Posted by Vice Admiral CockRoach (GM) in Main Sim - C Deck - Rick’s Quarters
[snip]

Taking the ‘prize’ Rick, still on one knee, carefully tied off the top of the bag, blinking and making a face as some of the pungent mass assailed his nose. “Good advice, ma’am. Bit of a rookie on this with getting surprised by this bundle of furry joy.” Reaching out he ruffled her neck and head. “Good girl.” Then to Naomi, he said, “She has a list of commands she knows longer than some of my engineering manuals. But she is here now and we’ll have to work on how to fit her in here. Captain already knows about her. He met the sergeant by the cargo bay and told us - ah, Ensign Gagarin and I. Seems the Captain was awake too.” Maybe there ‘was’ something about officers being vampires. Many of them seemed to be up in the middle of the night. He was happy to just be a lowly petty officer in that case. Unlike other officers, Rick felt more relaxed with Naomi. Maybe it was the way she carried herself - not uptight or formal like and she had enough curves to not give the Sergeant Rock look that a lot of officers seemed to project. Well, maybe not Sasha Gagarin. He was more of a boy just out of the sandbox. Rick, my contrast, projected a pretty uninhibited ‘country boy’ manner. He seemed of an age to Naomi which helped. He moved away a bit and gestured to her. “Nessa is pretty friendly and on duty even if she just did, ah, her duty.”

• Rick Walters Eng PO

Nessa gave a crisp “..Bark..” in reply to the comment of being a ‘good girl’ and getting a ruffled pet on her neck and head. After the words passed Nessa sat on her haunches panting a bit looking about as if waiting her next set of orders.

Rick checked his chrono. The shift was wearing on and by now Sasha should have finished off the survey in the storage bay. He supposed there should be some reconnection there to get set up on his next duties. But first he should get back to sickbay and collect the food and other things to take back to his quarters. He was bunked with Mark who likely had more time in space than half the engineering crew put together, having grown up on a boomer transport. He didn’t even know if Mark had seen a dog much less ever had a pet. THAT should be interesting. Not that Rick was any way the wiser himself. He needed to send a letter to Barb for advice. But first things first.

“Right, come on Nessa. We need to collect your things and drop them off in our home, at least temporarily.” Standing, Rick dropped the ‘remains’ that he had collected in a small composter that science had set up. Idly he wondered whether Nessa could learn important engineering things, like what tool was what to fetch them while he was working on shuttle pods and the like. Or whether he’d get in trouble for ‘corrupting’ a dog like that so trained in military things.

OOC: So Rick’s objective here is to collect all the various Nessa things, drop them in his quarters on C Deck then take her along with him on the remainder of his shift which, I’m guessing, isn’t too much longer after all of this. There was the crate. Was there a kind of dog bed there too? .. Gene

Nessa stood and came over dutifully to Rick’s side. Once he got going back to the cargo bay where the dog had worked its way out of he would indeed find a storage crate nearby with quite a bit of various dog food, treats, training aides and such for about a month or two. And yes there was indeed a fairly comfortable dog bed for Nessa to use. To be honest Rick might reflect upon feeling it and the padding it was probably as comfortable as a higher officer’s bed, vs his own bed in his quarters.......lucky dog?

Rick sorted through the stuff. “You have more things than I do, Nessa,” he said, thinking he needed a cart to haul these things - that or several trips. He opted for a cart. They were in a cargo bay after all and carts were part and parcel of that. It would be nice if someone could develop some kind of anti-grav kind of cart. What they had now was a kind of mag cart - the ‘new’ thing. It operated off the metal plating on the deck - at least where the deck had metal plating. It didn’t work on catwalks, but then little would outside of good wheels which, on this beast, was retractable. The thing about these grav carts was that the battery drain on them was big depending on the weight it was carrying. Seemed more bother than it was worth but he’d try out the slick new tech. Piling all of Nessa’s things on it he looked at Nessa just before pushing off. “Wanna trade beds?”

