Rock and Parole

Posted on Sat May 9th, 2020 @ 10:41pm by Ahreva Malana
Edited on on Tue May 19th, 2020 @ 12:37pm

Mission: Return to the Core
Location: Malana's Quarters
Timeline: 2397

The stone woman known as Malana rarely slept as most would know it, but often as she lived among biologicals, she meditated and sat motionless for hours on end, paying no attention to the outside world. Instead, she focused on the inside and assessed what she had learned.

A literal mountain of a woman, she wasn’t particularly tall or even that wide. If seen in silhouette next to the Hera’s security team, she would seem smaller. But her anatomical structure was silicone based and her body itself was nearly 270 kilos, being made of mostly stone, and as such was extremely dense physically. But to simply look at her, most would only see a tall, well built woman with steel blue hair and eyes like black marble.

On this day, as she sat in her quarters, various rock samples on the shelves and heavy steel furniture scattered about the room, her meditations were a little different. There was something that she cold not define that seemed to pull at the edges of her consciousness. Something drew her mind off of her reflections and deeper into what she could only assume was what organics would think of as slumber.

Slumber... and a dream.

It was a unique and fascinating sensation. She had never dreamt before. Not the way organic beings did. But in her long conversations with her newfound friend, the Edosian Ensign Wieaex, she had heard much of that woman’s dreams, both metaphorical and literal. And as a scientist, she was quite intrigued. However, those thoughts began to become muddled. After all, Wieaex often spoke of how one was often unaware they were IN a dream, and it appeared that this dream was having a similar effect as she soon found herself lost in the moment. She found herself back on her homeworld, in the old senate building that the biological race that had long died off had left behind. The walls were a strong, solid stone that even they couldn't reproduce and though the ceiling had crumpled away, they used the building as a governance spot.

The ancient structure had long ago been reclaimed by the elements of her homeworld, with generations of ivy and organic vegetative growth winding across all surfaces and the cold, cracked floor.

Around her, the colors of fall were abundant, covering her elders - grand statues of biological Ashravenians long since dead now in the modern living stone forms silently, motionlessly judging her for her crimes. Her people could communicate on a level most organics could never understand. And though there was no motion of any kind in the ancient chamber, but finding herself standing in the center, in her blue Starfleet uniform, Malana knew the assemblage of beings appearing as nothing more than statues frozen in place were there to condemn her. Wordlessly, they each debated her punishment for not only mingling with biologicals on their level...

That was taboo enough...

But she had also had the gall to make emotional attachments with them. And most heinous of all, to harbor thoughts of procreation with one. It was the thought she shared with no one. The thought she had long meditated on. The idea that was a crime to even consider among her kind. But an idea she could not escape interest with.

It was a scandal that none of them could condone and so as the yellow and orange signs of fall gave way to the snow of winter and then the signs of spring, then summer, they debated her punishment. An amount of time that would seem impossible to bear for an organic, felt all too brief for Malana. And it was in that span of time that she also thought of the cause of her judgment. For while the lifespan of the organic known as Wieaex was but a blink in her existence, she relished the fleeting moments she shared with the woman. The conversations where she could experience the passage of time almost in the same way that organics did. The moments she missed, trapped in the senate chamber of her people. Then once the leaves began to fall once more and a bit of the great senatorial dome crumbled, they came to a decision.

The great protector gargoyles finally moved after aeons of stillness and silence. There was a great din of noise as the build up of old, worn and dead vines cracked and the dried corpse of leaves rustled off of them. As joints that had not moved in many lifetimes stretched and groaned, there was a scraping sound as the stone figures moved and grabbed their great steel hammers as Malana was held down. The decision had been made and once the ruling body made a decision, they acted upon it.

She was to have her limbs removed and scattered into the rivers while she was to be tossed into the sea.

Slowly, and with a sensation Malana could only describe as utter contempt and almost disgust, the ancient stone hands tore the uniform she wore with pride from her form. Another symbol of her crime of integration and interaction. A cloak of her shame that she felt no shame in. But she gave no resistance.

With the first blow, a silent scream escaped her. She felt cracks spidering through her left arm and chips flaking off. It was a feeling of impossible coldness as she could feel the interior of her arm splinter into fragments and the air that rushed in between those fragments stabbed at her, blinding her mind as she struggled to remain focused. A few more strikes and her arm was no longer a part of her. Even though she could no longer control it, she could still feel it, which was the horrifying part. This was what all of her people feared. Losing parts of themselves like this.

Soon they had broken off her other three limbs and the protector gargoyles were making quick work of smashing them into small, irreparable pieces. She could never walk among the biologicals she called friends or worse... Lovers... She could never again see their smiling faces. If she was capable of tears, they would be flowing freely down her cheeks as she lay there in physical silence, but mental anguish. As they dumped her into the sea, the only biologicals she would get to be with are the fish. The only comfort, the kisses of sea life searching for food among the shards of her crushed limbs in a nearby river.

This would be how she would spend the rest of her aeons of life - slowly being worn away by the water's currents. And as she closed her marble eyes, she thought not of her physical pain. Not of the sensation she could still process from her shattered limbs. Instead, she thought of the one she had left behind. The one that she would never see again. She thought of Wieaex. She was condemned. Punished. And now, she had no reason to shield those thoughts any longer, which in a way, gave her a kind of freedom.

Then she awoke with a start, jolting awake so quickly she could swear she could hear a pop in her back or neck, her eyes wide, gasping for the breath her people commonly only need to reproduce sound.

She was back in her quarters on the USS Hera. It had been almost a full day since she began meditating, but she was still whole and solid and nothing could have made her happier right now. Nothing, save the cause of both her fears and her warmest thoughts. And as she had those thoughts, she buried those fears and tapped her commbadge. “Malana to Ensign Wieaex. Would you care to share a midday meal?”