The Web of Anansi

Posted on Tue Dec 18th, 2018 @ 5:19pm by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Commander Rita Paris & Emergency Medical Hologram (Adam Power) Mk X & Ahreva Malana

Mission: Escaped Pantheons
Location: Flight Control office
Timeline: 2395

Standing alone in the center of the now empty office, it's Chief Flight Control officer, one Melanie Dox, struggled to stay on her feet. In her hands was a non-functional replica of the flight helmet that enhanced her perceptions enough to enable her to navigate the HERA's way through the tumultuous chaos of the spacial anomaly in which they were now docked in a starship that carried a world within it at the center core of the galaxy.

The real helmet had somehow allowed Dox to perceive the psychic energies of the god-beings they were there to investigate. And that perception had caught the attention of the god of stories, Anansi. Because of its ability to project onesself physically into the Dreaming, Anansi desired to have it for his own. Anansi wanted the helmet, Dox had theorized, because he feared it could be made to eventually BLOCK their psychic powers.

That wasn't it at all.

Anansi was a god and loosed again, and quite powerful because of his folio. But if he could physically ascend to the Dreaming, he could live in the subconscious of all sentient life forever. He would endure, and be more powerful than the Sky-God, Nyame himself had ever been. A realm of his own if no other dream-gods dwelled there now, and sustenance and entertainment for an eternity. This would be his best trick yet, and he would make sure every race had a legend of how Anansi had come to rule the realm of dreams, across every world.

Mister Nancy. He liked that one. But they would invent names for him across every culture, iterations of the stories told in different ways relevant to that peoples. So many names, so many guises, but always the great spider who moves like a man, or a man with elements of the spider.

Closing in on the office where the brain-fried, exhausted and determined young woman who held the prize he sought hid from him, Anansi reviewed his options. The rules were clear- he could not take it from her. She had to give it to him, willingly. How he managed that was up to him and his cleverness, and he was confident. He still had a trick or two up his sleeve, and his ability to keep the ship nightmarishly distant from her was working well. She simply could not perceive most of the crew, nor they her, thus the ship seemed surprisingly empty.

The god of stories did not see the switchceroo, however. Because he was involved in this story. Which meant he could not see how it ended until they all arrived at that moment. The sheer excitement, the thrill of not knowing set his mandibles ashudder with anticipation.

The real helmet was now safe with it's inventor, Ensign Mona Gonadie, who Melanie hoped was halfway to Main Engineering. For her own part, Dox made her way slowly to her desk where she plugged the bundle of cables from the back of the helmet into her desktop computer interface.

"C... Computer. Call up the data from the last helmet simulation. Begin playing back the data diagnostics in real time on a... on a loop." The computer chirped it's reply and her screen came to life. Dox lurched back in her chair, taking a moment to try and compose herself.

The pain and disorientation she was feeling was being caused by nanomeds that Doctor Asa Dael had placed in her head to help her clear up the otherwise mentally overwhelming perceptions that the helmet caused. But it had become clear that they were malfunctioning somehow, trying to protect the exhausted Lieutenant Junior Grade from the psychic attacks of Anansi that took the form of vivid flashbacks and hallucinations.

She felt a stab of pain behind her eyes, which she had learned meant that Anansi was near and trying to push into her brain again. She had a plan and was desperately hoping her fake helmet would fool the trickster god long enough to enact it as she pretended to work at a quick pace.

That's when the office double hatch to the main corridor opened, and in strode Commander Rita Paris. All six foot one Amazon of command, with a stride of military confidence and a smile that lit up the room, fading quickly as she beheld the beleaguered officer slumped in the chair. "Miss Dox, are you all right? You look like someone landed a shuttlecraft on you."

The sight of Rita Paris filled the young pilot with a mix of relief and fear. In her exhausted and pained state, her sense of Starfleet protocol was more than a little off. "Rita!!" Dox yelled, instead of 'commander', standing up quicker than she should have done in her current state and stumbled back against the desk, shaking the one bit of decoration on it: A scale model of the Constitution-class starship Exeter that Paris had left there when she bequeathed the office and it's position as chief to Melanie.

"You... you shouldn't be here! It's not safe... he's coming! He'll..." Dox's mind flooded with everything she knew of Rita Paris' implausibly chaotic past. Being trapped as a ghost of living energy for 5 years. Being displaced across time and space. The idea of Anansi getting in Rita's head the same way he had attacked Melanie filled the young officer with a flood of anger and panic. "I can't let him get to you! I'm sorry... you have to get out of here! Get to security! Get help, but please..." She struggled to right herself but the pain in her skull had intensified beyond anything she had yet experience as her right side began to go numb.

