After inviting Spiegel and Noelle on the mission to go collect the Obama-class prototype, we had a good conversation in the mess, and I think I've unintentionally started a new nick name for the trio of women that serve as the next level of authority under th'Shan in tactical/security. They seem to be known as the Valkyries now, and what's worse is that despite his lack of appreciation of opera, Spiegel has managed to retain one bit that has been twisted for this particular application. He started humming Ride of the Valkyries when I first called them such, and next thing you know, half the peons in the mess are humming it along with him each time they came up in conversation. I wonder if they'll take it as a compliment or insult, only time will tell.

On my way out of the mess, I noticed Grace sitting with her friend, and I stopped by her table a moment to ask her to find me in my quarters after my duty shift today. She hasn't shown up yet, but I believe her duty shift today was the same as mine, even though she was down on the flight deck and I was elsewhere. The look on her face when I asked her to come talk to me told me she had an idea of what I wanted to talk about, but she assured me she'd be here, so I should be seeing her soon.

Bowling was a delightful exercise in pointlessness. We dressed up in hideous shirts and shoes, got piss faced drunk, and found out that the amazing Pukey actually had one thing he could do well. I also found out there was a more annoying Andorian than the blue bastard. I've nick named her Princess. It's odd, considering until these two, I've usually found the Andorian people to be good honorable people, worthy of friendship and trust.

I'm starting to think that the blue bastard, he's just lost, confused and socially inept. I still find it hard to justify shooting me in the back even if he thought he was doing me a favor. He clearly doesn't have combat skill and the ability to size up his environment if he felt that the morons who we fighting actually posed enough of a threat to justify saving me from myself.

Due to a freak bowling accident, Kinnara was taken off the mission. In her place, we received Pukey. While Kinnara is certainly a more skilled, better disciplined, and combat adept person, Pukey might actually turn out to be an asset, as much as I hate to admit it. If nothing else, he seems to have a talent for ineptitude that leads to shit house luck, and he certainly does a good job of drawing the attention of others to allow the rest of us to better slip around and do what we need or want. Very clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he actually decided that going into a crowd full of people before a big festival while wearing an easy to grab target like a purse was a good idea, or at least failed to realize what ripe fruit he was providing the pick pockets and thieves with. Lucky for him that the only one who tried to take it was a small child, and I felt it would be easier to finish this mission with his purse, and the contents there of, still in his possession.

I saw as the child grabbed it and ran off, and managed to capture the young thief before the rest of the away team quite realized what was going on. The oddest thing about it is that in the process of trying to teach the child some manners and get Pukey back his property, I ended up with the child's zhavey, mother, feeling that she owed me a debt of gratitude. Even if the race has attempted to pacify itself in the name of solving it's population crisis, there is still very much the cultural undertones of a warrior race left in these people.

At the suggestion of the blue bastard, we ended up taking the mother and child under our wing to accompany us to the city that is our destination. I suspect that the blue bastard enjoys the hero worship that he's the recipient of from the child. Also, regardless of what I think of his actual combat and observation skills, his by the book methods do support this sort of pairing. It allows us to blend in more if our group is half made up of natives, instead of being made up of mostly aliens. If nothing else, it makes for a good excuse to have some ego stroking at the hands of a child. I can't say I blame him for enjoying the attention, I know I certainly enjoyed the ego boost that came with being Grace's hero when she was young.

We've almost reached the city, I can feel the shuttle starting into a landing pattern, so I'm going to wrap up this journal entry. We get to make our way through another layer of customs. I am glad that I took the time to brush up on their laws before the trip, I did check most of my weaponry in with the proper paperwork, and it has made the trip a little easier. It makes me uneasy to be so lightly armed, but I didn't have time to get together the paperwork needed for anything but my d'k tahg to be on my person, and if we're supposed to be blending in, it's only going to make for problems if I'm getting into brawls with customs officials over what constitutes an acceptable weapon to bring onto their planet and what doesn't. I probably shouldn't be so uneasy though, after the years of school yard and bar brawls I grew up on, I typically never want for a weapon even if I enter the fight unarmed, being so easy to lift a weapon off another person as it is.

So it seems we've technically succeeded at our mission. We were to bring him back dead or alive, and due to a transporter accident, death was the winner of the day. Growing up with Klingons, one develops a strong stomach for blood, guts and gore, or one simply does not survive, so being in the transporter room when they materialized him didn't bother me one bit. Spiegel on the other hand was white as a ghost.

He handled the gore when we'd gone on away missions together during the Klingon war, so it didn't occur to me to drag him out of the room for this mess. There really wasn't a good chance though, the blue bastard's goons easily took up a majority of the space in the transporter room, and when they left, they were quickly replaced by a med team. And even if we'd been able to make it to the door with them in there, our chief engineer showed up about the time we should have been headed out the door. I'm not sure if Spiegel had known what to expect, or if he was just trying to get out of the way by getting in the way, but I had to firmly keep him out of the way of everyone else coming in to do their jobs.

The one who took it worse than Spiegel was Noelle Connor. From the way she reacted, you'd think she'd never seen combat before and that she was personally responsible for every action of the ship's systems. I tried to talk to her, but as usual, I was absolutely inept at dealing with human sensitivities, and Spiegel was so stunned himself all he could think of was alcohol. Noelle wasn't interested in getting drunk.

I was going to have Spiegel check in on Noelle some time this evening, but dude got so drunk that it was all I could do to get him into his bed to let him try to sleep through it. I did set his alarm for the morning, so he'd hopefully make it to the briefing, and I'll make a point to check on him with a prairie oyster, his favorite cure for hangovers.

For now, I'm not happy with how the Trafalgar handled on the way down to the planet this morning, so I'm going to set up a simulator in the holodeck and see if I can work out how to better handle such situations again, or how to improve the shuttle design to better work with such conditions. I have half a mind to surprise Grace and her friends, and invite them to join me, but I have no idea when their duty shifts are, so I don't know if they'd be able to join me. Also, I'm not sure if I'm in the mood to be on the receiving end of hero worship again. It was flattering coming from a little girl but I'm not sure how she's changed since then and I don't know if she still considers me her hero.

I might also need some combat time in the holodeck, there was entirely too little excitement on this away mission compared to what I'd been hoping for given my blank check and the build up. Maybe the Tennis Invasion would be good for me.

Well, I still haven't run into Grace around the ship yet, but she sent me a picture through the ship message system. It's her and her friends, all of which are posted here, right before they graduated from Starfleet Academy.