Dreamscape

Posted on 11 Feb 2013 @ 2:20pm by

3,628 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Arboretum
Timeline: MD3, 1600

ON:

Teppatsu no / naka e mo / arare, Vaikreyan hummed happily as she was carried down the halls. New things! New experience! People! Yes! She had her doubts about this one. But he was almost as nice as his like-friend. They all look the same. Very pointy. Very, very --

"We are not pointy."

Very stern! Emphatic-mode!

"That was Sekhet," Liyar explained to his plant as if it were perfectly ordinary and walked through the doors concealing the large arboretum. He relaxed noticeably. His shoulders dropped a little and the tension disappeared from his face as they walked through the nearly empty arboretum.

Friends! So many friends! Show me! Vaikreyan rapped on his skull.

"You would prefer to be here?" Well, he couldn't blame her.

Weeeeeeeell. You'd have to visit me... I can't be alone! No, no. Better to stay with you. They are very shiny. Who's the shiny-friend? Liyar sat down under a large tree, placing Vaikreyan beside him and pulling out his PADD. Shiny-friend approaches! Shiny! Princess-friend! Look at her! So red and white! Red on black, splashing colors - blue and yellow. Most of them annoy you. This-one amuses you. Look. Hey, Commie!

Liyar blinked. "I sincerely doubt she would approve of such nomenclature, Vaikreyan."

GOOD NIGHT, PRINCESS! Anta to ko-shite kisha ga / itta ri kitari suru / kemuri!

Walking through the arboretum toward the offices, Maenad spotted the Galileo's precious Vulcan diplomat sitting beneath a tree. This time, he was talking to himself. Maybe he was reading the PADD aloud. She couldn't make out his words from this distance, so she approached him, stepping off the dirt path. She had a PADD of her own in one hand, which she tapped against the side of her leg after she'd stopped in front of him. "Did you not see the sign?" There were in fact no signs anywhere. "Keep off the grass," she smiled jokingly down at him.

Vaikreyan laughed musically in his head as Liyar looked around, genuinely trying to find which sign he had missed. "I had not," he admitted, making no move to stand up.

Black hair! Straight angles! Whooosh! Vaikreyan swayed and vibrated unconsciously. Sparkly. Sparklies are nice. Why won't you let me talk to her?

"Because I am in doubt that she would appreciate such a venture," Liyar mumbled half under his breath.

Maenad suddenly took on a look of gravity. "Excuse me?" she inquired.

Liyar blinked. Right. People assumed he was insane. "Apologies. The plant is a telepathic vessel," he explained. There really was no good way to make sense of it without first-hand experience. "It stores and sorts through vast quantities of telepathic information. When it is attached to a handler, it will cycle through. As a result, she speaks to me." He looked up, highly serious.

Maenad didn't look very impressed. "Liyar," she breathed, "The plant is not telepathic. Anyway, what are you doing?" She tapped her PADD some more against her thigh.

"I am reading to my plant," Liyar responded, holding out the PADD in his own hand as though it were the most logical thing in the world, "Which is very much telepathic." He gestured to a spot beside him. "I can show you, if you still do not believe me."

Deciding to humour him, Maenad set herself down where'd indicated. She pulled her legs up and held her skirt in place. "Please do."

"I will warn you," Liyar started, "The summation of her experience is quite vast. She has been handled by many people. The more experiences she gains, the more she grows. She is approximately sixty-seven Standard years of age. You may find her temperament rather bizarre."

He rose his hand palm-up on his knee, and felt through his own connection to Vaikreyan, pulling the threads out and separating them before discerning each presence in the room individually. It was like a radar. Maenad was clearly the biggest presence, aside from himself. They were the only humanoids in the room. Others, trees, transposed and odd things, resonated with strength as well. Rather than crashing and jarring in terrible lack of tact, he manipulated the strands in his mind with uncommon ease. It might have been the environment itself. It was soothing, alive. Real. He gently managed to grasp that part of Maenad's self, that otherwise didn't make itself known, like playing an instrument, light through a crystal. He formed it into threads, and carefully touched it to Vaikreyan's mind-threads.

He lifted up one of the plant's enormous leaves and rested it in Maenad's lap as he established the connection.

