Hello Again

Posted on Tue Jan 21st, 2020 @ 10:32am by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Kodria Mizu

Mission: Neutral Zone Neutrality
Location: Deck 4, Flight Control Office
Timeline: 2397

Things were beginning to settle into a rhythm for Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox now that she was finally at home on the Hera and back to work as Chief of the ship's Flight Control Department. For Months, her life had been one of turmoil and duties that had taken her from the ship she loved and the family upon it. 

A month of captivity on her grandmother's Romulan Warbird, over two weeks of time spent on Earth being debriefed and all but interrogated by Starfleet Intelligence to confirm that she was fit to return to duty and then a full week back in Romulan space visiting the reunificationist colony world of Mol Krun'chi, had left the red-headed young Romulan pilot exhausted physically and emotionally. But now she was home on the Hera. Reunited with her wife and the friends and family she had fought to return to. She had her office and her familiar duties and in spite of everything, she was beginning to feel semi-normal again. 

Still tired, she had spent the last few days training the Edosian Ensign Wieaex to replace her wife Mona as the assistant Flight Chief, and it had been rigorous making sure the skilled pilot would be capable of rising to the more administrative tasks required. But it was the end of shift, and Mnhei'sahe had learned her lesson from overworking Ensign O'Dell for combat bridge flying duty, and the lessons and work for the day were over for her and the talkative Ensign. 

None of which meant she was leaving her office right away. Mona was now head of the newly formed R&D department and kept slightly different hours, so Mnhei'sahe had an hour to kill until her bond-mate would be free, so she was using that time to review potential pilot transfers to fill some of the holes in the department roster when the computer chimed.

As she was reading the files, Mnhei'sahe felt something lightly brush her leg as she sat at her desk. Having heard nothing in her office, she almost jumped out of her seat as she leaned back to see what was there. As she did, a green and purple striped cat lept up from the deck by her feat onto her desk and purred lightly towards her with a friendly and very broad smile. A decidedly cheshire smile, in point of fact.

"Maru? You scared the Areinnye out of me." Mnhei'sahe chuckled as she caught her breath and held her hand out at head height near the holographic representation of the Hera herself, that took a decidedly feline form. With a purr, Maru ran its head under her hand for the requisite scritches, which came as expected.

"What's wrong? Is everything okay?" Mnhei'sahe asked, as Maru appearing to her usually meant that there was some kind of threat, or that she had a message. A message from her android niece from the future Kodria Mizu, the granddaughter of Captain Telvan who had left Mnhei'sahe a number of messages before being placed in stasis. Smiling, Mnhei'sahe hoped it was a new message, even though they tended to be dire warnings, as she still missed the wide-eyed young woman.

Maru sat down and looked up at a holographic LCARs display reminiscent of the ones in the intel pod as it materialized with a blinking 'message waiting' logo. After a moment, the blinking stopped and the screen expanded into a multitude of screens, the holographic form of Kodria forming in front of them on the other side of the desk.

"Hello again, Auntie! I see you've somehow not been left behind on Romulus for years. That's thrown off almost all of my remaining messages and knowledge of your future, you know." The young holographic android girl shook one finger at the younger version of the woman she grew up knowing so well. "Either way, it's great to see you."

"Well, we can both thank your Aunt Rita for that." Mnhei'sahe answered, and then chuckled at herself for a moment for replying to a recorded message. But then she saw it again. What she had noticed but disregarded during the last message from Kodria just before her kidnapping. The message was waiting for her. Not paused, just... waiting. Waiting in real-time, moving slightly and occasionally blinking as she waited. As the curious Romulan woman watched, Mnhei'sahe raised an eyebrow slightly. "It's great to see you too. I'm glad to be here and not there so that I can."

Then, Mnhei'sahe stood up and walked around the desk, running her hand over Maru's back as she did, to face the holographic representation of Kodria. "Of course... messages can't really see the people they're being delivered to, can they?"

"No. Neither can they reply to them," replied the now sheepishly grinning hologram. "I kinda left part of myself in the pod's computer and Maru's been hiding me away. At first they were all recordings... But..."

Listening, Mnhei'sahe's eyes went wide and her mouth hung open in a slowly forming smile she couldn't quite resist. "Wait... this... this is really you? You're here... in the ship's computer?" As she spoke, her hands started up as if to reach forward, not quite knowing what to do.

