USS Bill of Rights

[melannen]

This exists partly because sarken was having a bad day yesterday, partly because I am insane, and partly because I wanted to practice freehand inking in GIMP. None of those are probably good enough excuses:


Captain Maddow of the United Star Ship Bill of Rights, with her department heads, left to right: Lieut. Commander Olbermann, Chief of Science; Chief of Operations Lieutenant "Andy" ch'Cuper; Lieutenant Stewart, Communications; and CMO Lieut. Commander Dr. Stehpen (DFA Vulcan Science Academy, and *don't* mention the ears.)


Q: Why does Captain Maddow wear the miniskirt & go-go boots uniform?
A: One, because it's an incongruity, and every time she walks into a Command meeting all those Admirals are forced to remember just how rarely women's uniforms get worn in command gold. Two, because it reminds Captain Kirk that he's never, ever going to get to sleep with her, and this makes her heart glad. Three, because it gets her all the girls. (Four, she still thinks Lieut. Commander Olbermann is only teasing when he asks her to please stop for the sake of his blood pressure.)

Q: Why USS Bill of Rights?
A: Because if there's any ship Captain Maddow serves, it would be that one. (A starship called Bill of Rights actually appears in the novel Best Destiny, one of the still rare Starfleet ships with a human female captain; Maddow's ship is the Constitution-class ship which bore the name before that.)

Q: What's up with Dr. Stehpen's ear?
A: Seriously, don't mention the ears.

Q: Why is the art so bad?
A: Because I don't practice enough. Also, I did this entirely with GIMP's inking tool, set to default (and eraser tool). It was good practice, both for brush inking, and for drawing in general; line weight depends partly on speed, so the greater the accuracy, the lower the precision. It *forces* you to use quick free strokes and be confident in them. Which I need much, much work on. But at least on the computer you can erase as much as you have to! And I would have failed totally without lots of reference from this ST:TOS publicity shot: http://greatbignerd.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/star_trek_csg_014.jpg

Q: No, really, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
A: Because Star Trek is awesome, and Pundit Round Table is awesome, and they both share the same commitment to freedom, diversity, and knowledge, and believe that evil only wins out over good if good is careless. I've wanted for ages to put them on the bridge of a starship anyway. Also, I'm a complete sucker for crossovers. And the art was actually flowing; that's even rarer than days when the fic is flowing.

Also, I was getting tired of The One Pig as my journal header.

(For those unfamiliar with the terminology, Pundit Round Table refers to a Real Person Fic sub-fandom in which Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olberman, and lately also Rachel Maddow hand out together, snark a lot, and solve crime. They are all liberal-to-moderate US cable news commentators (more or less), they are all really good at what they do, and they are all magnificently geeky.)

Also, drawing this has made me realize that part of the reason I love Keith so much is that he exactly matches my mental image of Lieut. Harb Tanzer, Enterprise's chief of Recreation. (Also it makes me want Captain Maddow/Dr. Dehner. Or at least want to draw Ana Marie Cox in Dr. Dehner's uniform.)

Comments

[sarken]

This is the best thing ever and I love you and, oh, God, I am going to have dreams about Captain Maddow and just -- *flails*

Edit: I should mention that the reference picture you used is my favorite TOS publicity shot. A poster of it was hanging in my bedroom for years all because, hello, massive crush on Nurse Chapel. ♥

[melannen]

It's not that Jim Kirk dislikes Captain Maddow. She's very, very good at what she does - given Starfleet's still-shameful transparent aluminum ceiling, she wouldn't have made Starship Captain if she wasn't, and she's had ample time to prove it since. And he's fairly sure she gets him in a way even most other captains don't - he checked her Academy records once; her Kobayashi Maru results are the only ones other than his that are sealed even against field command officers. And she's never been anything other than glad to see him when they're assigned to the same mission.

It's just that - afterward, he always has to put in at least one evening's quality time with Dr. McCoy's stock of Saurian brandy.