I am lovely and beautiful. Takibi / Hi no ban, Yakei / Kajikamu / Furunikki / Koyomi uri / Hinataboko! Tell me about your favorite things, Mysterious-Maenad! the plant's melodious tones washed over through her mind, in calm and tranquil amusement.

Liyar remained stoic. "As I said, she is quite bizarre. Touching the plant will also give her a more comprehensive link to you specifically. "

Pure like the winds of freedom, Vaikreyan corrected him, her voice still echoing between them both. 'You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion!' Weeeeeo! Isn't this fun? Deep breath, see? Like the ocean. Wiishhhh. Back and forth. Feet-people, so tense.

Maenad sharply jerked away into a stand. She left her PADD in the grass. "What was that?" she looked at the harmless looking plant and then at Liyar with wide eyes. "Some kind of trick? Because it wasn't very funny."

Liyar kept the link open, for now. Such an abrupt severance would not do, but he dulled Vaikreyan's presence down to the point where it wasn't perceivable to Maenad. "As I stated. Vaikreyan is a telepathic vessel. She could be likened to an exceptionally intelligent computer system, with the added benefit of natural psionic ability. She absorbs the thoughts and experiences of her handlers, and those she connects with, and adds them to her 'database'. This forms into an amalgamation of sensation and perception, which allows you to perceive a distinct 'voice', a distinct presence, which she then uses to communicate these experiences. She is not fully capable of thought. Although, I must admit, it is difficult to tell. If you are distressed, I will dissipate the connection I have made." He sounded genuinely confused by her response, and blinked up at her. He had asked, she had said yes. But he remembered, that must have been new for her. Telepathy was frightening, even to those who spent time amongst them. "I assure you, Vaikreyan is entirely harmless. I would not have allowed any connection if this were not the case."

Still, Maenad was skeptical. She'd never heard of a telepathic plant. How did it do what it did? If the plant weren't capable of thinking for itself, how did it ask her to tell it about her favourite things? She squatted down beside it. "I wasn't frightened," she snapped at the Vulcan. "It was just unexpected." She looked over the plant like a curious little bird. "Where did you get it?"

"I received it when we docked at starbase 185. My brother Sekhet believes that it is quite fascinating. I would concur. As for how it does these things, I have yet to be certain. She does and says things that I could not have come up with. But I do believe part of the more creative and intuitive aspects of her comportment arise from the fact that she is connected to a sentient being, and because she herself is a living thing." Liyar alternatively switched between the pronoun that Vaikreyan insisted was accurate and it, denominating the plant as a thing instead of a person.

"How do you know it's a she," Maenad wondered aloud. "Most plants are gender neutral."

Because, Vaikreyan said, while the connection was too dim for Maenad to hear, I'm pretty.

Liyar's answer was only slightly less ridiculous. "Vaikreyan refers to itself as 'she'." He shrugged. It was just as weird as calling holograms male and female, in his opinion. It was a visage, a persona. "I have dulled the connection between you, as your reaction was rather severe. Do you wish for me to dissipate it entirely?"

"Yes," Maenad said, but she wasn't aware that she was still connected. She looked at the plant. "Let me know when you figure it out and maybe I will try it again." She really had no intention of ever hooking up the plant again. "Only you would have a pet plant," she said to him with a grin.

Closing his hand over into a fist, Liyar began the process of deconstructing the connection. It was gone with barely a flicker. "It is gone," he said, looking up when he was done. He tilted his head, blinking slowly. "You are amused," he determined irelessly. He simply didn't understand why. He didn't really appear aware of the fact that having a talking, telepathic plant was in no way normal.

"You might say that," she agreed. "How long have you been in here?" Maenad looked up toward the sun which, for all intents and purposes, was real. It even had its simulated heat. The sky was a the colour of a late summer evening, totally cloudless. "It's beautiful out," she remarked.

"Approximately 14.3 minutes," Liyar answered with his usual precision. He was more interested in the grass under his feet and the giant tree they were sat under than anything else. It was Real. But he decided to pay attention to the sky as she referenced it and looked upward. It wasn't the same as the real thing. It didn't have that same energy, that same presence. But did it need to? Was it not sufficient on its own merits? Someone had taken the time to craft it, like artwork. He nodded and stretched his hands out, allowing them to pass over the soil underneath him and the tree he was leaned up against. Vaikreyan beside him sung patches of songs through his head. "Someone has taken great care with this space," he remarked almost contentedly. "It inspires peace within others. It is reflected. It has been witness to pain, but not shaped by it." Perhaps the last mission, he mused with a curious little frown. "An interesting sensation."

