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New page: {{EpiSidebox | series = Star Traks: The Original Series | ep_name = Please Hold For Oblivion | season = | ep_num = | writer = Alan Decker | year = 2385 | star...
 
 
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Ten years after Captain [[Alexander Rydell]] and the crew of the [[USS Secondprize]] manage to narrowly prevent the destruction of the universe, they are called back into service to finish cleaning up the mess they made a decade earlier. But things have changed. Lives have moved on, and grudges have grown. Can the crew pull it back together long enough to stop the end of everything? Or will one of their own send them all to OBLIVION?
 
Eight years after the [[Forever]] incident, [[Alexander Rydell]] gathers officers and friends from the [[USS Secondprize]] for a reunion.






==Summary==
==Summary==
'''STARDATE 52014'''
"The Star Traks Reunion Special" consists of several short stories surrounded by framing material set at the reunion.  The stories are...
 
While [[Trinian]] is away on her first vacation ever, the [[USS Secondprize]] is sent to investigate the source of some anomalous temporal energy readings.  The readings lead them to a moon of Batonis Six, and Lieutenant Commander [[Jaroch]] quickly determines that the temporal energy is identical to that produced by the Guardian of Forever.  On Betazed, Trinian's vacation is interupted by the voice of [[Guardian Control]] in her head telling her that the Secondprize had arrived even though she was supposed to stop it.  She is also informed that action has been taken.
 
 
Captain [[Alexander Rydell]] beams into the moon with Jaroch, Commander [[Travis Dillon]], Lieutenant [[Patricia Hawkins]], and Commander [[Scott Baird]], while Lieutenant Commander [[Emily Sullivan]] has command of the Secondprize.  As the away team makes contact with [[Forever]], the temporal entity in the moon, the Secondprize is attacked by a far more powerfull ship sent from Guardian Control, the [[Mitgogae]] commanded by [[Morticent]] with the assistance of [[Guardian #492]], which the Secondprize spends most of the battle running away from.  Rydell and company accidentally start the destruction of the universe (Forever is anxious to show them that he can do it) but manage to get Forever to postpone it for ten years.  Forever agrees and gives the five officers an access code which they must all say in unison followed by an apt profanity-laced closing statement from Baird.  With the crisis temporarily averted, Morticent calls off the attack and decides to use the ten years she has left to live enjoying herself.  On Betazed, Trinian comes to pretty much the same conclusion.  Rydell isn't too worried about the ten year deadline.  He's informed Starfleet, and he's sure they'll take care of it.
 
 
 
'''TEN YEARS LATER'''
 
On her first day on the job, newly-promoted Admiral [[Lisa Beck]] is informed that her first assignment is to get Rydell, Dillon, Baird, Hawkins, and Jaroch back together to stop the destruction of the universe, since Starfleet didn't actually deal with the Forever situation.  It was just filed away with a flag on it to deal with it in ten years.  Beck has the help of Commander [[Craig Porter]], who now works in the Temporal Physics department of Starfleet Sciences.  Beck sends him to scout out Forever, while she sets off to gather up the five Secondprize officers.
 
 
Alexander Rydell has long since retired from Starfleet to marry [[Karina Durham]] and run [[The Suburb]] Cottages and Spa.  Leaving Karina behind to run The Suburb, Rydell goes with Beck.  Morticent, who has spent the last decade running up some incredible credit card bills, learns that Starfleet is trying to stop the destruction of the universe.  She orders the Mitgogae back to Forever to stop the Starfleet Officers (she really cannot pay back her bills and knows what the debt collectors will do to her is worse than the universe ending), making one stop along the way.  Trinian is also contacted by Guardian Control.  They inform her that Morticent has gone rogue and that she needs to get to Forever to stop Morticent from killing Rydell and company. 
 
 
Rydell and Beck arrive at the [[Deneria Dry Dock]], where Scott Baird is the Supervising Refit and Repair Officer, a job he was given on the condition that he have a profanity filter chip installed in his brain.  His wife, Captain Emily Sullivan, is there as well with her ship, the [[USS Inevitable]].  Starfleet has declared the current situation classified, so Beck cannot tell Sullivan what is happening, but Baird is told that he must accompany them back to Forever.  Soon their transportation arrives, the USS Secondprize under the command of Captain Jaroch.  Jaroch and Rydell take the Secondprize to get Dillon, while Beck and Baird take a raceabout to find Hawkins.  No one will tell Rydell where Dillon is.  He soon learns that Dillon went a wee bit on the crazy side after Hawkins abruptly left him and he was passed over for command of the Secondprize.  For the last several years, he has been living in a holodeck constructed inside of an asteroid, where he is watched over by Counselor [[Ray Miller]].  Dillon has turned the holodeck into his own fantasy world where he is the absolute ruler.  Against Miller's advice, Dillon is yanked out of the holodeck and transported to the Secondprize.  Hawkins and her husband, [[Mookow]], run a private security firm, but due to some relationship issues and a botched security job, Hawkins is more than willing to help stop Forever despite knowing it will mean facing Dillon again.
 
