One of the first things the senior crew of the Starship Enterprise learned was how to write reports. Or, more to the point, what not to include in the reports they sent back to Starfleet Command. It quickly became clear that a certain sort of art was involved in making things palatable for command and even Spock saw the logic in doing that. After all, sometimes you needed to be present to really understand a particular situation.

The first inkling they had, in regards to this little spoken of aspect of command, occurred when they were less than a week out of space dock. Not to say the first few days of their journey had been mundane in any respect. With a crew composed mainly of people most were kind enough to call 'eccentric', things were bound to happen that you wouldn't ordinarily see on a Federation starship.

Take Engineering, for example. It took only a day or so for people to learn to identify 'scary explosions' as opposed to 'experiment explosions'. And there were quite a few of those, most of which originated in the machine shops. After one particularly rattling boom, Kirk had gone down to investigate. He found Scotty, Winchester and Staite, looking a bit singed around the edges of their goggles and wielding fire extinguishers.

When questioned, they all denied anything had happened. It would have been more convincing were there not a smoking pile of…something sitting behind them. But they seemed sincere enough in their assurances that the ship was in no danger, so Kirk just shook his head and asked them not to destroy the place. As he was leaving, a falling pipe nearly hit him on the head. That same disembodied voice he always seemed to hear shouted, "Sorry, Captain!"

The first night of the cruise, Cupcake, Danish, Muffin and Cream Puff (Otherwise known as Ensigns Raff, Lester, Tanaka and Boyd) managed to wind up in sickbay. Not from a fight or the vengeance they'd been waiting for Kirk to exact since becoming captain. No, they had become paranoid to the point where they got caught in the booby traps they had set up at the entrances of their rooms. Cupcake had a head injury, Danish and Muffin managed to slightly electrocute themselves and Cream Puff…well, McCoy had taken one look at his scalded, sticky, feather covered self and handed him off to Dr. Chase.

One of the walls in the lounge was already half covered in some strange sort of mural that tried to incorporate all types of land and cityscapes. Lt. Lorne, a geologist, was something of an artist and had taken the lack of aesthetically pleasing features aboard ship as a personal affront.

Then there was Shawn, the oddball in security who claimed to be a psychic, the strange little group of Brits that Kirk was sure he overheard talking about magic and Fraser, a Canadian who was prone to launching into long, rambling, incomprehensible Inuit stories.

So when something happened that made the senior officer sit up, take note and say, "Shit! How do we explain this?", you know it was beyond interesting.

TBC

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