10 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space Nine

A friend of mine had a birthday recently, and she had a general Star Trek theme. For the purpose of the event, I wrote up a TNG/DS9 crossover fanfic comedy routine, and I wanted to post it somewhere enduring. Thus, without further ado...

10 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space Nine

1) Lieutenant Reginald Enidcott Barclay swore off holodecks, but decides that he can see one just once--he's on vacation, after all. So he goes down to the station to rent one of Qark's holosuites.
"Are you sure you can handle this?" asks Quark. "These simulations... they're a lot more intense than the ones you Federation people use."
Barclay scoffs. "Listen, I, I have put in more hours on the Enterprise holodeck than any three people combined. I... I can handle this." He says it again, to himself. "I can handle this."
"Well, ok." Quark hands him the disc for "Vulcan Love Slave, Part II: The Revenge." Barclay steps into the suite for his half hour session. No one on the Enterprise ever sees him again.

2) Odo asks for Deanna's advice in the gift he picked out for her mother. It's a replica 20th century flapper-style feather boa. Deanna, in the style of every first grade teacher who's had to evaluate a macaroni "I Love You Mommy": "..... She'll love it because it's from you."

3) Judzia and Worf invite Deanna and Riker to their quarters for a private dinner--or rather, Jadzia invites Deanna against Worf's better judgment, and Riker overhears and invites himself. Jadzia and Deanna quickly find they don't get along; they debate politics, and Jadzia finds Deanna's approach too manipulative, too passive, too indirect. Deanna, for her part, believes that Judzia is too aggressive and deliberately antagonistic. Finally, Worf intercedes, telling them there is no need to fight over him, as Jadzia has already won, and that they are both embarrassing themselves. There's a moment of silence, and then Jadzia comments, "you know, Worf, for someone who can be such a smooth talker when it comes to romance, you sure can put your foot in it." She turns to Deanna. "Did he try his line on you too? About being afraid of hurting you?"
Worf interjects. "Klingon mating is very physically--"
"He did!" says Troi. "Which is odd, because in actuality, he's such a tender lover."
They spend the rest of the night debating Worf's sexual prowess. Worf is so mortified he is still sitting silently at the table an hour after the dinner ends, frozen in embarassment.
Years later, Riker will remember the dinner as one of the best nights of his life.

4) DS9 Operations Chief Miles Edward O'Brien sneaks onto the Enterprise during the night shift. He goes to the transporter room, sets out his tools, and gets to work behind the console. The next day, the Enterprise transporter chief finds a surprise. Someone has welded a leather chair to the spot in front of his console, and left a big bow and a note: "You're feckin' welcome."

5) Qark runs into Guinan, and is instantly terrified. Years ago, she gave him some advice on running a bar, and by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, she's entitled to half his profits unless he can convince her to admit he earned his success on his own. He attempts to wow her with his state of the art holosuites, his Tellarians-eat-half-off Tuesdays, his dabo tables. She is thoroughly unimpressed, until she runs into Morn, who orders his usual. Guinan: "Quark, I have been tending bars for longer than most civilizations have had star travel, and I have never, never met anyone as demanding, as particular, as downright picky, as Morn. I don't know what you're doing here, but if you've got him as your regular, you must be doing *something* right. Consider the rule satisfied." (Because of course Guinan knew exactly what he was trying to do the whole time.)

6) Ro Laren and Kira have a series of long talks about their hopes and dreams for Bajor, and start a friendship that will last the rest of their lives. Not everything has to be a joke.

7) Riker contracts a STI from a dabo girl, and gets it treated on DS9 because he doesn't want Crusher to know. Unfortunately for him, Dr Bashir is miffed that Riker doesn't immediately acknowledge him as an equally smooth ladies' man, and "accidentally" lets slip the information. Beverley knows how to let a good joke mature, though, so she waits until Riker's next annual check-up to say "and tell me, Will, are you still experience a burning sensation in your armpits?".

8) Q pays a visit, unable to resist the two teams in one place. He runs into Garak, who introduces himself and tricks Q into doing some low level magical favors him. Q figures it out, promises to ruin Garak's family and disappears, but this was Garak's plan all along: from the beginning, he figured Q would turn on him, which is why he gave his name as a member of a rival house in the Obsidian Order. Point for the tailor spy-master.

9) Jake tries to bond with Wesley Crusher (who is still on the Enterprise, despite it being at least season 4 DS9 if Worf's on the station--don't worry about it), but even he's annoyed by Wesley's know-it-all-ism. In desperation, he tries to get Nog to talk to Wesley, but Nog's own Starfleet-born competitiveness places them in a loop of one-upmanship. Finally, Jake abandons them both, and a month later, his essay on how Starfleet instills an atmosphere of unhealthy competitive elitism in its cadets gets published in a space-zine.

10) On the last day of the Enterprise's docking, the two teams play a friendly game of baseball. Geordi and Data get really into sabremetrics; Riker absolutely destroys his body to make amazing catches; Deanna gets really competitive and uses her empathic abilities to play mind games with the enemy team (Rom eventually needs to be carried out in a stretcher.) The Enterprise crew illustrates why they're the best and the brightest, perfectly fusing together as a team and effortlessly winning the game. But the Deep Space Nine crew have a lot more fun.

