Star Trek: Starbase 777

The service halls exemplify steel-brushed utilitarianism, except for the slime trails on the floor that sprout yellow mushrooms and blue mold. There are electronics, but they're entirely gunked up by oozing brie and mycelial tendrils. Lights flicker and sirens blare for half a second every five seconds.

Maggie wore a hazmat suit as she walked into the hall. “Mushrooms…” She said, putting her tricorder to the fungus and scanning.

Wearing some very 'stylist' PPE, Xuan stepped into the service hall and tried not to be grossed out. As someone with OCD, they were very thankful for the PPE as they would be unable to function had any of the... whatever this was, was actually touching their skin. Still, Xuna was here because there was always a need for medical and mouths were involved, technically. The air was dangerous and if there any issue with the upper respiratory tract they were the one to help. Xuan's features were obscured by the bulky outfit, but what was easy to see was their resting bitch face and overall Vulcan-like calm and soulless elachi eyes. They were chill, very chill. "Mushrooms indeed... I am quite partial to mushrooms, but perhaps people often compare elachi to mushrooms."

Maggie's scan detects both fungal and dairy DNA, or however you'd put it scientifically. The tricorder flags the material as, to translate technical terms, 'inadvisably edible'.

4

“Hm. Okay so. It’s both fungal and dairy DNA for some reason.” She said with a hum. “That’s weird. Nobody eat these.”

Xuan shivered as they stepped, glad they had the EV suit and wore a pair of noise cancelling headphones. They had sensitive Romulan ears after all. "I do not think any of us were thinking of eating but... I suppose that is good to know. So it's... cheese? That is fungus and dairy if I recall?"

Honestly, it might've been a long time since Allan had worn these EV suits, but they weren't actually that bad. Thankfully, they had some kind of technology that stopped the helmet from getting annoyingly dirty in a way that glasses back in the 21st century did. That'd be hell. He listened to Maggie talk about the readings, and tilted his head to the side as he bent down to look at some of the electronics they were covering. Were they still working at all? "Yeah, I think so? If only we had a reaaaally handsome biologist to explain that," he said wistfully, leaning just slightly against a certain someone as he said that.

4

By the sound of the lights and sirens, the technology on this ship certainly was working. It would probably be less annoying if it wasn't. Upon Allan's closer inspection, it seemed like whatever electronics were in the walls were working, but not well. For an engineer, it was like looking at an infected wound.

"A biology degree does not mean I'm now an expert in cheesemaking, you know," came a lighthearted reply from another blue and silver EV suit, the helmeted head of which turned to look at Allan. Saren then turned his head again, looking at the odd scene before the group: "However, some types of cheese do have mold in them, like for example the blue cheese that has penicillium in it. I am not sure how a biohazard breach involving these products could've happened on an entertainment vessel, but... here we are."

3

4

"As a medical officer who sees quite a lot of emergencies involving food, you would be surprised," Xuan said, glancing at the biologist and then looking back at the... whatever the 'cheese' actually was. They still weren't sure if it was actually cheese or just made up of the same stuff as cheese.

"Nah, of course not, it's the being handsome part that makes you an expert," he said jokingly back, doing the lightest ever helmet bonk against Saren's shoulder. Because what other way was there to show affection in these suits??? "I mean, it happened on Voyager, right? Maybe someone went a bit ham with the cheese and they have like... some outdated bio-neural components on board..?" Since the newer ones tended to have safety protections against that sort of thing ever since. "The stuff it's touching isn't doing so hot, but I mean, usually things blocking important components won't be.." he said as he did a scan for any said bio-neural technology.

2

Maggie stayed awkwardly silent to the jokes. Under normal circumstances she would be so done for joking and having fun, but she remembered Tina’s words going over her chat logs with Allan, and they wouldn’t exactly nice. But her mom knew best right? She shook her head and stood up. “We should keep going.”

It had no bio-neural whatever in it. No infected gel packs here.

3

Xuan used their tricorder to scan the atmosphere, thinking it would be a good idea to see what the air had and what it could be reacting to with the.. 'cheese'.

1

Spores. Lots of them. It was if the air was filled with a thick fog of yellowish cheeto dust.

