The Detour

Posted on 22 Feb 2014 @ 12:59am by Lieutenant Teth Miir

2,442 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: Draylax
Timeline: MD 30 1400

ON:

Teth sat down on the intricately embroidered, gold and purple sofa. It was a plush piece of furniture filled with dust and ash and suspicious stains. There was a small table in front of it covered in picture books of insects, geometric patterns, flowers, and various pornography featuring several humanoid races he was unfamiliar with. The room was filled with couches and tables and chairs and smoke. Mostly just smoke.

A young woman dressed in very little, but covered in bright body paint was sitting next to him, discussing a menu. On it were a variety of things. Food, drinks, narcotics and other difficult to obtain substances. People were also on the menu as well, for rent or to own. He was beginning to regret the decisions he had made in the past few days.

He was at the shuttleport on Vulcan, about to buy a pass to Earth. A man in a tan jacket approached him with a discounted ticket to Draylax. He hadn't ever heard of the plane before, but the man made it seem very appealing and talked him into thinking he needed to visit there. He hadn't felt quite ready to return to Earth anyway.

He arrived on the planet. The hole place felt like some type of urban dystopia. Crumbling buildings and starving homeless matched to many tea houses, brothels, and casinos. Teth had been promised a warm clean planet with sprawling meadows and a rich culture.

Once there, he decided to check into a hotel. The room was fine. It had a mattress and a blanket. It also had some large form of rodent scurrying through the walls during the night. Only having one toilet for the entire hotel felt like a serious design flaw, but he had never been much of an engineer himself. Who was he to judge?

After a fitful night of sleep, he woke up to something crawling on his leg. It was a large rodent with pincer like mandibles and six legs. He impulsively kicked it, flinging it into a wall with an audible, wet thud. Either stunning or killing it. Teth grabbed his bag and left immediately. He had no intention of finding out which outcome was true.

Hungry, he decided to hit the streets for a restaurant or shop that might be open at that early hour. He saw a large, pink, blinking sign that had the phrase "tea house" in it. Feeling that a place that serves tea might serve other breakfast foods.

When he walked in the door, he found himself in a dark hallway. The door slammed shut behind him before he had a chance to leave. He looked around, trying to force his eyes to adjust more quickly. All he could see were doors forever down a dark, sloping, mold covered corridor. Just as he was starting to walk forward, a door opened to his right and he was pulled inside by an unseen figure.

Before he had time to react, they had taken an eye scan with a special imager, scanned the credit chip in his hand and shoved him down onto the sofa. The young woman walked over on stilt like shoes, her skin painted blue gold. Her eyes were black substances voids, giving her the appearance of a broken doll.

She was offering him his choice of food, beverage, drug, or prostitute, all for modest fees. He finally took the menu and flipped to the food section. There were three things on the menu for food. Gagh, aged tsorlar meat, and scrambled egg soup with salt. It didn't say what kind of eggs they were, but it seemed like the safest bet.

"I will have the eggs and a Romulan ale." he said, quickly folding the menu shut and handing them back to the very disappointed waitress.

"That's all?" she said, nudging with the menu, "You must want more thand eggs. Maybe something to help you relax? Or someone? We have a very insatiable Kzin animal woman on staff."

Teth shuddered visibly at the suggestion. "Please, I'm fine. Just the food." he shoved the menu back to her. She grabbed it and left in a huff. Teth sunk back into the sofa. He was still wearing his Vulcan gown. As it turned out, the gown was intended for Vulcan monks. Which would explain why the shopkeeper seemed so disturbed when he bought it and why he got so many stares everywhere he went. No one had seen a Caitian dressed as a Vulcan cleric wandering the streets before.

No one was looking at him in the tea house, however. They all seemed very self involved in their own states of mind. They mostly just seemed to be under the influence of various substances.

He knew he should have just left as soon as they dragged him inside so forcefully. Of course he wasn't so certain they would let him leave anyway.

The painted woman returned with his soup and ale on a circular tray. She sat it down wordlessly and left.

The soup was very salty and had a mucous-like texture to it. Long strings of congealed, partially cooked eggs in a salty brine, apparently left to ferment and then later heated. He managed to swallow maybe three spoonfuls before he vomited into the bowl from the foul odor and bitter, stringy texture.

He pushed it aside and began to drink the ale. He was only a few tips in and he was already beginning to feel extrasensory perceptions. Rainbow trails streaming from everything. When he tried to stand, he turned to jelly and fell back into his seat, the room around him wiggled and pulsated, but only so slightly as to be observed. He felt warm and drowsy, suddenly unable to hold his glass, he rolled over to his side, to exhausted and heavy to change position.

He woke up on a table in a white room. A middle aged Andorian man and a young, tattoo-faced Romulan stood over him. He couldn't move, they seemed to be running a scan and assessing his cybernetic gear.

"It's all Borg." the Romulan said in a bored tone, "You can't even give that stuff away anymore."

He drifted away and then woke up once again. This time in a dark alley beside a large pile of discarded office chairs. He didn't have his case with him, he had checked it into a locker at the transporter station, but he knew he needed to get to it and leave.

The necklace he had stolen from Koran's corpse was still hanging around his neck. But his shoes and watch were gone. The alley had plenty of scraps of metal and broken glass which he carefully tried to avoid as he treaded very, very lightly, trying to get to a more populated place.

