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Dreams of Anansi

Posted on Mon Dec 17th, 2018 @ 1:36am by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Commander Rita Paris & Lieutenant Mona Gonadie & Petty Officer 2nd Class Ila Dedjoy

Mission: Escaped Pantheons
Location: Corridors of the Hera
Timeline: 2395

The cold metal deck plates of the smuggling ship, the Forrager, dug into the knees of the young Melanie Dox. The four year old part Romulan little girl was crying, locked out of the bridge of the ship she called home as the frantic voices of her parents leaked through the cabin doors.

The voice of Jaeih, Melanie's mother, was an angry roar of rage. Declan Dox's voice, Melanie's father, was more plaintiff. The sluring, drunk human was begging. Melaine strained to make out what they were saying but the words were muffled by the thick door. Suddenly, she winced in pain as she felt a cold stabbing sensation on the sides of her head.

Looking down, she squinted through tear filled eyes to see a small pool of her distinctly brown colored blood at her knees, flowing down from her head. Her hands were sitting between her legs, tiny fists clenched and covered in her own blood.

As the screaming continued from the bridge of the small freighter, Melanie shuddered as a chill ran down her spine. She felt... something in her closed hands. In each hand, she felt a rigid but soft, warm wedge. They were slippery and wet with the blood that seemed everywhere.

With a feeling of panic and dread overwhelming the child, Melanie slowly opened her hands. Looking down, she saw in each hand the tips of pointed, Romulan ears. Each with jagged, bloody edges. Melanie screamed, realizing that these were hers.

Suddenly, the door to the bridge slid open with a grinding sound. Melanie looked up, sobbing at the sight of her mother looking back at Melanie with panic across her usually stoic, Romulan facace.

"Mnhei'sahe!!! Melaine heard her mother scream as wave of nausea overcame the young woman. Her vision blurred and shifted out of focus, and suddenly Melanie Dox was again aware of where she really was.

In a corridor, she found herself back on the U.S.S. Hera. She was curled up on her knees, clutching tightly to the experimental flight control helmet she now remembered she was trying to keep from the invading God of stories, Anansi. Next to her on the floor was her shipmate, Yeoman Ila Dedjoy, also a victim of the psychic manipulations of the charming God.

With a stab of pain from behind her eyes, Melanie doubled over again. And again, she found herself on the Forager, but now as she was now. A woman and Starfleet pilot.

"Mnhei'sahe..." Melanie heard her mother's voice echo off the walls of the cold freighter as she shot back to her feet. "Mnhei'sahe..." The word echoed off the walls, warping and distorting to the familiar voice of Anansi.

Stepping into view from the shadows, the dapper dream god spread his long-fingered hands then began to move his fingers as a spider locomoting upon its web, as if reeling himself in toward the stunned starship jockey.

"Look it choo, all wrung out just by a little memory you doan wanna remember," the god of stories said slyly to Lieutenant Junior Grade Dox as he slid smoothly into a crouch beside her, his arms resting on his thighs with his hands dangling between them. "I'm bringing you da troot, child. You want to believe that I'm making this up and screwing with your head, but thas not me. I'm just tellin you the story like it happened."

Shaking in place as her mind raced with the images Anansi had just show her, Melanie shot back away from the intruding god, falling back onto the floor of the corridor in a panic. "What... Why are you doing this to us?!"

Before Anansi could respond, Dox's eyes fell to Yeoman Dedjoy on the ground next to the mischevious god and the panic was replaced by anger as she snapped out of it enough to remember her responsibility as a Starfleet officer. She scrambled to her feet and shouted "You have no right to do this! Get away from her!"

"Her?" The lanky long-limbed earthman with the bright glinting eyes smiled that perfectly white even-toothed smile as he chucked a thumb at Dedjoy, unconscious on the deck. "That one, her sister died, and a part of her died with her. She always wondered what those moments were like, how her sister died. She learning now. I am generous with my stories and dreams. Maybe she will believe it when she wakes. Maybe she will think it just a dream. I just offer the truth. But you... oh, baby, you... you got what I need. So give it to me... I'll show you the whole truth, and I'll be gone, pfft! Out cha hair. Off ya ship. Duty done, aye?"

Stepping back slightly, Dox tucked the flight control helmet tightly under her arms. It's what he said he wanted from her before and he was reinforcing that idea, which made the stressed young pilots mind race as a realization came to her. "That's not my duty." A rush of fear went through her but she pushed past it. "I'm... I'm right here and you're supposed to be a GOD. Why not just take it?"

'Why indeed?" The slender man whirled and blurred in the space he'd occupied, and he drew the shadows toward himself to add to his mass, those long fingers growing into long hairy legs, those sparkling eyes multiplying then doing so again, leaving 8 shining black eyes on the giant spider that filled the corridor. The giant spider who leapt into Melanie Dox's personal space, the fangs dripping with venom centimeters from her face.

