Always in Threes

Posted on Tue May 29th, 2018 @ 2:21am by Captain Charybdis MacGregor & Commander Fiona McCray & Lieutenant Commander Selune
Edited on on Tue May 29th, 2018 @ 2:24am

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Future Tense
Location: Fiona McCray's mind, USS Columbia
Timeline: 2285
Tags: BonneChanceTrio,timetravel

The voice was familiar, but muted, as though far away or at a point where the sea meets the surf, where the sounds are torn apart and everything is hard to hear despite the fact that the speaker is right nearby.

"Fiona? Fiona, I need for you to wake up enough to talk to me... but not fully awake. I need for you to recognize me and remember me, and talk to me... darn, you are probably too drugged to wake up anyway, so that's probably a silly thing to say. But you need to answer me... I have some news that you need to hear."

Char... of course it was Char, who else would be trying to wake her when she was sleeping so comfortably. Likely with yet another of her personal dramas or curious teenaged heartbreaks that she apparently skipped in her teenaged years and was busy exploring a decade late.

"Whut Char?" Fiona frowned in her sleep and pushed against the wall of fog in her brain. " He's not goin' ta call. He's a horse's arse." She tried to roll herself deeper into the soft warm cloud she was floating on. "What news? Can't it wait til morning. Soooo sleepy..."

"Fiona, this is important. I need you to WAKE UP. Just enough to think is all. He is a horse's ass and he reallllly isn't going to call now. Fiona, we're in trouble and you need to know what's happening." Char considered for a moment, then blared in what seemed to be a magnificent rendition of Fiona's mother's voice, "Git oota bed ye spalleen or I'll have ye scrubbin the floors wi' yuir weekend steada gooin oot ta the races wi yuir brothers!"

Char felt Fiona's mind positively snap to attention then got a very clear mental growl from her friend " Now THAT was all manner of low," the engineer sounded quite testy " Ok, so.... I'm not awake and we're talking? What the hell?"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I don't know how long I can keep this up, but I have to work while I can. We're on a the USS Columbia, a Federation vessel bound for Earth, Fi. They are probably going to debrief us, but there's a catch... we didn't quite get it right. They think we died, Fiona."

"They think we died twenty years ago."

There was a mentally audible pause then Fiona summed it up in one word-

"Damn."

Her thoughts immediately went to her family, then cycled back to their fight and flight at the cabin.

"The shuttle didn't blow up," she stated the obvious, then Char was inundated with a flood of calculations and schematics as the engineer tried to figure out what had happened.

"See, the antimatter mixture here, like this, the warp field attempted to engage and inverted like this... apparently what we managed to do, combined with that explosive in the manifold was create a subspace distortion and with this here... and this..." Charybdis could keep up with the flood, and in fact it made it much easier to explain, as Fiona had no trouble keeping up with her, and between the two of them they had rather a tidy model of the accident in short order recreated within the mental space they were occupying.

"So because it looked like an implosion, they thought we died. And because they thought we were dead, they seem to be a little suspicious of our sudden reappearance. Plus apparently Siivas knew we weren't dead, just that we'd reappear. He's got some sort of experience with all of this... he was there when we arrived, and he saved us."

"Well bugger." Fiona sighed " Don't they have our scans on record? Faking DNA is rather hard to do," she went over the model again, frowning. "Hmmm... that puts a real kink in things, doesn't it?" Char could feel her shrug "On the bright side, you don't have to fret going back to the Bonnie"

At that Char giggled... then laughed, and within seconds both of them were laughing hysterically. "Well, I guess he got the last word, right?" Char gasped out.

"Aye... Jaysus girl, when you break up you really break up!" That led to more paroxysms of laughter, until they were both finally spent. The sheer ridiculously unbelievable nature of the situation was a bit too much to bear, and they had both needed a release.

"I'm still trying to rouse the cat without startling her... plus this is a lot harder than you might imagine, particularly with both of you doped up. Oddly enough it seems to be helping me... without all of the surface noise of life I can concentrate much easier on this internal zen finding of my friend's mental wavelengths... whatever, I need to focus. The feline mind isn't really the same as yours. You I could find from across town, she's like trying to..."

"Catch a cat with a wet sack in a rainstorm on a slippery rooftop?" Fiona wisecracked. She was feeling more alert despite her best efforts. "You aren't going to shut up, are you?"

It was difficult to give a mental impression of raising a middle finger while communicating telepathically, but Chary spared a few seconds to give it a go. "Hardly likely, considering I'm unconscious and still not quiet. And according to Patrick I do this in my sleep as well as speak Romulan." She sighed at that and refocused her efforts.