"Mmhmm, part of me, at least. I left a lot of my more temporally dangerous memories in my body, of course." Kodria solved the issue of Dox not knowing what to do by stepping forward herself and hugging the woman she knew in the future as her pirate aunt.

"Oh... Tlhei dignair'le! Taome dynt!" Mnhei'sahe said, slipping into her native Romulan tongue without thinking as she hugged Kodria tightly. Then, realizing what she had done, she blushed green slightly as she leaned back, her hands on her future niece's shoulders. "Oh... sorry. Just... Oh my goodness, this is so wonderful." Mnhei'sahe repeated herself in Federation Standard this time, "I'm so happy to see you again. Of course... you... you probably didn't need the translation? Heh."

Calming herself down a little, the red-headed Romulan smiled broadly and wiped a tear from her eye as she thought about everything as Kodria shook her head with a smile, confirming Dox's last question. "That's... that's smart. One way to solve the problem of altering the timeline. Of course... your messages already did, in a way."

"You know. That's what you were saying. You know that I... I was supposed to have been left there, on Romulus?" Mnhei'sahe said, her tone shifting to one more of concern.

"Yeah... I mean, Aunt Rita's not there, Uncle Sonak isn't there... Your mom is rescued, but you're left behind, you destroy a colony or two... Your mom is killed trying to rescue you herself... There's a lot that I'm still trying to process." As she spoke, she motioned to the screens of raw data floating around her head. "Maru and Lucky have been giving me a hand, but really, they're not designed for this sort of thing."

"I know... at least a little about it, from Rei." Mnhei'sahe said, referring to her conversation with the woman known as Death, of the fate she had narrowly avoided thank's to Rita's timely intervention in her rescue. "I... don't think I want to know too much more about that, though. I know about what was supposed to happen to Mol Krunchi... but it hasn't happened. They're all okay. I... that's not me. That's not."

"So..." Mnhei'sahe said, purposefully changing the subject as she was beginning to become a bit upset thinking about the prospect that she might have been directly responsible for the deaths of those colonists had she remained under Riov Dalia Rendal's nightmarish tutelage. "Maru here obviously knew. And Lucky, you said. Who else knows that you're here?"

"Aunt Rita figured it out a while ago apparently. And Grandma Enalia. She's nothing like I expected, honestly. She's... Warmer. Not so cold, calculating, or callous as people tell me she was after her mother died in the Tribunal." The young woman looked thoughtful on that one, tapping her lips with one finger.

Thinking on it, the young officer made a realization, remembering the details she had read concerning the fatal duel at the close of the Tribunal. She wasn't present for the event, but the workaholic flight chief was known for reviewing the reports of everything that happened on the Hera. And what almost happened to the Captain was no exception. "So... Your Enalia. She killed her mother in that duel? Rita told me. So, you never actually met your real grandmother."

"That sword. It had some kind of technology that would have switched their minds had the Captain killed her instead of your Aunt Rita." Then Mnhei'sahe smirked lightly. "which just goes to reinforce the point. Your Aunt Rita saved your Grandmother AND me from our fates. And now you have a chance to know her for real."

Kodria nodded thoughtfully, the screens around her shifting slightly as the data she was processing shifted as well. "That makes a lot of sense. Thus, she swung by Vulcan to get everyone on her way to rescue you, tipping that in your favor... Which means that... Mmhmm... And that will go... Yes... Yes... I see now..."

She then grinned happily. "This means that the odds of the Hera losing a third of its crew in the coming year has been greatly reduced. On top of that, the two reunificationist colonies have had their survivability rates also greatly increased."

"Well..." Mnhie'sahe said with a warm smile as she leaned back against her deck, giving Maru a gentle rub along the small of his back as he purred his approval at the attention. "I have it on good authority that Mol Krun'chi's fate may be improved for now, at least. And hopefully, our efforts there will lead to something. But enough about futures that neither of us can predict anymore. You're here. At least a part of you here in the core. I have to say, I've missed you a lot. Has your program been in the computer since we put the rest of you to sleep? What have you been doing all this time?"

"Lurking... Watching... Wishing I could have given you a hug before you were kidnapped..." The young woman shuffled one foot around nervously as she tried not to admit too much foreknowledge, but it was pretty obvious that she knew a lot from stories, even if not the exact dates.

