguises to the blue and black of the science staff, and watched from a safe distance as the Doctor tried to coax the Sue into getting back onto the bed.
Janeway, who had come back to Sick Bay when the Doctor informed her the Sue had woke up, suggested she'd give it a go.
"Maybe I could try. I'll explain to her about where she is and what happened."
"They found out what happened?" Emma asked. "I mean, found out how the Sue ended up seventy light years from the room where she tried to kill herself?"
"I doubt that."
Janeway approached the Sue. She told her who she was and that they were on a starship.
'Starship?' Noel thought, 'I must be either dreaming or I'm dead. I guess I'll just play along though.'
"I'm having a figment of my imagination, but I'll play along with it," Emma said. "Whatever happened to just being in denial of changes you can't explain?"
Janeway asked the Sue a few questions: how she got to the planet; whether she had been kidnapped; and what the last thing was she remembered. The last thing the Sue remembered was taking an overdose, and she did not want to talk about that. She gave a vague answer. The Doctor confronted her with the suicide nonetheless.
"You tried to commit suicide, didn't you? We can help you, if you'll let us."
The Sue denied this. She said she was just dreaming and urged herself to wake up.
They're wrong. They're just trying to get me to sleep longer so they can exist longer. Yeah. That's it. Everything is going to be fine. I'll wake up, and everything will be back to normal. Maybe I didn't even try to kill myself. Maybe that incident didn't happen either. Maybe those were part of the dream too. I hope so. This dream seems interesting though. I think I'll try it, see if I like it. If I sleep to late, mom will wake me up.'
The agents looked at each other.
"So, one moment she wants to wake up because she doesn't like the dream she's having, and the next she decides to sleep through it a little bit longer because it's interesting."
Tasmin shrugged. "Sues, go figure."
"We're just wondering how you got to that planet in the first place... with 21st century pain killers too." Kathryn said.
"Ibuprofen is short for iso-butyl-propanoic-phenolic acid," Tasmin said. "It's chemical formula is C13H18O2. Theoretically it could be made in the Delta Quadrant as well. Particularly because they found the compound ibuprofen in her blood, and not actually any pills on her person."
"Besides, it's a drug of the twentieth century."
"They still used it in the twenty-first."
Janeway and Tom left Sickbay so the Doctor could examine the Sue.
"What was Tom doing here, anyway?" Emma asked. "The Doctor only has one patient. He can handle things on his own."
Tasmin pointed to the Words that explained what Tom had been doing.
The whole time Tom was there, he was folding the girls clothes. Once they stabilized Noel, they put one of the blue gowns on her. He took her clothes with him.
"I guess that also explains the stack of clothes he was carrying when he left." Emma pulled her notepad from her bag.
"That's two officers doing things that make no sense for their rank, if at all."
"And a missing apostrophe, and the Sue has a boy's name."
"Actually, around the time the Sue was born it was a popular name for girls as well."
Emma raised her eyebrows. "Seriously? Even though all the famous Noels are male?"
Tasmin nodded.
"Huh." Emma scratched the charge of her list. When she looked up she noticed Sickbay had been replaced by a forest. "What happened?"
"The Sue is having a flashback of some sort."
She saw someone jogging in the woods through her minds eye. It was dark, it must have been late at night.
"Jogging in the woods at night? These places are notorious for not having street lights." Tasmin shook her head. "I'm an avid runner myself, and I don't run where I can't see where to put my feet. Particularly not, if I know the terrain is uneven. Twisting an ankle is far worse than missing an hour of practice."
"Well, it isn't that dark. I can see excellently what the runner is wearing and the colour of her hair."
"Two charges then: one, running in the dark; and two, the dark being light."
A man ran up to the female jogger and attacked her.
The Sue sat up with a start. Sickbay had turned back to normal. The Doctor asked her what the matter was. The Sue said she was fine and that she wanted to go to sleep. She curled up on the biobed.
The Doctor had finished his tricorder measurements and returned to his office.
"So, is the Doctor going to be on suicide watch?" Emma asked as she peered over the Doctor's shoulder and tried to make sense of the information on his datapad.
"Why?"
"Because he thinks she tried to kill herself. She might try again."
"If he's raised a force field around her she can't do much, can she?"
"I don't think he raised the force field. Even if he had she could still try to cut her arteries by chewing her wrists."
"She's hardly going to do that. She doesn't like pain. Besides, as she took the last pill she decided she wanted to live."
"Doctor doesn't know that."
"True."
After a while the Sue sat up again. She had been crying, but tried to wipe away the evidence of that. The Doctor left his office to talk to her. He asked her why she had been crying. The Sue denied the allegation.
"She should be given a mirror, so she can see that you can't just wipe away the red and puffiness."
