Halfway through October and with Halloweeen fast approaching, I'm very excited to announce the second annual Holoween: a celebration of La Sirena's intrepid quintet of Emergency Holograms!
(This time with haunting art by the inimitable @regionalpancake!)
Do you have a spooky tale set on La Sirena that features the holograms somehow? Maybe some meta about their preferred costumes or fanart of the same? A story where the EH's need to dress up to save the day?
Then this is your opportunity! On the 31st of October and the week following (until 6th November), post your story, art, meta, or whatever else you might come up with and tag them as #holoween2024 or tag this blog so I can find them and reblog them here!
Since we're all probably busy with the various -tobers we're participating in (and Halloween is only a few weeks away), there are no sign-ups or minimum requirements.
Wrote a spooky hologram drabble? Post it on the 31st! Got a post that simply has a list of the holos and the costumes you imagine they'd wear? Tag it as #holoween2024! 8k fic you wrote three years ago? We'd love to give that a (re-)read! Brilliant post you submitted to last year's event? Looks like it's time for a reblog!
After all, what better time than Holoween to practice a little resurrection? 🕯 👻
Any work you think would fit and you'd like to share (or share again), simply get it ready to post/reblog between the 31st October and 6th November, tag this blog, and I'll reblog them all here!
If you have any questions or you want to sign up so that I can remind you about posting closer to the time, just shoot me a message.
The AO3 collection for all Holoween fanworks can be found here. It's not specific to a certain year, so older works are welcome just as much as new ones.
If you have any more questions, maybe they'll be answered in the Collection FAQ (the post is from last year, but everything except the tag still applies), or else just send me an ask and I'll get back to you.
🦇👻🎃 Let's get ready for a Happy (and spooky) Holoween! 🎃👻🦇
Reblogging for Holoweek! @holo-squad It’s a costume, so that counts. (From the fic - The Not-Always-An-Emergency Players Present A Helpful and Hospitable Production - which is not at all spooky, unless you count Rios’s horror at watching his holos perform Romeo and Juliet.)
I didn’t have the time (yet) to write anything new for Holoween, but since it’s okay to repost old stuff and I didn’t want to NOT post anything today, here’s a ficlet from my Whumptober 2020 series that may suit the bill. At least I think it’s got some spookiness along with some humor, and our holos once more save the day.
What’s A Whumpee Got To Do To Get Some Sleep Around Here?
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Hollow-eyed, Rios crossed the bridge to drop into the pilot seat. From the corner of his eye, he saw the Hospitality Hologram shimmering away, but he was too tired to voice his chronic annoyance with that particular crew member, and he secretly had to admit that he was grateful for the cup of tar-black coffee he found steaming within reach. He took a sip of the scalding hot liquid, desperate for a caffeine kick.
“Got any sleep?”
Rios hadn’t even seen Raffi, slumped as she sat in the navigator’s seat. She swiveled around to him with hanging shoulders, her curls wilder than ever, the rings under her eyes so dark they looked like bruises.
“No,” Cris sighed. “You?”
It was a rhetorical question, really, and Raffi huffed, pointing at her face. “Do I look like I slept?”
Fact was, none of them had slept in three days - except for Picard, who was out like a light in his quarters after the EMH had insisted on dosing him with a narcotic, worried about the old man’s heart. Sleep deprivation, he’d lectured them, could kill, and Rios was starting to believe him. Only that he was close to killing someone. Anyone, honestly. After nearly seventy-two hours of being trapped, with an offline engine, in a cosmic phenomenon that was somehow affecting their brainwaves, Rios was suffering from a very short fuse.
The most enraging part: While Raffi, Picard and him - the only human crew members on board at the moment - were turning into zombies, the holograms remained completely unaffected. Bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed, they zipped through La Sirena’s decks, running system checks and analyzing scans and fiddling with the ship’s engine, driving Rios crazy with their limitless energy and chipper mood.
Too bad that a hologram didn’t die when you choked it with your bare hands.
Rios threw a murderous glance at Emmet, the hologram currently slumbering in his seat in front of the tactical controls. He was the worst to bear, falling asleep in an instant as soon as his code told him he was sitting and no hostile activity required him to be awake. Feet propped up on the console, head tipped back and mouth open, he was currently snoring obliviously. And as a hologram, he didn’t even need to sleep.
Rios’ fingers involuntarily curled into claws.
“What is the nature of your psychiatric emergency?”
The EMH had materialized beside him and, hands in his pockets, was studying him with professional concern.
“You heart rate is elevated, your blood pressure is climbing, and your cortisol output-”
“Deactivate!”
“But Captain, I am…”
“Deactivate!”
The hologram disappeared with an affronted poof.
“Nice,” Raffi commented sardonically, chin propped up on a weary arm. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
Cris meant to roll his eyes, but it would worsen his headache, so he left it. Scrubbing his hand across his face, he tried to knit a clear string of thoughts together in his increasingly unreliable brain.
“We need to get away from here, Raff,” he said darkly.
She blinked tiredly. “I know.”
And it was true. What had felt like a weird anomaly three days ago - their impulse and warp drive dying suddenly, then the insomnia - had escalated into a dangerous crisis. In spite of incessant work, they hadn’t been able to bring the engines back online, and they didn’t need the EMH’s lectures to point out the consequences of sleep deprivation. They felt them.
Physical exhaustion was the least of it. Cris could get past the headache, the soreness, the nausea and the dizziness. But the tricks the insomnia played on his mind were an altogether different thing. He could no longer concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, and his short term memory had gone to fritz. It was bad enough that the tiredness was affecting his eyesight, causing the EMH to suggest reading glasses and almost getting his programming wiped by an infuriated Cris. But now he was starting to see things.
