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Posted on Thu 30th Oct, 2025 @ 10:12pm by Commander Paul Graves PsyD & Lieutenant Sufai Kell & Lieutenant Commander Yuma Mukkaai

3,586 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: From The Ashes
Location: Paul Graves Office

Hi, I saw you wanted a JP and I figured this was a good way to introduce my new character, Lt Cmdr Yuma Makkai. She is a future recruit for the IBEX, and assigned to diplomatic escort operations after a mission gone wrong. Austen suggested we can bypass the onboarding process to just have her be on board now, so could we start with her in therapy mandated by her former doctor?

That would be great! My character Damion Ildaran might be joining the IBEX for a while, as well.

I am sorry I rarely get both time and internet. I have time off soon! Working with Damion does sound fun. I don't know what Yuma is on the station officially. I had talked to Austen about her doing Diplomatic stuff as a security consultant and spy something or other. She is listed as Former NPC?

Ah, that's where I remember Yuma from; I think she used to belong to a player named Mike, who played the former security chief, Dallas Briggs. As this is pretty much a reboot for SB-109, I think installing Yuma in the diplomatic department would be fine. Do you need me to link her to you, or do you already have her linked?

*

Yuma wasn't sure how to enter the room, but the doors opened at her hesitation all the same. The Counselor had a pleasant lobby and a receptionist was sitting there at the service window to greet her. Yuma almost left, but swallowed her desire to turn on her heel and run away.

"May I help you?" the young blonde woman in a blue yeoman's uniform asked Yuma. She glanced at her computer screen. "Are you Lt. Commander Mukkaai? I hope I pronounced that right."

With a gentle nod she accepted the fair approximation, and conveyed through her tones and posturing that she appreciated the effort. Entering the room only enough for the door to close, she finally found the words she needed, "Is this a good time for you? I don't have an appointment, but there was a standing order for me to seek your office when I came on board. I can come back, but it's been a week, and I don't want to fall out of line but this is not something I am comfortable with."

"Dr. Graves is available now," the yeoman said. "I'm Yeoman Matav; it's good to meet you. Would you like to see Dr. Graves today and schedule this as a regular appointment time once he decides how often he'd like to see you?"

“Thank you, yes that’s nice of you to see me as a walk-in. I don't have a duty schedule yet, so I am free for the time being.” She stood at the desk, unsure of what to do. Her instinct from two cultures was to lay low and be unseen, but stopping that was part of why she wanted to come in the first place.

Yeoman Matav nodded and tapped the small earpiece she wore. "Dr. Graves, I have a Lt. Cmdr. Mukkaai who'd like to see you as a walk-in. Are you available now?"

She paused a moment, listening to the Counselor's reply and then glanced back at Yuma. "He can see you now. I'll buzz you in and take you to his office." A moment later a buzzer sounded, and the door beside the service window swished open. Metav met Yuma at the doorway, and the two of them walked down a curving corridor until Matav paused at a door with a nameplate showing the doctor's name. This door, too, did not just slide open automatically. Instead, Matav pressed a button that chimed, and the door slid open to admit them.

Graves was already coming to greet them. He was a tallish humanoid with dark hair and eyes. "Thank you, Deosha. Commander Mukkaai, please come in and have a seat. Can I get you a beverage?" he asked as the yeoman withdrew, leaving the door to slide closed behind her. It was a medium-sized office that included a desk with three chairs in one part of the room, and an area closer to the door with a sofa, loveseat, and armchair arranged around a coffee table.

Yuma knew the Betazoid counselor would see through her persona. She lived on Earth in Japan, had adopted their culture as her own after rejecting Angosian culture. Nonetheless, she was not one to be intimidated in her own skin. She was Yuma Mukkaai of Kyoto, and had conquered greater challenges than therapy.

As though in comparison, a fond memory of being tortured came to her, the settings of an electrical prong had been far too low and her acting was eventually discovered. They had really poured it on then but she giggled then as now. The IBEX saw Yuma through many adventures, she had seen more of the galaxy in seven years then others do in a lifetime. Today was about checking boxes so she could return to active duty after being out in the cold.