(He made the mistake - once, and despite her science officer's desperate "Bad idea! Bad idea!" sign language - of inviting her along. She took one look, said, "Really? You're drinking Saurian brandy straight?", and then proceeded to invade McCoy's drinks collection, do some absolutely obscene things to the sick bay synthesizers, and spend the rest of the evening lecturing them, with demonstrations, about cross-planetary parallelisms in drink-mixing traditions. Before she went off with a rather tipsy Nurse Chapel and didn't reappear until morning. Kirk is never again going to be able to look at a gin'n'tonic without wincing, and McCoy actually stopped drinking mint juleps for over a year.)

It just that - he's never, ever going to get to sleep with her. And he keeps remembering that fact.

(OMG, Nurse Chapel in that shot! It's like she's saying "Yes, I am more awesome than anybody else ever. And yes, I do know it.")

[peapods42]

OMG wonky ear! And omg Andy the Andorian! AND CAPTAIN MADDOW.

WIN.

[amadi]

This is so extraordinarily awesome I am kvetching.

[kikiduck]

I think the floppy ear is the best part of this.

[melannen]

The first thing new crewmembers on the Bill of Rights learn is "Don't Ask About the Ears". Everybody knows, of course, that Vulcans are supremely logical and perfectly in control of their emotions, and that despite his stern demeanor, Dr. Stehpan is friendly and fair. Just - don't ask about the ears.

Sometimes it's whispered in corners that Vulcans have a very strong privacy taboo, and any breach of the privacy veil will be punished by death. Some say that the reason Vulcans master their emotions is that if anything triggers a loss of control, they go into a killing rage. And so you don't ask about the ears.

The sickbay staff still tell each other the legend about how Nurse Bobby asked about the ears once, and then he got eaten. (Sure, there was an invisible bugblatter beast loose on the ship at the time, but they're pretty sure it was because he asked about the ears.)

There's a rumor among the ensigns that Ensign Meg knows. Whether she got it from him, or overhead something, or broke into the ship's computer - the most audacious of the rumors says she that when she was posted to Enterprise, she asked Commander Spock - but whatever it is, she won't talk. If asked, she mutely just shakes her head.

And if you happen to wander into the observation deck, or recreation, or the officers' lounge, and see Lieutenant Stewart petting them -- just back out. Back out, and pretend you were never there.

[stellar_dust]

Ok, do want. Anderson as an Andorian is pure brilliance.

And also, yes yes yes, Keith is Harb Tanzer! And I just remembered that character exists. ♥.

[melannen]

Lieutenant Keith Olbermann is the first Starfleet officer in history to become Science Officer of a Starship by way of the Recreation department, and he did it mostly by accident.

He hadn't planned a Starfleet career at all, but after a paper he co-wrote as a child about statistical trends in his home planet's competitive sports was picked up by Federation newsfeeds, Lieutenant T'Leiar of Starship Intrepid encouraged him to enter Starfleet as a rec officer, and shortly thereafter, he enlisted. (In later tellings, it is occasionally implied that he had an urgent need to be off-planet at the time; but there is no evidence to back this up.)

For about a decade thereafter, he served as recreation staff on several Starfleet vessels, mostly small courier and scientific ships. His service record shows consistently high performance ratings, but frequent reports of insubordination, including one Thranx commanding officer who accused him of having "too much backbone" and several suggestions along the lines of "if he's Recreation, he needs to learn to relax," and he changed posting slightly more frequently than average for someone of his experience.

He recieved his lieutenant's commission concomitant with his appointment as sole recreation officer on the last exploration mission of the tiny U.S.S. T'challa, and after a succesful tenure on that ship, was posted to Enterprise, second to Lieut. Commander Harb Tanzer.

This marked both the best and the most volatile period in his life; he bonded immediately with Tanzer, and the two of them proceeded to make life hell for the senior officers while raising Enterprise's efficiency and retention numbers to an all-time high for the fleet, and he received several commendations for his work. However, increasing personality clashes with other officers (which perhaps reached a high point when CMO Dr. Leonard McCoy banned him from sickbay entirely during Alpha shift,) and problems with disagreements over the limits of a Rec officer's role culminated in the incident on Alpha Carietis Seven and his re-assignment, with a desk promotion, to Starfleet Command.

