SPACE: THE TRITE FRONTIER. THESE ARE THE EPISODES OF THE STARSHIP SECONDPRIZE. ITS SIXTY MINUTE MISSION: TO EXPLORE LARGE, EXPENSIVE SETS, TO SEEK OUT NEW COSTUME CHANGES AND OLD GUEST STARS, TO GET THE HIGHEST RATINGS POSSIBLE, AND TO REPEATEDLY GO WHERE PLENTY OF PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY BEEN.
IN HD (WHERE AVAILABLE).
"Cap'm! Cap'm! Hey Cap'm!"
The perennially annoying voice of the Head of Maintenance could be heard, muffled, through the door to Captain Clerk's quarters. Clerk turned on his blue Captain's nightlight and checked the time.
1:30 am? Seriously? If this is Tribbles in the AC ducts again we're getting a new Head of Maintenance.
Captain's Blog, Stardate: six months after we left off. Things have been relatively calm since we got cancelled. I guess being off the air kinda takes the edge off a bit. Anyways, we've had a lot of changes, particularly in the personnel realm. First off, Klaa'ck's record-breaking tenure as First Officer finally came to an end, as he was called back to Vulcan for some kind of traditional camping trek or whatever. I think it's called Colander. Or is it Calendar? It's a real challenge to parse Vulcan names through a Klingon dialect. But I digress. Wharf also had to leave, which made me sad; he was the first friend I made on this ship. He'll be back at the next Big Event, I'm sure. As for new people, let's see... there are some replacements, of course, but I haven't met all of them. We have a new barber, Buzz O'Hara. He's set up shop right next to the Salon; I'm guessing he's trying to hit the "hairdo date night" niche market. There's our new navigator, a new bartender up on Deck -10, and, of course, a supply of fresh redshirts. Oh, and nothing really happened while we were away. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyways. Whew, this was a really long blog entry. I hope I changed out the SD card before I started. Last time, I forgot, and got--
Businesses come and go, but FleetbucksTM was on the rise. By now, they had at least one on nearly every deck. The one on Deck -7 was right by the elevator, so, for efficiency's sake, that became Captain Clerk's preferred stop on the way to the Bridge every morning. Sure, it was a little bit of backtracking, commute-wise, but after carefully calculating all the different distances to the coffee shops on each deck, he figured that was the least inefficient way to go. The elevator chided him on going with the chain rather than the local brands, but Clerk reminded it that never in the history of the Fleet did an elevator outrank a Captain, and just take him to work, okay?
"Sellout," the elevator mumbled under its breath.
It had been several months since Captain Clerk finally got up the nerve to ask Lt. Commander Info what his real name was,but he still had a hard time actually referring to the android by it. The Captain's primary habit was simply a "hey, you" or "do this or that, Lieutenant", and he had largely rid himself of that, but his internal habit of thinking "I need to get Whatsisname to do this" was the harder one to work out. Though Clerk was still elated to be able to know his right-hand android by name, it still made him somewhat nervous to actually say it out loud.
"Info?"
"Yes, Captain?"
"I'd like for you and a couple of redshirts to accompany me and Dr. Pullum on this away mission. Go on down to his office and get prepped to beam down. Tell him I'll be there as soon as I clear it with Fleet Headquarters."
"Aye, sir."
Clerk turned to go to his ready room, and it was at this point that he realized that his "autopilot" had still not gotten used to the new Bridge layout.
The extended stay at Starbase 404 actually turned out to be kind of a good thing, at least in terms of everybody's respective to-do lists. Some departments even reported digging into their "someday wishlists". Captain Clerk was no exception. The bees were getting some overdue attention, dossiers were getting read, webinars were being attended, and so on. Finally, he had arrived at the next-to-last thing on his list: Organizing the Ready Room.
Today is the day. This time, for sure!
Clerk stood just inside the door of his Ready Room and surveyed the chaos before him. While it could never be said that he had ever had a clean office, the recent re-modeling exacerbated the issue, especially when it was discovered that the room's new location was adjacent to an old storage closet, and somebody somewhere thought it would benefit the captain to knock down the wall between the two, leaving Clerk with both his mess and the previous captain's.
The longer he stood there, the more intimidated by the task he became. Finally, he turned around and poked his head out the door.
Captain's Blog, Stardate: Date night. I can't believe I'm going through with this. "Admiral" Kathy has asked me out to go see some band I've never heard of, and then get some pizza afterwards. I'm really nervous. She says it's "just a friend thing", but I've heard that from her before...
Captain James Edgar Clerk did not know what to wear.
Not that he was one of those people who would look at a closet full of clothes and say he had "nothing to wear", of course, but he was in a bit of a quandary. His closet didn't have a whole lot in it; mostly it was just a few uniforms (including that horrid green "captains only" tunic) and those last few band t-shirts that don't fit anymore, but he can't bring himself to dispose of them. None of this, of course, was appropriate for a "date with an admiral".