“Thank you Dr. Graves. Are you a tea drinker? I enjoy them. Oolong perhaps?”

She saw the obvious spot to sit, but it faced away from the door. Dr. Graves could see the door but she faced away from it. Angles played in her mind, calculus of entry- and exit. In his solid dark eyes she realized the reflection was apparent and was satisfied through that to finally take her seat.

"I do love some tea," Paul replied with a brief smile. He went to the replicator and ordered a carafe of oolong for her and one of orange-cinnamon black tea for himself. He set the carafes and two mugs down close to where the commander sat. Paul poured tea into Yuma's mug and invited her to dress it as she preferred. He put two stevia cubes in his tea and waited for them to dissolve before stirring his tea.

"What can I help you with, Commander?" She was hard to read--an almost giddy humor for a moment, then a feeling of remembrance, and then the same sort of checking out a room that Lt. Ildaran had done, the first time he'd come to Paul's office. The very brief glimpse he'd had of her service record before Deosha had let the woman in had not told him much.

“So I just want to ask how much clearance you have. I am often unable to speak plainly and that is problematic. I can discuss things that happened on missions but not the mission itself, and it gets tiring.”

OF course what she wanted to say was, “Doctor I’ve been forced to share space with people on death's door for three weeks while I was pretty much just fine and I’m so twisted emotionally over the loss of the crew and failure of our mission I want to cry but Angosians literally don't cry, and I don’t know anyone here to hug or to tell me everything will be ok because I am “Makoto” and she doesn't break…”

She sipped her tea, inscrutable.

Paul studied her for a moment. Was she one of the IBEX crew? He hadn't met any of them or seen a manifest yet. He took care with his answer.

"Aside from being Chief Counselor, I also serve as second officer of this starbase. Out of necessity, I have been made privy to the most secret intelligence operation I have ever heard of. I won't name the ship, but if you serve on it and recently arrived here, then you may consider me read in, and you may freely discuss with me whatever you need to discuss; that's part of why I was involved. If nothing else, professional ethics would bind me to silence about your mission and anything you might say to me here."

Yuma blinked in total shock. This was... rare.

"Ok... I was told to come here and avail myself of your wisdom and expertise. We don't need to say the name out loud, but Earth animals are a theme in this outfit. It's odd because they don't really talk to us. We get orders through our captain, but they get their orders from something else altogether. So I've trusted that the organization which recruited me was exactly who they claimed to be, a non-denominational free spirit of goodwill and enterprise, but we just lost half our crew in a violent escapade and I'm so %#$@ mad and confused and hurt... I'm supposed to go back but the thought of it makes me despair."

She never let her emotions take hold usually but by god a good therapy session was hard to find and she trusted the systems which directed her here.

Paul waited a moment before answering. "I'm guessing there's more to it than simply losing half of your crew to the mission--though that is a horrific number, and it would anger me to lose that many if I were part of your crew, too," he said, "especially if your crew is close and tight knit. I believe the standard crew for a ship the size of yours is 200. Did you lose a hundred or so people?"

She actually deep sighed, somehow he made her feel relief in the revelation of the low number. "No, we are a small outfit, we lost five of eleven. Our ship has holographic and automated support systems, we are all specialists. I didn't mean to imply such a thing when I said half... god I couldn't imagine. No I knew these people and the outfit doesn't usually put us in harm's way. I've served for a long time and this was my first operational disaster."

"Which would make it all the more difficult to tolerate," Paul agreed. "Well, I'm glad it wasn't a hundred people--though five is awful enough if you've served with them for a long time and were close friends as well as colleagues. What was different about this mission? Or--what caused it to turn disastrous?"

Yuma had plenty of time recently to consider exactly that. She had replayed the events, the loss of Alan, Merrick, even the DOT's had spark and verve but now absent and generating their own sympathetic pangs.

She snorted with derision, "We were supposed to erase data sold to a broker. The broker represented a scavenger government and it would have quadrupled their capacity to inflict harm. I wasn't chosen for the away team as females weren't allowed on their ships and I wasn't about to undergo that extensive an elective."

