A Captain And A Madman

Chapter Five: Renovation

The Doctor had asked that a meeting of the engineering staff who had been assigned to provide assistance take place at 0900 hours, and it was just a few minutes before then that Geordi and his hand-picked team shuffled into the chosen conference room. The Doctor was nowhere to be found, not yet at least, and so the engineers took seats from themselves, falling into murmured conversation. They were all specialists of varying kinds, mostly to do with warp mechanics and a smattering of other fields; in truth, the Time Lord hadn't given any specifics to the sort of people he was looking for, and so LaForge had opted for as varied a skillset as possible.

The muffled conversation was cut short as the conference room's door swished back open.

"Right! Morning!" With a wide, manic grin on his face, the Doctor breezed into the room; he had replaced his tattered outfit with a fresh one, identical to the first, obviously replicated using the ship's computer, though the suit jacket still bore soot marks, suggesting he had chosen to wear the old one; that, and the fading bruise on his jaw, were the only bits of evidence on their rather stressful day. The outfit was complete, of course, with bowtie, which he adjusted proudly with one hand as the half dozen engineers openly stared.

"Uh, Doctor," Geordi finally asked, lifting a hand slightly; "I thought Data was joining us on the project?"

"Oh, I've been working with him for the past..." he glanced at his watch; "...three hours already! Time flies. Didn't want to wake any of you up, we're having a marvelous time. He's just working on the TARDIS console, preparing the interface slot I'll be using once the modulator is complete. True professional, real pleasure to work with him."

Geordi frowned a little, but then nodded; "All right. Well, I had some ideas about how we could incorporate our power systems, but I'd need to wait until a closer look inside your ship-"

"Oh," the Doctor interjected, shaking his head. "No."

LaForge's head tilted. "...no...? As in...?"

"As in 'No, nobody else is allowed in the TARDIS,'" the Doctor explained, chuckling a bit at the very thought, "certainly not with any sort of scanning equipment, that's just insane. Please don't take offense, but infusing Gallifreyan technology into a more primitive culture has rarely ended well, and I think everyone can agree that such matters are best approached in baby steps. You have an entire central philosophy around that concept. Data has already been ordered by Captain Picard to keep any observations he makes entirely to himself, up to and including deletion of the memory engrams, so the risk is minimized with him. Humans with scanners on the other hand, no, terrible, terrible idea. After all, just because I'm not the Doctor of this universe, doesn't mean I can't behave with just a little bit of responsibility when it comes to keeping the children out of the liquor cabinet."

"Long as we're not taking offense, right?" LaForge asked, scowling a bit.

"Absolutely spot on!" The Doctor replied, cheerfully missing the sarcasm. Selecting the chair at the end of the conference room for himself, he plonked down onto it, adjusting his jacket, then reaching into one of the pockets. Out came one PADD... then two... then three... then four... until he had a stack of five PADDs resting on the table. Finally, he pulled out one more item; a bulky, boxy device that was at least three times larger than the pocket he'd tugged it from. Leaning back, he stretched, twiddled his thumbs, rotated back and forth in the chair a couple of times, then kicked his feet up.

"All right, the work should be simple enough," he began, "I mostly need people to run messages, collect supplies, hold light here or there, and help me better incorporate the particulars of your technology into the modulator I'm going to design, since much of it will need your hardware. Also, if anyone knows how to make your replicator produce jammy dodgers-"