© 1998, Claire Basney and Mark E. Becker
Yroli E, known as Elena Maru, managed to survive the destruction of her starship, on which she was science officer. She was pulled into a mysterious sort of middle world where a figure in black with an amulet, smiling in a superior and knowledgeable way, sent her--well, she really didn't know what happened then until she sort of woke up beside a wooded area in, apparently, a new world. Being aquatic, naturally the first thing she did was enter the forest in search of water. She immersed herself.
When finished recovering, she stumbled on a road and heard someone coming. Hiding, she saw Crystal and her family approaching and through illusion caused herself to look similar to them in dress and species.
They saw her then and offered her a ride into the town, which she accepted. They were inclined to be suspicious of her, and she of them, but Crystal had good vibes about her, which her family trusted.
Yroli E won Crystal's affection with some conversation and what her parents dismissed as sleight of hand with some rocks she had in bag, but which, as we know, was not.
At the town, they dropped her off and went on their roving way, as they were travelling peddlers or something similar.
Yroli E quickly acclimatized to the traditions of her new land and put away her Starship officer garb, as she thought, for good. She apprenticed herself, in disguise part illusion and part carefully-camouflaging clothing, under the name Maura, to a tinker and jack-of-all-trades.
Soon she had enough experience to open her own shop as tinker/scientist and made a comfortable living, as well as several friends and regulars, not the least of which were Crystal and her family, as their trading route brought them into the area every few months. During these visits, Crystal would spend much of her time at Maura's shop; watching, playing, etc. They had many interesting conversations; some of which were about things that Crystal should have known nothing about. (For instance, once they talked about birds, and Crystal started talking about a dream she had once had about wingedmetal wagons that carried people to and fro.)
This lasted almost two years, but then the family was forced by outside circumstances to change their trade route, and it would no longer include Maura's village. For another two years or so, Maura didn't see any of them. Then one day, Darien and Kara (Crystal's parents) came into town -- but Crystal was not with them. They told Maura that Crystal had run away, and they didn't know where she was. All they knew was that Crystal had told them that there was something she had to find, and the next day she disappeared. Darien and Kara continued on their trade route, and Maura saw them now and then for the next year and a half, but she could tell they never quite got over having lost their second child as well.
Maura's Tinker shop gained quite a reputation around the countryside, at least in part due to the fact that Darien and Kara helped to distribute some of her wares around their trade route. Eventually, she even attracted the attention of the King, who summoned her to the kingdom's capital city, Almaise, to perform a service for the court.
She traveled to the city -- which was quite different from the village she had been living in so far. She performed her service for the King, and for the next few days she wandered the city, taking in the sights. About mid-afternoon one day, she wandered into an area filled with pits, where large animals -- she had heard of fighting Drakes before, but had never seen one -- were trained to fight each other, for the entertainment and profit of their masters.
As she passed one of the pits, she overheard a group of young boys talking about a recent fight. One of them, a boy she could tell was small for his age and was riding a Drake of his own, was describing a maneuver he wanted to teach to his own Drake, and thought that it would have helped the one they had been rooting for. He described the maneuver as a backwards-kick attack, which should catch an opponent off guard. Maura thought that this was eerily similar to something Captain Keith had told her about -- a story he had told her about one of his previous lives, where he used a similar maneuver himself. When the boy's friends began jeering him, saying that the trick would never work, she commented that it would. The boy turned to her, thanked her for supporting him, turned back to continue arguing with his friends, then abruptly did a double-take.
"Hey, you look familiar somehow."
Feeling a strange sense of familiarity herself, Maura took the boy elsewhere, so they could talk, and they began to recognize each other more fully. As a test, she showed him her Starship uniform and communicator, recalling an incident which no one but one person in her past could have known about--making the communicator disappear. The young man had a very strong reaction, as if his mind were flooded with images.
In fact, Maura had met a person she had known very intimately before coming to this world--a person who reincarnated, and had before been known to her as Capt. Becker. This was he, but in a new incarnation. Both were very moved to see each other again--she had thought him dead, and he had felt guilty over their abortive friendship in his previous life. She also had some information he desperately desired--the result of his kamikaze flight toward a Borg starship.
With his reviving memories came the thought that another person should have followed him to this new incarnation, as much as Maura should not have been able to follow. This person was a friend from a former incarnation, known as Gem or other words of that sort, who had arranged to be transferred with him. Until then, she had gone as his sister, but now she was nowhere to be seen.