 
On [[Waystation]], Trinian is able to borrow a ship from [[Bradley Dillon]] in exchange for working for him, a deal she has no plans of honoring.  She races to Deneria, but finds that the Secondprize has already left for Forever.  She runs into Sullivan, tells her everything, and they take off after the Secondprize in the Inevitable.  Porter, who has made contact with Forever, is suddenly beamed out of the moon by Morticent and imprisoned on her ship (although, she makes his captivity quite pleasant).  The Mitgogae hides, waiting for the Secondprize, which arrives some time later. Rydell, Jaroch, Hawkins, and Baird beam down to Forever and make preparations to have Dillon beamed down while Jaroch's first officer, Commander [[Andrea Carr]], and Beck remain on the Secondprize. Thanks to a message left by Porter, the Secondprize discovers that the Mitgogae is in the area and send down transport scramblers to prevent Morticent from grabbing Rydell and company out of the moon.  Thwarted at this, Morticent instead grabs Dillon in transport and beams him onto the Mitgogae, not realizing that she has an unstable man on her hands.  Dillon knocks out Morticent and starts cackling about killing Rydell.  He soon discovers Morticent's secret weapon against Rydell.  On the way to Forever, she had the Mitgogae swing by The Suburb and snatch Karina Durham.  Dillon grabs Durham and beams down to Forever, where he tells Rydell that if Rydell doesn't do everything he says, he's going to kill Durham.




With her plan spoiled, Morticent attacks the Secondprize.  The Secondprize is again overmatched but gets some much needed help when the Inevitable arrives.  During the battle, Porter is able to free himself and sets out to find the Mitgogae's enginer room.  Meanwhile, Baird is able to drive Dillon off.  Rydell gives chase and is able to appeal to Dillon's sense of Starfleet duty, convincing Dillon to put whatever grudge he has against Rydell aside until after the universe is saved.
*'''Picnic''' - The Secondprize answers a distress call from a Yynsian ship, the crew of which is acting strangely.  After transporting the crew to the Secondprize's sickbay, Commander [[Travis Dillon]] and Lieutenant Commander [[Jaroch]] beam aboard.  Soon Jaroch begins suffering the same symptoms.  He attacks Dillon and sends the ship racing away from the Secondprize.  Dr. [[Rebecca Singer]] determines that a batch of irradiated potato salad is to blame.  Rydell is able to contact the battered Dillon and orders him to get rid of the potato salad on the ship.  Dillon, running from Jaroch the entire time, puts the potato salad the only place he can, in his stomach.  Free of its effects, Jaroch returns to normal, but suffers some nasty digestive after-effects.




The Mitgogae disables the Secondprize and turns its attention to the Inevitable.  Rydell, Dillon, Jaroch, Hawkins, and Baird try to give Forver their access code and run into one tiny problem: Baird's profanity filter won't allow him to say the final phrase.  The Invitable is disabled as well, but before the Mitgogae can strike the killing blow against both Starfleet ships, Porter shuts down power to all major systems.  Morticent sends Guardian #492 to find out what's happened as Sullivan and Trinian take a raceabout to the Secondprize, grab Beck and Carr, then all four women beam onto the Mitgogae.  Trinian heads to the bridge and fights Morticent.  Beck, Sullivan, and Carr are...distracted by some of Morticent's flunkies.  And Porter is found by Guardian #492, who decides to kill the Starfleet officer.
*'''Scenes From An Italian Restaurant''' - While the Secondprize is on a layover at Earth, Rydell takes Dillon, [[Patricia Hawkins]], [[Emily Sullivan]], [[Scott Baird]], Jaroch, and Dr. [[Elizabeth Aldridge]] to dinner at his favorite Italian restaurant...in Italy no less.  Sullivan makes a special order and ends up with a drug-laced meal intended for a table of Orion drug dealers.  As Sullivan has a drug trip, the dealers attempt to extract their product from her stomach leading to a battle with the Secondprize officers, a battle the crew is unprepared for.  As Rydell and Baird destroy the drug lab in the restaurant's kitchen, taking out most of the kitchen in the process, Aldridge forces some the drug remaining on Sullivan's plate into Jaroch.  Jaroch's past lives go suitably wild, and he, Hawkins, Dillon, Aldridge, and an equally-loopy Sullivan are able to take down the dealers.  