Hallucinations. They were a well-known but nevertheless deeply disturbing side-effect, and Cris, all too familiar with the phenomenon from his breakdown after the Ibn Majid disaster, was once more stalked by demons he thought he’d laid to rest. Captain Vandemeer had visited him in his quarters when he’d been staring into the darkness last night, sleepless, but too exhausted to remain on his feet. The top of his head gone, blood and brain matter dripping from the ceiling, Vandemeer had looked at Cris with opaque eyes, and it had taken half a bottle of Pisco to make him disappear.
Rios punched a button on his holographic controls.
“Ean!” He barked. “Status report!”
“We’re still offline, Cap’n,” came the instant reply. “But Enoch thinks he may be on to something. There’s a pattern of sub-photon waves that seems to be targeting the temperature sensors with galandrion radiation, effectively-”
“Only the bottom line, Ean,” Cris cut him off. His brain had shot down after “sub-photon waves”, unable to process anything more complicated than a spaghetti recipe.
“Bottom line?” Ean repeated. “We’re working on it, Cap’n.”
“What Ean means,” Enoch picked up, flickering into existence on the bridge with an avid expression, “is that we think we’re close to solving the problem. Now, if the scan check that I reprogrammed to include sub-photonic and pseudo nano-neurologic patterns reveals that not only the temperature sensors but also the newtonian reverse weight-speed effect of-”
“Callate!”Cris shot up from his seat. “Shut the fuck- Jesus!”
He’d closed up to the ENH in two strides, right fist pulled back to punch, and he’d managed to rein himself in only at the very last moment. He shook out his arms, trembling, trying to get rid of the tension and the shock he felt at his near loss of control.
Eyebrows raised in innocent wonder, Enoch cocked his head.
“Captain?” he asked kindly. “Would you like me to re-activate Emil? I am sure he could provide you with a sedative, if you’d like.”
Rios shot around again, blood boiling. All of a sudden, the bridge’s ambient lights felt too bright, and the cluster of stars visible through the panoramic window seemed to move forward, speeding up, threatening to attack and swallow La Sirena.
“Emmet!” Cris yelled. “Deflector shields!”
The ETH jerked awake and blinked at his screens in confusion. “Que? No veo nada.”
Raffi had gripped the arms of her seat and was looking at Rios in alarm.
“Babe,” she said anxiously and got up. “There’s nothing out there. You have to… Here.” She grabbed his arm and tried to lead him back to his chair. “Here, sit down.”
“What?!”
Rios glared at her. Raffi’s face looked strange all of a sudden. It… reshaped. Her hair shrank back into her skull, getting shorter, smoother… white. Her skin brightened, nose widening, her eyes morphing from brown to blue. Stubble appeared, and her clothes… his clothes… a Starfleet uniform with a captain’s badge.
“Sit down, son.”
Vandemeer. Intact, smiling paternally, he gently led Rios to his seat and sat him down.
Then, still smiling, he lifted a phaser, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Rios screamed, and he was still screaming when the EMH put a hypospray to his neck and cut his strings.
XXX
“Coffee, babe?”
Rios blinked a veil of deep sleep from his eyes. When his vision sharpened, he saw Raffi’s hand in front of him, balancing a cup that smelled of heaven.
He sat up and stretched before he took the coffee, looking around his cabin. He felt rested, and, to his surprise, he heard the familiar hum of La Sirena’s impulse drive propelling the ship through space at cruising speed.
“We’re back online?”
“Yes. Three days ago.”
“Three days ago?!” Rios almost spilled his coffee. “How long was I out?”
Raffi smiled, but there was an uncomfortable edge to it. “Three and a half days.”
“Dios.”
He racked his brain, memory creeping back in. Memory - and shame. Scratching his beard, he looked at Raffi with unease.
“It was pretty bad, huh?”
“Pretty.” She nodded. Then she placed her hand on his arm and rubbed it gently. “But you weren’t the only one. I cracked a few hours after Emil put you out. He says I was trying to open the cargo hatch to take a walk.”
Cris lifted astonished brows. “Good idea.”
Raffi’s worried face softened into a chuckle. “Not one of my best. I’m glad your holos were there to stop me. They’re not entirely useless, you know?”
“Right.” Cris smirked. God, he hadn’t felt this rested in ages. “Not entirely. But please don’t go and tell them I agreed with you on that. Enoch will never stop rubbing it under my nose.”
As if on cue, the EMH materialised at the foot of Rios’ bed.
“Captain Rios,” he said. “I am pleased to see you awake! And your brain waves have returned to a normal pattern. Now, if I could ask you to meet me in sickbay for a thorough scan of your neural-”
“Deactivate!”
Raffi smiled as the hologram begrudgingly dissolved.
“You ready to come back to the bridge, Captain?” she asked Rios, the twinkle back in her eyes. “Or do you need more sleep?”
Cris swung his legs from the bed.
“Sleep is overrated,” he said sardonically and headed off to take a shower.
In a splendig addition to the Holoween theme, @highfunctioningflailgirl brings us a haunting story where Rios is plagued by ghosts from his past. Thank goodness his faithful holograms are there to help him (and the ship and her crew) through the crisis!
I'm so glad you resurrected this story, it's definitely a classic and I always love to reread it!
Fic cover for @jazzfic 's amazing and spooky contribution to Holoween 2023 run by @holo-squad
Friend Corn Wants to Play - jazzfic - Star Trek: Picard [Archive of Our Own]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: La Sirena
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram & Agnes Jurati
Characters: Agnes Jurati, Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram, Enoch | La Sirena’s Emergency Navigational Hologram, Cristóbal Rios
Additional Tags: holoween, Holodecks & Holosuites (Star Trek), Mild Horror, Background Relationships, Gallows Humor
Summary:
Fears are silly, right? But she has Emil on her side, so surely Agnes can face this one.
@jazzfic brings us a reminder of spooky adventures on the holodeck. Can the holos help Agnes overcome her fear of the corn maze? Or is the seasonal terror going to win out?
Find out in this spooky tale (with an amazing cover by @regionalpancake's @thefinalfrontpage )
(31 October is busy art day! Holoween, last day of whumptober and Barnaby Brooks Jr’s birthday!)