Perhaps Liyar was unaware that she was one of the key designers of the new arboretum. It had to be completely rebuilt, almost from scratch, after whatever trouble they had run into before she got here. The arboretum was one of the most damaged sections on board. She didn't say anything about it. "Did you come to relax?" she sat down against the large trunk with him, her legs sideways and bent at the knees. "It's so real in here, it's hard to remember we're on a ship."

"It is easy to remember, for me. As for the arboretum, I was unaware," he confirmed, apparently unfazed by that bit of information. "Nevertheless, it is an accurate summation." He could feel the strange phased-out ghosts, but it wasn't held within, more like a reflection, as though others had brought it to them anew. For the most part, it came across very clean, and calm. It didn't change his opinion now that he did know. It did, however, alter his opinion of Maenad. He hadn't expected her to be capable of influencing a space in quite this way. She gave him a distinctly wired presence, tense and coiled. It occurred to him that she was a scientist, as any other scientist, and there had to be motivation there beyond simple pedantry. Even if she didn't show it, she had to appreciate life on a basic level, at least enough to want to understand it. Then again, on another level, he could identify how this would resonate. "You are surprised by this analysis?" He arched an eyebrow.

"Not at all," she replied. "I think we all must relax. Vulcans included."

"It is important," Liyar agreed. When he had first come on board the ship, he might have said otherwise, but his understanding of the term had grown.

Maenad settled herself more against the tree, her shoulder and arm almost touching Liyar's. She turned to look at him with a smile; it felt good to know that Liyar could appreciate a view and care for a pet, even if it was just a plant - apparently a little more than just a plant, she corrected. "Do you have any favourite places to visit on Vulcan?" she asked him, pretending to be enthralled with her PADD.

Favorite implied preference, which implied emotion. But he felt it was a little silly to pretend to deny there was preference. Every thinking being had individual opinions. It was ridiculous to assume otherwise. "The Hall of Ancient Thought," he finally nodded. "There is quite a lot of psionic energy. It was a very powerful experience." He let himself sit, soaking up the energy and impressions of the room through osmosis, while watching Maenad and her pretend-interests. He wondered what it would be like to have been to so many worlds, as Maenad must have been. "Do you hold any preferences?" he asked, genuinely curious. "On Terra, or any of the places that you have been?"

Maenad pursed her lips as she thought about the question. She loved her home of France and everything about it. But she couldn't just say France. She also loved her city of Nantes, but to say that wandering along the riverside was her favourite place in the whole world? Maybe it was. But there were other, more noteworthy, places to mention. "The Gorges du Verdon are fantastic," she said after a moment. "And so the white cliffs at Eterat." She looked away from staring into the distance, back to Liyar, "But I still like in the summer wandering along streams and quiet rivers in the countryside, it doesn't matter where - sitting on the embankment, daydreaming."

"More imagination," Liyar said wryly. They were sitting close enough to touch, but the Vulcan didn't see fit to pull away or even tense as he usually would at the random stream of thoughts and impressions, made stronger by proximity. He could see for an instant an image of the place she spoke of. Water, running in rivers, hillsides, in sharp twists of blue and green and white. "What did you dream of?"

"Oh," she sighed, "Different things. You know, silly things," she fumbled with her fingers in her lap. "When I was small, I used to pretend that I was a princess wandering my kingdom. I would sit by myself, staring up at the stars, and wonder what it all meant. Before I'd been in space, I have to admit, the stars were more wondrous than they are now. Being on a starship takes some of the mystery out of space," she trailed off, gazing into the simulated dusk. "I wish I could have some of that naivety back, in a lot of ways."

"I do not think things truly lose what makes them wondrous," he said quietly, contemplatively. In a lot of ways, her views were very contradictory to his. Of course, she called it silly, which only amused him. Truly alien, he mused to himself. Different in nearly every way. "Not in the intrinsic sense. But it is often we grow too accustomed to things, that we can forget what we once saw. Perhaps you would consider that naive." (Or childish. Or silly. He is certain she can come up with a variety of different words to describe him, all of them highly terrible.)