Later Days.

This might be the geekiest thing I've ever done. That doesn't involve comic books or video games.

I'm in an odd mood. Consequently, here's a list of all the fanfic crossover adventures I found that feature Sam from Quantum Leap by perusing the first dozen or so entries that turned up on Google:
(from fanfiction.net, http://www.tthfanfic.org/,http://www.slidersweb.net):
24 / Quantum Leap (1)
Angel / Quantum Leap (1)
Babylon 5 / Quantum Leap (1)
Batman / Quantum Leap (1)
Bewitched / Quantum Leap (1)
Big Wolf on Campus / Quantum Leap (1)
Bones / Quantum Leap (1)
The Borrowers / Quantum Leap (1)
Buffy / Quantum Leap (13)
The Cape/Quantum Leap (1)
Chuck / Quantum Leap (2)
Cupid / Quantum Leap (1)
Dark Shadows / Quantum Leap (2)
Digimon / Quantum Leap (1)
Doctor Who/Quantum Leap (5)
Early Edition / Quantum Leap (1)
Emergency! / Quantum Leap (1)
Enterprise / Quantum Leap (3)
Farscape / Quantum Leap (1)
Fearless / Quantum Leap (1)
Fraiser/ Quantum Leap (1)
Ganma / Quantum Leap (1)
Get Smart / Quantum Leap (1)
The Ghost & Mrs. Muir / Quantum Leap (1)
Ghostbusters/Quantum Leap (1)
Gilligan's Island / Quantum Leap (1)
Glee /Quantum Leap (1)
Greatest American Hero / Quantum Leap (1)
Harry Potter / Quantum Leap (2)
Highlander / Quantum Leap (2)
Highway to Heaven /Quantum Leap (2)
House / Quantum Leap (2)
Incredible Hulk / Quantum Leap (1)
Invisible Man / Quantum Leap (1)
JAG / Quantum Leap (1)
K-PAX / Quantum Leap (1)
Knightmare / Quantum Leap (1)
Knightrider / Quantum Leap (1)
Moulin Rouge / Quantum Leap (1)
NCIS / Quantum Leap (2)
Pirates of the Caribbean / Quantum Leap (1)
Pokemon / Quantum Leap (1)
Popular / Quantum Leap (1)
The Powers of Matthew Star/ Quantum Leap (1)
Psych / Quantum Leap (2)
Roswell / Quantum Leap (1)
Scooby-Doo /Quantum Leap (1)
The Sentinel/Quantum Leap (1)
Seven Days / Quantum Leap (1)
Sliders / Quantum Leap (1)
Star Trek / Quantum Leap (1)
Star Trek: Next Generation / Quantum Leap (1)
Stargate / Quantum Leap (2)
Stargate: Atlantis / Quantum Leap (3)
Starman / Quantum Leap
Supernatural / Quantum Leap (4)
That 70s Show / Quantum Leap (1)
Thunderbirds / Quantum Leap (1)
Touched by an Angel / Quantum Leap (1)
Voyager / Quantum Leap (1)
Wings / Quantum Leap (1)
X-Files / NCIS (1)
Yu-Gi-Oh / Quantum Leap (3)

Thoughts:
-Quantum Leap really lends itself well to fan-fiction. Fans can use the show to tell entirely original stories, or they can follow QL's premise and have him show up to "fix" some event in the show that they felt went wrong.
-One of the Doctor Who counts featured Jack, and no doctor, but his connection to the doctor was featured prominently, so I counted it here, rather than Torchwood.
-I opted that multiple stories featuring the same franchices cross-over pairings by the same author count only once ( ex) if samadams wrote two Simpsons/Quantum Leap stories, I'd only count 1) , regardless of whether the author intended for them to take place in the same continuity.
-For crossovers that contain more than two franchises, I'm counting only the most prominent one (besides Quantum Leap). Because, that's why.
-Some people posted the same story in multiple forums (under the same name, I expect, so it's fine), so the count may be off.
-I mixed up Knight Rider with Forever Knight, which really made me yearn for a Forever Knight Rider crossover.
-I always thought there should have been some follow-up of Giles' murder of Glory at the end of Season 5 of Buffy (um, spoiler), so seeing a crossover that dealt with that period gets my interest. I'm not crazy with the direction the author took it, but to each their own.
-Incredible Hulk / Quantum Leap wins for best title, "A Leap into Anger." Frankly, this was not a competition of giants.
-The Next Generation / Quantum Leap gets points for the plot where baddies try to take over the Quantum Leap facility; I suppose the ability to jump would make an interesting weapon.
-For obvious reasons, the Enterprise / Quantum Leap crossover combination is both obvious and brilliant.
-Buffy crossovers are clearly at the high count, but that's because the second site I found was actually a Buffy fanfic site that happened to have some Quantum Leap stories. Before the inflated count, Dr Who was in the lead, with 5. It's not surprising; in DW, we have another show whose nature lends itself to the fanfic crossover, for much the same reasons--he has a reputation for showing up wherever and whenever to fix things. Supernatural also had a very strong showing, and many made good use out of multiple characters named Sam.
-Most obscure: The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. Most bizarre: That 70s Show. Most inexplicable: Yu-Gi-Oh. Not in its existence, but in the fact that three different people decided to write a Yu-Gi-Oh/Quantum Leap crossover.
Last, my favorite premise has to be the Quantum Leap / Sliders, in which Dr. Beckett slides not into the character of Quinn Mallory, but into the actor Jerry O'Connell, with the mandate to prevent John Rhys-Davies for being fired in Season 3. I approve.

