#vulcans

[sinkoe-but-star-trek]

What if Vulcans have wedding bracelets instead of rings. Harder to lose, don’t touch the hands much.

On top of that, tiny Vulcans making friendship acquaintance necklaces

[mystrades-umbrella]

The Nokva'ar was never meant to be a lifeboat. It was, rather, a commuter vessel, barely warp-capable, that functioned mostly to take people to various spots in the outer part of the Vulcan system for scientific or industrial work. But with the planet falling apart underneath them, every single vessel at the Fan Sovok Spaceport had been pressed into service. They'd beamed up as many people as they could get locks on, and then had come the message from the Andorian Ambassador, begging them to find his daughter Tethryn.

They'd located her and brought her on board, but it had taken too long. All of Fan Sovok was being pulled into the growing black hole. Captain T'pir had ordered full impulse, but a piece of wreckage had gone right through the engine hoop and crashed into medical, setting them spinning out of control. She'd been able to feel spacetime itself stretching and twisting all around her, and said a short prayer that her katra would join those of the ancestors...

... then the lights were out and every possible alarm was blaring, sparks were flying and gravity was off, but they were still alive.

"Damage report!" She ordered, holding on to the arms of her chair to not float away.

"Unknown, Captain," said First Officer Tul. He made his way to the nearest console and relieved the woman clinging to the seat. Displays were flickering wildly, but then began to settle down one by one. "Power is restored," said Tul.

"I have engineering," said Lieutenant Pavok. "They were forced to eject the warp core when the debris hit. We are on backup power and will have only impulse engines. Artifical gravity and inertial dampeners are offline - they are running diagnostics. Aft port section has been sealed off due to hull breach, including medical."

That was the worst possible place to take damage. T'pir had never liked asking for help, but here it was the only logical choice - they needed assistance and they needed it now. "Once life support is stable, focus on communications," she ordered. "Starfleet promised to send aid."

The viewscreen came to life then, and they could finally see what was around them. The Nokva'ar was dead in space, rotating past an apparently endless field of debris. T'pir could see rubble, parts of spacecraft, and objects she could not begin to identify. The large ice moon, D'vega, drifted into view and then out of it again.

There was no sign of Vulcan at all.

T'pir had known she wouldn't see it. The emergency advisory they'd recieved had said the planet was collapsing. Even if the enemy ship had been unable to deliver its terrible payload, the tunnel they'd drilled into the planet's core would have massive seismic repercussions. But looking at where it should have been and seeing empty space was...

... that was most of the places T'pir, not a wide-ranging traveller, had ever been. The house she'd been born in, the school she'd attended, and the animal sanctuary where her father had worked, where she'd once stayed up all night helping him bottle-feed a litter of abandoned sehlat cubs. The desert where she'd done her kahs'wan, sheltering in the same caverns as her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother before her. All of that was... gone. Locked behind an event horizon, never again able to interact with the universe beyond.

In that moment, for the first time in her life, T'pir had a visceral feeling of what the old days must have been like, in the time before Surak. If she gave in to that sense of loss, the emotion would swallow her whole. It would burn her down in both body and mind, leaving not even a smoking shell. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, and tried to disconnect. There were seventy-six other sentient life forms on this ship that were counting on her to keep them safe. Do not feel. Think.

"What other ships are nearby?" She asked.

"None, Captain," said Pavok. "I am not detecting any Vulcan or Starfleet transponders in the system." He frowned, puzzled. "Nothing."

Tul was also reporting confusing findings. "Subspace communications appears to be entirely non-fuctional, but diagnostics are not reading anything wrong."

"Try emergency radio," said T'pir. It would be slow, but it was all they had.

More systems came back online, piece by piece... but with strange exceptions. They could neither send nor recieve subspace signals. The inertial dampeners, too, absolutely refused to activate, despite nothing being detectably wrong with them. The same was true of the artifical gravity. And try as they might, they could see no other ships.