[ID: Sketch of the holosquad. Enoch and Ean are walking, Steward is about to start walking, Emil is standing in place with hands in his pocket and Emmett is lying on the floor. All is normal except for that everything from their legs up is pixelated 8-bit style, except for Emmett who is super low resolution and just a few large pixels. End ID]
-
The holos have decided their costumes this year take the form of poor resolution for everything except for their already bewildering and mysterious legs and shoes.
For our very first entry in this year's Holoween, @lemissingmask brings us this brilliant take on the true nightmare and horror of any photonic life form: poor resolution 😱
Thank you so much for this brilliant start to the week (and the incredible attention to detail!)
Only three more days until we begin our week-long Holoween bash! 🎃👻
(For details, see my pinned post!)
Would you like to write something or create some art for the week of ghostly holo-horror tales, but can't quite think of anything that would fit? Here are a few ideas to get your started!
The crew makes a pit stop at some far-flung trading station and Picard acquires an Ancient Artefact of Great Renown and Immeasurable Value (i.e. he's sweet-talked into paying way too much for an old piece of junk). Raffi decides it looks like a Ouija board and holds an impromptu sceance, since it's Halloween and all. Unfortunately, it turns out the artefact is not some harmless piece of junk but a highly sophisticated piece of technology that can mess up all kinds of computer code...
Rios is haunted by ghosts of his past and the holos decide to help him through it.
After a few gruelling months of close calls with hostile ships and diplomatic incidents, Steward digs through a database of ancient Earth customs to find something that might cheer up the crew's spirits. He lands on a tradition called a "Halloween Party", which may or may not end in disaster...
Emil has to patch up various participants of Elnor's "introduction to pumpkin carving (with a guest lecture by Emmet on the advantages and disadvantages of various types of knives)".
It's only been a year since Rios has had this holographic "crew" of his, and their relationship is strained, to say the least. When a computer glitch threatens to turn his Emergency Holograms into hollow, lifeless specters of their former selves, he has to decide how far he is willing to go to save them.
Enoch tries to create a corn maze on the holodeck. Things only get more convoluted from there.
Feel free to use any of these as straight-out prompts or modify them to your heart's content!
And if you don't have the time or spoons to create something new, remember: Holoween is an excellent time to practice a little bit of resurrection! 🕯👻
Simply post a link to a work you have already published or reblog some art and tag me, so I can find it and reblog it!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: La Sirena, Star Trek: Picard
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Soji Asha & Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram
Characters: Soji Asha, Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, Canon-typical swearing, Synth Biology, which unfortunately is still biology after all, Post-Season/Series 01
Series: Part 3 of Bed Rest
Soji has the synth-flu and is not having a great time of it.
—
I think I already posted this here way back when I frist wrote it in December 2022, but it has taken me until now to finally get it polished and put on AO3 😅
Hopefully, by now it’s been long enough that it’ll feel like a new story or at least be worth the re-read.
@jazzfic Thanks again for the prompt way back when! Truly the inspiration that keeps on giving 🤣
And thanks to @wingsofhcpe for nudging me into actually posting this!
48. Name a song or music genre you think each of the la Sirena holo squad would like.
I don't really listen to a lot of music, so I can't talk too much about specific songs or 20th/21st century genres. Fortunately, this is Star Trek, so I get to be creative 😁😁😁
Emil: I mean, if you've read my fic, you know my Emil listens to all kinds of opera and likes to sing it, too! Doesn't have to be Klingon opera, either. He once spent a delightful afternooon being taught the finer points of Bynar coloratura by Xyr (the star tenor Rios hooked up with one time and whom Emil has a crush on admires).
When it's not opera, Emil probably listens to various forms of jazz, about which he has Very Strong Opinions. (Of course, he would never go so far as to, say, have a protracted argument with someone on Federation hypernet message boards about the merits of warp-shift-amplifiers on Tellarite slop jazz, but in his defense, cargo runs really do get very boring sometimes when you don't want to risk turning off and not being there when your captain gets himself shot again......)
Ian: He'd say Scottish folk music as a matter of pride, but he also unironically loves it! He has a vast repository of sheet music for historic tunes set for various instruments and always keeps an eye out for new talent from Scotland or Caldos Colony that might be worth keeping an eye on. He does play the bagpipes himself, too, though usually only when nobody from te non-holographic crew is on board. He has also been known to lead a rousing round of sea shanties every now and again.
Other than that, he also enjoys really experimental genres. There was an unfortunate incident a few months ago where Ian was listening to a new album from an underground spectral punk band while he did engine maintenance. He was sure he wouldn't be bothering anyone, because the music wasn't in the audible spectrum for humans and only Rios and Agnes were on board at the time. About twenty minutes into the record, he got a very salty message from Emil, asking him to please stop playing music that could cause crippling migraines and ruptured ear drums in his patients...
Enoch: Enoch is all for the Federation equivalent of top 40 radio. He sometimes sneaks onto the holodeck to watch concert-transmissions from the latest Andorian pop princess or Bajoran singer-songwriter. When he's sitting watch on the bridge on the rare occasions Rios is asleep (not that he needs to be there, the computer would activate him, if his services were required, but it feels right to physically keep an eye on things, you know?) he'll often tune in to the biggest music broadcasts to keep up with new music and concert dates.
Enoch also has a knack for finding the exact song, musician, or current trend that is most likely to piss off Rios and to then fall in love with it completely. He claims it's entirely coincidental, and Emil has seriously considered writing a psychology paper about this phenomenon and what it might say about the origins of musical taste and aversion. Emil and Agnes have spent many an hour sipping tea together, watching with rapt attention as Enoch and Rios yell at each other about the "Taylor Swift Revival"-Revival Band and what is or isn't sacrilege to force poor Sirena to play through her speakers. (The rumour that there was popcorn consumed with the tea is pure slander, though!)