Yuma knew her looks were among the top tier of Humanoid selection criteria, genetic augmentation and a life living with soldiers kept her in top shape as well. Her biochemistry was already a Gordian knot, an inauthentic gender change and body surgery was not something she was willing to undergo without dire circumstance.

Something compelled her to keep going with energy and she actually sat forward, eager to continue, "So I sat and watched, when I was usually in the action. Poor Merrick, he can lie with the best of them, but Chalnoth only respect strength." Yuma winced as she mentioned the race; she wasn't being careful, but this man had high enough clearance to know some details.

Taking a beat to restrain her nature at the moment, she steadily pressed forward, "He completed the mission, knowing good and damn well he didn't have an exit path. They ripped the information from him using a Mind sifter, found out about us, and we took a direct hit while hiding and unprepared--a sequence of events which led to us howling across a quadrant with %#$% savages relentlessly shooting at us. We had to remote hack and delete our scans from their systems, which they just loved, by the way, and actually boarded us, which is when I finally got to do something. They still got five others and by then it was too late, by then we lost Jessup, Alan, Merrick, Duke blew his arm off... If I had been on the mission team it wouldn't have gone this way. I could have cut a hole big enough for us to escape through however many as stood in our way, I could have resisted interrogation-"

She finally stopped, emotion cracking her voice.

Paul stopped himself from saying, "You don't know that." She was a highly trained covert operations specialist, used to working in deep cover. He was certain she had a very good idea of what she could have done. "I'm glad you were able to keep them from killing more than they did." He grimaced. "Chalnoth are not easy to take down."

She made a face in reply, "If they learned how to properly go to space rather than commandeering others' rides, the Federation would face an empire not unlike the Klingons."

Finding that she needed to say more, her words rambled out, "They don't try to learn because they can just take, and that limits them. Did you know there are over four trillion of them in their star system? That they have genetic drifts between their planets and genocidal wars over them? Each planet has a Super Stadium every country mile 100% intended for gladiatorial bouts. And someone sold them an entire lab of enslaved academics. Federation citizens put to the whip to teach them how to get to space. We watched two other outfits try to rescue them, got everyone killed. Everyone."

She was shaking, the time had built pressure in self-imposed stoic silence which had finally found release.

"We had to go in and take that from them. Some of the Chalnoth in that lab were actually learning, showing scientific curiosity, even. The guys from 31 tried to make it all go away with assassinations. They were swept away, too. They aren't just hard to kill, they are a threat we cannot deny will spill outside their star system one day." She pointed at Paul, almost accusing him of not understanding in her tone, as she darkly glowered in fear and dread, "Hordes."

She reached her own epiphany point, "So I guess yeah if I had been there. it wouldn't have changed any of that which came before."

"And they likely would have savaged you, besides," Paul said with wry agreement. "They sound about as bad as Kzinti--whom I'm surprised they haven't already partnered with; they're so like-minded." He took a sip of tea and thought for a moment. "Thank you for giving me a clearer idea of how difficult the missions are that your team handles. Even if this one was unusual, it gives me an idea of the sort of work you are trusted to do. That's a heavy, heavy responsibility and an extraordinarily dangerous species to thwart. I'm taking your warning about the Chalnoth quite seriously. Have you submitted an after-action report including your analysis?"

Yuma blinked, the ordinary methods of Starfleet so completely foreign to her now. She finally found her voice after a beat, "The Kzinti..." memories clearly were in full cascade, "If you've met them I am sorry for your loss."

She quickly answered his other question, "Our version of action reports go into a washing machine of intelligence backchannels. Everyone who needs to know will get told something. My code name is all they ever see. We endure hardships with anonymity, it keeps us safe, keeps them safe too. Do you have much experience working with intelligence officers?"

"I met a Kzinti telepath as part of my training on Betazed. It was...morose," Paul said, "the telepath, not the training. Yes, I do work with intelligence officers. Sometimes, the reasons why people are tapped to work in Intelligence mean that they have issues they are already working through. Intelligence officers are often people who grow up keeping secrets; that's why they're so good at the work. Counseling helps them stay on an even keel."