He saw another man on the other other side of the chair pile. He was unsure if he was unconscious or dead. He was wearing a pair of bright blue boots that seemed big enough to fit. Perhaps it was the mind altering substance coursing through Teth's system at that moment, but he found himself pulling the man's boots of and putting them on himself. He could tell by the stiffness of the man's legs and feet that he was in fact already dead. He laced them tightly before running at full sprint down he alley and to a main street.

From there, he knew he needed to find the transporter station so he could beam back to the orbital shuttleport. Most of his time in the city was a blurr. He remembered eating meat on a stick, only to immediately throw it up. A running theme for his trip. This time it seemed to include a lot of blood, but he didn't know if it was real or just a hallucination.

On the street, he passed a vendor selling insects for food. The creatures were massive, one and two meters in length. They were all already dead and kept on ice. Teth watched as an attractive Rigellian lady picked one out. She had to large eyed children standing at her side.

The vendor layed across the table and started cutting into it's exoskeleton and pulling out strange, neon colored organs and glands. He gathered all the organs into a small insulated bag. He then began hacking off the legs and the head. Only then to snap the antennas off the head and break the legs at the knee joint. Please, the woman took her packaged giant beetle carcass and went on about her business.

"What do you want?" the vendor said turning to Teth. It was only then that he noticed the vendor's deformed skull. It was as if someone scooped one side out and covered the hole with skin. Most of his teeth were missing and he could only think of Koran's teeth scattered in the desert.

The Caitian backed away slowly, shaking his head no before making a run for it. The entire thing just felt nightmarish.

At one point later on, he found himself in a library. It was filled with hundreds of people wearing hooded cloaks, their faces covered by a dark mesh veil. They were chanting rhythmically around a metal fire pit in the center of the building. Women in what appeared to be priest cassocks yelled into voice modulators and handed out fliers.

Teth felt so moved by the emotion of it all, grabbed as many flyers as he could. He felt like if he had enough material representation of the event, he could hold on to the emotion forever.

This, however, seemed to upset the priests and they began surrounding him. Not chanting, but staring at him from their eyeless cloth faces. His pockets stuffed with fliers, he ran as fast as he could from the army of hooded clerics.

Safely on the street again, he was withing sight of the transporter station. Somehow, some way, he had made it there. He could go home and leave the awful, post-apocalyptic wasteland that was Draylax.

He was just nearing the station when he was approached by a set of identical Klingons. Each of them were easily four inches taller than himself and twice his weight.

"We are taking a toll for all who cross this threshold." one of the man said, poking at Teth with a knife, "Your money, all of it."

"I don't have any, please, I don't want trouble."

The brothers gave each other knowing glances before turning to Teth, one attacking with fists and another with a knife.

The knife wielding Klingon was swiping at him but missing repeatedly. He smelled strongly of alcohol and was obviously drunk. So the Caitian decided to rush him, trying to throw him off balance and force the knife from his hand. He managed to take it after a moment long enough to cause multiple lacerations on his hands, forearms, and chest. He grabbed it, swung around and kicked the Klingon in the face, deforming the structure of the cartridge in his nose.,

Unfortunately his victory was only to be followed by the unarmed brother punching him in the back of his head repeatedly, rendering him unconscious.

He woke up on a bench in the transporter station. He was still bleeding and delirious. He had a hand carved Klingon dagger tucked into his left robe pocket. He knew that he only needed to get to his locker, beam to the station, and get on the next shuttle to earth.

===================================================

With his case tucked between his knees Teth autosutured his lacerations to the best of his ability. He would arrive at Earth in around fifteen minutes soe put in the minimal amount of effort to repair himself. He could go to Medical whenever he wanted to.

He pulled the ring necklace from inside his collar and looked at the ring. Though it was quite heavy, it was also quite small. It appeared to be a woman's ring, with a lace design lasered into the dense metal on the outside. On the inside was an inscription. It was written in old Vulcan. "My Beloved" was what it translated to.

Teth found himself gnawing on the inside of his cheek, wondering what the significance of the ring was to Koran. It had probably belonged to his wife or mother. Teth knew both women well when he was younger and a fixture at the family home. Now had it on good authority that both disowned him when he was sent to prison. He wondered how he hadn't noticed the ring at all on that night several years before. He had the cable wrapped around his hand so tightly it left ligature marks.

But now it was his, along with the squid dagger and the bone ash in his fur. They were the only things left of Koran. Teth was reminded of the fact that in many species, serial killers tended to keep "trophies" from their victims. But Teth certainly wasn't a serial killer.

So why did he need the necklace? It felt more like a memento than a trophy. He wasn't proud of anything that happened. The entire story, from beginning to end, from the first time he saw Professor Koran until he watched the color and life fade from his body, was a point of shame, fear, and revulsion.

The ring wasn't a trophy, it was a testament to himself that it was all real. Even that day they decided to meet at the Vulcan wildlife preserve. Even the burning pile of bones two days before.

Though perhaps it was a trophy in one way. It was proof that in the end, he won.

The counselor sighed deeply as he stared out of a shuttle window, he could see earth spacedock growing in size as it became closer and closer on the bottomless horizon of space. And of course there was Earth, blue and glistening as usual. He would return to San Francisco with his friends and crew, his family back in Dusseldorf. Everything would go back to normal just like it always had. He knew that even after the darkest days, life would move one, with or without him.

He dropped the necklace back down his collar and put away the first aid kit as they approached the station. He had called for M'Ressa before he left Draylax using a public communication terminal, but he was unsure if she would see it in time. He also wondered what he would tell her about his trip.

OFF:

Lt. JG Teth Miir
Counselor
USS Galileo

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