Lieutenant JG Amelia Semara - The Girl With the Golden Hair Pin

[Max]

(( Main Street, Nivatara, Nantahala Valley - Casperia Prime ))

There she sat, atop her mountain throne.  Tavakiev: the high sun spirit of the valley, crowned in sapphire by the planet's rings above, wearing a majestic cloak of gold grasses and purple summer flowers and a scarf of pure white snow.  It was a sight Amelia recognized in a heartbeat.  The enormous peak was a great many kilometers away, but the main street of Nivatara had been aligned so the iconic Nantahala sight was visible from anywhere along its length.

Quaint yet swanky storefronts had always played host to a constant rotation of new and old shops trying to cater to the tourists coming and going through the town - all the locals knew the best places were down in the river district - yet Amelia found herself curiously unable to place even one of the names.  Surely she hadn't been away that long, had she?  The throngs of variegated visitors with every bauplan imaginable took no note.

The town had started to crawl up the nearest hill even before she'd left home, but now gawdy homes were perched all the way up on the top, barely even bothering to try to hide their bulk behind trees or blend in with the rock the way they used to.  In the opposite direction, the river district now sported bulky condo developments at the east end... When had those been put in?

At least the temple to the four deities still stood where it always had at the far southern end of main street, where there was still a park with wildflowers beside the banks of the rushing Sasagar river.  Even though it still dominated the town's skyline (such as it was), its curving forms were delicate and lyric yet ancient-looking, like a venerable tree that had been tenderly cared for by a sect of nymphlike attendants who still put great faith in the old Betazoid beliefs.

In the opposite direction an entirely new place rose from the ground: an obelisk, of sorts.  Rather several tall white stones were arranged around a fountain, a humongous Casperian cherry-aspen planted to the side in full pink bloom.  Caution awakened in Amelia the instant she saw it - this was not her dream.  Nor was it just a dream.

It had all the incomplete strangeness of a telepathic intrusion - the faces that wouldn't resolve until she looked straight at them, the store signs seemed to change shape at the edge of her vision then settle back down when she stared them down...  Yet it lacked the emotional urgency she associated with a telepathic assault.  The kind that typically stopped someone from seeing the fuzzy edges.  Instead, the vision simply sat there.  And then there was the other matter: how had someone created such a vivid depiction of her home valley without stealing the images from her own mind?

Realization released her to act, and curiosity compelled her to move.  She started toward the fountain.  As she went, she took a deep breath, inhaling the sense of the surreal place into her blood and bones and neurons the way Professor Kayto had taught her so many years ago.  She readied herself for anything.  Understanding was the first step to escaping a telepathic vision.  But as she did so, Amelia found there was nothing whatsoever keeping her there.  Strange.  Why go through all the effort of visualizing her home, however not-quite-right it was, if not to trap her?

Another breath, feeling the empathic currents in the air, and she let her eyes be drawn to a woman standing next to the new monument.  She carefully, slowly stepped closer.  There was something so familiar about her.  Even with her back turned, she could feel the woman's aura beginning to leak into the vision.  If she was an assailant, she was a sloppy one - no attacker would let their own grief shine through so plainly.  It was like blood spilling into the telepathic waters: bitter and metallic; swirling and spreading everywhere.

She was just on the verge of recognition.  Who was it?  An old friend?  A forgotten cousin?  Maybe her niece she hadn't seen in years?  The sensible blonde hair certainly seemed like a clue, as did the classic country belle dress.  The familiar-yet-not woman reached out to the monument, running her fingers along engraved letters on the stone in front of her.  Her shoulders heaved, her shuddering, tear-depleted weeping almost audible under the chattering tourists, apparently oblivious of either woman.

Amelia's heart tore in two for the woman she felt she should know.  Despite the risk, she reached out and touched the woman's shoulder.

Semara: :: Softly :: Hey, you okay?

The woman wheeled about with a gasp, and vanished in a blink.  Too quickly to see the face, but not so fast that Amelia didn't catch a glint of gold in the woman's hair: a leaf-shaped hair pin rendered in loving telepathic detail, and the honey-pink sapphire set into it.  The Golden Leaf of Semizad.

The dream winked out of existence.

