#alara posts fanfic

[levislegislation]

Hi!!! Some friends and I are starting a new fanfic (AOT x LOTR). Its a reader/oc x Levi Ackerman, Legolas, and Aragorn and is set in the LOTR universe, but it can be read without any knowledge of LOTR, as we will explain everything in the story!! hope you give it a read!! (posted on ao3 + wattpad!! links below)

Summary:

Alara, mourning her beloved fiance's death, holds the One Ring of Sauron, determined to destroy it. Joined by Legolas, Aragorn, and Captain Levi Ackerman, she embarks on a perilous quest. Torn between her growing feelings for each man, Alara must choose her true path while battling the ring's corruption and untold secrets.

[alarajrogers]

Untitled Picard/Q-ish fic

This is very rough -- no beta, we die like women -- and I don’t even have a title for it yet, but I wanted to get it out there because it’s late. It was supposed to be for Tapestry Day, Feb. 15th.

It is very subtle Picard/Q, and could be interpreted as friendship rather than romantic feelings, because that is how I roll. It’s set in the current Star Trek: Picard series (up through episode 5), and explains why Q hasn’t been around to help Picard with things like supernovas killing billions of people (and for that matter other things that are spoilers so I won’t mention them but would affect his son.)

There was someone sitting in his study.

There was someone sitting in his study, and Laris and Zhaban were nowhere to be found. Quietly Picard edged toward where one of the various hidden phasers that Laris and Zhaban insisted on hiding in his study, dining room, bedroom and pretty much everywhere was stashed.

“You’re not very stealthy in your old age, mon amiral,” a voice said. A voice that was familiar, but that he hadn’t heard in… had it been decades? At least twelve years, to be sure.

“Q!” Picard stepped forward into the study, unable to control the joyful smile on his face. As soon as he was close, though, he took half a step back, literally taken aback by what he saw.

Q looked old.

Not as old as Picard himself, perhaps, but his face was lined and worn, his dark hair shot through with silver. He also had facial hair, a mustache and a brushing of beard on his chin and jawline.

“You look almost happy to see me,” Q said. “Well, you did. Now you just look shocked.”

“I never expected to see you age,” Picard said. “But I suppose you can take the form of an old man as easily as you took the form of a young one.”

Q smiled wryly. “I can, yes, but… there’s always been an element of truth in how I appear to you. I’m not doing this to make some sort of commentary on the fact that you’ve aged… a terrible mortal habit, there, but I don’t imagine I’ll break you of it any time soon.”

“No, I think not,” Picard agreed, nodding. “Are you saying you feel old?” He sat down in the chair that faced Q. “I remember when you told me of your new responsibilities in the Continuum, you said they’d age you prematurely, but I took it for a joke.”

“It was a joke. That’s not… why.” Q closed his eyes. “I know you called for me. You asked me for my help, didn’t you? And I didn’t come.”

“I… assumed that your responsibilities had become too onerous to spend time in the company of mortals anymore,” Picard said, carefully.

It had hurt. When Starfleet had refused to help the Romulans, when there were so many stranded and desperate and Picard had no resources to save them… he had called out to Q. Better to owe his omnipotent sometime-nemesis, sometime-companion something than to cling to his human pride and let billions die.

Q hadn’t come. Picard hadn’t seen him since… since several months before the supernova. Q had said nothing, then, to imply that he wasn’t going to come back.

Picard had spent a long time convincing himself not to feel betrayed by that.

“No, no,” Q said. “I’d have made time for you, if not…” He shook his head. “The one time you break down and spontaneously call for my help, and it had to be for this.”

“So there was a reason for it.”

“A very good reason.” Q snapped his fingers, and a glass of something alcoholic appeared in his hand. Another one appeared on the end table next to Picard.  “Not the house brand, but I imagine occasionally you indulge in something you didn’t grow yourself?”

“Occasionally,” Picard said. Q would get to the point, eventually, and he had learned patience. He picked up the glass and breathed deeply of the aroma. “This is… actually from Betazed, if I don’t mistake it?”

Q nodded. “Adwana wine. Not particularly strong as alcohol goes, not to humans, but it interferes with telepathy.”

“Are we worried about telepaths?”

“Not… exactly.” Q took a sip. “When I’m in human form, the same brain centers that mediate telepathy in humanoids allow me to connect back to the Continuum. I’m not, currently, an extradimensional being driving a puppet around. This is me, mostly.”

The wine tasted rather like sake, but with a sweet undertone that was distinctly fruity and yet wholly un-grape-like. Almost like… blackberries, he thought. But not quite. “You’re shutting down your powers. Why?”

“I don’t want to have them right now,” Q said. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, the Calamarain’s not going to show up on your doorstep. I can’t possibly fully shut myself down with a drink or two. I just… I don’t want to be so aware of it.”

“I suppose you have your reasons.” Picard set the drink down. It really wasn’t to his taste.

“And you’re just waiting with bated breath for me to tell you what they are, aren’t you?”

