SD 11/27/04 - "No, I'm not Harvey" It would have been too much to expect everything to go as planned, but who could have expeced that?
Orlan had been scratching at his hand and looking more and more amiss as the moon of that planet rose over the horizon. Then he looked a bit bloated and in need of a shave. Then all of a sudden, RRRRRRIIIIIIIIIP! His costume burst open, and he seemingly grew into a seven-foot rabbit-like being.
And before someone could say "It's Harvey," he ran over to Lera, who had just returned from somwhere to throw a glass of punch at Lynx, for some reason. Upon seeing Orlan charging her, she screamed and threw the whole bowl at him, but to no avail. He grabbed her in a tackle-hug, and she shrieked like crazy.
My immediate reaction? I burst out laughing. Orlan's apperance was funny, and combined with Lera's ridiculous "bunny- phobia," it was the best laugh I had in a long time. Lera didn't think it was funny. She screamed and she screamed to the point I was begining to wonder if the windows were going to shatter. Then Orlan let her go, and she ran off. Or with her being topless, jiggled off.
I complimented Orlan's "imaginative costume," when he told me it wasn't! He really had turned into a rabbit! And after Lynx and Tarra tried to pounce him, he was ready to get back to normal. With Lera absent due to her silly fear, Half-Pipe was the one who went to work on taking care of the situation. He had trace ammounts of some strange mineral in his system, and some alien DNA from a nearby star system, that from a rabbit-like animal, had spliced into his own. Half soon came up with a way to un-splice it, and injected the antidote into him, which took effect almost immedietly.
The antics continued for a little while longer, notably Tarra giving me a tackle-hug after I tried to get the replicator to make ice cream and instead it made a turkey. But when she finally put me down and got into it, turned out it was turkey meat with the taste of ice cream. But after someone gets turned into a bunny, not much can compare to that. Rumor has it Lera spent the remainer of the time in her quarters, with Lott. Lera's friskiness lends color to the imagination of what might have happened, but it's best not to jump to conclusions.
As it turned out, the shard of that alien mineral was what gave him that rabbit DNA. What probaby happened was that millenia ago, an asteroid probably struck frozen ground containing a huge colony of those creatures, turning them into a kind of rabbit DNA stew and hurtling it up into space, where radiation worked on it over time until it ended up on that moon. Perhaps the scientists at the next Starbase can use a more suitable medium to recreate the creatures than Mr. Orlan's body. I doubt Lera with her phobias can be persuaded to do it.
And so once again, life goes on. Thanksgiving is around the corner, and hopefully the turkeys and the ice cream will be completely seperate. But until then, and for some time afterwards, we'll be exploring this local system of stars with Jovian and ice worlds. The only greenery will be in our holodecks, when they work.
The stereotypical months of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror, though on this ship for every moment of boredom there seems to be a moment of frustration over malfunctions, glitches, and the occasional redshirt shooting himself in the foot.