She flinched again at the mention of the Kzinti, answering him, "I will remember that. The Keel is canting left, but if you say this will help..."

She took a deep breath, "I don't know who or what I am. Outside of my service, I mean, and I'd like to know. I was rejected from Angosian society, so I lived in Osaka, Japan on Earth and adopted their culture like a hat ... but edifice erodes, where truth endures. I am not Yuma or Makoto."

She felt bad speaking only of herself, and organically it occurred to ask him, "Who are you outside of work?"

Paul smiled at the question. "I have to admit that, for the past few years, work has consumed a lot of my attention. I used to just be Chief Counselor, and then I was selected to be Second Officer, as well. That's usually a flag position, not a staff position. I took it on anyway, so you could argue that I'm either an ambitious masochist or insane."

He paused a moment to think. "I...want to care for this base. Making sure that everyone who lives here has a chance to succeed in their lives is important to me. It's not just a professional thing; it's how I want to spend my life. There are some decks called the Garden District now. I worked with the residents there a lot because they had been through some rough times in the recent past. They're more independent now, and many of those residents have become friends of mine. Aside from that, I'm in a relationship. I love to cook. That's a lot of it."

Paul leaned back in his chair. "I can understand feeling that your service has become your life. Who or what would you like to be? Have you done any exploring?"

It was charming to hear of a good man living a life of happiness. That was the purpose of the fight, to protect the good people from the bad things and let life flourish without predators waiting in the wings. A small show of approval manifested as a grin while he mentioned the rest of it. The man wasn't lying, but was still being humble, it hid deeper pains, truths which were only earned in time. His questions were uncannily close to the same thing plaguing her innermost thoughts. What was she without the mission?

"Exploring is definitely a part of the job, but rarely for pleasure. I can't think of the last time I chose where I went purely for the recreation. We are only supposed to work for ten years, but I'm almost twenty-one years deep. I can't remember who or what I am outside of the mission here. My personality is always diplomat/spy, and changes based on the mission. Gods above, I don't know."

"You said you were rejected by Angosian society. Are you descended from one of the people exiled to Lunar V? Paul asked.

Yuma had been told not to let the secret out for so many things, Lunar V was the first big secret she had been told to keep.

"Yes, the reforms reintegrated the Lunar V population within the main populace and erased our identities. My parents were able to marry, I was born. The surgical and chemical augmentations they had received were not applied to me, though I retained some aspects of the genetic tailoring and as such I am seen as separate but equal in the eyes of the law. The Civilian population stresses the separation aspect quite hard."

Yuma smiled a bit, inwardly more than anything. "It wasn't all bad. One of our missions was to aid in the translation of a rune which would prove.... long story, but we didn't have stress or strife of the usual kind, just a timeline to meet and a puzzle to solve. Those were my favorite ones."

"You like to solve puzzles, then," Paul said. "Mysteries intrigue you. You like to solve problems that engross you and don't necessarily require combat. That's something to start with."

Yuma nodded, “I think that’s what it is, Doc. Our missions are so covert, this was so open, so ugly. I don’t want to go back for fear of it becoming exactly that. Oh, Doctor Graves, the mysteries in our archives that cry out to be solved! It’s always been so intriguing, so… passing without a trace, leaving only footprints in the snow. That’s what I want to do.”

She was visibly relieved at the realization. It wasn’t cowardice or reticence that stayed in her brain as a twisting cancer of fear and anxiety. She knew in her heart, deep down, that the life of a bloodthirsty merc was not for her.

"Now, you've got me curious," Paul told her, smiling. "I could talk with you about the mysteries in your archives for another couple of hours, but unfortunately, I have a patient scheduled. Would you like to schedule a follow-up session?"

Yuma was sheepish as she blushed a bit, “What? You mean I’m not fixed?” She knew he knew this was a joke, and continued on, “Yes definitely. It’s nice to have a person outside of the ship to speak with. If even in veiled ways.”

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," Paul quoted. "You're welcome any time, Commander. Deosha will get you on the schedule. I don't feel you need regular appointments, but maybe once every month or two, or whenever you feel the need."

 

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