With one minute remaining until universal annihilation, Hawkins takes drastic action to shut down Baird's profanity filter, hitting the engineer with a swift boot to the head.  The chip is broken, but Baird is dazed.  At the last possible second (of course), they are able to give Forever the complete access code and and tell him NOT to destroy the universe.   
*'''Uncle Dork''' - Baird and Sullivan are stuck watching Baird's nephew, Herbert, for a night.  The disagreeable child argues about food, presses random buttons on the bridge, and demands to see Engineering, which Baird most definitely will not allow.  Herbert gets away from Baird and escapes to Sickbay with Baird in pursuit.  The boy manages to inject Baird's leg with a local anesthetic, slowing the engineer considerably.  Baird tracks Herbert to Engineering, where the child is able to get the drop on the hobbled Baird, and Baird ends up dangling precariously over the edge of the warp core shaft.  Sullivan and Hawkins intervene, rescuing Baird and preventing Baird from killing Herbert until he is picked up by Baird's parents later that day.




Forever decides to do it anyway.
*'''You're the Inspiration''' - The Secondprize crew have two weeks of leave on Argellus III.  While there, Lieutenant [[Andrea Carr]] meets one of her idols, the poet Seugio P'lezar.  Discovering that she is a fellow poet, P'lezar asks her to dinner and has her read her poetry to him.  And then she spends the night.  The next morning as she is leaving with P'lezar for another reading, Carr is kidnapped by members of the Uleera Independence Guild, who release her on the condition that she delivers a message to P'lezar.  He is to use his influence to push the planet's rulers to free the Uleera Province.  P'lezar urges Carr to return to the Secondprize, so that she will be safe.  She refuses and insists on going to his next reading with him.  She's kidnapped before this one as well.  Her captors tell her that she will be killed unless P'lezar does what they have told him to do.  Carr escapes and rushes to the reading to let P'lezar know that she is safe.  She arrives and discovers that he is reading her poems to the audience and passing them off as his own.  P'lezar had been suffering from writer's block since the publication of his last work.  He'd become such a success that he had no suffering in his life to use as fuel for his creativity.  Carr's poems struck him as being good enough to present to his fans, who were demanding new material.  With the help of some friends, he arranged to have Carr "kidnapped," so that she wouldn't know he was reading her poems.  The misery he feels at what he's done gets him writing again.  He asks Carr to give him another chance.  Carr declines.




A chronometric wave shoots out of the moon in all directions, unraveling all of the possible timelines of the universe.  The six people inside the Forever moon are the only ones protected from its effects, Dillon cackling all the while that Rydell failed.  Seeing no other options, Rydell leaps into the source of the chronometic wave, hoping to find the force in control of Forever.  Dillon takes the opportunity to get revenge against Hawkins.  Before he can kill her, Jaroch challenges him to personal combat.  Dillon stuns Hawkins and accepts the challenge, both men saying that they have been waiting a long time for this.  Rydell finds himself in a clock shop.  There the proprietor shows him a mangled broken clock labeled "Forever." The clock is our universe, and it is very very broken.  The shop proprietor has no interest in fixing it, since he's got many other clocks.  Rydell grabs some tools and sets out to fix it himself, knowing all the while that this whole clock shop thing is probably completely metaphorical and that he is in way over his head.
*'''The Road to Feruk'Zin''' - When the Secondprize rushes away from Starbase 163 to try to prevent a civil war on the planet Feruk'Zin, Lieutenant [[Monica Vaughn]] and Counselor [[Claire Webber]] are accidentally left behind.  They are forced to hitch a ride on the USS Ontario, which is also headed to Feruk'Zin to make sure that Captain Rydell doesn't screw things up.  The Ontario's captain is not at all pleased to have officers from "that ship" on board his vessel.  He's even less pleased when Vaughn and Webber start fraternizing with his crew.  The Ontario becomes trapped in a subspace distortion, at which time the Ontario's captain must suffer one final indignity: being rescued by Alexander Rydell.