Later Days.

Fan Fic: ...after this scene, they all go out for ice-cream.

I'm writing this at 4:17 am, so you can guess how my sleep schedule's been doing. But this time, my insomnia's your gain: I was sorting through some older stuff, and I came across this gem. It was written for a class on cyberpunk that I sat in on. One class, we we focused on hacker subculture, and we were all assigned to bring in something that resembles a "hack." In my case, I chose to write a short piece of fan-fiction. The idea is that it fit the general definition of a hack--unauthorized presence within a larger system--and it harkened back to the Grub Street hacks, a bunch of 18th century writers whose work was published by the printers in Grub Street. They were, as a group, horrible writers--poorly paid and universally reviled. The term "Grub Street hack" came to be known the lowest form of authorship. And what, in these days of Internet cyberspace, has earned the title of "lowest form of authorship" more than a fan fic writer? (Okay, maybe someone who designs LOLcat posters.) Anyway, I thought it was pretty clever, playing off the double meaning like that. Sadly, the professor didn't quite agree with me, but the joy of auditing a course means you don't have to be stellar, you just have to be there. Still, I had a lot of fun with writing the piece, and so, without further ado, I give you:

The Lord of the Deathly Hollows: A Fragment

A boy walked through an endless, empty cavern, following the path of a large, green creature. They trudged for hours in silence, until, at last, the green creature spoke. "An' where are we,again?"

"The Mines of Moria," said Harry Potter, shortly.

"Moria," Shrek repeated. "More like, like 'More-Dark. Ye get it? Do ye get it?"

"Would you shut up?" Harry hissed. "You're supposed to be looking for threats, not telling stupid jokes."

Shrek sighed. "Ach. He doesn't like mah jokes, he thinks ah'm just here to hit things, he's clearly got some sort of racial problems against Scottish ogres--"

"I do not!"
"--I'm starting to think I should have stayed with the donk--" He stopped in his tracks. So did Harry. A masked man stepped out of the mists before them. He was garbed entirely in black, complete with a flowing cape and a great dark helmet. Even from some feet away, they could hear the raspy sound of the figure's breathing.

"You shall not pass," said Darth Vader. He took a small cylinder from his side, and a red beam of light shot out from it with a faint hum.

Shrek leaned towards Harry. "Don't take this the wrong way," he whispered. "But his wand is definitely bigger." He straightened up. "Well, then," he said, starting forward. "Ah guess it's time for the big, mean ogre to hit--" Vader waved his hand, and Shrek flew backwards. He collided into the side of the cave, and landed in a heap.

Harry whirled around. "Shrek!" he exclaimed. A quick movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned back just in time to see Vader advancing. "Protego!" he shouted, getting up a shield just in time.

Vader's lightsaber bounced off Harry's shield with a flash of sparks. "Your concern for your friend makes you weak," the Sith lord commented, circling around the boy. "Your friends will always make you weak. They will drag you down with their petty concerns, their little jealousies, their endless needs. Your friends are the reason you fail."

Harry brandished his wand. "No," he said, fiercely. "My friends are the reason I fight."

Now unnoticed by the two combatants, Shrek picked himself up. "There was some force behind that hit," he muttered. He noticed that another figure had entered the cavern, and was watching him silently. It was gigantic, dwarfing even Shrek, with a flaming back, full wings, and a long, coiling whip in its fist.

"Well, hello there, young man," Shrek said. "And what does your mommy call ye?"

The creature said nothing, but advanced slowly.

"Ah, the strong, silent type. Well, for yer sake, ah hope that silence extends to not weeping like a little girl." Shrek drew back his fist. "Brace yerself, boyo, 'cause this is really going to--"

The Balrog kneed him in the groin.

"Hurt," Shrek whispered, and fell over.


...Man, that was fun. Looking back, I can modestly say that I nailed Shrek's voice. Harry's okay too--no Rowling, but it works in a pinch. Vader... Vader talks a little too much here. And he's too angsty. Not enough Vader, too much Anakin. But what I mostly got out of the exercise--and even a bit now, from typing it--is how much fun it was. I totally get the appeal of fan fic. You get to play with established characters, which both makes it feel like you're participating in something bigger, and still carries a whiff of the forbidden, since it's "not allowed" activity. Plus, there's a challenge to it--can you match the character's tone? Do you have anything new to contribute? I might try this again some time; just as soon as my "Dr Who / Dark Tower / Uncle Scrooge" crossover finishes coalescing.

Later Days.