Emmet: Emmet has the great advantage that he does not give a fuck what anyone thinks of him or his taste in music. He has had phases where he'd be listening to metal and grunge at top volume (usually only in his head, though occasionally he'd "accidentally" blast it over the ship's speakers). But he also enjoys all kinds of classical and historical music and has listened to every genre of punk known to the Federation's audio libraries.
Then there was a memorable week where he got so into Trill's childrens music that Steward had to ask Ian to block the sound files, because the inane ear worms were starting to infect the other EH's over their shared neural pathways, and Rios had threatened that the next holo humming the tune to "Where are you wriggling little worm?" would be scrubbed from the system.
But Emmet's secret joy, the music he doesn't really tell the others about or ever listens to where anyone can hear, are whale songs. He knows the songs of roughly two thousand different species, both from Earth Whales and other aquatic mammals that communicate in similar fashions. He even has a few very rare recordings of space whale calls, and nobody has dared to ask what he had to do to get his hands on those.
Steward: Steward, on the other hand, cares A Lot what people think about his musical tastes. He would like to be sohpisticated and classy, and enjoy opera and jazz as much as Emil and the captain, or have some deep cultural ties to a genre of music he enjoys, like Ian. But alas, he finds it heart to really get into any of that. He has found himself tapping his foot and nodding along to some of the catchcy stuff Enoch often puts on when Rios is asleep, but he knows that's not really dignified and worries he might seem uncultured if people know he enjoys top 40 radio.
(Raffi has called him a snob on more than one occasion, and he knows he'll have to do some deep thinking to overcome some of the biases his creators endowed him with, because he has come to realize his interpretation of "hospitality" differs quite a bit from what they seem to have been envisioning.)
He would really like to learn to play the guitar. He can play a lot of different instruments and his singing voice is exquisitely trained, but the guitar is one of those blindspots he was left with, after Rios's deletions to the holos' memories. Steward knows that Rios can play incredibly well himself and keeps a real, hand-crafted guitar in secure storage for the extremely rare occasions Rios has been in the mood to play. The EHH has dropped a lot of less-than-sublte hints around Agnes recently and hopes she might be able to coax Rios into getting back to a hobby he once loved.
Steward himself dreams of a time when they'll all be sitting around a campfire on the holodeck, or maybe in the open cargo bay with sand from the beach they landed on blowing up the loading ramp, and him playing the guitar as they all sing campfire songs and make smores and stockbrot.
Until then, he is going to make sure Sirena's access to the various Federation audio libraries is always running smoothly, the holodeck is perfectly calibrated and stocked to cater to everyone's needs, and their various music collections are kept in whatever way is most fitting to the individual crew member, holographic or otherwise. Because he is in charge of the welfare of every soul La Sirena, and if that means occasionally reassuring Emmet (or Rios) that he definitely s the only one besides Steward who knows about the collection of whale songs and reassuring him nobody will ever find out he likes to fall asleep to them, or helping Emil or Enoch workshop another fan letter or scathing blog post, or running simulations on Ian's latest music genres to make sure they won't wilt the botniculas, then that's all the music he needs.
--
This was fun! I was gonna apologize for the length of this, but then I doubt you mind, do you? 😁
Thank you so much for the opportunity to write about my favourite gaggle of hyper-competent idiots and their various exploits! This was a great way to do some worldbuilding and micro-fic-writing even when full ficlets seem out of reach, and I'm realy grateful for the inspiration!
If anyone else wants to know more: Send Me Star Trek Asks 💗 (Or alternatively: send me holo-asks! I'm alsways delighted to write stuff like this!)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: La Sirena
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ian | La Sirena’s Emergency Engineering Hologram & Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram
Characters: Ian | La Sirena’s Emergency Engineering Hologram, Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram
Additional Tags: Holo-Technology, Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, (if you can call it that when the sick person is in fact a hologram), Post-Season/Series 01, Slice of Life
Series: Part 2 of Bed Rest
After their harrowing adventures and crash on Coppelius, Ian tries to do some much-needed maintenance on La Sirena’s systems. However, Emil has different ideas about which systems should be prioritized.
If you were around for my brief bout of daily writing at the end of last year/beginning of this year, this story will probably be familiar. It’s one of the four-to-five I wrote based off a prompt from this promptlist that @jazzfic sent me. But I thought it was time to finally post it Officially, with a title and beta-reading and formatting and All Of The Things.
I hope this little holo heart-to-heart will bring you some joy (and remind you to take care of yourselves, because you are important and deserve to be well!)
Also reblogging because I only just noticed: Enoch is wearing a tactical vest - and Emmet isn't. This allows only one conclusion! But first: a technical side note.
Since the five Emergency Holograms in the basic installation are highly customizable, they all have their own dedicated database of preferred outfits/algorithms for garment generation. They draw on one underlying catalogue, but each piece of clothing is adjusted to fit the individual hologram as needed and then stored in an array their visualization engine can access.
Because these are all drawn from a shared origin, though, and because the data isn't as sensitive as, say, personality traits or memories, the clothing repertoire isn't kept nearly as discrete as other parts of the programme and the holos can access each others wardrobe to copy over the code for specific pieces of clothing.
So that leaves three possibilities for how Enoch came by the vest (the one part of the outfit that's more than a generic shirt-and-trousers combination): 1. he drew on the basic clothing items from the catalogue Emmet used to generate his clothes and adjusted their code to properly reflect Emmet's attire. This is a very sensible solution, but it would inevitably end up with a vest that just isn't quite right.
2. He went into Emmet's wardrobe-database, copied over the code exactly, including any modifications Emmet might have made, and stored it in his own database to wear as a costume. That is a very elegant solution, but also exceedingly boring.
So, 3., the most likely explanation: He pestered and prodded and pleaded until Emmet was so annoyed he took off his vest and gave it to Enoch, just to get some sleep. Enoch then proceeded to put on the vest with a gleeful grin and practice his best boneless-flopping-onto-the-sofa.