That did not make sense. Vulcan had evacuated as many people from the planet and surrounding space infrastructure as possible. There ought to have been dozens, hundreds of them, and they would have taken some damage but surely they couldn't all have been destroyed. And Starfleet had promised help. Human, Andorian, and other vessels should have been rushing to their aid. Where were they?

Could it really be that they were the only survivors?

"Captain," said Pavok. "I am reading structures in orbit of the second planet in the system. There will be approximately a twenty-minute light speed time delay in communication with them.

T'pir breathed a sigh of relief. With no Vulcan to orbit, perhaps it was logical that the ships arriving had stopped somewhere else to wait for the worst of the danger to pass. They were, after all, surrounded by potentially dangerous debris. "Then we need to send a distress call at once," she said. "Set a course for the planet."

"It will be a slow trip," Tul warned. "Without inertial dampeners we must maintain acceleration of no more than twenty metres per second squared. Loose objects will be forced aft. The back wall will become the floor."

"Understood," said T'pir. The journey was likely to take days, and it would be intensely uncomfortable... but all other options had been exhausted, so this was the logical course. "Do it."

Tul began speaking into the microphone. "Greetings, unknown outpost. This is the Nokva'ar. We have survived the destruction of Vulcan and are on our way to you. Please respond."

There was no response, but there wouldn't be when they were limited by the speed of light. Had the destruction of the planet had some effect on local spacetime, disrupting subspace? She supposed she'd know when they reached the planet.

-

The journey ended up taking a week. An intensely uncomfortable week in which walls were floors and everybody had to eat from the fast-dwindling supply of emergency rations because without the antimatter reactor there was not enough power for the replicators. Halfway there they had to begin decelerating, and everything that had previously been thrown to the back walls now fell to the front.

In all that time, nobody answered their calls. Pavok said there was no sign anybody at their destination had recieved them. T'pir began to think they would arrive and find the place abandoned. She told herself that was illogical. The installation they'd detected showed every sign of power generation and use. There must be somebody there. It was just somebody who, for whatever reason, could not see or hear them. She told Tul to keep trying.

As they approached, they found the planet didn't even look right. It had the familiar ring, but the second planet from the Vulcan sun had always been swathed in swirling white and brown ammonia clouds. The world they were approaching, however, was brilliant blue. Spectroscopy identified cyanophyll, a photosynthetic pigment. There was life in those clouds?

Something was very wrong. Everyone on board knew it by now, but nobody wanted to discuss it. Not when this was their only potential source of help.

Two people died on the way. One was a crew member, a woman called T'shav. She needed a transfusion, but nobody on board matched her rare blood type, and with the replicators down they could not synthesize it. T'pir wrote the required letter to her family, not knowing if she would ever be able to send it. The other was a dock worker, an older, muscular woman with tattoos that suggested she'd spent time serving aboard a Tellarite vessel before working at Fan Sovok. She had already been suffering from a head injury when she was brought on board. Nobody knew her name, and she died without ever regaining consciousness. Despite the illogic of the action, T'pir wrote a letter for her, too, referring to the deceased only as 'your loved one'.

Finally, when they were so close the inhabitants of the space station would be able to look out a window and see them, they made contact.

"This is First Officer Tul of the Nokva'ar, seeking permission to enter orbit." They were back in microgravity now, which was preferable to walking on the walls. They at least could use the consoles from the intended positions.

There was a rustle of static, and then the bridge filled with what sounded like strange, alien music. T'pir could tell there was structure in it... and sure enough, after wrestling with the unfamiliar sounds for a few moments, the universal translator found meaning.

'Who is there question?' The sounds were asking.  'Humans question?'

"We have two humans on board, and one Andorian, but our crew and passengers are mostly Vulcan," said Tul.  "We are requesting medical and mechanical assistance."

They were near enough now for sensors to get an idea what was inside the structure they were seeing.  "The station appears to be built of metallic xenon polymers," said Ensign Shilaak, studying the readouts.  "The atmosphere inside is ammonia at four hundred and eighty Kelvin and pressures similar to the planet's surface."