Once he would get back to his quarters on C deck and sort through everything he would find there was a feeding dish that was setup on a timer for dispense food once eaten, a water dispenser that could be filled with about a gallon of water at a time for free drinking. And most useful was a harness probably used for the dog to have equipment satchel on its side for squad mates to use in a pinch. The whole getup was light but well made and while not the most protective was a step up from just raw fur and muscle/tissue to protect the dog from simpler forms of harm if it was needed. All MACO standard issue of course.

Thankfully he had passed Sasha in the corridor who said to just get himself sorted out. Of course he hadn’t said it that way. His exact expression was, “Rick, you have a Czar of a were-dog. I’ll work at our calibrations and you .. see if you can fit it all into your quarters.” By his look Sasha did not look confident on that at all which did rather fit his own thoughts. Later, in his and Mark’s quarters, Rick was soon found sitting on the narrow patch of decking surrounded by Nessa’s things. Mark found him holding up the harness and equipment satchel as if trying to figure out how it worked.

Quizzically Nessa looked around the quarters as if pacing out the room and outlines and while Rick setup things sat off to the left of the door to his quarters keeping out of the way sitting on her haunches.

GM CockRoach

Mark stepped in. “You’re back earl…” He stopped and blinked, his eyes flicking nervously around and about the quarters and Rick’s ‘new’ stuff. He hadn’t noticed Nessa yet. “Um, what is this stuff? Where is that goi..” he cut out as he suddenly noticed Nessa and started, backing into the corner. “What have you got? Did you smuggle that onboard? You can’t hide a dog?! And .. here?” It looked like he was almost on the verge of hyperventilating.

“Easy. This is Nessa. She got .. mislabeled and loaded here instead. I’m .. ” he took a breath and said, “I’m looking after her.”
“Here?”
“Why not?”
“There’s all this stuff? And look at the size of that … bed?” Rick sighed as he looked at it too.
“You never had a pet?”
“No. On a boomer ship we didn’t have them.” Mark crawled around, picking his way through the stuff and climbed up to his bunk. “Just glad you know about pets.” Rick didn’t meet Mark’s eyes in that statement and turned away his tablet that he had open to ‘basics of dog ownership’.

Slowly Rick moved about, finding places to stow Nessa’s things in his locker, stuffing Nessa’s bed as best he could between the corner where Mark had hidden and the door. Her food and water he put in the opposite corner not far off of their corridor to the facilities. Being the ‘engineer’ he a affixed a small night light over it so that they wouldn’t trip over it in the dark. He found the food dispenser fascinating as an engineer and poked and played with it to figure how it worked.

“You’re going to break it,” Mark said, watching him from above.
“I’m not going to break it. I’m an engineer. We don’t break things.” Under his breath he muttered. “Yeah, Rick, don’t break it.”
“You said her name is Nessa?”
“Yeah, she’s a MACO dog. Has the rank of Sergeant. So she kinda outranks us.”
“MACO? You mean she might bite me?” Still nervous.
Rick glanced up. “No. She’s not like that. More a sniffer dog and support dog.” Okay, he lied. She could bite and sounded like she’d take them all out back in the cargo bay. Nessa had Sasha terrified. “I’ll take her along on shift, um, I hope. I’ll talk to the chief about that. She’s bright. I’m thinking she can be helpful.”
“You’re good with dogs?” Mark asked.
“Yeah, great. Barb’s family has them. Real used to them.” Well, okay, another lie.
“What about when she has to, you know, does she use the facilities? I’ve heard some cats can do that.”
“We walk in the arboretum,” Rick said, pushing out more confidence than he had on that. It was smaller than he had hoped but it did the trick.
So this went on with Rick getting rather more flustered but eventually opted to just go to sleep, figuring that Nessa would wake him if she had to hit that arboretum again. But he lay awake worrying on whether he had bitten off more than he could chew. But something in him had to take care of this dog. He’d wake early and study.
- Mark and Rick