Emil doesn't really understand the point. Enoch should have just made his own vest. The moment he took the vest off Emmet, the code snippet representing it was passed from Emmet's matrix to Enoch's. If he'd copied it over the result would have been completely identical. But Ian has some wise words about how the fact that the code for the vest was initialized by Emmet's visualization engine lends it the right *spirit* and that's very appropriate for Samhain.
(Enoch tries to explain this to Rios at some point who decides he does not ever need to think about his holograms' clothes as anything but an unchangeable part of them that is firmly attached at all times. And then he goes to get a very big glass of liquor.)
For the final post on the final day of this, our first ever Holoween Week, I want to bring back this masterpiece!
@lemissingmask's truly inspired drawing has given me so much joy over the years, and it was front of my mind when I suggested this little celebration.
Thank you so much for letting me reblog this to round out the week on a perfect note.
(And I hope you all will forgive me for also reblogging the conversation that followed the tremendous art. Because it wouldn't be holo content if it didn't involve a certain level of excessive nerdiness. It's what the boys deserve 😋)
Fic cover for @jazzfic 's amazing and spooky contribution to Holoween 2023 run by @holo-squad
Friend Corn Wants to Play - jazzfic - Star Trek: Picard [Archive of Our Own]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: La Sirena
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram & Agnes Jurati
Characters: Agnes Jurati, Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram, Enoch | La Sirena’s Emergency Navigational Hologram, Cristóbal Rios
Additional Tags: holoween, Holodecks & Holosuites (Star Trek), Mild Horror, Background Relationships, Gallows Humor
Summary:
Fears are silly, right? But she has Emil on her side, so surely Agnes can face this one.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: La Sirena
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram & Agnes Jurati
Characters: Agnes Jurati, Emil | La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram, Enoch | La Sirena’s Emergency Navigational Hologram, Cristóbal Rios
Additional Tags: holoween, Holodecks & Holosuites (Star Trek), Mild Horror, Background Relationships, Gallows Humor
Summary:
Fears are silly, right? But she has Emil on her side, so surely Agnes can face this one.
Long green leaves were plaited all around, with a line of lanterns leading back. “Welcome to Friend Corn Maze! There’s nobody inside at the moment, so you are first in line.”
@jazzfic Brings us a gloriously spooky little adventure on the holodeck! There's a reason you should be careful when programming ghosts into the machine...
And the seasonal illustration by @regionalpancake rounds out this offering to Friend Corn is perfectly! Enoch would be so proud (in the brief time alloted by the captain for such trivialities 😁).
Life Raft - Regionalpancake - Star Trek: Picard [Archive of Our Own]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: La Sirena
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Emil | La Sirena's Emergency Medical Hologram & Four (xB OC)
Characters: Emil | La Sirena's Emergency Medical Hologram, Four (xB OC), Hugh | Third of Five, Mister Hospitality | La Sirena's Emergency Hospitality Hologram, Ian | La Sirena's Emergency Engineering Hologram, Emmet | La Sirena's Emergency Tactical Hologram, Enoch | La Sirena's Emergency Navigational Hologram
Additional Tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hugh | Third of Five Lives, holoween, Holoween2023, holo technology as medical accessibility, slaps the roof of the fic - this bad boy can fit so much medical trauma
Summary: When no one else can get a young xB the medical care she needs to save her life, Emil is the only doctor for the job.
My contribution for Holoween! Thanks so much to @holo-squad for organising and giving me the excuse to write the holos again <3
On the 4th day of Holoween Week 2023, @regionalpancake delivers a breathtakingly gorgeous fic about trauma and support and costumes and kindness.
I still do not have the words for how utterly stunning this story is, and it'll be a while before I do. Go read it and prepare to laugh and cry and continually fall more in love with these characters with every paragraph!
Space pirates incapacitate La Sirena and her crew. But in the process of looting, they encounter more than they bargained for.
The hiss of the seal filled the small compartment as the airlock pressurized. Baines breathed through the oxygen mask over his face as he waited for Ruiz to get the other door open. A moment later, there was the clank and creak of metal. Their four-man crew stepped onto the speed freighter and swung their wrist lights around the completely dark corridor.
"Round up the crew," Baines told Grag. "Ruiz, get the life support back on. Vaofa and I will start the gutting."
They set off. Not far down the corridor, Baines and Vaofa stepped over the body of a young Romulan. Grag stopped to grab the kid's arms and drag him off to another location, the Nausicaan being the muscle of the operation.
"Unusual for a male to have long hair like that," Vaofa commented.
"Don't care," Baines replied. He and the Tellarite began cataloging the various parts to strip.
Vaofa ran her scanner over some of the relays. "These are in better shape than I expected for a Kaplan F17," she said. "The captain even made some upgrades. This is going to be a prime haul."
Baines grinned. Score.
"Life support is back on," Ruiz commed.
A second after that, the emergency lights flickered to life as well. They didn't want to restore full power to the ship, though; they didn't need it.
Baines took off his oxygen mask and switched off the flashlight. Then he and Vaofa started yanking parts out of the power conduits. With each armful they grabbed, they carried it up to the center of the upper deck and began to make a pile. They passed Grag a few times as he did the same with the crew, carrying them one by one over his shoulder to lock in the holosuite. Not that they should be waking up any time soon after the EMP blast the ship had been hit with. It was a nasty little thing that was able to disrupt both the power grid on a ship and the electrical signals of any organic lifeforms onboard, rendering everything disabled.
Grag brought over a woman and unceremoniously dumped her on the floor at their feet. "This one's got Borg implants," the Nausicaan said. "She can fetch a pretty price too."
Baines pursed his mouth at the blonde. Those were some interesting Borg pieces. He shook his head, though. "Bjayzl is dead, and without another guaranteed buyer already lined up, taking a live prisoner is too risky."
Grag made a snuffling sound but picked the woman up to take to the other prisoners.
