| Author | Message | ||
     Maiko D`rall |
Angry winds howling Fury filling air in haste Peace will now come soon. -- The air rushed by the small craft, its unseen hands caressing the outer skin, its engine providing the thrust necessary to allow the wind's hands to keep it aloft. Its control surfaces twitched ever so slightly, altering the plane's course by a hair of a degree. Inside, the wind was also present courtesy of an open window, its strong gusts billowing into the cockpit, sending the pilot's hair whipping around as if it were a frenzy of agitated snakes. Ignorant of the wind, the pilot sat in her chair, hands on the controls, guiding the plane onward as surely as her thoughts weren't. One thought that repeatedly popped up was why people seemed to eager to tell others about their alternate memories. Another puzzled over how she would cope with having the memories of a second lifetime. The third had been on her mind since the changeover, and it was this that had tempted her to go to her personal retreat on the holodeck - a holographic recreation of her trusted plane, the Highwinger. Her mind was reeling with people she knew in one universe yet never heard of in another - or never existed in another. Ensign Taerlo Laertes, an officer she had helped train from almost day one - never born. Then there were those who were dead in that universe who might still be alive. The hope of finding her parents alive clashed with the fake knowledge that they were dead. For Maiko, there had been no horrible last-minute escape with the aid of her parents, but an escape with the wrath of her mother's opinions on the idea. Maiko forced the train of thought off the tracks before she began to worry again about her parents. They would be fine. Everyone on Reorsa would be fine. A slight nudge on the yoke tipped the craft up on one wing as she began a slow banking turn. The moment she got her parents out of her mind though, the other horror emerged - her memories of dying, writhing in the twin agonies of passing through an active shield matrix from the inside and asphyxiation in space. Feeling her body torn in two directions as the shields tried to repulse the part of her further away from the ship yet remain behind inside the envelope. Then just as the shields finally failed, so did her grip on life as her body finally gave out. No comforting hand, no tunnel, no blinding light but just emptiness. Did she die or did she become unconsious? She never felt the transporter beam that somehow grabbed her and put her on the Vanquish, nor anyone treating her. Worse yet, her other self - a woman who reveled in her wartime skills yet had no idea of how to become a civilian. A woman who refused to consider working the frontier, who gave up painting... yet still had the same skills, the same accent - even the same painting, right down to the latest brush strokes! The rude awakening of just suddenly existing again and being aware of the differences - yet knowing there was a gap in one's life in which they did not exist - grated on Maiko's nerves. Her anger - at the universe, at the man who destroyed (yet didn't) Coronado, and at her alternate self - consumated in a pent up primal scream that tore from her throat. The wind heard all and moved on. |