Further conversation revealed that the person Maura had met in the forest on her first day, the child Crystal, had indeed been the girl who had transferred with the young man. However, she and her family had not made their customary visits to Maura's village for the past two years. Uneasy about this, Maura and her new/old friend decided to breach the woods and look for her, though the woods were thick and dark and most people avoided any deep exploration. They went their separate ways for the night, saying that they would meet again in the morning to begin they quest.
During the night, Maura had a dream. The dream began with Maura floating in the dark. She couldn't quite tell if she was in water, air, or what. Soon, the scene brightened, and she recognized that strange between- world, where she met that mysterious figure.
As she floated there, she saw other figures appear and disappear. One was an old man, in brown robes and carrying a satchel. Another was a young man in strange black clothing -- she could barely recognize them as military fatigues -- and carrying a backpack. These were the only two she got a good look at, because they were relatively close. Then, that mysterious figure, the one who had appeared to her the last time she had been in that place, appeared near each other person, waved his hand near them, and they disappeared. After the final person vanished, the figure turned to her and smiled.
Suddenly, Maura was back in the oceans of her homeworld, except the places she was swimming past were scenes from throughout her life. First vas the home where she spent her childhood, then a school she attended. Later came the starship that her people were constructing, and soon thereafter, she was showing Captain Keith around the remains of her society. Then there were scenes from the U.S.S. Atlantis, even though she was still in the ocean. She saw the holodeck, the bridge, and her quarters. Then she passed a scene from her stay on Vulcan, and the irony of a scene from a desert world appearing underwater sent her spinning with laughter.
When she managed to straighten her path out again, she found herself near a great battle taking place between starships. One gigantic cube was tearing many smaller ships to bits. She recognized the Atlantis, just as it surged forward and obliterated itself against the Borg Cube. Then, before she could react, she was engulfed by the spacial anomaly that destroyed the starship she was posted on, and everything faded to blackness again.
A moment and an eternity later, she found herself face-to-face with Jonah, except his face started to change. She saw a handsome red-head, then Captain Keith. It became a dark-haired boy, then became a bald-headed soldier-type. It suddenly became a naked skull with a cold glow in its eye sockets, but quickly grew skin, long blond hair, and pointed ears.
She then noticed that each time the face changed, a line appeared in the background. As she focused on this, the faces separated, and each one moved to a separate point along the largest line. She watched the other lines, until she saw something moving along one of them. Looking closer, she saw that the object was heself, swimming along the line of her own life. Following the line, she watched it converge with Kickback's for a while, then veered away. As hers progressed, Kickback's line appeared again out of nowhere, and they converged again. At that point, she also saw several other lines converge on the same spot. On each one of these was another tiny figure. She recognized one of them as the old man she saw earlier, and another as the younger man in black fatigues.
She saw a small red dot appear on Kickback's line, and at the same time she heard a noise. It sounded like thunder or, if she didn't know better, an explosion. As she focused in...
Maura woke up to yelling outside her window. Started from her dream, Maura felt lightheaded and giddy . . . too dry, she thought, when it slowly occurred to her what brought her up out of the dream. Her throat is sore, as if she had been talking for hours or screaming, but the actual yelling was going on outside her window. She pulled herself achingly to a sitting position, and shook her head to clear it of images she had seen not moments before -- a battle? Some strange people? It was already fading and the yelling was not. She dashed her hands into the earthenware bowl of salt water she always kept beside her bed and rubbing her face, she ventured unsteadily toward the window, careful to assume her human shape in a all-covering kimono as she reached the sill. Daylight made her squint sharply, but she looked anyway.
It was shortly before dawn -- the sky was just beginning to lighten.
A few blocks from where she was staying, she could see a crowd of people. Some moving in one direction, others moving in the other. Beyond them, she could see smoke rising from one of the far buildings, and a pale reddish glow against some of the buildings near it. There must have been a fire!
After watching for a moment, a thought hit her. Jonah had told her that his home was in that direction!
Though still thick from sleep, Maura heard a small exceedingly dispassionate voice in her head ("Aack! Sobek" she thought) which informed her that the likelihood of that being Jonah's house aflame was approximately one in three hundred houses. Nevertheless, without quite knowing why (she thought later it had something to do with the strange dream), she dropped her illusion as she left the window and doused herself with saltwater again. Quickly pulling on her baggy leggings and cape, she filled a leather bag with salt water and slung it over her shoulder. By the time she reached her front door, she was running, but nevertheless remembered to engage her human form before entering the street. When she did, people were pushing past her, but in her anxiety she gave them sturdy pushes until she was in a relatively quiet part of the street where she could move quickly.
