Revising Help

Posted on Fri 30th Apr, 2021 @ 6:13pm by Lieutenant JG Kellian Michaels & Makila i'Hartelhai

785 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Business Not At All As Usual
Location: Makila i'Hartelhai's residence, River Village
Timeline: MD- ? 1900 hours

Faint music played in the background of a scene straight out of an ancient Hollywood college student movie. The young medical student-Makila lay on the couch with a cold cup of tea at her elbow, a stylus holding her curls in place and books or papers covering every surface that could hold them. Makila pored over the lecture notes with an expression of long-suffering exhaustion on her pretty face. The clinic was closed today, and if there was another emergency, then they knew how to find her. Arik was becoming quite adept at rousing her from her bed at all hours of the night.

A knock sounded at her door. Outside, Kellian Michaels stood with a picnic basket in hand. He'd known that the life of a medical intern would be godawful busy, but Makila was proving particularly difficult to get hold of because she was trying to hide the fact of her internship from her father. Why, Kellian couldn't figure. His own father would have been delighted had he gone into medicine rather than forensics.

Today, he'd noticed that the clinic in Brown Sector was closed, so that had to be at least one less drain on Makila's time. Her father, Dr. s'Siedhri, seemed to be covering at the Tivoli Gardens clinic, and Makila wasn't at the Main Infirmary that Dr. Addams ran. Therefore, he would bet money that she was home.

"Makila, are you awake in there?" he called out.

"Define awake," she called back in a quiet voice that dripped with exhaustion.

"That good, eh? May I come in?" Kellian asked. "I have food and tea, and I'm not Greek."

"Only if you promise to ignore my notes...which are everywhere." she grumbled, pressing a button to allow him entry into her uncharacteristically untidy home.

Kellian fought to stifle a laugh as he stepped inside. Makila's normally neat home looked as if a tornado had blown PADDs, styluses, and medical diagrams all over the room. "Maybe we'd better have this picnic at your kitchen table," he suggested, "so we don't risk getting food on your notes. How long have you been at this today?"

A sheepish look crossed her face. "That would depend on what time it is..."

"1900," Kellian told her. "I'd have been here earlier, but we had a case, so I had to put in some extra hours at the lab."

"Tell me about it" she said quietly as she leaned back into the pillows stretching her back with a moan of exhaustion.

Kellian considered literally telling her about his case and then decided she was too exhausted to put up with him being deliberately obtuse--which was too bad; he and Muffet had debated back and forth about what the evidence meant for almost two hours. "Stay right there," he said and carefully moved a stack of notes to one side so that a clear space existed on Makila's coffee table. "I do crime scenes; I'll know where those notes belong when you need them. For now, you need food."

He dug into the picnic basket and pulled out a long, warm, foil-wrapped shape, which he handed to Makila. "Chow down. It's a shrimp poor-boy."

Then he pulled out the Thermos of iced tea and poured Makila a tumblerful, which he set in the empty space where the notes had been. "This is some Bajoran tea I picked up in Brown Sector. On Earth we would call this chai tea. I don't know what the Bajorans call it."

"Probably they call it tea. That's funny, though. I heard once that chai means tea, so chai tea actually means tea tea. " A giggle escaped her lips, one borne of exhaustion rather than her complete good humor.

"Yes, it does," Kellian agreed, chuckling with her, "but for some reason, the little coffee shop I go to always calls it Chai Tea Latte. Weird. You'd think they would know better." He sank to the floor and stretched his legs out in front of him on a narrow bit of floor that was miraculously free of notes. "Ahhh! God, that feels good!" Kellian took out his own shrimp poor-boy and tea and began eating. "I'm starved," he said in between wolfing down bites of foot-long sandwich. "I should've taken a break at 1700 hours, but I was too interested in what I was doing. So what've you been studying all day?"

"Various therapeutic techniques and their applications to various species. In essence xeno-medicine, but there's so much more to it than that." she muttered with a smile even though her voice was tired. "Are you fully human?"

"'Fraid so," Kellian said. "Born and bred in County--I mean Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Man, I am tired."

 

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