"Hey! Hey hey hey!" Paris rushed to the side of the collapsing officer, catching her and easing her into the desk chair. Looking to the overhead, she barked an order that despite its polite phrasing, God himself would have obeyed. "Computer, please activate the EMH, medical emergency!"

When nothing happened, Paris began gathering up Dox in her arms, rolling her over the tall human's shoulder for a fireman's carry. "One way or another, I'm getting you to sickbay. Shipmates don't leave behind shipmates," Paris grunted as she slowly hefted Dox up, bearing her weight, which was apparently a bit more than the first officer with the lean musculature had anticipated.

In her arms, the short but hefty young woman began to squirm. "He's... the comm system doesn't work when he's around... I don't know..." The pain had become more intense and there was growing nausea in Dox as she weekly struggled against her superior officer. "You have to leave me, Rita! He's got to be almost... almost..."

At that instant, Melanie's stomach tightened as a horrible thought occured to her. The pain caused by the nanobots had only gotten this bad when Anansi was trying to get inside her head, and he was a shape-shifter that had already taken on the form of her own Mother to try and manipulate her into giving the helmet up. What if this wasn't Rita Paris?

"P... please, let me down, Commander. I... I can walk." She didn't honestly know if she could, but she had to know the truth.

Having just gotten under the load of the dense little pilot, it was more effort to put her down safely. But Rita Paris would never haul a fellow officer about if they said they could walk, and certainly not one of the section chiefs. Toting her about the starship would be undignified, and if she said she could walk, Paris gave her the benefit of the doubt and set her down, leaning against the desk. Holding the young woman by the shoulders, the compassionate commander made solid eye contact. "Steady? You okay to stand?"

While the pain continued and her vision had begun to blur as she tried to focus on Paris, Dox steadied herself and tried to downplay the agony she was in. "I'm... I'm okay, Commander." Her eyes darted between where she was standing against her desk chair and where Rita was standing before her. The decoy flight helmet was on the desk, just out of her reach but closer to the Commander. But if she was right, for whatever reason Anansi needed her to give it over. "I just... I need to get the helmet out of here. Away from Anansi if he attacks again!"

"I don't pretend to know what's going on here, but if the situation is as dire as all that, we'd better get moving." Drawing the antique-appearing phaser pistol from her hip, Paris held out her hand. "Hand it to me and we'll get you to Sickbay."

In a flash, Dox's pain was replaced momentarily by anger. She leaned over and picked the helmet up by the cables, disconnecting the leads. "Right... yeah... Commander."

Righting herself against the back of her chair, Dox looked back at Rita, and taking a breath, pulled hard on the cables. She swung wildly with the cables, using the helmet as a club, to slam it across the side of Rita Paris' head.

"How DARE you!!!" Dox screamed as her swing sent her slamming into the transparent aluminum wall behind the desk that overlooked the flight deck, as the pain in her head exploded. Her vision spun, threatening to go black around the edges and a stream of brown blood leaked from her nose as she screamed in agony.

Which was when some genuinely awful things started happening.

Spun about by the impact of the helmet, as Rita Paris came back to bear on Dox, two pairs of long, thin, hairy spider legs began unfolding from the back of the first officer. Growing to nearly twice her body length, they hoisted the curvaceous form up to loom over the injured pilot, even as 'Commander Paris' shrieked in pain. "What are you doing to meeeeee!"

Struggling back to her own feet, Dox wiped her nose and squinted through the pain at the sight of the horror happening in front of her.

From between those full lips, a protrusion grew obscenely, widening the mouth of the chronal cosmonaut until the protrusion split into two horrific mandibles, dripping with venom, as those bright blue eyes turned solid black. "What have you done to me? What is this in my head? What is happeninnnnnng?!?" the voice, half that of Rita Paris' familiar alto and half horrific nightmare echo as the eyes multiplied, then multiplied again as the bizarre nightmare creature wobbled unsteadily.

Tucking the helmet under her arm, Dox shuttered at the nightmare transformation, trying desperately to think clearly. The creature was wild and clearly in pain. But her own mind was clearing. "The... The nanobots..." She muttered to herself. "Pushing you out!"

With legs that felt like heavy bags of jelly, Dox let her academy training kick in to push past her fear as she stumbled out of the office into the corridor. "You want it, come and get it, fehill'curak!" tossing in a Rihan insult for 'asshole' for good measure as she broke into a limping half-run.

Behind her, the dream god shrieked as the mindlink he had established with Melanie Dox to manipulate her perceptions was now working against him, draining him of power and robbing him the ability to cloud the lieutenant's mind with illusions. The illusiory form of Commander Paris was rent asunder as the spider god could no longer maintain the phantasm.

God of Stories he be, but he was IN this story. In this story he was no mere observer- he could be hurt, outsmarted, outwitted. This thing, these ants in his brain that wore at his soul, these nanobots, were tearing away at his godhood. Now, when he was so close to so much more.

