Finders Aren't Keepers

Posted on 14 Mar 2013 @ 9:01pm by Anera
Edited on on 14 Mar 2013 @ 9:03pm

3,544 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 6, Multi-purpose Labs
Timeline: MD04: 1200 hrs

[ON]

After a productive morning of meetings and meditation, Anera decided to do as the captain had suggested and acquaint herself with the ship. There were a number of places she simply wasn't permitted to go as a civilian, but her curiosity was an intellectual sort - not an intrusive variety. It was her first day on board and with the size of the Galileo, she gauged she could manage a full tour of the available spaces in a matter of a couple hours. It was the smallest space-faring vessel she'd yet travelled on, after her father's trading shuttle.

It might have seemed disorganized, the way she turned haphazardly down different corridors, but there were places with unpleasant emotional contexts and she didn't want to intrude. Nor did she want to absorb that negativity. She had a responsibility to the youths she would be guiding for the next while and carrying the cloudy auras of strangers with her wouldn't help anyone. So she avoided them, sidestepping and sidetracking her way through the ship - a path that eventually landed her just outside the ship's sickbay. It felt different than most sickbays she'd experienced. Warm, full of consciousness and life. Something inside tickled her mind and heart with curious, mental fingers, and she let it as she continued on by. She had nothing to hide.

Stopping by the turbo-lift, she paused, dropping to one knee to lift a small white orb from the floor. None of the officers milling around and past her seemed to notice it, strangely enough. Occupied, she supposed, as they should be, but still... she turned the sphere over in her hands. It wasn't solid. It felt light in her palm, complex, and there was a... taste to it. She felt a slight tension in her chest as she considered it, her shoulders stiffened subconsciously - precision, connection, but ephemeral, tasteless heat at the back of her tongue... Cupping the sphere in her palm carefully, she breathed deep, inhaling that sense. It led her back to the sickbay again. Then to another turbolift, down... she didn't know where. Just down. She requested deck five, stuck her head out, and retreated into the turbolift again. "Deck six," she tried again and this time took a step out. She hovered there, like a baby bird hesitant before a first flight from its nest, then walked forward, took a left, and found herself in front of a laboratory door. It was closed and she had no means of opening it, so she did what any sensible person would do. She knocked.

The door opened to reveal a scowling Vulcan. He swept his eyes over her with about the same interest one would give a wingslug and abruptly snatched the fereikek reh out of her her hand protectively. He stared at her and breathed out audibly. She was still standing there. She should not be standing there. She needed to go. He could not stand her presence, his mind wide open as a sieve, he hated it. Hated them, just want to be alone not with some - what is that he felt his body tense and blinked a few times before brusquely retreating into the lab, a dragon poking its head out of its cave and ducking back quickly. The door closed behind him.

Anera swayed where she stood, blinking dumbly at the closed door. Overflow. A living touchstone. She backed up a few steps from the door, wrapped her arms around herself, and walked quickly away.

"You knew it was mine." The voice interrupted her departure, just before she turned the corner. He was standing on the other side of the corridor, but his voice carried easily. He leaned against the wall just outside the lab door, tossed the sphere in the air and caught it. "Stay there," he motioned with his hand. She was far away. Out of his sphere. Good. "Please. I apologize, for my ill manner. You knew that was mine."

Anera took another step back with a small shake of her head. "It's very connected to you. That's all." Her gaze fluttered around him like a distraught butterfly, "You're a mess."

Liyar arched an eyebrow. "Thank you for that assessment," he responded dryly. "You are not wrong," he muttered under his breath and snapped open the hologrid, letting it float on one panel in front of him. "Who is it you are?"

"Anera," she answered. "Who are you?"

That told him absolutely nothing. He tapped some streams of data and began analyzing them. Cerebral scans. He was drawing out the design, like a map, point to point. An artist, he was not, so it contained only the most rudimentary aspects of the scan, specifically the mesiofrontal cortex. He began recreating the structure from sickbay that he had seen, when his abilities were amped into overdrive. "Liyar," he spoke, leaning over the grid to tip his chin upward in greeting. "You are not a Starfleet officer."

She laughed. "No, I'm not. But you are." Her eyes seemed to dance with laughter as he studied her. "You should sit down before you fall down. Do you drink tea?"