Maenad tilted her head. "Maybe," she said. She looked at him sideways. "What did you imagine as a Vulcan boy?" she grinned. "Before you became a personification of logic."

He was silent for a long moment as he thought, and brought his hands up to rest his chin against them, leaning forward a little. "I possessed what my parents called a highly illogical fascination with our archives, the vre-faul. Before my kahs-wan, I was expected to experience all two hundred of the recorded memories." He shook his head a little. "Hundreds of memories, of people. My forebears, and theirs. Time, stretching endlessly backwards. And then, forwards. What could be next? I would try to map it out, covered our fortress walls in predictions and equations. I thought I could melt into the air, and travel along the passage of time itself." He pressed his lips together slightly and waved a hand. "As you would say, quite silly."

Maenad laughed. "Not at all," she nudged him. "I think we would have made best friends as children. I loved to hear stories, and you would have had so many to tell me."

"Perhaps you would have found them more intriguing than my peers," he speculated mildly. Liyar met her eyes as she looked back once again. It gave him the impression of being totally focused. "Do you truly find yourself so different now, than you once were?"

"It depends on how far back we go," she mused. "I still have elements of the child I was, I'm sure. I'm still afraid of spiders and being sick. I still have the same sort of interests that I've always had. When I was a young woman, I did things that I would never do now to feel as part of the group, I am not like that at all anymore. I might still have the thoughts, but they're interpreted differently." She frowned, "Do you find that hard to believe?"

Liyar tilted his own head in a shrug. He didn't know. "To some degree, yes. Where I grew up, on Vulcan, as you know psionics are a way of life, for us. I learned at an early age to begin the process of isolating that which was, that which lived. It grows, evolves. But the core," he shook his head, unconsciously forming his hand into a fist. Not maliciously, but more pensively. "I could not explain. What I can sense in you, of you, as you are. It is too deep to think that it would be different in childhood. Question everything. Comfort in the unusual, melancholic. To be part of the group disinterests you, now. But it is still there, to belong. Simultaneously fascinated and real. Not only wonderment, but reality. You could not see the wonder up close, could not break it apart with your own analysis. And so you were not satisfied until you did."

"To be loved," Maenad said at barely a whisper. She frowned. What Liyar said made sense, and she knew it all to be true. But, "It is the desire to be loved. Not just be accepted," she corrected, "Not to be worshipped or praised, but just to be the object of someone's affection." She rested her head on her friend's shoulder. "Real affection."

"Yes," Liyar agreed. Though he had the suspicion that she might not have appreciated it being put quite so bluntly. "To belong to someone. To have someone belong to you. In general, to be acknowledged for what you are, and," he gestured his fingers outward, "Loved, you would call it. For that. Rather than a construction or persona. You are very real." He repeated the word again, in a way that suggested it held a specific meaning. "At least, that is what I sense. That you do not prefer insincerity. Although you hesitate, in being real so frivolously. Others must earn it. Or find it."

Maenad didn't say anything. She simply looked at her feet, thinking. She never intended to bring this up, it just sort of happened. At least, with Liyar, she didn't feel uncomfortable about talking about love and want. He'd probably had some sense of it before, anyway. "Well," she sat upright. "I have this list of orders to give the duty officer," she explained, following the edge of the PADD with the fingers of her other hand.

Liyar looked down at her calmly. "Indeed." She appeared to be expecting something. He did not know what it was. "Does this bear significance?"

"This?" Maenad held up the PADD. "No. Well, it does for the arboretum staff," she tapped his arm with it and brought herself clumsily to a stand, pushing herself up off of Liyar's shoulder.

"Ah. You are leaving," Liyar finally deduced, as though he hadn't understood before.

"Yes," she laughed, then frowned. "I have these orders to give," she waved the PADD, then dropped it to her side.

Liyar looked up, giving her an odd little blink and then a nod. He rose his own PADD in a vague salute, remaining seated against the tree while he gathered Vaikreyan closer to him once more. "Farewell, Maenad."

"I will see you soon," Maenad reassured him. Despite his usual blandness, she thought there was a little regret in his voice. "Have a good evening," she gave him a smile and turned back toward to the path to the arboretum offices.

OFF:

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

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

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