(( Sickbay, Deck 6, USS Khitomer - At Warp ))

Her eyes flit open.  Every muscle in Amelia's body had skipped right past being merely tight and instead transmogrified into structural beams embedded in concrete.  Someone had left a glass of water next to the bed, and she groaned as her limbs heavily reached towards it.  She gulped the whole thing down, managed to only dribble down her chin a little, and gasped when she set it back down.

It tasted like nectar from the flower at the heart of Jalara, returning life to her body.  But what had she just seen?  No one she knew aboard was capable of projecting a telepathic image like that...

Her hand crawled across a console until she found the light switch, which she pressed.  Then she saw the time.

Semara: Eleven hours??  :: A groan ::

Amelia sat up.  That long without waking up or even really moving.  No wonder her joints felt like congealed glue.  She ran her hand across her leg where something itched.  The metallic lump of the radiation scrubber was still stuck to her thigh.

Sencha radiation.

So it was just a dream, after all.  It had to be.  There was only one person aboard capable of visualizing and projecting a memory so tailored to herself: Amelia.  Something to do with the radiation must have scrambled her neurons enough that she'd wound up seeing her own dream as if it were someone else's telepathic projection.  Bizarre.  Certainly it was hard to say why her mind had come up with those particular images, but dreams were rarely sensible things.  The rest of the facts fit.

She cautiously stretched out her empathic feeling body with a big breath in, just to feel the life-pulse of the others in sickbay.  Enough to satisfy herself that she hadn't actually projected the dream beyond the bounds of her own flesh, if that was indeed what she'd done.  She let the breath go, and her awareness returned to its normal bounds.  There was something pleasing about knowing that, even asleep and irradiated, she held control over her own telepathy.  Professor Kayto might have even refrained from scolding her.  That was something to be proud of.

Easing up onto her feet, she hobbled to the replicator, and replicated herself a cold and sweet fermented tea.  While typically preferring food and beverage from soil and toil instead of from pure energy, the sugars tasted of divinity in her parched throat.  One glass drained, she promptly replicated another.

Amelia turned to look for the person who’s aura she felt coming up behind her.  A smile graced her lips at the sight of Ayemet Dewitt.

Semara: :: A soft curtsy :: Lieutenant.  How d’you do?

Really?  This again?  Even she didn’t understand why she couldn’t stop giving curtsies pretty much whenever.  It looked especially absurd in her ragged uniform and with her sleep-mussed hair.

A. Dewitt: Response

Semara: Sorry.  :: A weird little grin. :: Can't seem to stop.  I thought I was fine, cuz I was only doin’ it with senior officers, but now I've realized that’s because everyone is senior to an ensign, and I really ain’t got a clue how to stop.  I feel like if I meet too many people at once, I’ll just get stuck in an endless loop of cursyin’ to every dang person in the room…  :: A soft giggle, making little mock curtsies to imagined dignitaries :: Send help.

A. Dewitt: Response

Amelia gave a hearty, good-natured laugh.  She was being silly, and she deserved whatever was coming to her.  Leaning on the wall, she sipped her tea.

Semara: You should start an advice column.  “Dear Ayemet…” :: A happy sigh. :: Hope I didn't disturb you. Just woke up from an odd dream.

A. Dewitt: Response

Semara: I'll be fine. Promise. :: A big smile. :: What about you? :: Glancing around the sickbay. :: Looks like things weren't easy down here.

It would take time to understand her dream. If it could be understood. Assuming it meant anything, other than she'd been exhausted and irradiated and sleeping somewhere besides her quarters. The Lieutenant, meanwhile, had something about her that called to Amelia.

Perhaps she sensed the cruelty of the counselor suite's proximity to sickbay that had put the Lieutenant in charge of keeping an eye on various recuperating officers while Ohnari likely got much-needed rest. Or maybe there was something else. Amelia had to confess she knew little about the woman beyond what she'd seen of her on the Bridge an entire mission ago, and that she was married to Connor. Yet, just from that, she had to wonder if something stalked the woman's empathic aura beyond the most recent events.

A. Dewitt: Response

Tag / TBC...

Lieutenant Junior Grade Amelia Magnolia Semara

Science Officer

USS Khitomer - NCC-62400

A239710MA0