"I am part of the diplomatic detachment," he corrected her with a slight shrug. "And yes," Liyar answered, but he held a hand up as she came closer and reattached the psi-clamps that were in his pockets to both wrists. He lowered his fingers into his palm uncomfortably and powered down the hologrid.

She'd steeled herself against the aura surrounding him, taking a step to test herself, but watched as he locked himself down. "Those won't help," she said quietly. "They don't silence empathy. Kratoa tea," she told him. "-may help in very small amounts. It's not yours." She held a hand up, gently reaching towards him across the distance and tapping the air with her palm. "No. It's a womb presence. Females." She folded her hands together, "Shall we see if we can't find a replicator?"

He shook his head. "It is me," he said, traipsing along into the lab after her. "There is only the matter that it is not my perception." When is it ever, he tactfully didn't add. He was a telempath, but it wasn't anything like this, naturally. He could feel emotions now. Deep down into the cores of people, not just the reflecting shades of their experiences, their colors in a mirror. This broke the mirror, shattered it. Let out something other. He stopped just inside the lab. It, like the inside of him, was a mess. If it was there to be rifled through, tossed, turned, tipped or analyzed, he'd done so. PADDs, experiments, components, consoles, tricorders, Starfleet and non. He stepped over a haphazardly strewn block of PADDs and picked them up awkwardly. In the front of the room there was a clear board with equations mapped out all across the large transparent space. "Kratoa tea. You stated it will stop this."

"I said it may help," she reiterated with a small smile. "In small amounts. You're a living touchstone, and judging by your lack of containment - kratoa tea - newly so." She pressed a code into the pad that popped out after the request and watched it slide back in. For the most part, she ignored the room and its contents; she cared little for order or disorder as long as it facilitated intelligent, creative thought. And he had that. She couldn't hear it or feel it, but it ballooned into his emotional intelligence. "It isn't just you, you see. It's you and... but even you on your own... it's hard to feel actually. Quite convoluted." She picked up the small steaming bowl, requested a thumb sized shot glass, insulated, and poured a measure into the thimble. "Have you ever tasted spidrek centipedes?"

"No," Liyar answered, tilting his head. "I do not consume animal products." He watched her prepare the drink curiously, hovering over her shoulder with his hands behind his back. He tapped his fingers against one another in agitation. "What do you mean, living touchstone." She sounded as though she knew what was happening to him. Could she fix it? Did she know what happened? "Tell me what you know of this," he demanded quietly.

"Well, then, I don't know what else it tastes similar to," she smiled, offering him the thimble, "but you may not like it. Small sip to start to see how you take it; kratoa nuts have a fairly specific flavor." She poured a small measure into her palm and sipped it. Immediately she felt a measure of relief from the chaos revolving around the Vulcan beside her. "I don't know anything. But I can guess. I've seen walivaz induced orgies render empaths similarly entangled... but you don't seem the type to indulge in hallucinogenics. I could be wrong."

- what? - Liyar held out his hand to take the glass and he downed it all in one go. He swallowed convulsively afterward. That was, quite possibly, the most disgusting thing he'd ever consumed. He cleared his throat. "I do not participate in such activities. The properties, this drug. It is called walivaz?" He needed a solution, he needed it to end. He could feel whatever it was, working in his system, floating through his veins, but she was very much still there. Too present. He knew almost immediately what she was. Not the species, but she was almost certainly like Lirha Saalm. Pheromones. A drug. Something. He didn't react favorably. His body vibrated with energy, as though with the urge to punch something. He set down the shot glass and flicked his gaze to it. "Another." He drew down the fereikek reh beside him and began rooting through the database. "Tell me your guess."

She retrieved the shot glass and retreated to the other side of the room. She wasn't about to overexpose him to kratoa on his first try. His aura was a pulsating thing, like a physical heart pounding around him and pressing against the walls. "My guess," she hummed, "is that you've gotten yourself tangled in the psyche of a womb presence. More than one. How many more, it's hard to tell, but at least one of them was an empath."

"I do not understand your reference. Womb presence." He broke away from his calculations for a moment. "Female. Kestra. Trija. Perhaps. Yes, yes," he said with oblivious impatience, "I know that. What did you mean, about - living touchstone? You stated that is what I am." He stared back at his board and called up the drug, beginning to analyze it and cross-examine it with something in Orion script on the sideboard.