5

"The air has spores of some kind," Xuan announced to the group as they took a few more steps closer to the 'mushrooms'. "One would assume they are coming from this fungis?"

"Voyager... a lot of things have happened on Voyager," he sighed, for that particular part of the Federation history curriculum was... peculiar, to say the least. Especially to an outsider species. While his teammates were doing their own scans, he took out his own tricorder to see if there were any signs of life in their vicinity. The people here had to go somewhere, right?..

3

The cheeto fog seemed to inhibit the tricorder's ability to scan that far. It crackled and came up with an atmospheric interference notice.

"...Well then," how inconvenient. "The spores are interfering with distance scans. Keep that in mind." How about the mushrooms themselves, though? Any interesting data?

“We should probably stick together then. I doubt it wouldn’t affect comms.” She said as she lightly wrote down some notes on the fungus.

"Well, good thing is this isn't a Voyager situation," he said after he'd read the results of his scan, "at least, not exactly, no bio-neural stuff anywhere in the panels, it's just... I guess, maybe frying? Yeah, sticking together's a good call." He said as he actually bent down and started looking at one of the electronic panels a little closer, trying to figure out what type of damage the cheese fungus or whatever it was was doing to it, whether it was corroding the wires or something else.

tul!edit A little late, but not too much so, Essen followed behind the others, also wearing PPE. She didn't say much right off the bat, she instead stayed quiet, observing as much as she could. She finally spoke up in response to Allan. "Heh, if we didn't stick together, we'd probably all separately end up turning into a big gob of this cheese fungus. God forbid." She kept her phaser holstered, there was no immediate danger here. (edited)

It was hard to determine without more extensive DNA analysis, but the scan was registering multiple different kinds of mushrooms, like several kinds of fungi had voltron'd together. Generally speaking, this wasn't a thing mushrooms just did by themselves. Or maybe it was? Warning: set your scientific accuracy sensors to low for this event.

1

Aventurine, as the resident mycologist of the team, was both incredibly fascinated by the cheese mushrooms, and incredibly concerned about the effects they might have on the health of living things and the integrity of the ship itself. He just hoped they weren’t somehow weakening the ship’s actual structure. “I for one would love to avoid becoming cheese fungus. What’d you find from that scan?” He asked Saren, having seen that he’d done a scan on the mushrooms themselves.

"What I would like to know is where all this came from. Perhaps we could compare the scans to known substances and organisms on other worlds? Do we have a ship log?" Xuan suggested, thinking they wouldn't get much more information from scanning the fungi itself. They should probably dig into the origins and perhaps that would clue them in on what they could use to clear it out.

"The ship log might be our best bet with what we can readily find," Essen agreed with Xuan. "That might give us where this fungus originated from so we can compare."

Here! He was totally definitely here the whole time. Swear. And very glad he wasn't able to see all of the 'goopy, cheesy, slimy stuff'. He wasn't a big fan of sticky things... Iviaan's antennae were half-down under his helmet as he looked nervously around. "Any medical or science records could prove useful," he piped in.

3

The cheese fungus was gunking up the circuits and preventing them from working in some places and in others, it was eroding the circuits and replacing them, like petrified wood mimicking a tree. It was like it couldn't or was unable to decide whether it wanted to destroy the ship or become it.

2

Hm. Well, that made things more difficult. "The ideal thing is if we detected any signs of life other than the fungus, if there's anyone else here that could tell us what's going on. But if there was we probably would have found out by now..." But then she reconsidered. "Or maybe not, because of just how strong this fungus is against the scanners?"

Xuan got a little closer to the fungus and tried to cross analyse the material with any species within the Federation (and allies) databases.

"Huh," was the most of what Allan said as he looked more closely at the wires in this panel, moving them gently aside with his gloved hand as he looked at how the cheese fungus tended to block them off from everything else. And it was also.. "Shit, this stuff is like... eroding the circuits here, guys, that's a little, um.." concerning, for sure, worrying, maybe, because if it continued spreading... hm. "It's doing both, though. Trying to stick itself into everything and also sizzling it, which ... is weird, to have both those properties at once, probably? I'm an engineer, not a chemist."

