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“My dear doctor. Would you happen to have anything to do with the deluge of gifts that have arrived in my quarters?”
“So you got it. Good. Do you like it?”
Garak laughed. “I appreciate the gesture, but it’s a bit much, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why? I can’t see my own bed.”
“On account of yamoksauce? It’s that strong?”
“Perhaps you should come and see what I mean.”
***
Julian’s jaw hit the floor.
The entire room was full of wrappages of yamoksauce. Wrappages on the couch, on the bed, all over the floor as if they’d simply been dumped in from the ceiling. Garak dared not set foot in the room for fear he’d burst one.
“I would appreciate an explanation.”
“Wh- I heard that Quark had leftover Cardassian food, so I asked him to give you ‘some’ yamoksauce,” Julian explained.
“This is certainly an amount of yamoksauce.”
“I didn’t know he even had this much!”
“What am I supposed to do with all this?”
“I don’t know, eat it?”
Garak raised his eye ridges.
“Have a bath in it?” Julian suggested helplessly.
“And open all the packets individually? I’d be here for months.”
“Maybe you could put them in a little shredder thing- you know what, forget I said anything. I’ll call Quark and get him to remove it. Maybe he can prank someone with it, I don’t see who he can sell it to.”
“Well, that would be a waste of Yamoksauce... depending on who it was,” Garak mused.
“I hear Dukat might be coming to the station in a few days.”
They both got a devilish idea.
***
The transporters were calibrated, the coordinates were set. They just had to wait for Dukat to start coming out of his ship.
They both leaned into the hacked camera feed as Dukat walked up to the airlock.
“Ahem.”
Julian and Garak turned around sheepishly. Odo was frowning down at them.
Garak attempted to defuse the situation, despite being extremely caught.
“Ah, constable. Fancy seeing you here.”
“I might say the same for you two. Spying on Dukat, are we? Now why would you do that?”
“Security. You can never trust the man.”
“Hmmm.”
As soon as Dukat entered the station, Julian sneakily pressed the button.
Yamoksauce flooded out of the airlock, forming a tsunami. Damar was caught in the tide, and clung to the edge of the doorway as Dukat grabbed onto his leg.
Their angry screaming could be faintly heard through the monitor.
Garak glared in disbelief at Julian, who had just done the prank in full view of the constable.
They both stared at him a long while, gauging his reaction. He gave nothing away.
Immediately Commander Sisko made a station-wide annoucement.
“To whoever has flooded the docking ring with yamoksauce, we will find you.”
Garak and Julian started running.
***
Sisko paced around the meeting room table slowly, periodically shooting a suspicious glare at members of the senior staff. Not one of them seemed particularly unhappy about the prank itself, so Julian was trying very hard to be casual.
“None of you wants to admit it?”
Julian wished that if he stayed perfectly still, he could turn invisible.
Sisko stopped pacing, and looked calmly around the room. Then he slammed the table.
“Somebody here used the command transporter overrides!”
Kira shrugged. “Dukat getting drowned in yamoksauce would be the opposite of a problem.”
“Except that it would be a diplomatic incident and probably start a war,” Sisko chided. “Odo? Do you have anything to add?”
The constable seemed to have heard Julian’s telepathic pleas, because he grunted “Whoever it was covered their tracks extremely well. They hacked the override from the outside so they couldn’t be identified, and it’s highly likely it was a team effort.”
Sisko let out a quick laugh. “So, you all cooperated? Is that it?”
Silence.
“You’re all grounded!”