"You're an empathic crossroads. Not..." she trailed off, humming again, "not entirely unlike the one I passed near where I found your orb. Except it was tendrils and you are tentacles. Instead of touching, you're grabbing and pulling. Uncoordinated," she reiterated from earlier. "How is the kratoa treating you?"

He focused on trying to project his internal shields outward, the ones that protected his katra, his mind. The only ones he had left. It would have to do, to combat the stifling, thick sensation of Anera's mind and body. He supposed that he wasn't supposed to be feeling like this. He could not imagine she would walk around the ship in such a state. It was just him. His own, whatever was happening to him. He could feel his shields buckle against the pressure. They were only meant to be small. Powerful, almost impenetrable, but small. They were being overused, overextended. Finally he gave up and retracted them. He could not risk damaging those. "It's not," he grouched uncharacteristically. He crossed his arms, standing over the hologrid, watching the mathematics fall into place. "What causes this to happen. Kestra is a receptive empath. I am a receptive telempath. But what I am now, I was not always." He made an aborted gesture and returned his hand to the crook of his arm, trailing off.

She poured another small measure of the kratoa. "Did you take anything? Before?" she asked, carefully balancing the shot on a rolling stool and nudging it towards him.

Liyar paused again. "Before what? It was unintentional," he explained with a shrug.

Anera's smile twitched slightly wider. "I've had nights like that," she sighed fondly. "So you didn't take any kind of... enhancement? Empathic? Telepathic? Psychological? Physiological?"

Nights like - Liyar glanced at her sideways, eyes narrowing. "Enhancements for what? Kestra was in a coma." He realized he was absorbing again and forced himself to speak with an even voice. "Trija was helping me to establish a link so that we could retrieve her. I, accidentally pulled us through. Without seeing her. Without knowing anything. Surely you do not think -"

She couldn't tell what he was thinking, true, but she felt the switch in him when he got uncomfortable. By that time, though, she was already thinking in terms of the tendrils stretching out of the sickbay. "She's expansive," she murmured. "Like a huge anemone." She rested her elbows on a lab table and tucked her chin into her hands. "You were anchorless."

Liyar downed the rest of the beverage and avoided wincing this time. He could feel the prickly akathisia in his skin building as she spoke. "I did not do what you think I did. She lacks proper shielding. I have given her my shields for now."

Shields...? Anera wondered. No wonder he felt so tight. Fraught. "You have a gravitational pull, Liyar," Anera murmured. "She's a cloud. You need your shields more than she does."

"You believe I should be free," he contradicted her primly. He set the shotglass down. Apparently it was not doing the trick. "I should not. I should not be feeling this. It is not natural." He realized his hands were gripped tightly in one another. He relaxed them. "Explain," he slid the glass back over and focused on his calculations, "how this substance increases psionic capability," he said flatly, putting it up next to the list of other substances including su'aasal and several dozen other psionic enhancers.

"Walivaz?" she asked. "You'd know if you'd taken it. It's a combination of the pollens of two Deltan flowers combined in a sahish honey."

Liyar looked down. "That is an unhelpful answer. Do you understand the scientific properties of this substance."

"I'm... not a chemist. But I'm fairly certain you can't replicate it off Delta IV so the likelihood that you somehow ate it without noticing is extremely remote." Anera pursed her lips. "You're unwinding. That's good. More kratoa?"

"Not what I asked," Liyar sighed and went further into the database. "Or why. Yes. Please. Thank you." He repeated the inane phrases woodenly. He brought up one of the chemical compositions of sahish and quickly calculated an algorithm to help parse out the exact flowers used in the Federation database. "What else do you know of, these enhancements. What else is there."

Anera shook her head, "There's an infinite number of different stimulants and narcotics one can use to effect perception. I couldn't possibly name all of them right now."

"What about one that mimics the reaction of an enhancement but does not affect the cognitive abilities beyond this," Liyar asked specifically.

"You need the opposite of an enhancement," Anera told him quite calmly.