"There seem to be multiple species of fungi clumped together. Not a homogenous mass, but..." he made a vague gesture, "stuck together. Distinct components of a whole."

Essen remembered something. "If this cheese fungus is just that, a fungus... It needs something to feed off of. It can't just survive without a source of energy. I think heterotrophic is the word? Is it eating off of the metal of this place? Or is there something else organic that it's feeding off of?" She asked.

The fungi all matched the kinds of spores you'd commonly get on mouldy cheeses on earth. You know, the fancy kinds, as well as the kinds of mould you'd get on food when you didn't want it there. Some of the mould was, in fact, just straight up penicillin. Note: this was a Ferengi ship.

4

"It seems like these spores have things in common with earth cheeses. I am not too versed in... earth cheese, but it seems a bit odd for a Ferengi ship to have earth moulds," Xuan said as they looked at the read out on the tricorder. They listened to Allan talk about the stuff eroding the circuits and started to get more concerned. "We need to clear the mould off of the circuits, perhaps that is what is causing the lights and sirens."

Essen looked down at her phaser, thinking that could clear off the mold... Then reconsidered. "Phasers might not be the tool for that."

"It's, um.." he looked down at the wires again, brushing some of the cheese off, * "it's a lot of cheese. Kinda caked on here in a lot of plac- um, yeah. Phasers are definitely not the tool for that." (edited)

"And spread the spores more?" Xuan brought up, unsure if shooting toxic cheese with phasers was a good thing.

"Good call, Lieutenant," Iviaan reassured Essen with a nod.

...Penicillin, huh. Saren furrowed his brow, skimming through the list of species, and upon comparing it with data sources... huh. Yeah, sure... "Mold feeds on dead tissues. Plants, and animal matter. Also, I feel the need to note that all of these species are found on Earth only. Which begs the question of "how", because, if I recall correctly, this is not an Earth vessel."

Essen gave a nod back to Ivi-- a smile across her face! That felt good hearing that from the ACMO. Anyway, she kept her phaser holstered. "Thank you, sir!" She said to Ivi, then turned to the rest. "I don't have tweezers unfortunately. Wish I did. Would make this much easier. Or does someone have a tool here that eliminates having to physically touch the spores? Unlikely, but it's worth a shot."

"Contamination through trade. Perhaps." Iviaan tried, wincing at another blare of the sirens. He was very grateful for TTTS at the moment.

"And this one feeds on dead tissues, and... metal, and wires, and.." he said in response to Saren's comment about what the mold fed on, "well, maybe it's not actually eating it, it's just.. acidic enough? But it's also not doing that in a lot of places, so.. yeah, maybe something with trade, like some people brought some cheese over here?"

Maggie hummed. “Maybe.” She said. “Also is it really cheese? That’s not great.”

"That's what I want to know too," Essen remarked with Maggie. "Is this actually cheese? If so then that can give us maybe just a liiiiittle bit more to go off of?"

"If I recall, there are solutions that can clear off mould. I remember during my days on Virinat with a lot of humidity we would often need to use gas cannisters in our shower or wet areas to guard against mould," Xuan said, thinking perhaps that could be a solution. After all, they were all in PPE, the gas or whatever would not harm them. Also.. Xuan was incredibly grossed out by the 'cheese' and liked the idea of a single solution to clear it all away.

"Makes sense to me," Essen replied to Xuan. "Keeps everything touchless. We'd just need to find gas canisters."

The sirens kept blaring, getting progressively more annoying by the minute. Each step you all took squelches. Under all the noise, you heard a slight skittering. If you turned and looked, it was in the direction of the next room. (edited)

7

"We would need —" Did you guys see that? What the fuck? Rehszan turned his head towards the noise. "A pest problem, perhaps?" he mused idly. (edited)

"Whoa--- what the?!" Essen said. "Did anyone hear that?" She took a moment. "Yeah, I heard it, I didn't see it but I heard it..."