Jaroch and Dillon fight, Jaroch discovering much to his discomfort that Dillon has spent his time in the asteroid holodeck training himself.  Karina, whom Dillon had stunned earlier, regains consciousness and demands to know where Rydell is.  Jaroch and Dillon point her in the direction he went, and she leaps in after him, finding herself in the clock shop.  She tells Rydell that he is not a god, and they decide to go together to face the end of everything.   
*'''Thanks For Your Support''' - The Secondprize is examining the Mondigeri Anomaly to test out new sensor hardware and software provided by a third-party vendor.  As soon as Jaroch brings the system online, it shorts out every system on the ship.  Baird is able to get some basic things back online, but not the engines, which is something of a problem since the anomaly is reaching out to absorb the Secondprize.  Jaroch attempts to contact the sensor vendor's tech support system and runs into several difficulties until finally reaching a living being.  Unfortunately the company outsourced their tech support to the Klingons, so every suggestion involves a bat'leth.  Jaroch is finally forced to take matters into his own hands to save the Secondprize.  He manages to move the ship away from the anomaly, and then he and Baird have to spend several days rebuilding the computer core from the ground up.  With that complete, Jaroch has the Secondprize drop by the vendor's headquarters, where he installs their own software into their system.  Much chaos ensues.




Dillon injures Jaroch badly, knocking him to the floor.  Hawkins has recovered by this time and leaps up to continue the fight against Dillon, faring even worse than Jaroch did.  She's the one Dillon has been training for, and he attacks her mercilessly.  Jaroch is able to summon [[J'Ter]], who takes over Jaroch and gives Dillon a thorough thrashing.
*'''We Welcome Your Suggestions''' - The bridge crew and Commander Baird attend an on-ship training from Mister Bob.  The training is so dull that every single person, including Commander Dillon, falls asleep.  After the training, the attendees begin exhibiting strange behavior.  Rydell sees snakes at every turn.  Baird wants nothing to do with anyone and seals every door on the ship, so that no one can get near him.  And Dillon can't find his butt.  Realizing that something is very wrong, Dr. Aldridge has Monica Vaughn beam her directly to the bridge, where she discovers that the bridge crew have been implanted with subcutaneous transmitters.  Mister Bob has planted post-hypnotic suggestions to incapacitate the bridge crew, making the ship ripe for a takeover by Mister Bob's half-brother, an Orion auditioning for a post in the Orion Syndicate.  Aldridge is able to free the crew from the effects of the hypnosis, and Mister Bob and his half-brother are taken into custody.




The clock shop proprietor shows up again, and Rydell and Durham are able to talk him into repairing Forever.  Dillon is beaten, but he tells Jaroch and Hawkins that it doesn't matter because they're all going to die anyway.  That's when Rydell and Durham return, fresh from having saved the universe, to prove him wrong.
*'''Viva Lost Vega''' - While the Secondprize remains in orbit, Rydell, [[Lisa Beck]], Dillon, and Baird attend the grand opening of a casino on Vega Four.  Soon after the opening ceremony, the entire planet vanishes.  Rydell and Beck learn that the casino owner gambled the planet away to a nice couple, not realizing that they were a couple of omnipotent beings actually capable of taking possession of it.  Rydell and Beck are able to convince the couple that the casino owner had sold the planet to them first, so the omnipotent beings scold the owner for dealing in bad faith then go off to find a planet somewhere else for the solar system they're building.  Dillon and Baird spent the entire time gorging themselves in the buffet and had no idea anything had happened to the planet.  They about kill themselves trying to out-eat each other and are forced to comm the Secondprize for an emergency beam out to Sickbay, where the stomach pumps are standing by.




With the universe back in place, Morticent surrenders, and Trinian takes her and Guardian #492 back to Guardian Control for trial.  Beck has Dillon committed to [[Tantalus V]], where he can finally get the help he should have gotten years ago.  Hawkins informs Jaroch that, while she does have feelings for him, she needs to go home and see if she can work things out with Mookow.
*'''The Secret Life of Trininan''' - Over the course of her years on the Secondprize, Trinian saves the ship from threats that the rest of the crew aren't even aware of.  The last of these, a horde of psionic parasites, leaves her needing a vacation.  She heads off for Betazed, just in time for Rydell to find [[Forever]].




One year later, Beck visits Rydell at The Suburb and meets his baby daughter, Ashley.
Before the next story, the reunion is interrupted by the arrival of two agents from Temporal Investigations.  They accuse Rydell of aiding and abetting a temporal displacement and inform the others that the Travis Dillon in the room with them is not the Travis Dillon they knew on the Secondprize.  Travis acknowledges this is true and says that the real Dillon saved his life.




