"Howdy Yasmine." Conrad looks up from the sniffer as Yas steps into the hold, "I'm jus' about done in here, an' it's lookin' all clear.  Nuthin' on any of the containers, or anythin' else neither."

He carefully refrains from mentioning that he ran the sniffer over the two personal vehicles while he was at it, just to be sure, fully realizing that some people can be a little sensitive about such things.

"What's nex' for me to be doin'?"

"If you don't mind I'll do it myself anyway.  Can't hurt, unless your feelings are hurt, of course," Yas replies with a teasing grin.  "But if you had it with the hold you can go do any other area, 'cept for the passengers for now.  Can't hurt that either, I think." she adds and smiles briefly before she turns her full attention to manually inspect every single container, even though it is a daunting task.  But that is something she is familiar with from her days the Marines.

Shui blinks at the description of the fruit.  Not all that glitters is gold, of course.  It's a shame about the stench, but why is Corlan looking so depressed?  Because the flower is almost gone?  Or is he thinking about his past?  Uncertain which, she doesn't try to offer any comfort, concerned she might offend.  It is probably the flower...things like this are not meant to be forever.  They burn too brightly.

Reaching out with a tissue (no doubt Yasmine would have something amusing to say about that), Shui brushes the indicated area ever so carefully, and then folds it up.  Then she stands and turns to face Corlan in the shifting light of the flower.  "Mr. DeSant...I will not say that I assisted you for duty's sake.  It has been, truly, my pleasure.  Please take me at my word, and you are most welcome for any help I might give, be that as a doctor, steward, or merely a fellow passenger who finds your company most intriguing."

"Please," she continues, "when the flower is gone, and the fruit arrives, I would like to examine it.  I can remove it to my laboratory, to...clear the room of whatever scent may disturb you."  She considers for a moment.  "Though I suspect you must think it an odd request - I assure you I do not prefer the scent of month-old rot to a bouquet of roses."  A quick bow.  "I would greatly appreciate it."

Meeting his eyes, she cocks her head to the side, a small smile playing a the corners of her mouth.  "It seems that every time I turn around, Mr. DeSant, you have another surprise for me.  I must admit, I am most curious to see what the next could be."  Dropping into a crouch, she studies the flower again, reaching out very carefully to touch the 'petals', her fingers as light upon them as feathers.

Conrad makes his way through to Jago's cabin to report in.  Tylen is there, with the captain, and Conrad nods to him as he enters.  Then, all business, he speaks to Jago, "Jago?  I scanned the cago, an' I di'n't find nuthin'.  Went right through the hold. an' it all checks out clean.  Yas said I should check the rest of the ship, 'ceptin' the passenger side.  Thought I'd start with the bridge, work my way aft, but this is gonna be a lot tougher'n the cargo.  Might go quicker if'n Tylen here could gimme a hand with it?  Unless'n ya'll got somethin' else for him to be doin'?"

“Good job Conrad,” Jago says, getting to his feet and gesturing with his unlit cigar, “we’ll both help, bridge first, then the hanger and the air car, I’ll trust everyone to check their own rooms.”

Tylen nods to both Saskia's reply and the prospect of a job to occupy him. They needed to get to the bottom of the mystery of the substance. For the passengers and for the wellbeing of the ship's crew, possibly even the ship itself. In that regard he was happy to be of serivce. "Ready and willing, where can I get another scanner?"

"Sure, I got a spare in my room.  Jus' let  me have a minute to fetch it, an' we'll be good to go."

Jago, Conrad and Tylen make their way to the Bridge, the latter two armed with sniffers and start checking for any sign of contaminants in the compartment.  Jago uses his familiarity with the layout of the bridge to point out odd nooks and crannies behind panels and under consoles, while the others use the sniffers to check the places Jago indicates.

Yas searches the cargo bay again, crawling about to peer under containers, climbing over others, and generally getting a good workout.  At one point she is squeezed into a narrow gap behind a stack of containers, and fails to see Shui pass through, carrying a carefully folded tissue.

Shui takes her leave of Corlan, and carefully carries the tissue back through the hold, failing to spot Yas on her way.  Outside her quarters is the box that Saskia had promissed her, containing a half dozen stoppered vials filled with the dust which is causing such a stir.  She carries the box inside and sets to work.

Saskia, sprawled in her usual seat in Engineering, pores over schematics for the atmospheric systems, flicking back and forth as she traces connections and junctions in the ductwork..

