Oscar returned to his quarters, a little annoyed that he had allowed himself to get caught up in dealing with the general public. He’d had enough people wanting his help and attention on the Starbase, especially after word got out that he was officially the hero of the whole situation. He did not want some Romulans thinking that he was single-handedly responsible for bringing them a functional hospital. That being said, it was also nice to just take off the isolation suit; he hadn’t been aware of how dependent he was on it until he decided not to wear it for a few days recently, and he knew that he needed to finally adjust to living without it.

He turned to the containment case in his quarters, activated the food and water dispensers for their preset cycles, and looked at the fungus within.

“Hello. It’s been quite the day today. People who would have loved to kill us half a century ago are now getting help from us, and nobody’s sure whether we really should be doing this. It just confirms my long-standing belief that doctors are usually well-meaning idiots.”

He said all of this in Spanish. Strangely, the fungus seemed to respond to The Grouch’s speaking, following his voice and then altering its surface to, for whatever reason, imitate sound waves.

“Yes, I have to go back to work tomorrow. That’s the nature of this job. For now, though, unless there’s an emergency, my time is my own for the next four hours. What a time to be alive.”

Oscar looked over at his archive wall (what others had, not inaccurately, called his “junk collection”) and realized that he hadn’t obtained anything from the planet to add to it. For a place that needed a mercy mission, it had been surprisingly clean.

“I need to look harder for something messy the next time I’m on the planet,” Oscar said to the empty room, although the fungus once again responded, this time without The Grouch seeing it.

Oscar Cascarrabias
Engineering