Eighteen months after Forever, the Secondprize arrives at Starbase 84.  Hawkins is there waiting for Jaroch.  She and Mookow have divorced, and she wants to see if Jaroch is willing to give a relationship a try.  He readily agrees.
*'''Experimental Outcomes''' - Several years after his release from Tantalus V, Travis Dillon must visit his brother, [[Bradley Dillon]] on [[Waystation]].  Their father, [[Dr. Richard Dillon]] has died, and there are certain things in the will that Bradley, as executor of the estate, must explain to Travis.  Bradley gives Dillon a note from their father telling Dillon that his entire life has been a psychological experiment and that now he wants Dillon to check in with a Dr. Bunch, one of Dr. Dillon's colleagues.  Dillon decides that rather than going along with his father's wishes, he's going to throw a wrench into the "experiment."  He takes a ship to [[Lorikel]], where [[Dr. Derrick Azar]] had a lab where he performed temporal research.  Dillon finds that Azar is dead, but he left behind a time travel device, which he uses to go to the early 21st Century.  He finds that era's [[Travis Dillon (20th Century Version)|Travis Dillon]], who, after having his own mental health issues, now lives alone in a cabin in Montana.  He convinces that Travis to change places in time with him.  When Travis leaves for the 24th Century, Dillon has a breakdown and wanders off into the snow ranting to himself.  In the 24th Century, Travis meets with Rydell and tells him what has transpired.  Rydell agrees to help him hide the fact that a switch has taken place and to see if he can get Dillon's book about the Secondprize's adventures published.  Travis then confronts Dr. Bunch, who has been trailing him taking notes, and heads off to start his new life.




Two years after Forever, Dillon is doing much better and is about to be released from Tantalus V.  When asked what he plans to do now, Dillon states that may write a book.
Back at the reunion, the Temporal Investigations agents insist that Travis has to be put back in Montana, so that he can die in a snow drift like he is supposed to.  The group realizes that Dillon must have died in the snow almost as soon as Travis left.  Rydell agrees to retrieve Dillon.  They take the Secondprize back in time, and Rydell and Jaroch beam down to retrieve Dillon.  Rydell says that history will have its body.  He'll get Dr. Aldridge to make a fake corpse.  She's done it before.  Then they'll take both Travis and Dillon back to the 24th Century.  Rydell and Jaroch go to Dillon as he is freezing in a snow drift and tell him that they've come to take him home.


==Featuring==
==Featuring==
Line 95: Line 76:
*[[Karina Durham]]
*[[Karina Durham]]
*[[Craig Porter]]
*[[Craig Porter]]
*[[Kristen Larkin]]
*[[Rebecca Singer]]
==Author's Comments==
The first thing I wrote for this project was the Prologue, appropriately enough.  At that time, I didn't even know it was going to be a project.  The conversation between Rydell and Travis just popped into my head, and I typed it up, not sure what it would become.  As the idea for the reunion special as a whole formed, I had a a thought of "Am I really going to do this?"  I wasn't sure that I wanted to go back to the well, as it were.  Did I really want to risk messing up what I'd done in Oblivion and Lost Years?  I decided that this was going to be different.  I wanted to go back to telling some fairly simple funny stories and to have a good time with the characters.  In the end, the reunion special achieved that for me.  Your mileage will vary.  Of course, the end did get a bit more on the sentimental side.  Sometimes I just can't resist.




"Picnic" was originally written as a script for a Star Traks comic that never ended up happening.  A reader had contacted me about wanting to draw a Traks comic and wanted to know if I would provide a story.  I did.  Unfortunately the project never took off.  The storyline fit in with the type of thing I wanted to do for the Reunion Special, so I rewrote it as a prose story and included it.
The original version of "Uncle Dork" was written in the first batch of Star Traks short stories back in 1993.  I was never happy with how it turned out, so I didn't post it when I started the website started three years later.  I still liked the concept of Baird having to deal with a child, so when the reunion project came along, it seemed a good time to see if I could rework it.  The original story didn't have Sullivan involved, but I think adding her and the relationship aspect makes the story work better than it did before.
"Viva Lost Vega" is the only time that I can think of when I've built a story around a title.  Like Rydell, I enjoy Elvis music.  One day "Viva Lost Vega" popped into my head.  I have no idea where it came from, but I thought it was too good to not use.  I've been to a few casinos, and I swear that the bits about the slot machine players robotically putting money in the machines and not reacting even when they win is absolutely true.
"Thanks For Your Support" grew out of my experiences working in the IT field.  There's nothing like dealing with tech support.
Believe it or not, some of "We Welcome Your Suggestions" really happened.  In our Freshman year of college at [[Old Dominion University]], several of my friends and I attended a hypnotism show on campus one night.  I watched my friends act out most of the suggestions I used in the story.  I guess I got off easy, since I was the one given the suggestion to laugh hysterically at everything.


