#so this prompt gave me the opportunity to just slap on a vague but entertaining conclusion

[enterprisetrampstamp]

"does anyone have a spare blowtorch?" janice rand

Janice slides down the wall of engineering to sit, legs demurely settled at her side, and flutters her eyelashes as she summons her flirtiest smile. “How’s my favorite lieutenant today, Mx. Givens?”

The engineer in question looks over at her from where they’re cross-legged on the floor, two elbows deep in a control panel, and an amused smile tugs at the corners of their lips. Their voice, however, is drily sarcastic as they retort, “I don’t know, Ms. Rand; wouldn’t you need to be on the bridge or in sickbay to get that answer?”

“Aw, G,” Janice croons, reaching over to cup their cheek with one hand. “You know our love is as true as the ones I share with Ny and Chris.”

“I also know that you only ever bring up our love when you want something,” Givens informs her with a snort, pulling one hand out of the panel to scribble a note on the PADD resting on their knee.

“I bring up our love every time we talk!” Janice protests, snatching back her hand.

Givens makes an aborted move, as if they’d have thrown their hands in the air in exasperation if they weren’t full of wiring. “And you always want something!”

Janice opens her mouth to retort and then clicks it shut with a huff of annoyance. “Well, alright, fair enough.” She walks her fingers up the sleeve of their uniform, smiling winningly. “Can you get me into Scotty’s office?”

They eye her warily, fingers slowing in their deft ministrations. “Why?”

“Well, you see. Our resident Scotsman and Min Sung--”

“The botanist?”

“The very one. They’ve been having a rather prolific memo war regarding the temperature controls in the greenhouses, and their yeomen have gone on strike until they agree to work out their differences in person. So of course, because being the captain’s yeoman--“ Janice’s nostrils flare as she adds, more sourly than she means to-- “and this captain’s yeoman on top of that--isn’t enough work, I’m having to do their jobs as well for the next few days.”

Givens blinks at her. “Scotty replaced his yeoman with a robot.”

“Eustace 2.3; I know.” Janice squints. “Relevance, G?”

They roll their eyes, an edge of annoyance in their voice as they ask, “How can a robot go on strike, Jan?”

“Scotty may not have figured out how to program sentience yet, but he’s certainly managed to achieve ‘attitude’.” Janice clicks her tongue. “Can you let me in or not?”

“You better not be pulling my leg,” they caution, even as they pull their hands back out of the machinery and insert a pinky into each corner of their mouth to whistle sharply. “RANDERS!” they bark, and Janice flinches. (Lieutenant Givens didn’t earn the title of “Best Set of Lungs in the Engineering Department” for nothing.) “LET YEOMAN RAND INTO THE CHIEF’S OFFICE, WOULD YOU?”

Janice hears the slide of fabric on metal, and looks up just in time to see a young woman (with a truly extraordinary head of hair) drop suddenly from the jeffries tube to her left. The ensign straightens out of the crouch she’d landed in, flipping on the safety of her multipurpose laser wrench before tucking it behind her ear and snapping off a mocking salute.

“Follow me,” she says cheerfully, and sets off with a long-legged stride that leaves Janice scrambling to her feet to catch up.

“I ask you for a favor, G, and you pawn me off on an ensign?” she hisses, walking backwards to keep her gaze fixed angrily on the back of their head.

“The Enterprise is my one true love, and you’ve known that from the start,” Givens tells her solemnly. There’s a teasing glint in their eye as they glance back at her. “Don’t worry, Jan; you’re still a distant second.”

Throwing her hands in the air, she spins on her heel and stalks away. “I thought you Lieutenants were the only ones with the code, anyway!”

“Scotty has a ‘hacked door policy’--it’s like an open door policy, except you have to earn it!” Givens calls after her. “I’m busy, but Randers has the magic touch; you’re in good hands.”

“You’re a lackadaisical, teetotaling buffoon, Lieutenant!” Janice shouts back, and Ensign Randers stifles a laugh into her shoulder as she dismantles the keypad for Scotty’s office door.

“Whatever you say, Jan,” Givens agrees distractedly. “Just let me know if Eustace is still AWOL by the end of shift today, and I’ll either crack its housing and fix the programming or code the door to Scotty’s office to your biosignal.”

“I knew they loved me,” Janice tells Randers with a smirk of satisfaction as she drops her shoulder against the wall next to the door and crosses one leg over the other. She watches the ensign, her long fingers picking delicately through the wiring, for a long moment before asking curiously, “How long is this going to take?”

“Not even another minute,” comes the muttered response.

Janice beams, an expression that reaches all the way to her sparkling blue eyes, and declares, “I hope that whatever god or omnipotent creature happens to be out there in the universe smiles kindly on your soul, Ensign.”

The door hisses open; Randers turns a crooked grin on Janice. “Kind of you, ma’am. Need any help sorting through the chief’s files?”

Janice straightens, shoving up her sleeves with the single-minded determination that makes her so very effective at her job, and her grin turns feral as she calls for the lights. “If I needed a little help just to tackle Scotty’s woefully inadequate filing system, I wouldn’t be Captain Kirk’s yeoman, now, would I?”

And then Janice actually looks at the office laid out in front of her, and she feels, first, a thrum of confusion. On its heels follows foreboding.

Scotty’s office is... surprisingly neat. His in-tray (while full) isn’t overflowing, and there’s enough shelf and table space crammed into the room to keep separate what are obviously several different projects being worked on concurrently. With all of Eustace’s complaining- the original, human Eustace, who was Scotty’s yeoman until he weaseled his way into a transfer and after whom the robot was named- she’d been expecting a war zone; this is barely even as messy as Captain Kirk’s gets after several back to back missions with no time to tidy up in between.

But if not his organization, then...

“The problem isn’t the chief’s filing,” Randers tells her, sounding torn between amusement and sympathy. “It’s that he refuses to use manual input for anything, and the computer’s really bad at transcribing his accent.”

Janice sets her hand on her hips and narrows her eyes. This is not what she signed up for when she joined Starfleet, and it certainly shouldn’t be her problem now. She claps her hands together decisively, turning neatly on her heel. “New plan; anybody got a spare blowtorch?”

Randers’s eyebrows climb sharply towards her hairline. “Do I want to know?”

Janice throws her a pitying glance as she sets off across the department floor. “Not unless you want to give up your plausible deniability.”