Baines and Vaofa made their way down to the med bay where they met up with Ruiz. Ruiz let out a low whistle in appreciation. Indeed, the med bay was quite fancy and full of good stuff for the taking. The three of them immediately went to different counters to start snatching stuff up.
Ruiz suddenly yelped, making Baines whirl around.
"What?" he demanded.
Ruiz pointed frantically at the alcove. "I saw something."
Baines and Vaofa turned to look, but there was nothing there.
"I swear, there was something—"
Vaofa snorted. "Get back to work."
Baines shook his head and resumed rifling through the instruments on the counter. Until a few minutes later Ruiz shouted again. This time when Baines looked up, he caught a glimpse of two sparking blue eye sockets framed in the faint contours of a face. The amorphous figure started storming toward them, only to completely vanish after two steps.
"What the hell," Baines uttered.
"I told you!" Ruiz exclaimed. "Dios nos proteja," he muttered, picking up his Saint's necklace and pressing it to his lips. "We should go."
"Don't be an idiot," Vaofa snapped.
Ruiz shook his head urgently. "I've heard stories of ghost ships. We do not want to mess with them."
Baines rolled his eyes. "Those ridiculous stories are always about old abandoned wreckages. This ship has a live crew. Well, for now," he added with a smirk.
Ruiz didn't look convinced, but they got back to work. They were on their last haul of the med bay when the sound of weapons fire erupted on the upper deck. They drew their phase pistols and hurried up the stairs to where Grag had been emptying the armory. The Nausicaan was sitting on his ass on the floor, a phaser burn across his arm.
"What happened?" Baines demanded.
"One of the rifles just fired on me," Grag grunted, nodding to a weapon lying horizontally on a rack.
Vaofa scoffed. "You just mishandled it, you big oaf."
"I'm not a fool," he snarled at her.
"Something's going on here," Ruiz said. "My mama, she had the gift. I can feel it too, sometimes."
"Shut up," Baines snapped at him. "This is a job like any other." He turned to Grag. "Are you sure all the crew members and passengers are accounted for?"
"Yes," the Nausicaan growled as he got to his feet.
"Then just focus on the job. The sooner we finish here, the sooner we can leave."
He pivoted and marched off. When had his crew become bumbling idiots?
Baines went up to the bridge to look around. Wouldn't hurt to take a few plasma conduits from under the operations consoles. But there was suddenly an odd almost clicking swish behind him, and he turned to find a ghostly figure with glowing blue and white spritzing eyes standing only a few feet away. It pointed a spectral finger at him. Baines whipped out his pistol and fired, but the plasma burst went right through the phantom and struck the bulkhead. The figure did disappear, though.
The others came rushing up to the bridge.
"What now?" Vaofa huffed.
"Nothing," Baines snipped.
She arched a dubious brow at his drawn weapon, which he hastily holstered.
"Let's just get this done," he groused. The insanity was catching, apparently.
The consoles at the operations stations suddenly lit up and started blinking in chaotic fashion.
"Who turned that on?" Baines demanded.
Ruiz raised his hands, only to reach for his medallion again. "Don't look at me."
Vaofa strode over to the console and began tapping at the controls, trying to turn it off. The panel sparked with a surge, and she yelped as a squiggly bolt of energy jumped from the console to her. She staggered back, clutching her arm.
"Can we get out of here now?" Ruiz whined.
Baines gritted his teeth as he snapped his gaze around the ship. He was not going to let himself get run off a job, not one this good. He caught a shimmer of what looked like movement, this time across the deck near the engines. Something was tapping against the metal casing, and the core started flickering as though trying to come back on. Baines drew his pistol again and sprinted across the deck. An incorporeal figure looked up from tinkering with the engine, those eyes glitching before he disappeared.
"I recognize him," Grag said. "He's one of the crew."
Baines's jaw tightened. "So, what, he's capable of astral projection? Bring him out here!"
Grag hurried off, leaving the rest of them on edge as they scanned the deck, waiting for that ghost to reappear.
No, it wasn't a ghost. Baines didn't believe in those.
Grag returned, the crewman in question slung over his shoulder. He dropped him on the floor, then hauled him upright by the back of his shirt. Baines strode forward and smacked the man across the face.
"Wake up!"
He slapped him a couple more times before he finally started to stir. The man's head lolled back with a groan as his eyelids fluttered open.
"Wakey wakey," Baines said. "What's your name?"
It took him a moment to process his position, and then he straightened in a show of defiance, but Grag's grip on his shoulders kept him on his knees.
"Captain Rios," he said. "What the hell are you doing on my ship?"
"Ah, captain, good," Baines said. "How many are currently aboard your ship?"
Rios glowered at them. "Why would I tell you that?"
"Because this can go the easy way or the hard way."
The captain twisted to look around, then grunted in frustration. "Seven, including myself."
Baines looked at Grag.
"Seven in the holosuite," he confirmed.
Baines pursed his mouth in aggravation. "Were you having computer glitches?"
Rios furrowed his brow, and his gaze shifted past Baines to one of the wall panels with the conduits ripped out. The man scowled. "Gutting my ship might have something to do with it."
"The power was offline. We didn't turn it back on. Who did?"
"I don't know."
Baines backhanded him across the face, snapping his head to the side. "Don't toy with me."
Rios slowly rolled his neck back and didn't say anything, just glared up at him.
"Let's just finish and go," Vaofa urged.
Baines clenched his jaw. He didn't like being messed with.
Sparks abruptly started shooting from relays all over the deck, making everyone duck and flinch away.
Baines grabbed the captain by the front of his shirt and shook him. "Who's doing this?"
"Baines!" Ruiz shouted, pointing frantically as a nebulous figure came striding forward out of thin air, expression stormy with lightning in its eyes.
Baines jerked back and drew his phaser to fire. But there was nothing solid to hit.