"Oh, no. Don't do that, please. I blame myself enough for all the things I couldn't do anything about, don't you do that too." Mnhei'sahe said, tilting her head down to meet Kodria's eyeline as she smiled. "You were doing everything you could to help us, and you did. What you told Aunt Rita enabled her to save your Grandmother. What you told me helped my mother save Mona and lead Rita and your real Grandmother to save us. You did so much, and you risked yourself every time and that was incredibly brave. Don't you ever think you didn't do enough."

As always, Kodira... even a copy of her heart and mind projected holographically by the ship... engendered a strong parental desire to protect her. It was there when she had been on the ship before and it seemed all the stronger now.

"Well... I... Yeah, I know I shouldn't do that. That's part of being young and alone though, right?" The young woman smiled up at the younger version of the piratical aunt she knew and loved so much. She wanted to tell her so much more, but knew that if she did, she risked never being born or worse. There was just too much at stake. "But now I can at least say hello thanks to aunt Rita."

"Well, you're not alone anymore. Your home with your family, now." Mnhei'sahe said, stepping over to Kodira as the young representation of the Android Vulcanoid fidgeted a bit. As she did, she stood up a little taller and put a hand on her niece's shoulder.

"You'll know what to do with what you know when the needs arise. You're already in an alternate timeline from where you come from, so there's no roadmap anymore. But… you know me. Or at least a different version of me. And you've been watching us for a while, so I'm betting that you know a little bit about my… friendships."

"Which we don't have to go into details about." Mnhei'sahe added with a smirk while she spoke about her unique relationship with Death herself. "So, you know… I'm thinking… that I know a little bit about what it's like to have knowledge about things that you can't tell anyone about. It's hard, but we all understand. And we all know you'll do the right thing with everything you know. Just remember the rule… what would Aunt Rita do?"

"She'd fight fate herself if it came down to saving those she loved," Kodria replied without hesitation. "And that's a great way to look at things, but I also can't change the timeline too much more."

"Then don't worry about the timeline. You're on a completely new one anyway and our future is what we choose it to be. As I understand it from what you've said anyway, you don't really know anything that's going to happen anymore since the core of this timeline is different from the one you came from. So, in a sense, what you know is now only really useful as guideposts anyway." Mnhei'sahe said, shrugging lightly to help Kodria take some of the pressure off of herself. "For now, you have a whole new life to start living here. So, I would be a terrible aunt if I didn't ask you what YOU want to do with it, now?"

"Other than the obvious answer of hug the people I love most? One of which is currently a baby?" Kodria had to chuckle softly at her little joke before turning serious. "I guess I'd like to help out in the way that I've been doing so since I do still have some foreknowledge of future events. Crisis aversion is what the original set me up for, after all. That and I've noticed that since I'm not chrono-locked, I've had some of my data changed, even though my memories of events haven't."

"I mean, like the Rendal fiasco... Now that you're here on the Hera, I now know two ways of her overarching crisis being ended," Kodria confirmed, one hand waving small circles near one of the data screens around her. "One in my memories of being told what happened by you and aunt Rita and another of me looking up the logs. I also have a memory of those two matching, but now that they don't... well... I just have to conclude that temporal shift has occurred and proceed from there with future calculations."

"So, you can hypothesize. And since you have knowledge of how things once WERE going to go, it enables you to do so with much greater accuracy since at least one possible outcome at least once had a one hundred percent chance of happening." Mnhei'sahe said, getting up to pace slightly as she thought which was an old habit that Kodria knew well from the memories of her older Aunt.

"And we trust you to know what's too much information." Mnhei'sahe said, looking over to make eye contact as she spoke. "Which... I know won't be easy. But you've done so very well so far, and we know that you can do so moving forward. It's not easy... I know. But we're all here for you. And now we know you're here for us too. And I couldn't be happier about that. The girls won't have to wait near a century to meet their aunt Kodria."

"Yep! I'll be here for you all until the day I wake up," Kodria declared with enthusiasm.

And with that, Mnhei'sahe stepped in again and gave the young holographic representation of her android niece an even longer, harder hug as a happy tear ran down her cheek. Quietly the young Romulan woman whose fate might have been far darker had it not been for Kodria's warnings whispered a gentle, "Welcome home."