It was three weeks after Simon and Kaylee finally married. But instead of taking advantage of the fact that she was willfully sleeping with him, Simon was spending this evening in the dining area of the ship, going over his latest medical notes on River. He had hoped that this union with Kaylee would be the beginning of something new and better. But after the euphoria of the events had died down, and the sand of Anubis was washed away, things seemed to be getting back to normal.

When he and Kaylee had gotten back to the ship after their short honeymoon, he was treating both Kaylee and River. River with a new, experimental drug he had managed to get his hands on, and Kaylee with a deep gash in her right foot from a particularily sharp seashell. Simon had stitched up Kaylee well enough, and was about to inject River with the new treatment. He had gone over to the sink and began to wash his hands, when a terrible smell emerged from the sink. It reeked of urine, feces and whatever biological waste the different crew members of the ship produced. The smell tripled in intensity when septic waste started to flow out of the faucet and the drain of the basin at an alarming rate. Simon staggered back, Kaylee held her mouth to keep from vomiting and River started screaming. The entire infirmary was soon filling up with shit.

It took about half an hour before the flowing stopped as soon as Kaylee ascertained what went wrong. Apparantly, someone had re-routed the pipes of the waste disposal so that it would lead to the infirmary sink. It was obvious that this was Jayne’s idea of a prank, which only he found funny. Of course he had to clean it all up and not by blasting it out of the airlock. But Simon was the one who was really concerned. Not only was his workspace that he had worked so hard to sterilize become a bacterially infected, shit smelling Petri dish that would be out of operation for weeks, but the sight of shit bubbling up had sparked a new wave of hysteria and shock into River. The new treatm