"I... am the god of stories. If I kill you here and end your story, it isn't nearly as interesting as it's going to be, because anything is more interesting than dead. I like you, child. I want to help you by telling you a story, YOUR story." Those eight insect eyes studied the Starfleet officer with sinister intent.

Eyes wide with terror at Anansi's transformation, Dox tried to scream but found her voice refused to respond. Falling backwards, she slammed the back of her head against what she thought was the corridor floor. But when she opened her eyes, she was somewhere else.

There was no enormous spider, but instead Melanie found herself staring up into a series.of bright lights. She was on a cold surface that felt like metal and she couldn't move or scream. Her eyes went wide with panic as she saw arms breaking the light above her as her eyes struggled to focus.

At first, she feared that it was the spiders arms again before the shapes and shadows became more clear. There were two people standing above her in stained gray gowns, their faces masked. The figure on the left gestured to the one on the right, who passed over a long knife that reflected the light from above into her eyes.

The other figure picked up a syringe and plunged it into Melanie and she felt a stab of pain in her arm and a flush of warmth. Her eyes felt heavy but she struggled to keep them open. Suddenly, the figure with the knife put one hand her forehead. She struggled to move but was still paralyzed as the knife moved closer and closer to her face. It slid to the side of her head and she felt a sensation like being burned by freezing ice

Suddenly, the sensations changed and Melanie felt a wave of nausea overtake her as an intense stab of pain exploded behind her eyes. The image of the cold room and the lights blurred back to the corridors of the Hera and the face of Anansi as Dox let out a high pitched scream of agony.

The enormous spider screamed in unison, scuttling back from the pilot. "What was dot?!? What's in your head, child of Roma?" The spider scuttled back into the shadows, drawing them about him like a web, then disappeared.

From the deck of the corridor, Dox clutched the back of her skull as she squinted at the vanishing Anansi in confusion. "In... my head?" The pained pilot slurred. Her right arm tingled as she struggled to her feet. "What the fuck..."

Steadying herself against the wall, she felt the pain subside and her nausea abate enough for her to think. She somehow had held on to the helmet through the visions and pain, but Anansi's words started to process.

"The nanobots. Asa's nanobots. They were designed to... help me regulate the visual input from the helmet... They must be... Doing the same with his..." While thinking through the problem, she stumbled to a knee to check Dedjoy's vitals. Her pulse was steady and she seemed okay, if still trapped in whatever vision Anansi was giving her. But it was Melanie that the god wanted.

'No...' she thought. 'It's the helmet. If it projected me into his... Astral whatever. It enabled me to somehow pick up their psychic energy. Maybe it could BLOCK it too.'

Putting the helmet on to free her hands, Dox tucked an arm and began pulling the limp form of Ila Dedjoy up. Taking nearly a full minute, Melanie finally made it to her feet with her arms tucked in the armpits of the unconscious Yeoman and began dragging her down the corridor toward the turbolift.

Once inside, she flopped hard against the rear wall of the lift. The weight of Dedjoy feeling that much heavier for the effort. For a moment, the door to the turbolift remained open and Dox began to worry.

Which was when, in a bizarrely surreal moment, Jaeih Dox stepped around the corner and into the turbolift, as she eyed the panting Starfleet officer underneath the unconscious yeoman. Clad in the black coveralls she had worn in every message to her daughter, the stern maternal figure arched an eyebrow critically as she took appraisal of the situation. When she spoke, it was in flawless Rihan, in the inflection that Melanie Dox knew all too well from her childhood.

“Endangering yourself for another who is not even of your people? Fleeing, stubbornly refusing to bargain with an entity vastly more powerful, who only wishes to make a deal over something easily replaced? You disappoint me, daughter.”

Initially shocked and frightened, Melanie pushed further back against the rear wall of the turbolift, pulling Ila Dedjoy's limp frame in closer to her. Her mind was spinning trying to process what she was seeing, and she responded in the same Romulan tongue, "M... Mother?"

Rihan was Dox's first language and in her current state, it flowed much easier than English did. Her expression, thought pained, snapped to suspicion. "No! This is another hallucination. My mother isn't here!"

"An hallucination is a lie a child tells herself, to deny the truth she wishes not to face, Mnhei'sahe. I offer you only the words you know to be true, to pose a question you do not wish to answer because you continue to defend your poor choices." Turning to stride back out of the turbolift, Jaeih Dox tossed a wave over her shoulder. "Do as you see fit. I will have nothing to do with it."

It was a phrase the young lieutenant junior grade remembered from her upbringing, which was her mother's argument when Melanie made a decision with which her mother disagreed, but she refused to debate it because of her conviction that she was right and Melanie was wrong.

The panicked young part Romulan pilot felt like a little girl again as the words of her mother reverberated in her head. Still speaking in Rihan, Dox whispered to herself. "It's not real... It's not real..."