"HSSSSSS!" he roared, pedipalps waving fiercely as he declared war on the mortal. Rules be damned, he'd have his prize, and none could take it from him once he was the lord of the Dreaming. It was a tight fit, but the giant spider raced down the corridor of the starship, in hot pursuit of one stroke-addled Melanie Dox.

Sliding down the corridor wall to steady herself, Dox ran as fast as she could manage. Her right side was tingling and she had broken out into a cold sweat as she could hear the raging shrieks of the creature scrambling behind her.

Slamming into the doors of the nearest turbolift at the end of the corridor, Dox was panting as the pain in her skull continued the throb. Seconds later, the doors opened and Dox fell into the lift.

Looking up at the corridor, Dox pushed herself up the rear wall of the lift as Anansi scrambled after her, screaming in rage at the terrified pilot. She clutched the helmet tight as she shouted to the ceiling. "Computer!! Close doors, close doors!! Deck twelve... Sickbay!!

"Give me what I ask for and I shall be merciful to you upon my ascension. Else I shall enter your mind once more, child of the stars! I can survive another round- can you say the same?" Anansi roared in the corridor.

With the doors finally closed, the turbolift began to speed to it's destination even as the shriek of the frustrated god echoed briefly behind it. Dox tried to catch her breath as she felt a cold sensation in her ears. Feeling her ear with her free hand, she felt a wet warmth, and pulled her hand in front of her face to see that she was bleeding from inside her ears.

As the doors opened, she stumbled onto the deck of the corridor but only made it about twenty feet before collapsing to the ground with a thud. Hoping that with Anansi weakened, his effect on her communicator might be weakend as well. As her right arm didn't seem terribly cooperative, she brought her left arm up weekly and tapped it as she struggled to her feet. To her surprise, she heard the familiar computer chirp in response.

"Yes... C... computer... Please... Please call the EMH."

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency," the EMH said as he grabbed a bedkit out of an emergency wall panel and popped it open to pull out a tricorder and scan the bedraggled CFCO. "You look like you've seen better days."

"Please... I'm sorry... We don't have much time, Doctor. I know we haven't really talked so you have no reason to trust me here, but I need you to listen." Dox looked behind her with a look of panic as she could hear the faint whirr of a turbolift in the shaft approaching.

"Behind me... The god Anansi. The... the spider... I know this doesn't make sense. He can get into your head. He feeds off of your memories and fears. He attacked me and Yeoman Dedjoy."

"The Yeoman is in sickbay being treated now, which is where we need to get you for safety." The EMH smiled brightly as he finished scanning, tucking the tricorder back in the medkit. "Besides, I doubt this Anansi can hack my program. I'll make sure your body is at least safe, ok? Now let's get you to sickbay."

As her knees began to wobble, Dox tried to protest against the Doctor and explain all that happened, but all she could manage was barely audible gibberish in Rihan.

With a shock down her spine Dox turned, hearing the turbolift arrive.

"He"s... He's here." Dox slurred in Rihan. Then, suddenly as she felt Anansi draw nearer and the Nanomeds began to his psychic energy trying to reach her mind, her eyes rolled into the back of her head as her body went numb. Finally, the pressure in her brain overwhelmed her and she collapsed to the floor as the turbolift doors hissed open.

Turning weekly from the deck at the feet if the EMH, Melanie looked toward to open door of the turbolift to see... nothing. Anansi was gone and Dox could feel the pressure in her brain lessen. But the damage had been done, and the young woman finally passed out.

Hours later, multiple procedures and plenty of reassurances, Doctor Dael had done their work, and chief pilot of the USS HERA was going to be all right. Some damage had been done, but it was reversible. Now she just needed rest.

The lights had been dimmed and the localized white noise turned up to isolate the patient without having to use a private ward. It was in the dark of the night that Melanie Dox awoke, to see a medical crewman checking one of her monitors.

Squinting at the unfamiliar crewman, Melanie felt nervous. Her head was still fuzzy and as the crewman moved his hand across the monitors to wave a sensor over Dox, she flinched. His fingers seemed somehow too long and his eyes seemed too dark. There was a shine in those dark eyes as the crewman smiled down at Dox with what seemed like too many teeth.

"Sleep well, child." The crewman spoke, but it was the voice on Anasi that cane out as Melanie began to scream.

Suddenly, the crewman was gone and Melanie's eyes snapped open. She was still in Sickbay. Still recovering, but Anansi was nowhere to be found.

Was this just another one of his projected dreams, her dreaming that she was all right? Or was it simply a nightmare of her own?

Melanie Dox didn't know... and she wasn't sure she would ever again know for sure.