"You couldn't just talk in your sleep, nooooo you had to talk in other people's sleep, too," Fiona snorted then shouted "OI! KITTEH!"

"Ow. She can't hear you, just me until I can rouse her... I think... I really wish Charybdis had studied this harder..." Char muttered mentally. "...new, had ta talk in oother peepul's sleep tew..." she mimicked softly under her mental 'breath'.

She could feel Fiona's frown " You're talking about yourself like you're not you," the Scot accused.

"Oh, that's another level of complicated we could go into right now... come onnnn, cat! Wonder how I could pull on her tail... I could trigger a memory of your mother yelling at you, so ideally there might be something there..." Char murmured as she felt her way through the process and tried to avoid Fiona's question.

"Oh we are SO going to have a talk about this..." Fiona groused.

With a heavy sigh Charybdis gave up actively trying to contact the achromatic Caitan for a moment and focused on the room she had rented in the penthouse of the Empress, where the three of them had sat together and she had received her first real relationship advice.

"Okay, but another time maybe? This is important, and she needs to know... I can't leave her unprepared for what's coming," Charybdis expressed, then redoubled her efforts.


Selune's mind sat tranquil, whether the effects of the drugs or her meditations or some of both didn't matter. Her mind was a nebula among the stars. Almost intangible as it thinly stretched into seeming infinity without more than the faintest wisp of a thought.

Without warning a sudden pressure began to build on the outer fringes of consciousness, rapidly building into a great sphere of mixed and conflicting emotions, screaming questions faster than they could be considered let alone answered as it built itself into a crescendo of disruption and exploded into the great expansion, shattering any pretense at peace.

Out of the grave of fireflies that had been a peaceful universe lost in tranquility a soft question bubbled to the surface, "Chary?"

Finally having made contact, Char was actually surprised, and reigned back in the hurricane she was using when a breeze would suffice. "Hello kitty... I have some news. It's about our little shuttle crash?"

The scenery around them changed, and she found herself sitting on the bed of Char's room at the Empress from only days before, with Fiona.

"Chary," Selune murmured quietly, "You gave me a headache. Nice to see you two..."

"Good to see you too Selune... sorry about the headache. Listen... you know how I always go on about what a great pilot you are?" Char took her hand gently in her own and looked her in the eye. "Well, now you can add something new to your list of accomplishments... you can say that you flew through time."

Fiona waved at the Caitian. "No, we're not dead"

"Through... time?" Selune replied blankly.

"Twenty years, give or take. I can explain the physics and the math... we made a model if you'd like to see?"

"Some other time maybe..."

"I know it is a lot to take in Selune, but they may not tell us when we get to Starfleet Command... that's where they are taking us. And you needed to know the truth."

Fiona glanced at her reflection in the mirror, "Well... another wee silver lining. We all look amazing for our ages..." She was trying hard to remain upbeat and positive.

The curvaceous commander eased Fiona into a hug. "Your family... I understand. You're the only one of us whose life had roots... I'm thinking of how to get us all back. For now this is all I can do... protect you by keeping us together, the three of us, keeping you informed and planning as best we can."

Fiona returned the hug then quickly broke it, "Right now I can't think about them. If I think too much about my family I'll lose it, and we need to be calm and reasonable."

"Starfleet's bringing us in... I don't believe that this is a positive sign. They are suspicious," Char chimed in, "Possibly of me. Plus, time travel... maybe a first?"

Fiona shook her head, "Maybe, but I don't think so," she said quietly. "The theory has been around since the 20th century... you can't tell me in all that time that there hasn't been at least one instance."

"Nineteenth century. H.G. Welles formalized the theory. But as for real time travel... not to my knowledge," the Vulcan vixen expressed with a shrug. "There may have been numerous examples of time travel that we just don't know about."

"H.G. Welles is fiction, not science," Fiona sniffed slightly.

"That doesn't mean it hasn't been done Fi, just not that it's common knowledge. Maybe that's why they are hauling us to Starfleet Command... this is part of how they keep a lid on these things?" Charybdis considered for a moment, then furrowed her brow. "We need to put our heads together and have some semblance of a plan so we are aren't walking into this blind with the admiralty looking for a weak point to place blame."

"Lovely," Fiona's expression soured. "Red tape and prodding." She shook her head, "Travel through time, but some things never change. And it seems bad news is always in threes..."

 

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