She hurried in the direction of the glow and reached a small street where a house was indeed ablaze. The intense heat was driving both spectators and people trying to put out the fire back, but it turned on her especially as if it knew she could not take it. Already gasping, she staggered toward the side of the street and sunk down to recuperate and drink some of the water she had brought. No one else had to know it is salt.
The house was in one of the poorer areas of town, and was thought to be abandoned. However, a pack of children -- ranging in age from six to sixteen -- were scrambling out of the house, trying to escape the fire. Maura heard some of the other onlookers discussing how the 'street rats' took over the abandoned house, and must have just set it aflame as a prank.
Looking at the house, however, Maura got the impression that it must have been something more that just juvenile arson. All of the boarded-up windows had been blown out, and some of the walls in one area were buckling as well, indicating a great deal of force hit them -- from the inside.
As the city guard simultaneously tried to extinguish the fire before it spread to any other buildings and pursue the escaping children, Maura recognized one of the fugitives as one of the boys Jonah had been hanging around with the day before, when she had come across them by the pits. She continued to look around, but could not locate Jonah.
However, a few minutes later, she felt a touch at her mind. She looked to her left, down one of the quieter alleys, and saw a dark four-legged form. She felt yet another mental contact; this time an image -- a picture of Jonah, Shard, and Maura from when they talked previously. Then the shape in the alley bounded away, and went around a corner.
Maura pulled herself up from the street, her first instinct to chase the child who was running so suspiciously from the burning house; however, the heat as she again neared the house nearly made her scream and she could not get around the corner to the alley where the children had disappeared. Seeking almost just to get away, her mind confused by the glare and noise, she turned her back on the fleeing kids and stumbled down the other alley, where, she thought for a moment, an image touched her mind. Jonah, she, and... Shard? The relative dark and coolness calmed her quickly and she remembered seeing a shadow of something, a four legged animal, running or hopping around a corner. Dipping her fingers again into her watersack and rubbing her forehead, she walked more quietly toward the corner, ready for any surprise or even attack (the apparent explosion at the house made her wary) and peered around the wall.
Standing about twenty yards down the alley was the four-legged shape, which (now that she was out of the glare of the fire) she could clearly make out as a Drake. It was standing with it's head turned, looking back at the corner. Once it saw Maura, it watched her for just a moment, then started moving down the alley again.
Still watchful, but a little reassured that nothing jumped out at her, Maura followed the drake. She knew little of them, except that Jonah had a good idea for training them, and hoped it was not harmful. She hoped, mainly, that it was not firebreathing.
The drake loped down the alley until it reached an alcove on the side of one of the houses, formed by its wall and chimney. There was another small figure lying agaist the wall there -- this one a person. When the drake reached the person, it nudged the form with its snout, and the person awakened. The person looked around, and spying Maura a little ways away, called to her.
"Maura," she heard. It was Jonah's voice!
Maura ran over, forgetting her caution, and bent over Jonah. "Are you all right? Was there an explosion? Who did this?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," he replied. "Mostly," he added, sat up straighter, and showed her the back of his right arm. It was red and slightly swolen -- a minor burn.
Shard sat down next to Jonah, so that Jonah could lean on him. He settled his head on the ground between Jonah and Maura, but his eyes remained wide open and alert.
"I was able to get out before the fire spread much," he continues. "As for an explosion... Well, um, yes. It actually..." He paused, with a look of chagrin on his face. "It was kind-of my fault, actually."
He went on to explain that after he had returned to the house that he and the other street children lived in, the rest of the gang he had been watching the Drake fights with had surrounded him, demanding to know where he'd been and what he'd been doing. He had tried to explain to them, without going into the details of his reincarnating, about Maura -- that she was a friend and that they were going to be leaving. The others interpreted this as early-teenage boys usually do: they accused Jonah of 'going' with an older woman, and started teasing and harassing them.
"I kept trying to tell them that it wasn't anything like that," he said, then grimaced and added, "Well, at least not now." He looked away for a moment, but then collected himself again.
