A Season of Light

Posted on Wed 19th Dec, 2018 @ 3:09am by Commander Jasmine Collins-Keller & Commander Paul Graves PsyD & Lieutenant Commander Alora Baro

976 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Oblivion
Location: Warehouse 13, Cargo Space 780
Timeline: MD 21, 2345

Previously on Starbase 109:

"We shall have to take the more difficult path," Addams concluded. She turned to walk around The Wolf, and a new path appeared, marked by what seemed to be the head of a one-eyed Santa Claus mounted on a sharpened peppermint stick.

and now, the continuation!

What bizarre biological mind came up with this environment? Elizabeth wondered. And how bizarre are all of us that we can see it? She really wanted to have an ongoing conversation with Damion about everything she saw, to check whether they saw the same things. Obviously, at least several of them had seen the wolf on the path, probably all of them, since no one was objecting to the new direction. Note: Research all databases available on Terran-wolf history.

Damion peered at the one-eyed face on the candy stick for a moment and tried to decipher its significance. Lacking information, he simply accepted it as scenery until more information should be forthcoming. But he glanced at Elizabeth and whispered. "Do you think she's the one who bound that wolf?"

"I still have both my hands, so clearly not," the Witch answered, holding up her hands by way of demonstration. "We need some positive energy. You..." her eyes fell on Jasmine and Adam. "Tell us your happiest memory."

Baro glanced at the two still confused by the old man head on a white and red stick.

Jasmine smiled. "The day we got married." She started. "All of our friends were there, the garden was beautiful and the cherry blossom petals were floating down almost magically."

Adam smiled. "Jasmine was the most beautiful bride I'd ever seen and then the baby came."

"When Chlamydia put her in my arms, I felt immediately in love with her." Jasmine spoke when Adam finished his sentence. The pair told the same story each picking up where the other left off. Even the details were the same.

Jade chimed in. "The opening of my first Orchids & Jazz. I'd waited so long and it was simply perfect!" She grinned at Jasmine and Adam, "A little like having my own baby."

Beck didn't speak out, hoping that just thinking of a happy memory would be enough for whatever the woman was trying to work up - some kind of lightness to combat the darkness around them, perhaps? She knew most pilots would say the day they were pinned with wings was the best of life, but she went further back into her childhood. She'd been 14 when her youngest brother was born. Darrington Finn Beck. Her mother had been sick for months afterward, and a lot of the mothering had fallen on Rebecca. She smiled as she thought of the darling little bundle he'd been. Then she chuckled as she realized all of them were thinking about their "children" of one kind or another.

Elizabeth glanced at Damion and wondered what his happiest memory would be. Her own ... she hadn't always had emotions to judge the early years as "happy". That had started about the time she and Damion became friends. She thought maybe he was the catalyst that had caused her to grow outside normal boundaries. Relating to him, defining her beliefs through talking with him ... those were the things that had led to the changes. Those were the times she defined as happy.

"The day I invited this lady--" Damion nodded at Elizabeth. "--to take a walk with me in the holodeck of the USS Hermes. The setting was a Japanese garden. We talked about all sorts of things--beauty, the differences between biological and electronic life-forms. We talked about faith. I walked out of there feeling stunned, awed. I'd never felt so powerfully moved or so sure of anything in my life." He glanced at Elizabeth. "I--I never told you that because I didn't know how you would take it."

"The births of my children," Lanis said with a look directly at Dawn Addams--or whatever she was. He smiled. "The look of pure adoration on my wife's face the first time she held the two of them. Made me wish I'd been an artist, so I could've drawn the way she looked and kept it forever. Aside from that?" He shrugged and then gave a soft laugh. "The first time I operated on someone and didn't lose the patient. I had to cobble together tools because we'd just left Rakantha Province in a hurry, ahead of the Cardassians. I think I'm prouder of that surgery than of any other I've done since, because it was so infernally difficult."

Paul thought a moment and then spoke. "The first time I ever deeply read someone's emotions and had a true sense of just how humbling, beautiful, and terrifying an experience that was. It gave me an entirely new respect for my patients. I think... union with the Deities must be like that--that complete knowing beyond knowing. The laying bare of oneself in return--not in submission but in sharing. It is not something my people customarily do; you can't do that all the time. But it is a precious and glorious thing when it happens."

The old woman behind the young woman's face smiled. "I, too, have known the joy of having children," she said, turning her gaze on Purulence and Ischemia. Silently, she congratulated herself on the success of her ploy, distracting her mortal companions from the silent shores of Lake Hali and its black, waveless depths; from the ruins of lost Carcosa on the lake's far shore, where flapped the tatters of the King, unheard.

"We draw nigh," she said, hearing the Al Azif, the insectile droning taken for the howling of the damned consigned to hell by early European occultists on pharmaceutically induced voyages in the realms beyond.

 

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