Meet Lt. Zariel Sindile, temporarily assigned to Voyager for its rescue mission in the Badlands. Now she's stuck in the Delta Quadrant, her children are at home without her, she has no one to depend on, and her darkest secret is about to be laid ba...
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Stardate 51654.8
Zariel pulled on her baseball cap and slid her braid through the back, grinning an excited little grin, as she approached the entry to Holodeck Two. She'd been looking forward to this. Tapping the panel outside the door, she said, "Computer, run program Rebel Baseball."
"That program is currently in progress."
Zariel frowned, then stepped in front of the door. It whished open, and she walked inside to see her re-creation of Swayze Field. She walked through the tunnel to the field. Standing near the plate was Tom Paris, with a bucket of baseballs on the ground beside him and a fungo bat in his hand, and in shallow center, Harry Kim, a frustrated look on his face and a scattering of baseballs on the ground behind him. Tom was saying, "Harry, close your fingers, then cover your glove with your right hand."
They turned at her approach, and she said, "Keep your thumb under the ball." She held up her own hand to demonstrate, then held out both hands in a "carry on" gesture. Tom hit three more balls to Harry, who caught them all. Zariel grinned at him, then said, "Y'all the ones been playing my baseball simulation? I wondered why I had to keep resettin' it."
Tom said, surprised, "This is yours? I thought this was a pre-loaded program."
"No, this one's mine. You can tell by how this one actually knows the rules of the game." She rolled her eyes. "Anyway, gentlemen, it's 1800 hours. My holodeck." She walked into the dugout, selected a bat, slung it over her shoulder and strode to the plate. "Unless you boys think you can play with the big girls."
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Two hours later, they had gotten Harry to reliably field routine grounders and fly balls, and tried him out in various positions on the field, discovering that he was in fact an outfielder. At the plate, however, he was discovering that merely being an athlete didn't make one a baseball player and that Parisses Squares skills didn't necessarily carry over. Harry would need some work at the plate.
Tom was a middle infielder, it turned out. During his batting practice, Zariel fixed a hitch in his swing that left him vulnerable to an outside breaking pitch. Tom, unlike Harry, had played quite a bit of baseball before, and just needed to knock the dust off his skills.
Sweaty, tired, and dirty, the three of them flopped on the bench in the home dugout. Zariel tugged her cap off and rubbed her forearm across her face.
Harry stretched his arms over his head. "I'm going to be sore tomorrow."
Tom looked over at Zariel. "Lieutenant, how often do you play this program?"
"Whenever I can get the holodeck time. My boys are both ball players, and I spent a lot of time in the stands. It's great to be out on the field again myself." She leaned back against the dugout wall. "And on the ball field, it's Zariel. Or Zee."
Harry asked, "Can we play this with you again?"
"Absolutely," she said. "We can pool our holodeck time." They smiled, and she said, "Look, between the three of us, we've got a pretty decent middle of the field. Do y'all know anybody else who might want to play?"
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After a few more holodeck sessions, the team had grown quite a bit. Between the three of them, they'd recruited Chakotay to play catcher, Mandy Chamberlin in right field, Ensign Gallagher at third base, Phil Jacobson at first base, Ensign Mulcahey in left field, and Crewman Swift to pitch.
Most interesting of all, however, was one other who had come to the tryout they'd held. Tuvok stood at the side of the field watching, until Zariel approached him and asked, half-joking, "Any position look interesting to you?"
She fully expected some clinical Vulcan query about the possible point of this activity, but Tuvok pointed out to the mound, where Swift was warming up his fastball, and then his fastball, and just to shake things up, his fastball. Anyone who could catch up to it was going to put it over the fence. "I believe that if one were to vary the trajectory of the ball sufficiently, it would make it more difficult for the batter to hit it."
Zariel looked at him blankly for a moment, head to one side, then lifted the whistle that hung on a cord around her neck and blew a blast on it. She turned and shouted towards the mound, "New pitcher!"