"Yes," Liyar replied. He had thought that was rather obvious. "But your tea is not helping. Maybe in not making the trigger connection, we can speak. The psi-clamps, not helping. Not really. They told me it would eliminate extraneous perception," he said rather skeptically. "I need to understand the mechanics of psionic enhancement. The most obvious way of doing this is to study things which create this reaction." Liyar batted the acerbic bite that threatened to clip the end of his sentence away, polite and rigid as ever.

"You're tangled in womb-psyches."

"What?" Liyar stared at her skeptically.

"Your problem. Is that you're tangled in the psyches of female empaths. Strong ones. You're absorbing them; shuffling and reshuffling their connections on top of your own. Disorganized. And that happened because your awareness is a raw wound searching for things to fill it and sate it."

"No. I know that," Liyar bit out, and then exhaled. "Yes. Thank you. I know that," he repeated more calmly. "That was the link to Kestra and Trija. It was how we pulled Kestra from the void. Kestra is too weak to risk dissolving the link, I know it is affecting me," Liyar threw up one of his hands. She wasn't going to be of any help. He sagged and continued with his research silently.

"Because you're a walking wound. A living touchstone. There is a part of you that was torn away and now it is looking for things to fill the chasm."

"I am not special. Many Vulcans have experienced this. Each of them in pain. Each of them hurt. Yet my mind reacts thus. Not theirs. You call me a touchstone. Trija calls me an amplifier. But no one can tell me why."

"I told you why," Anera told him, warming her palms on the outside of the kratoa cup. "You had a bond that was severed - not severed. Torn out by the roots. Now your mind seeks to fill that gap with anything it can. So it links you. Seeking. Scrambles you. That's why I thought of walivaz. Untangling empathic links through such disorganization is a sometimes insurmountable task. When was the last time you had sex?"

"It is not supposed to do that," Liyar tried to explain, but he didn't know how. "It is not supposed to fill anything, Vulcans are touch telepaths and -" he stuttered as he realized her last question, "And that is a completely irrelevant question."

Anera quirked a brow at him, "It's entirely relevant. Your aura craves contact. If you want to stop reaching out to others telepathically and empathically, you need to fill the void physically."

Physically - Liyar looked as mortified as it was possible for a Vulcan to look. "For one thing," he started, punctuating each word irately. He took a breath. She was trying to help. "That is not done. For another, I have absolutely zero desire to engage in that. I require to discover the source of this," he gestured idly, "whatever has happened. I was changed. It did something to me. No Vulcan should experience this, not to this degree."

"You did not have an empathic bond torn asunder?"

"Yes." Liyar didn't feel comfortable lying. "That is not the relevant issue. I apologize. Clearly this line of inquiry is proving to be unfruitful. Thank you. For the tea." He tapped it against the desk again and moved toward the replicator, depositing it into the reclamation system and tapping the controls harder than usual to dematerialize it.

Anera watched him; the Vulcan's discomfort and frustration were palpable even through the slight haze generated by the kratoa. He was wrong. It was entirely relevant. Whatever Vulcans told themselves, the mind and body were holistically one. You had to treat both. And he had a great deal of healing to do on all fronts. "You're welcome," she said, keeping the remains of the kratoa cupped gently against her middle. "I wish you the best of luck, Liyar. Don't stay too long in the wilderness."

"I had not intended to," he shrugged palm-up and his words drifted off. He felt as though he was doing too much apologizing lately. "Be rude," he made himself finish, and then he busied himself with the very fascinating components of the replicator system. "If that is an intoxicating substance, I suggest you do not wander about with it," he added.

Anera smiled. "I thank you for your concern. I have a prescription. And this... 'rudeness'..." She rested her hand gently on his shoulder. "Feel free; every wounded creature lashes out. Take care of yourself. And if you need anything, you let me know. Even if it's just someone to be annoyed with." She winked at him. "Anything before I go?"

Liyar turned, tensing slightly. Her touch brought with it a tug of quixotic otherness, falling over him like a mist, yanking him into a halfway point of awareness, a tapestry of connections. He shook his head to himself. Empaths. He needed to stay away from them all. Forever. "No."

Her expression fluttered between her understanding and his irritation. "As you wish," she murmured, and slipped away.

[OFF]

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

Anera
Teacher
USS Galileo
(pNPC Lilou Peers)

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