(Scotty was the one who piloted the shuttle taking him to the starbase. "Lad," he chortled to himself, "I've heard of folks burning their bridges behind them, but I've never heard of anyone burning up the entire river before!"

"It was a methane river," Keith muttered, still sulking.

"Yes, but lad, the atmosphere had no oxygen." Scott shook his head. "That's one for the books, all right.")

He remained at the desk job for about a year, but found himself deeply resenting the work, and was considering retirement when word was put out that Command was having difficulty finding an experienced XO willing to serve under newly-minted Captain Maddow of the Constitution-class Bill of Rights. Olbermann put his name forward, and Command, more than happy to place two troublemakers on the same boat, gave him the assignment.

They shortly came to regret that decision.

[orbitaldiamonds]

Oh...my... *dies*

That is too much win for my puny human brain to handle!

[siegeofangels]

I love this a lot a lot; it took me longer than it should have to realize who these people were [based on]; I love her use of the miniskirt-and-go-go-boots uniform, I love the reasons why, and I *love* how it looks with captain's stripes on the sleeves.

[melannen]

Nah, it took you a while to recognize them because I'm not actually very good at drawing real peoples' likeness. :D I'm just thankful you eventually did.

Captain's stripes on that uniform are - well, actually there's only one person in Starfleet who wears a uniform like that, and she had to bully her Chief of Ops into reprogramming a replicator to make it for her. Oh, it's completely regulation, don't get me wrong, but promising female cadets still get steered out of Command track ("Why waste your career in Command when no woman has ever made Starship Captain? Better off going in to Ops or Science, where you might make Department Head and get command in emergencies.") And the few that push through despite it all always choose to wear the uniform with trousers, once they're high enough rank to get the choice.

Rachel wore the trousers uniform, too. Until her first real command, acting Captain of the science cruiser Shen Kuo while Captain Summers was on a research sabbatical. In her first week, she was approached by terrified but determined Yeoman Cho, asking if she could please be reassigned, because her lieutenant kept looking at her, and making her climb Jeffries tubes for spurious reasons, and pick things up off the floor, and it's true that Captain Summers had always said there was nothing officially inappropriate about it, but it made her really uncomfortable, so would Captain Maddow maybe transfer her to Maintenance? She liked cleaning sewage converters, really.

Rachel considers that her first real command decision. And she walked onto the bridge the next morning with a new personal yeoman, and a new uniform, and sat down in the Captain's chair, and crossed her leg over her knee, and just dared anyone to say anything about it.

When she wore the miniskirt six months later to her promotional hearing, after wearing it through that thing with the Orion pirates and the Omozdian cricket plague and the barely-averted disaster at Harrapa, she smiled sweetly, and the assembled (white, male) Admirals didn't dare say anything about it either. They stuck strictly to her record, and she walked out of that room with Captain's stripes and command of a Constitution-class starship. She hasn't looked back since.

(Then, once she officially wasn't in command of Shen Kuo anymore, she asked Yeoman Cho out for a proper night on the town, and was grinning irrepressibly for weeks afterward.)

[bessemerprocess]

DIES OF SQUEEE. DEAD, SERIOUSLY. I love this so much, I might have to write fic for you, but only if you tell me the story of Rachel's Kobayashi Maru (and can I say thank you JJ for making that common fannish knowledge?)

And the wonky ear!

[melannen]

You can write me all the fic you want! About anything you want to write about.

Rachel Maddow was born on a small colony planet, and while she was a small child, it suffered first a disastrous plague and then an attempted genocide. She's always been painfully aware that the only reason she survived was that she was young enough that the Executioner couldn't know she was an undesirable, and that's a large part of the reason she joined Starfleet - to make sure that no one ever had the opportunity to do something like that again.