Vaofa suddenly fired her weapon across Baines's path, and he reeled away to find a second specter closing in on them. Grag's eyes were wide as he looked at something behind Baines, and he twisted around. There was a third, and a fourth, all faint wispy outlines of figures with flashing eyes blank and unseeing, yet somehow looking furious as they advanced.
Baines whirled back to Captain Rios and aimed the phaser at his head. "Make it stop!"
One of the phantoms ran straight at him then, passing through Rios and flinging itself into Baines's face. And though it passed through him too, he still recoiled with a scream and flailing arms.
Rios surged to his feet and lunged at him in that moment of distraction, grabbing his arm and trying to wrest the phaser away from him. The rest of the specters attacked as well, though being incorporeal, they couldn't actually cause any damage. But in the frenzy of shooting at them regardless, Ruiz hit Vaofa with phaser fire. Grag fired haphazardly, and one of his phase blasts shot between Baines and Rios struggling, hitting them both. The freighter's captain dropped to the floor, having taken the brunt of the hit, while Baines staggered back with a gasp of pain and a snarl of curses at the Nausicaan.
A fifth specter appeared in front of Baines, standing straight and tall and prim. "Get off this ship," it intoned.
The five phantoms surrounded them, eyes flashing rapidly in dizzying synchronicity. Baines had had enough.
"Abandon ship!" he ordered.
He and his crew retreated back toward the airlock. Ruiz reached it first and punched frenetically at the control panel, blithering like an idiot. He finally got it open as Baines and Vaofa staggered over, and they all fled off the haunted speed freighter without any of their plunder.
~
Rios felt the subtle rocking of a ship disengaging from La Sirena. Good riddance, damn pirates. He grunted as he sat up, wincing at the phaser burn across his side.
"A little help here?" he groused at the holos.
"What did you think we were just doing?" Emil snarked, his disembodied outline and eyes standing over Rios in a rather unnerving way.
Rios groaned and pushed himself to his feet. "Where's everyone else?"
"Secured in the holosuite," Enoch's voice responded.
"Okay." Tucking his left arm across his stomach, Rios started hobbling that direction. "Malfunction came in handy, though," he commented between strained breaths. "Scared the shit out of those conchetumadres."
"It was quite amusing," Enoch agreed cheerily.
Rios glanced over his shoulder at the spectral holos following him and cringed. Even knowing what they were, the visages were creepy. That needed to be fixed first, once he freed the others.
He scowled as he saw all the destruction those looters had caused and how much was going to need to be repaired. At least they hadn't gotten away with it. And when Rios had his ship fixed, he was going to hunt down those bastards so they couldn't do this to anyone else.
Especially since not every vessel came equipped with emergency holograms that took their duty to ship and captain above and beyond their programming parameters.
Reblogging for Holoweek! @holo-squad It’s a costume, so that counts. (From the fic - The Not-Always-An-Emergency Players Present A Helpful and Hospitable Production - which is not at all spooky, unless you count Rios’s horror at watching his holos perform Romeo and Juliet.)
I didn’t have the time (yet) to write anything new for Holoween, but since it’s okay to repost old stuff and I didn’t want to NOT post anything today, here’s a ficlet from my Whumptober 2020 series that may suit the bill. At least I think it’s got some spookiness along with some humor, and our holos once more save the day.
What’s A Whumpee Got To Do To Get Some Sleep Around Here?
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Hollow-eyed, Rios crossed the bridge to drop into the pilot seat. From the corner of his eye, he saw the Hospitality Hologram shimmering away, but he was too tired to voice his chronic annoyance with that particular crew member, and he secretly had to admit that he was grateful for the cup of tar-black coffee he found steaming within reach. He took a sip of the scalding hot liquid, desperate for a caffeine kick.
“Got any sleep?”
Rios hadn’t even seen Raffi, slumped as she sat in the navigator’s seat. She swiveled around to him with hanging shoulders, her curls wilder than ever, the rings under her eyes so dark they looked like bruises.
“No,” Cris sighed. “You?”
It was a rhetorical question, really, and Raffi huffed, pointing at her face. “Do I look like I slept?”
Fact was, none of them had slept in three days - except for Picard, who was out like a light in his quarters after the EMH had insisted on dosing him with a narcotic, worried about the old man’s heart. Sleep deprivation, he’d lectured them, could kill, and Rios was starting to believe him. Only that he was close to killing someone. Anyone, honestly. After nearly seventy-two hours of being trapped, with an offline engine, in a cosmic phenomenon that was somehow affecting their brainwaves, Rios was suffering from a very short fuse.
The most enraging part: While Raffi, Picard and him - the only human crew members on board at the moment - were turning into zombies, the holograms remained completely unaffected. Bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed, they zipped through La Sirena’s decks, running system checks and analyzing scans and fiddling with the ship’s engine, driving Rios crazy with their limitless energy and chipper mood.
Too bad that a hologram didn’t die when you choked it with your bare hands.
Rios threw a murderous glance at Emmet, the hologram currently slumbering in his seat in front of the tactical controls. He was the worst to bear, falling asleep in an instant as soon as his code told him he was sitting and no hostile activity required him to be awake. Feet propped up on the console, head tipped back and mouth open, he was currently snoring obliviously. And as a hologram, he didn’t even need to sleep.
Rios’ fingers involuntarily curled into claws.
“What is the nature of your psychiatric emergency?”
The EMH had materialized beside him and, hands in his pockets, was studying him with professional concern.
“You heart rate is elevated, your blood pressure is climbing, and your cortisol output-”
“Deactivate!”
“But Captain, I am…”
“Deactivate!”
The hologram disappeared with an affronted poof.
“Nice,” Raffi commented sardonically, chin propped up on a weary arm. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”
Cris meant to roll his eyes, but it would worsen his headache, so he left it. Scrubbing his hand across his face, he tried to knit a clear string of thoughts together in his increasingly unreliable brain.
“We need to get away from here, Raff,” he said darkly.
She blinked tiredly. “I know.”