In lieu of a mirror the Doctor described what the Sue looked like. The Sue argued that if she should talk to anyone she should talk to a psychiatrist.
Turbulence caused by a sudden jump of the story to a different location on the ship, knocked the agents over. When they scrambled up they found they were in Tom and B'Elanna's quarters.
"Tom and B'Elanna didn't share quarters until they got married, did they?" Emma asked.
"I'm not sure. I don't think so."
"Than this is a charge. Janeway told the Sue they'd been in the Delta Quadrant for four years. Tom and B'Elanna didn't get married until after six years."
"Please also take a note of the fact that he has the Sue's clothes spread out on his bed."
"That is kind of sick."
He set them up to look like some one was wearing them, but then disappeared, leaving their clothes behind.
But before the agents could find out what Tom was doing, or why, they were knocked over again and tossed onto the floor of Janeway's ready room. Janeway was sat at her desk and debriefed Chakotay about the Sue and Tom's findings. Tom believed the Sue to be from the past: the clothes she had been wearing had been twenty-first century.
"Tom's expertise is 1930s B-movies. I doubt he's much of an expert on twenty-first century fashion or fabrics."
"Which theoretically could also stem from the Delta Quadrant. It isn't impossible that there are civilisations in the Delta Quadrant have similar fabrics and fashions as Earth. At least, that goes for the non-organic fabrics."
"Perhaps Tom had read the labels inside the Sue's clothes."
Tasmin growled. She growled again when Janeway assigned Chakotay to another away mission to the surface to find out how the Sue had ended up on the planet. "What? Wasn't Seven's away mission sufficient? That is Out of Character behaviour."
"Chakotay's about to leave. Can we take a portal somewhere before we get hit by another of these time rifts." Emma had an eye on the Words and noticed a distinct lack in scene breaks.
"Right you are." Tasmin pulled the remote activator from her bag.
-oOo-
The portal took the agents to Sickbay where they nearly ran into Janeway.
"How is she, Doctor?" she asked, concern etched on her face.
"Physically, she's fine. But mentally and emotionally, is a whole separate thing in itself. Captain, I know we can't request that Starfleet send us a Psychiatrist, but I think that in this case, I am under-qualified. I'm not trained for this kind of work."
"Can't he upload some Psychiatrist protocols and integrate them into his system?" Emma asked.
"It's what the Doctor would normally do. Voyager doesn't have a ship's counsellor, and I doubt the Doctor would think Neelix the morale officer would be a suitable substitute."
"I think it's actually amazing that in seven years in the Delta Quadrant no one in the crew developed mental problems that went beyond that what can be handled by a cheerful morale officer."
Tasmin nodded in agreement. "Also, take a note that if Starfleet would be sending anything to Voyager at this time, it would have to fit through a microwormhole."
"That would be taking the term 'shrink' a bit literal."
"And if Voyager is having contact with Starfleet that means they have been in the Delta Quadrant for at least five years."
"Janeway fibbed to the Sue? Temporary memory lapse?"
"From Janeway or the author?"
"Which do you think?"
"If it's the former, it's a charge; if it's the latter, it's a charge."
"Doesn't really matter." Emma smirked and made a note.
Janeway explained to the Doctor that she thought the Sue was from the twenty-first century. He thought the explanation was acceptable as it could also explain why the Sue kept thinking she was in a dream.
"And still neither of them stops to wonder how she ended up in the Delta Quadrant in the twenty-fourth century. That she's from the twenty-first century is not the most probable explanation for finding a comatose human on an uninhabited m-class planet."
"I guess, it's a kind of magic."
Tasmin rolled her eyes. "This is sci-fi, not fantasy."
"They're on the same shelf at my local bookstore."
The Doctor and Janeway patiently waited for the Sue to return from the bathroom. When the Sue didn't come out, Janeway went in to check on her, and found the Sue in a puddle of blood on the floor. The Sue had been knocking her head against the wall to wake herself up, but all she managed was to knock herself unconscious.
"When she went to the bathroom the Doctor should have said, 'knock yourself out'." Emma chuckled.
Tasmin rolled her eyes again and produced the remote activator to call up a portal.
-oOo-
Janeway was back in her ready room contemplating that the (two) away team(s) had had no success in finding out how the girl had ended up on the planet in the first place. Then Q appeared in her room. Janeway instantly suspected his involvement.
"What do you mean? Why did I save that poor little girls life? I don't know, really. It just came over me to help her, and who better to help than you?"
"There's no arguing with a show that has its own deus ex machina, is there?" Emma said.
"Q never does anything out of the kindness of his own heart."
Q, however, argued he had acted because he felt sorry for the girl. At the moment she tried to commit suicide her parents were killed in an automobile accident, and she had no other family except for an aunt who was dying of cancer.