T'pir nodded.  They'd always known this world was a Class N, with conditions inimical to humanoid life.  Yet now it seemed someone was there, someone who thrived in that same environment.

'Sounds like humans,' said one voice.

'Not shaped like human ship,' said another.

'We only know one human ship," a third pointed out.

'We need expert,' the first voice decided, then spoke more loudly.  'We get human!  We bring human to talk to you!'

The connection closed.

Tul looked over his shoulder at T'pir.  "Why would they assume we are human?"

T'pir was not sure, either... but then she realized something important.  "They don't have a translator," she decided.  "They cannot understand us, and they do not realize we can understand them, but they recognize the sounds we make as speech.  Perhaps all humanoids sound alike to beings who communicate in tonal chords."

"If they don't have a translator, then their human may not be able to understand us, either," Tul observed.

"There are humans who speak Vulcan," said Pavok.

"I took a xenolinguistics course in school," said T'pir.  "If all else fails, I speak a little English.  We will have to hope this human does, too."

HOLY STARS THIS IS ACTUALLY SO PEAK JDJDHEIWJSJFJSKS ITS ACTUALLY SO GOOD KAJDHEISHSKSHDJWKSBD

I adore T’pir I’m actually so attached to her now

the way you describe everything is so beautiful

and its amazing that the eridians didn’t automatically understand but do vaguely recognise the way they speak

AMAZE AMAZE ITS ACTUALLY SO PEAK AND AWSOME DIEGSKFHWKVDJEKEIDBFHWJW

[species8472kisser]

I assumed as much

[aehallhyon]

Okay so I thought the "Vulcans are cats!" thing was just fun silly Tumblr headcanon being Tumblr headcanon, like how it's very popular here to draw Trek species with tails. But I am realizing slowly that people here really do actually think Vulcans evolved from cats in Star Trek canon.

I saw a reply thread in which people were talking about "Vulcans" while actually describing the background and legal situation of the Caitians and Kzinti. That's how I realized you all were serious. I can kinda understand this confusion. There's parallels to the Vulcan-Romulan split in that these are two species who uh... split. They're both psionic species who have violent pasts. But they're not related to Vulcans.

As far as I know, the only source on Vulcan evolution is Spock's World, and their ancestors are described as hominids indistinguishable from our own primate evolutionary ancestors aside from their green blood. There are entire chapters in Spock's World revolving around them being semi-arboreal hominids. Their most catlike feature (double eyelids) isn't a natural part of their normal evolution, but is the result of strategic eugenics projects after they reached their modern form during their early Bronze Age. Ancient Vulcans fought wars to arrange bondings to get them. There are also several chapters in Spock's World about this.

Vulcans being evolutionary quite similar to Humans is thematically important. This is why we freak out the Vulcans and Romulans so badly. This is like... the entire point of 'The Chase' and the Progenitors. The other option we are given in canon is a connection to the Arettans / Arettians, also not cats, who resemble both Vulcanoids and Deltans.

If there's a different novel or episode that discusses Vulcans' evolutionary history and says they are cats, please let me know. I have literally never seen anyone insist on this until I joined Tumblr and you're all saying it as if it's fact, so I'm really interested to learn where it's from.

[leonoramaymorgenstern]

That one guy in Balance of Terror: Omg Spock saved my life

[full-of-scorpions]

One of the greatest things that the Enterprise episode Carbon Creek offers is that Vulcans have always been Like This. From the very first Vulcans who stepped foot on Earth, most of them are utterly indifferent to humans, but there's that one guy who's like, "What are you guys talking about? Humans are GREAT. They're super interesting and I am going to pose this as an intellectual fascination, but let's be real, I just think they're neat."

And hundreds of years later, it's still happening.

[the-liminal-masc]

I'm kinda wondering is Vulcans have a higher percentage of Hyposexualality and/or a higher A-spec population than humans...

Like, that would make sense right?