==Author's Comments==


"Experimental Outcomes" was written while I was in graduate school.  It was a standalone story at the time and was originally posted on the Star Traks: Unleashed page as an out-of-canon story, since it was so serious compared to everything else I'd done.  I liked the story enough that I wanted to use it for the reunion project, but I really couldn't leave Dillon dead like that.  I know the epilogue undoes most of this story and is incredibly sentimental, but I like it.


==Links==
==Links==
[http://www.star-traks.com/traks/oblivion.txt Please Hold For Oblivion (text)]
[https://www.star-traks.com//original/stories/reunion/reunion/ The Star Traks Reunion Special]
 
[http://www.star-traks.com/traks/sttraks2.html The Star Traks: The Original Series web page]

Latest revision as of 20:38, 28 October 2022

Star Traks: The Original Series
Episode name Please Hold For Oblivion
Season
Episode number
Writer(s) Alan Decker
Year 2393
Stardate
Chronology
Previous in series Please Hold For Oblivion [TRK]
Next in series
Previous in timeline
Next in timeline


Eight years after the Forever incident, Alexander Rydell gathers officers and friends from the USS Secondprize for a reunion.


Summary

"The Star Traks Reunion Special" consists of several short stories surrounded by framing material set at the reunion. The stories are...


  • Picnic - The Secondprize answers a distress call from a Yynsian ship, the crew of which is acting strangely. After transporting the crew to the Secondprize's sickbay, Commander Travis Dillon and Lieutenant Commander Jaroch beam aboard. Soon Jaroch begins suffering the same symptoms. He attacks Dillon and sends the ship racing away from the Secondprize. Dr. Rebecca Singer determines that a batch of irradiated potato salad is to blame. Rydell is able to contact the battered Dillon and orders him to get rid of the potato salad on the ship. Dillon, running from Jaroch the entire time, puts the potato salad the only place he can, in his stomach. Free of its effects, Jaroch returns to normal, but suffers some nasty digestive after-effects.


  • Scenes From An Italian Restaurant - While the Secondprize is on a layover at Earth, Rydell takes Dillon, Patricia Hawkins, Emily Sullivan, Scott Baird, Jaroch, and Dr. Elizabeth Aldridge to dinner at his favorite Italian restaurant...in Italy no less. Sullivan makes a special order and ends up with a drug-laced meal intended for a table of Orion drug dealers. As Sullivan has a drug trip, the dealers attempt to extract their product from her stomach leading to a battle with the Secondprize officers, a battle the crew is unprepared for. As Rydell and Baird destroy the drug lab in the restaurant's kitchen, taking out most of the kitchen in the process, Aldridge forces some the drug remaining on Sullivan's plate into Jaroch. Jaroch's past lives go suitably wild, and he, Hawkins, Dillon, Aldridge, and an equally-loopy Sullivan are able to take down the dealers.


  • Uncle Dork - Baird and Sullivan are stuck watching Baird's nephew, Herbert, for a night. The disagreeable child argues about food, presses random buttons on the bridge, and demands to see Engineering, which Baird most definitely will not allow. Herbert gets away from Baird and escapes to Sickbay with Baird in pursuit. The boy manages to inject Baird's leg with a local anesthetic, slowing the engineer considerably. Baird tracks Herbert to Engineering, where the child is able to get the drop on the hobbled Baird, and Baird ends up dangling precariously over the edge of the warp core shaft. Sullivan and Hawkins intervene, rescuing Baird and preventing Baird from killing Herbert until he is picked up by Baird's parents later that day.