Tylen runs the thing over and around attempting to make sense of the readout. He's used one before but alas it had been a long time. So he carefully picks his way through the places that Jago points out, making little mental notes, so that one day he might be as well versed in this ship as her Captain.

There are so many empty spaces tucked away behind the equipment on the bridge, Jago orchestrates the opening of long forgotten panels and the pocking about behind banks of monitors and overhead switches a studied thoroughness. With Conrad and Tylen’s help, they probably stirs up enough dust the choke the filters without outside assistance.

Searching high and low, far and wide, near and narrow, up and down, Yas enjoys her little hunt and the limbering exercise it gives.  She peeks under and on top of everything, behind and beside all things and is having the most fun she has had since they left their last space dock and she ate the cake.

She finds places she had forgotten about in the cargo hold and spots a few things people have lost over the years while searching for her Unholy Grail.

Yas continues her search of the hold, and finds no trace of the dust...

Jago, Tylen and Conrad do their search of the bridge, leaving no access panel unopened and no crawlspace uninvestigated.  They work their way backwards and end up in the gunnery cubicles, before moving out into the forward crew lounge.

Nothing so far.

Shui works her way through the samples, both her own, and those collected by Saskia...

Shui's head slowly comes up from the holoscope, and she leans back in her chair.  Glancing over to the right, she carefully checks to make certain none of the tops are off the samples Saskia collected.  Moving with careful precision, she sets up an isolation system around the holoscope.  Then she keys her com-link.

++ Mr. DeSant.  Please do not concern yourself with removing your beautiful flower, ++ she says quietly, her voice calm and composed.  ++ I have determined that there is no connection between the dust and the pollen. ++

Another tap to a holokey.  ++ Ms. Blake - if you could take all of your samples and place them in isolation immediately, that would be a good thing.  Please continue filtration, but any particulate you capture should be washed into isolation, or incinerated. ++

Closing her eyes for a long moment, she breathes out once, slowly and evenly.  Only the white knuckles of her hand, gripping the table, give any indication of her feelings.  Then it's time for another call.

++ Captain Lanza?  Could you come down to med-bay, please?  While I have not determined the actual source of our...dust, I have discovered its composition. ++  Her jaw tightens.  ++ Your presence is requested immediately. ++

Quickly, Shui moves to wash her hands, then pauses.  Instead, she quickly whips up a sterilzing solution, and washes them in that.  It will irritate, perhaps damage the first few layers of skin, but...  All the while, a little voice inside her is screaming that she should take off her clothing and change, quickly.  But into what?  Her spare clothes are not hermetically sealed.  This dust is in the air.

Then she moves back to her holoscope to study her discovery, her face a mask of icy calm.  Regrettably, her haunted eyes betray her true feelings.

"Well, hello there!  What have we got there then?" Yas says to the thing she found.  A single hole in this paper-like, fragile ball.  Something that rattles inside.

"Uh oh."

She quickly places it down of the floor with the opening down against the floor itself, holding two fingers on top of it to make certain it does not roll over.  Then she begins to look around for a bucket or a tarpaulin or something to put over the ball, or to put the ball in it.

If this is what she suspects it is she wishes she had put on her comm this morning, but being in J-space with nothing to do and on her spare time fiddling with the motorcycle she did not wish to be disturbed.

"YO!  ANYONE AROUND!?" she hollers.

Jago wipes the dust from his hands on eh front of his jacket and takes the cigar from his mouth, “you guys carry on here, I’ll be back once I’ve found what the Doc wants.”

Jago remains relaxed and casual as he strolls out of the gunnery area, in spite of the concern engendered by Shui’s tone of voice.

It’s just a dozen or so strides to the medic’s room, and once there, Jago knocks and waits to be invited before entering, and closing the door carefully behind him.

“Well now Miss Tiesi, what have you discovered?”

Shui looks up from the Holoscope, and smiles.  It doesn't reach her eyes, not by half, which is unusual to say the least.  "Captain Lanza.  Thank you for coming so quickly.  If you like, it is more easy to show than tell."  Motioning for him to come closer, she steps out of the way of the screen, keying it for replay.

"I was studying the samples collected by Ms. Blake, comparing them against pollen from flowers in Mr. DeSant's quarters," she begins, her voice steady and quiet, "and I could not find any identifiable features for our 'dust'."