Xuan looked in the direction of the skittering and then stepped in that direction, trying not to think about the squelching when they did so. Xuan's hands were starting to shake, but they were determined to get through this. All of their therapy sessions had prepared them to face their icks straight on. "It seems like there is another room here... shall we proceed?" Xuan did a little scan, just to ensure there wasn't anything crazy waiting for them.

With a breath, Essen nodded. There was no going back now. "These pests are the type of 'company' I don't think anyone would want. Rats, or worse... I'm ready when you all are."

"Metal-eating fungi would not be that far-fetched. After all, some are very keen on eating plastic," he shrugged, carefully walking around... only to freeze up and turn his head, like some hunting dog. The next thing he did was slowly take out his phaser. Just in case. Even if the skittering sounded like it belonged to something small.

It had sounded quite small. Little guy skittering. Could be a space mouse.

6

"Okay, yeah - do we want to turn the sirens off, too..? Or should we kinda leave those on, in case, like, someone else is here and needs to hear them over.. and over.. you'd think they'd be quieter," given, well... Ferengi hearing.

Near the strange sound was a large door that led to the PARC DE LUXE: Sports and Wellness complex. There was a sign.

Fuck... It probably was mice after all. Mice and cheese went together like bread and butter---eugh... "Nononononono..." Essen muttered to herself hearing the skittering. "Sports complex...?" Essen said aloud now. "Why would the sound be coming from near there...?"

Maybe the mouse was doing sports.

6

7

"I can take the lead, if needed," he was one of the senior officers, after all. Technically. And considered himself quite capable, in case shit hit the fan. Or... cheese?.. Anyways, "It could be quite a big area, so we would need to stick together." (edited)

"I think you would be suitable to lead," Xuan agered with Saren about him taking the lead. "I will be in the back to assist with any medical situations if needed."

"Right with you Lieutenant." Iviaan vroooomed up to meet him. "Staying together is best. I agree. Let's figure this out, shall we?"

"Agreed," Essen said. "Assistant Junior Chief of Science Lieutenant tr'Lareth can lead." She wanted to make sure she got his title right. "Any tactical needs, I've got you covered, sir."

"Personally, I'm thinking it's trying to get enough gains to fight the cheese," he shrugged, staying next to Saren as they went closer to the next room. "Yeah, no going off in weird directions. I'm not gonna drag someone out of a tube today." Unlike.. other situations.

"I was unaware you could fight cheese," Xuan said in response to Allan's remark. They watched as their fellow doctor zoomed up to join Saren in the front whilst they held their position in the back, just watching.

"I'm thinking there's like, a giant cheese boss we'll fight in the middle of this thing, you know? So maybe this thing we're hearing is like, our wise mentor in that task sort of deal, right?" He said back to Xuan, sincerely hoping that there was not a giant cheese boss, but he wasn't ruling it out entirely!

"I do not think the cheese has a boss. I do not think it is sapient," Rehszan helpfully chimed in, tail swishing back and forth in its custom-made PPE.

4

3

"Cheese boss? Oh, gosh..." Essen remarked to Allan. "I've seen enough horror movies to know that's not even out of the realm of possibility... Let's just hope I'm wrong..."

"You ever played a video game, Rehszan?" He tilted his head - or rather, his helmet, as he addressed the entomologist.

"Cheese boss sounds.... Interesting. I think that game.. .League of Space Legends, has a cheese champion, but I am unsure," Xuan said, revealing their 'secret' nature as a gamer.

3

"No pressure..." he sighed, green eyes skimming over the group for a headcount. Unfortunately he couldn't do a shotgun reload motion for the coolness points, so setting the phaser to stun would have to do. "Be vigilant, but not trigger-happy - there might be people in need of our help somewhere around here..." Welp. Into the unknown!

"Never. It is not the sort of thing that interests me much," he affirmed. "Yes, sir. Following!" and follow he did!

Iviaan right behind! He held a little tighter to his medical equipment. Vrooooom.

"Ahh, right, yeah - boss in a video game, is just, like.. the final villain you have to fight, I guess? Kinda like that." He said as he also went into the room. Looking for the space mouse. Or rat. Maybe the one that made all of the rules.

Essen followed behind, rolling her shoulders back. Well, off they went! She followed the rest of the group.