  • You're the Inspiration - The Secondprize crew have two weeks of leave on Argellus III. While there, Lieutenant Andrea Carr meets one of her idols, the poet Seugio P'lezar. Discovering that she is a fellow poet, P'lezar asks her to dinner and has her read her poetry to him. And then she spends the night. The next morning as she is leaving with P'lezar for another reading, Carr is kidnapped by members of the Uleera Independence Guild, who release her on the condition that she delivers a message to P'lezar. He is to use his influence to push the planet's rulers to free the Uleera Province. P'lezar urges Carr to return to the Secondprize, so that she will be safe. She refuses and insists on going to his next reading with him. She's kidnapped before this one as well. Her captors tell her that she will be killed unless P'lezar does what they have told him to do. Carr escapes and rushes to the reading to let P'lezar know that she is safe. She arrives and discovers that he is reading her poems to the audience and passing them off as his own. P'lezar had been suffering from writer's block since the publication of his last work. He'd become such a success that he had no suffering in his life to use as fuel for his creativity. Carr's poems struck him as being good enough to present to his fans, who were demanding new material. With the help of some friends, he arranged to have Carr "kidnapped," so that she wouldn't know he was reading her poems. The misery he feels at what he's done gets him writing again. He asks Carr to give him another chance. Carr declines.


  • The Road to Feruk'Zin - When the Secondprize rushes away from Starbase 163 to try to prevent a civil war on the planet Feruk'Zin, Lieutenant Monica Vaughn and Counselor Claire Webber are accidentally left behind. They are forced to hitch a ride on the USS Ontario, which is also headed to Feruk'Zin to make sure that Captain Rydell doesn't screw things up. The Ontario's captain is not at all pleased to have officers from "that ship" on board his vessel. He's even less pleased when Vaughn and Webber start fraternizing with his crew. The Ontario becomes trapped in a subspace distortion, at which time the Ontario's captain must suffer one final indignity: being rescued by Alexander Rydell.


  • Thanks For Your Support - The Secondprize is examining the Mondigeri Anomaly to test out new sensor hardware and software provided by a third-party vendor. As soon as Jaroch brings the system online, it shorts out every system on the ship. Baird is able to get some basic things back online, but not the engines, which is something of a problem since the anomaly is reaching out to absorb the Secondprize. Jaroch attempts to contact the sensor vendor's tech support system and runs into several difficulties until finally reaching a living being. Unfortunately the company outsourced their tech support to the Klingons, so every suggestion involves a bat'leth. Jaroch is finally forced to take matters into his own hands to save the Secondprize. He manages to move the ship away from the anomaly, and then he and Baird have to spend several days rebuilding the computer core from the ground up. With that complete, Jaroch has the Secondprize drop by the vendor's headquarters, where he installs their own software into their system. Much chaos ensues.


  • We Welcome Your Suggestions - The bridge crew and Commander Baird attend an on-ship training from Mister Bob. The training is so dull that every single person, including Commander Dillon, falls asleep. After the training, the attendees begin exhibiting strange behavior. Rydell sees snakes at every turn. Baird wants nothing to do with anyone and seals every door on the ship, so that no one can get near him. And Dillon can't find his butt. Realizing that something is very wrong, Dr. Aldridge has Monica Vaughn beam her directly to the bridge, where she discovers that the bridge crew have been implanted with subcutaneous transmitters. Mister Bob has planted post-hypnotic suggestions to incapacitate the bridge crew, making the ship ripe for a takeover by Mister Bob's half-brother, an Orion auditioning for a post in the Orion Syndicate. Aldridge is able to free the crew from the effects of the hypnosis, and Mister Bob and his half-brother are taken into custody.


  • Viva Lost Vega - While the Secondprize remains in orbit, Rydell, Lisa Beck, Dillon, and Baird attend the grand opening of a casino on Vega Four. Soon after the opening ceremony, the entire planet vanishes. Rydell and Beck learn that the casino owner gambled the planet away to a nice couple, not realizing that they were a couple of omnipotent beings actually capable of taking possession of it. Rydell and Beck are able to convince the couple that the casino owner had sold the planet to them first, so the omnipotent beings scold the owner for dealing in bad faith then go off to find a planet somewhere else for the solar system they're building. Dillon and Baird spent the entire time gorging themselves in the buffet and had no idea anything had happened to the planet. They about kill themselves trying to out-eat each other and are forced to comm the Secondprize for an emergency beam out to Sickbay, where the stomach pumps are standing by.


  • The Secret Life of Trininan - Over the course of her years on the Secondprize, Trinian saves the ship from threats that the rest of the crew aren't even aware of. The last of these, a horde of psionic parasites, leaves her needing a vacation. She heads off for Betazed, just in time for Rydell to find Forever.


Before the next story, the reunion is interrupted by the arrival of two agents from Temporal Investigations. They accuse Rydell of aiding and abetting a temporal displacement and inform the others that the Travis Dillon in the room with them is not the Travis Dillon they knew on the Secondprize. Travis acknowledges this is true and says that the real Dillon saved his life.