The holoscreen shows the magnified dust to be composed of smooth, semi-spherical objects, microscopic in size.

"I was...fortunate enough to come across this," she continues, tapping a key and calling up a second replay.

One of the tiny grains on the screen splits, and a small creature crawls from it, also microscopic in size.  An arthropod with four, segmented legs, and mandibles nearly as long as its body.  As this happens, another 'egg' splits as well.  The two creatures immediately orient upon each other, and the battle begins.  Within moments one of them is dead, and the other begins the process of consumption.

"We appear," Shui states, raising one eyebrow, "to have an infestation."

Standing in the lounge, while Jago goes off to see what the doc needs, Tylen and Conrad can hear Yas' yelling for help from the cargo hold.



The computer chirrups politely, alerting Shui that it's found a match in one of the databases.  Not the Medical Expert System though, but the reference library system.

Conrad hears the call, and curiosity drives him to go and see what the problem is.  Perhaps Yas has found herself in an embarrassing position, something they can have a good old laugh about later.

He steps through into the hold and looks about, unable to see any major emergencies or impending disasters. "Sumthin' I ken help y'all with, Yas?"

Saskia stares at the comm, even after Shui has signed off.  "Wow!  She's sure got ants in her pants about something."  Not that the medic need worry, Saskia has no samples left.  As soon as she'd found that the solvent she uses for cleaning fungus and molds out of the landing gear also worked to destroy the dust, she'd tested it on all her samples, just to be sure (and out of a thirst for vengeance on the dirt for getting into her nice, clean systems), then incinerated any residue.

She goes back to the schematics, and reluctantly concludes that there's no way to set up a sensor to check the air outside the vents.  The only sensors which provide atmospheric data are inside the vent system.

Probably just as well, she reflects, with a scowl, or Ridge would have been setting off the contaminant alarms all day, every day.

Tylen follows Conrad, momentarily leaving the panel looking, maybe Yas found something that they could actually be of help to them. He hurried after, any stop to, or even news about this, 'Mystery Powder', would be good. It made him nervous to say the least, as he suspected it did to everyone else as well. Little did he know, the truth of the matter was much worse...

"Over here!  Find a bucket or something like that, or a sealable container!  We got some kind of nest here, I think!" Yasmine calls out when she hears the new navigator calling out to ask how he can help, lifting one hand to wave to show where she is.

"No idea what it is, but something is moving inside, and I'm not about to find out if it's something lethal or not!" she explained, keeping her eyes on the fragile looking thing she kept a couple of fingers on.  "It'd be a bad idea to let it loose in the ship too, I suspect!"

Jago continues staring at the monitor for a long while after the scene has played out.

“Just what is that?” Jago asks, “or more to the point, how dangerous is it?”

OOC
Sorry for thge delay, I thought that had been posted :O(

"Alright, Chief, be back in a minute..."

Tylen jumps to, and sprints to the Infirmary, he was sure that he might be able to find a decent sealable biocontainer there.

Moments later he stood in front of the doorway to Shui's offices, and tapped at the door alert. Even in a situation like this he thought that Shui probably wouldn't appreciate a rude entrance. So he waited his foot tapping and looking back towards the hold...

"Hmmm...Harper's Termite," Shui states, reading off the holoscreen.  "Not as bad as I feared, but certainly not good, either.  Unless one happens to be a Hiver."  She glances up at the Captain.  "Here is the information, Captain."  One finger brushes the screen, which de-rezzes for a moment before reforming.  "It is native to Saurus, in the Vilis Subsector.  It can grow as long as-"

There is a chime at the door.  Shui raises one eyebrow.  "A moment, Captain.  Please, read this."


Shui quickly moves to the door.  Might it be Saskia, complete with whatever other samples she had taken?  But no, it is Tylen.

"Mr. Orgesh," Shui begins, noting his slightly disheveled state.  Has he been running?  "May I assist?" she asks politely, with more than a little concern.

Wouldn't you know it: another emergency.

"Make it a half and I will make you a cup of cocoa the way that only I can!" Yas hollers after the disappering Tylen and then grins at Conrad.

"I have no idea what is inside here, but I doubt it is anything nice.  Never is in J-space, after all," she tells him with a chuckle.  She is no expert on these things, but as far as she knows there is no little fluffy bunny , a cute little kitten or a charming chorlok from Estra 5 in this thing.