And it was true. What had felt like a weird anomaly three days ago - their impulse and warp drive dying suddenly, then the insomnia - had escalated into a dangerous crisis. In spite of incessant work, they hadn’t been able to bring the engines back online, and they didn’t need the EMH’s lectures to point out the consequences of sleep deprivation. They felt them.
Physical exhaustion was the least of it. Cris could get past the headache, the soreness, the nausea and the dizziness. But the tricks the insomnia played on his mind were an altogether different thing. He could no longer concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, and his short term memory had gone to fritz. It was bad enough that the tiredness was affecting his eyesight, causing the EMH to suggest reading glasses and almost getting his programming wiped by an infuriated Cris. But now he was starting to see things.
Hallucinations. They were a well-known but nevertheless deeply disturbing side-effect, and Cris, all too familiar with the phenomenon from his breakdown after the Ibn Majid disaster, was once more stalked by demons he thought he’d laid to rest. Captain Vandemeer had visited him in his quarters when he’d been staring into the darkness last night, sleepless, but too exhausted to remain on his feet. The top of his head gone, blood and brain matter dripping from the ceiling, Vandemeer had looked at Cris with opaque eyes, and it had taken half a bottle of Pisco to make him disappear.
Rios punched a button on his holographic controls.
“Ean!” He barked. “Status report!”
“We’re still offline, Cap’n,” came the instant reply. “But Enoch thinks he may be on to something. There’s a pattern of sub-photon waves that seems to be targeting the temperature sensors with galandrion radiation, effectively-”
“Only the bottom line, Ean,” Cris cut him off. His brain had shot down after “sub-photon waves”, unable to process anything more complicated than a spaghetti recipe.
“Bottom line?” Ean repeated. “We’re working on it, Cap’n.”
“What Ean means,” Enoch picked up, flickering into existence on the bridge with an avid expression, “is that we think we’re close to solving the problem. Now, if the scan check that I reprogrammed to include sub-photonic and pseudo nano-neurologic patterns reveals that not only the temperature sensors but also the newtonian reverse weight-speed effect of-”
“Callate!”Cris shot up from his seat. “Shut the fuck- Jesus!”
He’d closed up to the ENH in two strides, right fist pulled back to punch, and he’d managed to rein himself in only at the very last moment. He shook out his arms, trembling, trying to get rid of the tension and the shock he felt at his near loss of control.
Eyebrows raised in innocent wonder, Enoch cocked his head.
“Captain?” he asked kindly. “Would you like me to re-activate Emil? I am sure he could provide you with a sedative, if you’d like.”
Rios shot around again, blood boiling. All of a sudden, the bridge’s ambient lights felt too bright, and the cluster of stars visible through the panoramic window seemed to move forward, speeding up, threatening to attack and swallow La Sirena.
“Emmet!” Cris yelled. “Deflector shields!”
The ETH jerked awake and blinked at his screens in confusion. “Que? No veo nada.”
Raffi had gripped the arms of her seat and was looking at Rios in alarm.
“Babe,” she said anxiously and got up. “There’s nothing out there. You have to… Here.” She grabbed his arm and tried to lead him back to his chair. “Here, sit down.”
“What?!”
Rios glared at her. Raffi’s face looked strange all of a sudden. It… reshaped. Her hair shrank back into her skull, getting shorter, smoother… white. Her skin brightened, nose widening, her eyes morphing from brown to blue. Stubble appeared, and her clothes… his clothes… a Starfleet uniform with a captain’s badge.
“Sit down, son.”
Vandemeer. Intact, smiling paternally, he gently led Rios to his seat and sat him down.
Then, still smiling, he lifted a phaser, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Rios screamed, and he was still screaming when the EMH put a hypospray to his neck and cut his strings.
XXX
“Coffee, babe?”
Rios blinked a veil of deep sleep from his eyes. When his vision sharpened, he saw Raffi’s hand in front of him, balancing a cup that smelled of heaven.
He sat up and stretched before he took the coffee, looking around his cabin. He felt rested, and, to his surprise, he heard the familiar hum of La Sirena’s impulse drive propelling the ship through space at cruising speed.
“We’re back online?”
“Yes. Three days ago.”
“Three days ago?!” Rios almost spilled his coffee. “How long was I out?”
Raffi smiled, but there was an uncomfortable edge to it. “Three and a half days.”
“Dios.”
He racked his brain, memory creeping back in. Memory - and shame. Scratching his beard, he looked at Raffi with unease.
“It was pretty bad, huh?”
“Pretty.” She nodded. Then she placed her hand on his arm and rubbed it gently. “But you weren’t the only one. I cracked a few hours after Emil put you out. He says I was trying to open the cargo hatch to take a walk.”
Cris lifted astonished brows. “Good idea.”
Raffi’s worried face softened into a chuckle. “Not one of my best. I’m glad your holos were there to stop me. They’re not entirely useless, you know?”
“Right.” Cris smirked. God, he hadn’t felt this rested in ages. “Not entirely. But please don’t go and tell them I agreed with you on that. Enoch will never stop rubbing it under my nose.”
As if on cue, the EMH materialised at the foot of Rios’ bed.
“Captain Rios,” he said. “I am pleased to see you awake! And your brain waves have returned to a normal pattern. Now, if I could ask you to meet me in sickbay for a thorough scan of your neural-”
“Deactivate!”
Raffi smiled as the hologram begrudgingly dissolved.
“You ready to come back to the bridge, Captain?” she asked Rios, the twinkle back in her eyes. “Or do you need more sleep?”
Cris swung his legs from the bed.
“Sleep is overrated,” he said sardonically and headed off to take a shower.
In a splendig addition to the Holoween theme, @highfunctioningflailgirl brings us a haunting story where Rios is plagued by ghosts from his past. Thank goodness his faithful holograms are there to help him (and the ship and her crew) through the crisis!
I'm so glad you resurrected this story, it's definitely a classic and I always love to reread it!