  • Experimental Outcomes - Several years after his release from Tantalus V, Travis Dillon must visit his brother, Bradley Dillon on Waystation. Their father, Dr. Richard Dillon has died, and there are certain things in the will that Bradley, as executor of the estate, must explain to Travis. Bradley gives Dillon a note from their father telling Dillon that his entire life has been a psychological experiment and that now he wants Dillon to check in with a Dr. Bunch, one of Dr. Dillon's colleagues. Dillon decides that rather than going along with his father's wishes, he's going to throw a wrench into the "experiment." He takes a ship to Lorikel, where Dr. Derrick Azar had a lab where he performed temporal research. Dillon finds that Azar is dead, but he left behind a time travel device, which he uses to go to the early 21st Century. He finds that era's Travis Dillon, who, after having his own mental health issues, now lives alone in a cabin in Montana. He convinces that Travis to change places in time with him. When Travis leaves for the 24th Century, Dillon has a breakdown and wanders off into the snow ranting to himself. In the 24th Century, Travis meets with Rydell and tells him what has transpired. Rydell agrees to help him hide the fact that a switch has taken place and to see if he can get Dillon's book about the Secondprize's adventures published. Travis then confronts Dr. Bunch, who has been trailing him taking notes, and heads off to start his new life.


Back at the reunion, the Temporal Investigations agents insist that Travis has to be put back in Montana, so that he can die in a snow drift like he is supposed to. The group realizes that Dillon must have died in the snow almost as soon as Travis left. Rydell agrees to retrieve Dillon. They take the Secondprize back in time, and Rydell and Jaroch beam down to retrieve Dillon. Rydell says that history will have its body. He'll get Dr. Aldridge to make a fake corpse. She's done it before. Then they'll take both Travis and Dillon back to the 24th Century. Rydell and Jaroch go to Dillon as he is freezing in a snow drift and tell him that they've come to take him home.

Featuring


Also Featuring

Author's Comments

The first thing I wrote for this project was the Prologue, appropriately enough. At that time, I didn't even know it was going to be a project. The conversation between Rydell and Travis just popped into my head, and I typed it up, not sure what it would become. As the idea for the reunion special as a whole formed, I had a a thought of "Am I really going to do this?" I wasn't sure that I wanted to go back to the well, as it were. Did I really want to risk messing up what I'd done in Oblivion and Lost Years? I decided that this was going to be different. I wanted to go back to telling some fairly simple funny stories and to have a good time with the characters. In the end, the reunion special achieved that for me. Your mileage will vary. Of course, the end did get a bit more on the sentimental side. Sometimes I just can't resist.


"Picnic" was originally written as a script for a Star Traks comic that never ended up happening. A reader had contacted me about wanting to draw a Traks comic and wanted to know if I would provide a story. I did. Unfortunately the project never took off. The storyline fit in with the type of thing I wanted to do for the Reunion Special, so I rewrote it as a prose story and included it.


The original version of "Uncle Dork" was written in the first batch of Star Traks short stories back in 1993. I was never happy with how it turned out, so I didn't post it when I started the website started three years later. I still liked the concept of Baird having to deal with a child, so when the reunion project came along, it seemed a good time to see if I could rework it. The original story didn't have Sullivan involved, but I think adding her and the relationship aspect makes the story work better than it did before.


"Viva Lost Vega" is the only time that I can think of when I've built a story around a title. Like Rydell, I enjoy Elvis music. One day "Viva Lost Vega" popped into my head. I have no idea where it came from, but I thought it was too good to not use. I've been to a few casinos, and I swear that the bits about the slot machine players robotically putting money in the machines and not reacting even when they win is absolutely true.


"Thanks For Your Support" grew out of my experiences working in the IT field. There's nothing like dealing with tech support.


Believe it or not, some of "We Welcome Your Suggestions" really happened. In our Freshman year of college at Old Dominion University, several of my friends and I attended a hypnotism show on campus one night. I watched my friends act out most of the suggestions I used in the story. I guess I got off easy, since I was the one given the suggestion to laugh hysterically at everything.


"Experimental Outcomes" was written while I was in graduate school. It was a standalone story at the time and was originally posted on the Star Traks: Unleashed page as an out-of-canon story, since it was so serious compared to everything else I'd done. I liked the story enough that I wanted to use it for the reunion project, but I really couldn't leave Dillon dead like that. I know the epilogue undoes most of this story and is incredibly sentimental, but I like it.

Links

The Star Traks Reunion Special

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