As the door to the turbolift hissed closed, Melanie slumped down as she felt the same stabbing sensation behind her eyes as before. Struggling to speak, much less stay upright, her words were slurred slightly in partly broken english as tears streamed down her cheeks. "Computer... D... Deck 4... FL... Flight Control."

To her shock, the turbolift whirred into motion. She was afraid that it too would fail to work in the presence of Anansi's power like her comm badge. "Hold on, Ila." Melaine mumbled, her words switching back to her native Rihan. "I've got you. I've got you."

The turbolift doors opened up on deck 4 as Dox continued to drag the still prone form of Ila Dedjoy with her as she inches her way towards the flight control office. Her head was throbbing and she felt faint from the effects of Anansi getting into her mind again.

'Something's... Something's wrong. Asa's nanobots are pushing Anansi's hallucinations out of my head. Blocking him... but something's wrong... It shouldn't be hurting like this...'

As the doors to the flight control office whooshed open, Dox fell hard into the room with the body of the sleeping Dedjoy splaying out over her. Two young ensigns were talking in the center of the room and turned with a shock at the sight of their department chief struggling to get up.

"Mona..." Dox called out, weekly and almost inaudibly, from the floor, desperate to find Ensign Gonadie, the Miradonian pilot and inventor of the flight control helmet which had rolled off her head into the room. The two young ensigns rushed over to help. One rolled Yeoman Dedjoy off of Melanie while the other helped the lieutenant to her feel.

"Ensign... Harnell. Ensign Paulsen. I... I need your help." Melanie's voice was weak and her complexion was a pale, sickly yellowish green.

The young Ensign helping prop Melanie up went to tap his comm badge, but like before, nothing happened. "You need to get to Sickbay, Lieu... what the hell?" The ensign replied.

"Listen to me!" Dox snapped, pushing herself to stand under her own power. She looked back down the corridor to the direction she had just come from and saw nothing. Turning, she gestured to the other end of the corridor. "Arm yourselves... I need the two of you to take Yeoman Dedjoy to Sickbay NOW! Once you can, call security and tell them we have an intruder from the God ship... but get her and get yourselves away from this room as fast as you can."

The two young officers looked confused and a little frightened, but Melanie's head was splitting and she was rapidly running out of patience. "NOW! That's an ORDER!"

Once they had left, the doors to the room hissed closed and Dox was as certain as she could be that Dedjoy was safe, she righted herself and stumbled over to the closed door of Gonadie's office as it hissed open. Sighing with a momentary bit of relief at the sight, she called out to the brilliantly colored ensign, "Mona!!!"

Startled from her latest project, Mona looked up from her displays to see a bedraggled Melanie entering her office, her prototype helmet under one arm. Quickly clicking her desk screens off, she rushed to her friend's side to help support her. "What in the sky? What happened? You look like a lemuria cat caught you."

"Lemuria giant spider god... actually." Dox replied, hurriedly. "But there's not enough... No time."

Removing the helmet to gesture with it. "It's this. Your helmet." Her head felt like it was splitting open as she tried to summarize for the concerned looking Ensign. "Somehow... It made it so that I could... their psychic energy. The helmet picked it up. And now they want it... he wants it. One of the gods... Anansi. He attacked us... In our minds."

"That's not good..." Mona was a bit unsure what to do, but if one of the gods wanted her invention and was willing to harm people for it, it was definitely not for a very nice reason. "Maybe we should destroy it then."

"No... He wants it too much. I think... He's afraid of it somehow, maybe. If it can receive psychic energy, maybe it can be made to block it. He's... I think... Feeding off it. We cut off their ability to get strength from our minds... that's a weapon." Her idea was meerly conjecture at this point, but it was enough of a reason to keep moving forward.

Looking behind her at the door to the corridor, Melanie knew Anansi would be on them in no time. She winced in pain again as she turned back to Gonadie. "He... For some reason, I don't think he can just TAKE it. He's trying to make me give it to him. You can't let him see you with this or he'll come after you." Dox pushed the helmet towards Gonadie.

"Get this out of here... Engineering... Figure out if we can get this thing to block their psychic energy. I just need to get him away from it." Stumbling over to the console on the wall, Melanie slapped the computer controls. "Computer... Replicate non-functional replica of flight control helmet."

In the alcove in the wall, a perfect recreation of the helmet appeared in a flash of light. Suddenly, Dox felt a wave of nausea that passed after a second as she picked up the fake, replicated helmet and turned towards Mona Gonadie. "Go! Get out through the flight deck so he won't see you. I need to have him focused on ME, Mona."

As the colorfully-plumed aviatrix made her recommended getaway, Lieutenant Junior Grade Melanie Dox was getting precisely what she wanted. The great weaver of stories and dreams was indeed focused upon her, and he was coming for that he desired. The experimental adaptation of a Dominion technology to sensory perception to aid in piloting.

To Anansi, the crown to the realm of the Dreaming.

 

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