You know, in orientation, one of the things they really made sure to impress upon you was that if you're doing piracy in tlhIngan sep, DO NOT GET CAUGHT. Seriously, you'll wish you were never born.
By sheer luck, the Orion cohort of the boarding party--Ry'talla, Temek, and Luhnes--had made it back to the Good Afternoon, and only Slamtha had been abducted by the Klingon military patrol. If they knew what was best for them they'd highball it out of Klingon territory and never look back, loyalty be dammed.
But even when Slamtha had been shoved into the cold metal floor of the prison cell, luck hadn't finished its job with her just yet.
Slamtha was resting--she couldn't melt into a puddle, she'd be too vulnerable, so she didn't get any sleep--when they finally came for her. The Klingon Defense Force officer--a Lieutenant, if she was interpreting the rank indicator correctly--was wearing armor that covered her body and face, a far cry from the bare skin barbarian look the Klingon military was usually going for.
"You're to be taken for questioning," the Lieutenant said. She pressed a button on the control panel and the force field fizzled away. The lieutenant didn't bother to open the physical bars, but just pointed a disruptor and waited.
Slamtha sighed and stepped between the bars, easily folding herself and her clothes through the thin gap.
"Let me guess, a test?" Slamtha said. "You want to know how well your brig would handle a power outage with me inside."
The Lieutenant said nothing, but merely pushed her disruptor to Slamtha's back and pushed her through the angular, smoky, red-lit corridor. Slamtha wondered if they used actual torches behind those lighting panels, if that was why it was always so smoky and red inside Klingon ships. It would be on brand.
Of course, civilian Klingon ships don't go all out like that. The Klingon freighter she and her crew had been attempting to plunder had been more like her middle school common room than some ancient warrior dining hall.
In the turbolift, the Lieutenant lead Slamtha out, and Slamtha followed her. Slamtha began to hear sounds of screaming and crying as they approached whatever cruel quarters awaited her. Her surface went tough and rubbery, but she tried not to show her fear--that was also important when dealing with the KDF, or so she'd heard.
The Lieutenant turned around to face Slamtha, and stared at her. Then turned around and dramatically dropped her disruptor. "Whoops!" the Lieutenant said.
Slamtha just stared at the weapon, then the Lieutenant, and then she lunged for the disruptor.
"FINALLY!" the Lieutenant shouted, and she threw her knee into Slamtha to deflect her.
Slamtha splatted against the other wall, but quickly sprung back, and slid along the floor to grab the disruptor. Before Slamtha could point it at the Lieutenant, she drew a long, broad Mek'leth sword from her scabbard, and swung it swiftly and precisely into Slamtha's hand, cleaving it off entirely. The disruptor clanged on the metal floor with a yellow pool of slime around it.
"Muck! That hurt! Come on!" Slamtha shouted.
"Oh no!" the Lieutenant said, "does the widdul goo-goo have a boo-boo? GIVE ME A BREAK!" and she thrust her Mek'leth forward into Slamtha's torso. This time Slamtha bent her spine out of the way to dodge, and then she looked around for something--anything. No weapons, no way out...
Slamtha stretched her damaged arm into a crescent-like blade and whipped it across the Lieutenant's arm, so fast that she could not react. The Mek'leth fell to the floor, and so did the Lieutenant's gauntlet. Pink Klingon blood poured out of the gauntlet.
The Lieutenant moaned, but it didn't sound proportional to the pain she should be in. With her other arm she reached for the Mek'leth, but Slamtha was faster.
"NOW we're talking!" the Lieutenant growled.
Slamtha held her damaged arm close to her chest and drove the Mek'leth through the gap in the Lieutenant's armor. Blood poured out of the wound, and the Lieutenant fell to her knees, laughing maniacally.
Slamtha stepped back slowly, in horror, and she reached down and grabbed the disruptor and the puddle that had been her hand.
She shakily pointed the disruptor at the Lieutenant, who was still laughing.
As more and more blood poured out of the wound, Slamtha realized that the blood was behaving unnaturally. It was not flowing like blood should. It took its own path to find the ground, almost like it was... alive?