It gave her a drive, at the Academy, that made her stand out even among the other bright young people who were Starfleet officer cadets, and it gave her the anger to push her way into Command track, and stay there right up until the end. She failed her first test in her last semester at the Academy - the test called Kobayashi.

Despite losing her ship she performed admirably in command, and made the test last almost nine minutes with minimal loss of life. Her instructors had only compliments for her handling of both the scenario and its fallout, which is why Commander Constrev was surprised to find her the next day in the library, researching the history and theory of the test. He wasn't too worried, as there was almost nothing to be found; but it was less than a decade since the reign of the infamous Kirk, and it was standard policy to keep track of a cadet's activities for the weeks after the test.

She noticed him looking over her shoulder and glanced up. "This says it's possible to re-take the Kobayashi maru."

"Yes," he told her, "but very few cadets do, and to be honest, I hadn't expected you to be one of them. I want to reassure you that your score on that test didn't bring down your class rankings, if that's been worrying you."

She waved away the whole notion of class rankings with a negligent hand. "No, I'm just trying to figure out what it would benefit me to re-take the test. I did everything right, according to my post-simulation debriefing, and yet still lost; what could I do differently going in? And more importantly, why wouldn't they at least change the basic set-up of the problem for a re-take, if the idea of the test is to assess a cadet's reaction to a novel situation?"

Constrev blinked. "The idea behind the test may not be what you believe it to be, Rachel."

Rachel rolled her eyes. "I know exactly what they're trying to do; to they think it's not obvious? The whole point is power. As long as they control the simulator, they have all the power, and there's nothing I can do to save my ship. So the point of the test must be to see how a command cadet reactions in a situation where he's completely powerless. Cadets are used to being smarter, stronger and more privileged than those around them, from good families and politically powerful planets; take away that automatic assumption of power, and see who melts."

"I'm not entirely sure that power differential is how the commandant would characterize--"

"Of course it's about power," said Rachel. "It always comes down to power. The thing they may have missed is that being on the wrong side of a power differential isn't a novel situation for me. It's my life. The problem isn't how to deal with it, it's how to change it."

Constrev came away from that conversation disquieted, but Rachel stopped her researches into the Kobayashi Maru and seemed to have become fully absorbed in a comms project she and Cadet Uhura were working on involving signals leakage and detection, so when he was told several weeks later that the cadet had requested a re-take, he was suprised but saw no real reason to be concerned. Rachel tended to be thorough and meticulous with her sources; it was entirely possible she simply wanted to check her work.

And it did, at first, seem like an entirely ordinary run. "Captain" Maddow requested confirmation of a distress call in the Neutral Zone, verified that there were no other ships in communications range, notified Starfleet of her intentions and crossed the border with shields up and crew on high alert, only to be immediatly surrounded by a squadron of Klingon Warbirds.

She blinked, nodded, and politely requested Uhura, on comms, to open a channel to the lead Warbird. A growly, mustachioed Klingon captain appeared on screen and immediately declared that, due to her violation of the neutral zone, she surrender or prepare to be destroyed.

That's when things got weird. She sat up, rubbing nervously at her neck, and said "But what if I don't like either of those choices?"

The Klingon captain replied "Do you not see the ships that are surrounding you? Given you situation, you have no choice."

"I see the ships," she said. "But you're a bit arrogant, you know? Maybe there are other factors. Things you don't see. Like the fact that this morning, somewhere in the vicinity of this building, I hid an activated communicator with certain modifications. The second it detects the electrical pattern that signals a ship in this simulation being destroyed, it will send a message to every currently enrolled student at this Academy, informing them that the Kobayashi maru is a fake, designed to be an unwinnable test, and that there's no need to worry about it because everybody fails."

Then she smiled, stretched out her legs, and said "Your turn."

There was dead silence for a few seconds, and then the viewscreen abruptly turned off. Her helmsman turned around and said "Did you really--" but cut out abruptly when she raised an eyebrow at him. And then Cadet Uhura started snickering, quietly, and when a few minutes later power was cut to the whole simulator, a group of high-ranking Admirals came on to the bridge to be greeted by Cadet Maddow swininging around to look at them, and saying calmly, "Ah. So it turns out there wasn't a real Kobayashi Maru after all. That's disappointing."

