#21 Whispers in the Dark

Posted on Sun Feb 19th, 2023 @ 4:18pm by Lieutenant JG Ainkara "Kara" {Meji}

Mission: Vanished
Location: starbase
Timeline: current

ON:

Ainkara had gone down into the bowels of the station. Down into the secondary machinery areas where personnel rarely went. It was all the backups for the replications system and many other engineering systems, but was kept at minimal power and was surrounded by reinforced superstructure and hull plating. If primary systems went down then a team could come down and boot up the backups and the station could maintain for a while longer using these secondary systems. The lighting was dim, soft lighting, casting hues and shadows all around, giving the spaces a creepy, haunted look. Her Sense on high, Ainkara moved casually, not in a rush, not wanting to be surprised by whatever she had been following through the Force's guidance.

Though she had just began her training only a few weeks ago, Ainkara's innate abilities already gave her a tie to the Force, as Master Ro had explained. Adding the Force to what she could already do was quite simple, and using it as an extension of her own senses came easily for her. She had no doubts that part of that was due to the conditioning placed on her brain by the Iconians. But, now, that conditioning could backfire on her old captors as the Force was a potent ally with which to fight back. Something the Iconians knew nothing about. Hearing what she thought was whispering Ainkara stopped in her tracks, perfectly still as she listened with her acute Vulcanoid hearing, and adding to that with the Force. She could not make out the words but there was more than one person whispering to each other. The sounds of the machinery was interfering with her hearing since she was between a water filtration unit and a power manifold. Then, as she began to move cautiously to get a better angle on where it was coming from, Ainkara heard the soft patter of feet running off in another direction. Slow and steady she followed the sound, pausing occasionally to see if she could hear any more. The spaces had gone silent again. If there were people out there, hiding, then they knew she was here, that she could feel. Fear and anxiety came forth from the beings. There were people down here, alive and well, but they were determined to remain unseen and hidden. With the population of an entire starbase missing, she could understand their anxiety and reticence. She needed to make them see her as a non-threat. An officer searching for stragglers and survivors.

As she went to step forward her right ankle touched something and she stopped and looked down, seeing a large, leafy plant with a large white flower in a center stalk. It was quite dead, dry and brittle she noted as she squatted to look at it. Pulling her tricorder she began to scan the plant, her mind finding it strange that a plant of this nature would be down here among all this extra machinery. It had obviously been discarded but whether by choice or mistake was yet to be determined. And, as her eyes and the Force told her, it was quite dead. If she was to stand the plant up it would be roughly four feet tall, the flower quite large and empty of any seedlings. Looking around at the deck Ainkara noted that there were seed pods and a dusty residue accompanying them, spread out in a cone-like distribution. Did the plant attack someone, or defend itself by its own means? The seed pods appeared to have burst open and produced the dusty residue, probably done while they were shot forth from the main stalk. Something about this whole plant situation nagged at her mind, knowing she had read about something similar in the library files. But, at the moment, her recall escaped her. So, the next best thing was to take deep scans of the powder and the plant and log it away in her tricorder, which she did.

The Force told her she was once again being observed, but from somewhere up high. There were catwalks in these spaces and many a shadowed alcove to hide and see below. She did nothing to make them nervous, instead seeming to be focused on her plant and the powder. Ainkara stood up and tapped her tricorder, closing it down and holstering the item. She pulled her phase pistol from its holster, making sure it was on stun, and also making sure that whoever was watching saw that she did check to make sure her weapon was on a non-lethal setting. Hopefully, they knew about Starfleet weapons. She holstered the sidearm and continued on her original path.

OFF:

TBC...