"But they wouldn't listen, and started saying some really horrible things," he continued. "I guess I should have expected it, but I really didn't like what they were saying about you, and, well, I got mad. I tried to hit one or two, but Shard was on the other side of the room, so I couldn't catch them. That made me even madder. Then, suddenly something popped into my mind. Almost before I realized it, I cast a FIREBALL at the other side of the room. Then all hell broke loose."
Jonah leaned forward to scratch Shard's head -- on a ridge right above his left eye. "Shard managed to get me out before things got too bad, and we had to evade not only the city guard but others from the gang -- they're REALLY mad about the house, needless to say."
Right about then, Shard picked his head up from the ground, and looked around.
"Somebody must be coming," Jonah gasped, looking around. Then he turned to Marua.
"Can you leave the city, RIGHT NOW?" he asked.
Maura breathed loudly with relief when she saw the small burn was Jonah's only wound. She listened carefully to all he said, wincing when he mentioned their former relations. Deep within, she still longed for him, as Captain Keith, as Jonah, she didn't know or really care which. She didn't even care about the slanders to herself for she almost felt that she would prove them true if given the opportunity. However, she had been so hurt before, almost destroyed, that she bottled those feelings up tightier than ever, like a small cold pellet of iron in her belly. She even managed to smile a little tightly as Jonah continued his explanation, but his last statement froze it on her face.
"What? Leave now? You don't understand--Jonah--it's impossible. I would have to return for basic supplies-you know how I live, and I am almost out of water!"
Suddenly she remembered the water in the leather bag under her arm. "Just a minute. You're in no condition to go anywhere without healing beginning on that arm; even though it's slight, it could easily get infected, especially with the filth in this alley. Now grit your teeth, young one. This is going to sting."
Jonah began to protest, "It's really fine for the moment, GAH!" but was interrupted as she began her ministrations, and silently let her finish.
Gritting her own teeth, she dabbed the salt water onto the burn. She heard the air hiss between his teeth as he felt the sting and burn. "I know, I know" she murmured, almost to herself, but in a reassuring way. "It will hurt like hell, or a phaser blast, but it will begin the healing process almost faster than anything else I know."
Maura's joke about the phaser elicited a half-grunt, half-chuckle from him. Then, when she has finished, he turned back to her and said, "Thank you."
Pulling his sleeve back down over the affected arm, she stood and essayed to pull him to his feet as well. Shard nudged him and Jonah managed to rise. "I have everything ready," she said quietly, grinning tightly again. "Starfleet protocol rid me of some of my flibbertyjibbits, whatever else it did." ("To you and to me" she thought painfully, but bottled that up too.) "Just let me run back to my house and pick up my pack; it's right by the door. You run wherever's safe--some meeting place, perhaps right outside the city gate??--and think about it hard, in image. I will be tuned to it and know where to meet you. Just think hard, and I will know. Will that suit? I think people will be here soon. There is turmoil near."
Leaning heavily against Shard, as his weak legs could hardly support his weight, he nodded.
"The northern road isn't far from here," he said. "It leads out toward the farmlands. There is an abandoned barn just a little ways out. I'll meet you there."
He then climbed onto Shard's back, and the two of them disappeared into the shadows.
Following and watching until he turned the corner into the main street and shuffle safely, Maura reclosed her bag--almost empty now--and turned back toward her own temporary lodging. With more than a little weariness. If she thought she had been dry when she woke up, it was nothing to now. Still, she had to hurry. Reaching the door, she realized she had left it partly ajar in her haste leaving.
Realizing that collapsing would help Jonah not at all, she quickly stripped and for a moment bathed herself with a large sponge with saltwater from her pitcher and bowl. Rather more refreshed, she dressed again and, as before, filled the bag with salt water. Refixing her illusion in her mind, and therefore assuring it was fixed in everyone else's eyes, she scooped up the bag she had packed the night before--small knife, science kit from her present time period with her couple (absolutely secret) perqs from Starfleet, including communicator, phaser, and tricorder, changes of clothes--only two--blankets and two more leather bags of water. One was small and fresh, and the other the same as her original. Salt. She could never afford to leave her Starfleet gear at any time when she travelled, lest someone find it, and she could leave nothing behind in the cottage. She had burnt the uniform.
Thus arrayed, and satisfied she had left nothing behind, she picked up the pitcher and bowl and emptied them out the door into the street before replacing them on their stand. SHe then headed for the northern road and gate, the farmlands, barn, and Jonah. SHe surprised herself by humming for the first time she could remember.