(There was a disciplinary hearing, of course. Constrev tried to point out that, with Kirk's precedent, it would be extremely unfair to interfere with Maddow's graduation, but apparently merely breaking into and reprogramming the Academy's most secure computer system was nothing, compared to attempting to undermine the authority of the whole Academy before its student body.

Constrev was fairly certain this was the result of the fallacy know as "pride", but attended the hearing to do what he could.

Rachel appeared completely unruffled; when asked for a defense, she pointed out that the guidelines of the simulations allowed for a canditate within the simulation to do anything necessary to achieve success, with no repercussion beyond grades as long as no-one was physically harmed.

"Yes," pointed out Admiral Blitzer, "But the communicator in question wasn't within the simulation, was it?"

"Have you recovered the communicator in question, Admiral?"

"We presume you had a confederate remove the communicator as soon as you'd achieved your objective. And I do hope that wasn't in the nature of a threat, Cadet."

"Have you discovered the confederate, sir?" She glanced up at them through her lashes. "You won't do either - there was no confederate, because there was no communicator. It seemed like an unnecessary risk, given the advantage I held. So unless lying to Klingons in battle is now against the rules of the Service, I am not entirely sure why you've called this hearing."

Costrev caught up to her afterward. He was too curious to resist asking, "Was there really a communicator?"

She glanced at him, and grinned merrily. "Was there really a Kobayashi Maru?"

He drummed his fingers against his leg, and finally said, "Ask James T. Kirk."

[idlerat]

I love you.

[crantz]

I would so read stories about this ship. I love the name too.

[fenellaevangela]

Do, the picture itself is pretty awesome (Andy is an Andorian and Rachel is CAPTAIN!), but you really won me over with the Q&A - particularly the first one :-D

[stellar_dust]

Oh my God. XD

You need to write more, and then post it somewhere other than comments!

[(Anonymous)]

Bahahaha

I'm so happy about this I have to post anonymously... ahh.

[sarcasticsra]

Followed a link from stellar_dust's journal, and man. I know very little about Star Trek and I still think that this whole thing/idea is really, really awesome.

*applauds*

[d_generate_girl]

Oh my god, this is all just so brilliant. The way you've playfully tweaked each pundit (Andy the Andorian! Keith's recreation track! Stehpen's ears!) to the Trekverse, and having them interact with the TOS crew. I just adore it - my inner fanchild is bouncing in GLEEEE.

[aybara_max]

ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS DAHLING!!! Captain Maddow and her dork glasses are the most gorgeous thing in the galaxy, and Andy... !!!! ^_^ Keith, Jon, and particularly Stephen are adorable as well, thank you for sharing!!!!

[vulgarweed]

Here from Sarken. This is the coolest thing I have seen in my life. Or up there, anyway.

[skywaterblue]

SORRY I AM LATE YOU GAVE COOPER A PROPER ANDORIAN GENDER YOU AND I SHOULD BE FRIENDS FOREVER.

Um. *rubs neck*

It's so totally awesome, this AU. I love you.

[twtd]

This is so freaking awesome! Captain Maddow ftw! I am giggling with glee.

[(Anonymous)]

(don't have a Dreamwidth account)
(am magicalmongoose on LJ)

You've managed to combine two of my very favourite things: Rachel Maddow and Star Trek. You're officially my hero for today!

[marigan]

This is a thing of beauty! This scares me. Beauty! Scary! Thing of beauty that is also terrifying? I love Rachel Maddow in the gold miniskirt and go-go boots.

I haven't written anything in a million years, but I'd love to have a comment!fic ST/SW crossover between your pundit crew and one from Faux Noise in a Star Destroyer. (See, it's really the thought of Mara in an Imperial uniform... ;) *invites you to my LJ, where I suss out the crew and comment about the uncanny resemblance between Rupert Murdoch and Grand Moff Tarkin*