"Hold on, Q. Don't over do it with the angst."
Janeway was still dubious, though she could not see what he could benefit from saving the Sue's life.
"It's not about what he can gain," Tasmin said. "It's about how he can cause trouble. And that doesn't need to be obvious."
Q asked Janeway to be a therapist for the Sue, and when she was cured he would send her back. Janeway immediately offered that the Sue could stay, seeing as she had nothing left back home. Q said there was still left something, and then he left.
"Well, that's in true Q 'it's more fun if you know less' fashion," Emma said.
"Yes, but not in true Janeway 'you made this mess, you fix it' fashion. She should have insisted the Sue was returned home, rather than insist she'd stay."
"Cause what Voyager really needs is a teenager with mental issues."
"Like a toothache."
"Or being 70 light years away from home. Oh, wait. They already have that."
"Yes. Let's put a stop to this now." Tasmin pulled the remote activator from her duffel bag once again and opened another portal to Sickbay.
-oOo-
The Sue was just waking up from the surgery where the Doctor had fixed the hole in her head. She looked up drowsily at the agents leaning over her.
"Please don't leave me along with that man," she said to them.
"Oh, that's right," Emma said. "You're a rape victim. You are now afraid of strange men indiscriminately."
"How do you know-"
Emma held up her hand to shush the Sue. "Noel, we are Protectors of the Plot Continuum and we are here to charge you with crimes against fanfiction in general and Star Trek Voyager in particular. We charge you with being a Mary Sue. We charge you with Q taking pity on your angst and transporting you to the Delta Quadrant for help. We charge you with causing incompetence and out of character behaviour in most of Voyager crew. We charge you with them with wondering more about where you got the meds than with how you got on the planet. We charge you with Janeway sending two away missions to the planet's surface to search for clues. We charge you with not having any side-effects from taking 250 pills of ibuprofen. Apart from actually being able to take that many pills without throwing up, you should have done some serious damage to you stomach lining."
"Overdose of ibuprofen can cause damage to internal organs like the liver," Tasmin said. "Other side-effects are unsteadiness, blurred vision-"
"I've had that!" the Sue interrupted.
"That was caused by the concussion you gave yourself," Tasmin rebutted. "Further you could have had ringing in the ears, gastrointestinal, nausea plus vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, probable loss of blood in intestinal areas or stomach or both, headache, agitation, drowsiness, incoherence and confusion. In some cases of ibuprofen overdose the patient suffers a seizure, gastrointestinal bleeding, metabolic acidosis, respiratory depression, hyperkalaemia, tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, coma, hepatic dysfunction, renal failure, cyanosis, and cardiac arrest, but unless you are actually allergic of ibuprofen there is a slim chance you can actually kill yourself with the stuff. In which case you would only need a small dose to kill yourself. In all other cases you are more likely to die from internal organ failure."
"But, as charged, you didn't have that."
"The Doctor fixed me."
"The Doctor never mentioned what he fixed. Or how, or that you should rest so your newly replicated stomach would not be expelled by your body. Anyway, back to the charging. We charge you with Tom taking your clothes to his own quarters - which he doesn't share yet with B'Elanna, by the way - and determining from them that they and you are from the 21st century. He knows a little about 1930s movies; he's not an expert on all things 20th and 21st century Earth. We charge you with Janeway jumping at the opportunity to say you can stay at Voyager.
"We charge you with running on uneven terrain in the dark. We charge you with that dark being light enough to see colour. We charge you with bad math, and with some missing apostrophes. We charge you with seriously overdoing it on the angst." Emma lowered the notepad she had been quoting from and looked at the Sue. "It could have been an interesting plot, Q transporting a Alpha Quadrant girl to the Delta Quadrant. But he would do it for the giggles, not because he felt sorry for the kid. You have been charged. Your punishment is death. Tasmin will shoot you now and leave the Voyager crew to puzzle over how a 21st century bullet got on board."
Tasmin shot the Sue. "We're not going to leave her here, of course." She started tugging at the Sue's arm.
"Of course not. Has the Phage been cured yet?"
Tasmin looked up at her partner. "I don't think it has." She grinned wickedly. "What a wonderful idea."
"You mean we don't have to worry about the Suefluence carrying on in this continuum?"
"Even if the Vidiians can harvest her for organs, those are going to die soon enough. Plus they are light years away." Smiling rather broadly she set the coordinates in the remote activator and opened a portal.
-oOo-
A/N: This is probably going to sound like some rather crude advice, but if the character picks a method of suicide, the author should research how effective that method is, and give the character side-effects accordingly. Painkillers may seem like a good choice to the character. The character doesn't have to do the research (unless they are the type to extensively research their suicide). An author should do the research. And in case it wasn't clear from the mission, painkillers are a very bad choice of method.