Slamtha tensely approached the fallen pile of armor and "blood" and held her disruptor out at arm's lenght. She leaned over and used the tip of the disruptor to raise the visor on the ridge-headed-helmet covering the Lieutenant's face.
There was a Klingon's face, covered in pink Klingon blood. No... of course not. She should have known sooner. All three of Slamtha's eyes went wide in shock, and she flinched back.
"SURPRISE!" the Lieutenant said, and she lunged at Slamtha, flowing out of the armor from the helmet.
"You're... you're a mellanoid slime!" Slamtha said, as the pink slimegirl re-formed on top of Slamtha, pinning her down.
"I'm a Klingon officer!" the Lieutenant said.
Slamtha stared at the pink mellanoid slime face in front of her. It was a typical convergent bipedal face, but with a gooey simulacrum of Klingon facial and nasal ridges, and with eyebrows which looked almost Bat'leth like in their own right. She had the long flowing hair typical of a Klingon warrior, except of course it was made of slime and not fur.
And, made of shimmering pink goo, she looked almost exactly like Klingon blood.
Slamtha melted into a puddle and poured herself out from under the Lieutenant, grabbed her disruptor, and fired it.
The disruptor didn't make a sound. Slamtha tapped on the control buttons. They did nothing.
"It's dead. WAS THIS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME?" Slamtha shouted.
The Lieutenant was laughing.
"It wouldn't have made a very interesting fight otherwise!"
The Lieutenant stood up. She still had her uniform tunic and pants, but now her arms, which bore more musculature than Slamtha would have thought possible on a Mellanoid, were bare. Out of the armor, the strange slimegirl warrior was a magnificent sight to behold. There were even two smaller, leaner arms coming out of holes in the side of then tunic. One of the smaller arms reached behind the Lieutenant's back and pulled out the Mek'Leth, and handed it to one of the bigger arms.
Slamtha started to run away, down the corridor.
"Disappointing!" the Lieutenant shouted. "Running away like a petaQ!"
Slamtha ran up to a turbolift and tapped on the control furiously. The Lieutenant was slowly walking towards her.
"Where was that vigor? Where was that spirit?"
Slamtha grimaced, then shouted, "What do you want with me!"
"Is this really what a 'mellanoid slime' is like where you come from? Weak? Pathetic? You ran away just when the fight was getting good."
Slamtha closed her eyes and breathed through gritted gums. She charged at the Lieutenant, turning her arm into a blade-whip once again, and this time, without armor to protect her, Slamtha managed to slice the Lieutenant's torso in half. The separated halves slid down. The bottom half fell to its knees and the top half fell onto her side.
"Maybe there's some fight left in you after all," the Lieutenant said.
"If there wasn't, I'd be dead long before getting stuck in these... these... mind games you're playing with me," Slamtha said, furiously, her voice shaking. She didn't even realize she'd stopped talking in Orion Standard, and had reverted to her native Mellanish.
The Lieutenant listened to the babbling, gurgling, chirping language in awe. It was a tongue that--did it even count as a tongue? There were phonetics which were impossible for a Klingon or any other humanoid. The translator implant lagged a little, but the Lieutenant understood what Slamtha had been saying, and she narrowed her eyes and grinned.
"If I didn't have fight in me, I'd have died when your brutes attacked us in the Great Nebula," Slamtha said, slinging her arm-blade-whip into the turbolift console, slicing through the screen. "If I didn't have fight in me, I'd still be a slave in the mucking Orion labor camps." Another swing of her arm, this time back at the Lieutenant, slicing her torso again, but not quite cutting it in half. "If I didn't have fight in me, I'd have killed myself on mucking Mellanus!" A final swing, this time cutting the Lieutenant's head and upper torso down the middle.
The two halves (or two thirds?) of the Lieutenant chuckled. "You're going to have to show me how to do that blade-arm thing. I had no idea we could do that," said one half. "You'll pay for this! You'll pay! I'll make you pay!" said the other.
The three pink slimegirl chunks melted into a puddle--one that still looked disconcertingly like Klingon blood. The turbolift finally arrived, and Slamtha rode it down to the shuttlebay.
That was probably the pink slimegirl's biggest mistake--reminding her that she was a fighter.