“That is why you’re dropping hints, I think.”

“You know me so well.” He twirled the drink in his hand. “Tell me, Picard. You had hypotheses, I’m sure. What did you guess was the reason I didn’t come when you called?”

“I’ve said. I thought your responsibilities—”

“There were other things you thought, though.”

“So I see the adwana isn’t interfering with your telepathy that much.”

Q shook his head. “I’m not reading your mind, but I know you.” He leaned closer to Picard. “Jean-Luc, there has never been a day in your life when you haven’t been considering multiple possibilities for everything that happens.”

“Well, I thought perhaps you were forbidden to interfere. Or—”

“Or?”

“Or that… well, why would you care about humans? You have your own life in the Continuum. You have a son. Perhaps your… interest in me was… a passing thing. Something you have no need for, anymore.”

“Mon amiral. Sometimes you don’t know me at all.” Q sounded mock-hurt. “But then, I imagine the truth would be… impossible for you to guess at.” He leaned forward. “I didn’t abandon you willingly, Jean-Luc. Yes, I had more going on in the Continuum than I’ve had in billions of years, but… in the Continuum, I’m a leader now. People look up to me. I’m not sure I have friends there even now. Allies, comrades-in-arms, but… no Q sees me as myself.”

“Well, by definition I don’t see you as yourself, since you have to take a different form to interact with me.”

“Yes. Ironic, isn’t it? I can most be me with a creature who literally can’t even see me. Worthy of being included in a stand-up comedy routine.” He took another deep sip, and then set the glass down with emphasis. “I was dead, Picard.”

Picard raised both eyebrows, head going back. “Dead? How?”

“Did you ever wonder… how could a supernova of one star, however large, start triggering an instability in space that blows up other stars?”

“Neither Federation nor Romulan science was ever able to explain that,” Picard admitted. He remembered something, then. When the Q killed each other with the weapons they’d used in the civil war… it had caused supernovas. “Good God. Did the war break out again?”

“In a sense.” Q looked down at his hands, folded in his lap in uncharacteristic stillness. “There was a bomb.”

“I assume you mean some sort of metaphorical something that best translates to my perceptions as a bomb?”

“Oh, no. An actual bomb. Made of Continuum-substance, of course, you wouldn’t have perceived it except through analogy, but… something that explosively releases raw energy of a form that disrupts the pattern of anything made of Continuum energy and tears it to shreds? Sounds to me like a bomb.”

“By any other name,” Picard said quietly. “But – you were dead? What do you mean by that?”

“I mean I was dead. Someone set off a bomb in the Convocation and… a dozen Q died. Which is actually a very large number. I realize it sounds like a trivial number to you—”

“No. You’ve told me that the Q number in the thousands, if that, and even if there were trillions of you, a dozen deaths are never trivial.”

“Thank you for that.” Q took a deep breath. “I was one of the casualties. The others… didn’t have a son. No Q was willing to spend the time and energy needed to put a dead Q back together, no Q had a pattern to follow they could use for reference to do so anyway… except my son. He used himself as the pattern and he spent the past… I don’t actually know how many years putting me back together and I don’t even know if I’m the same me anymore—”

“Stop.” Picard put his hands on one of Q’s. “You’re alive. That’s what’s important.”

“I don’t know if I am,” Q whispered. “I mean, yes, I’m alive, but am I me? I spent billions of years trying to preserve my identity, so many other Q trying to influence me, and now…”

“Listen to me, Q. Life changes us all. Being what you are, I imagine you don’t have much experience with the concept of scars, but even you changed over time, just from the demands of life.”

“This is a rather large change, Picard.”

“Yes. It is. But what’s the alternative? You can’t go back to what you were before, can you?”

“I suppose not.” He stood up and went to the window, looking out. “You know I would have come if I could, Jean-Luc, right?”

“I know.”

“And there’s nothing – I can’t fix it. I can’t fix any of it.” He looked back at Picard. “Do you know – of course you don’t. I changed things. We were – having an argument. You and I. Not important what it was about. But the point is… I altered the past.”

“Wait. What did you do?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He walked back toward Picard. “It’s all gone. All the changes I made. Retroactively. Because we can’t do anything in the region of space affected by the bomb.”

Picard stood up. “Tell me what you did that doesn’t matter anymore.”

Q sighed. “We were arguing about whether I actually care about you mortals. You were very upset. You pointed out that Data died and I did nothing, and he saved my life one of the few times I was vulnerable. You said that I live on the scale of a god and I can’t relate to mortals enough to be friends with one. So, I fixed it.”

“You fixed what?”

“I arranged for Shinzon to be adopted by a human scientist and taken off Remus in his childhood. Never grew up with the hatred and resentment of humanity. Resented you, but he ended up going into Starfleet anyway. No attempt to destroy Earth. So Data didn’t die, you didn’t suffer clone angst, Charlie – that was what his name got changed to – had a happier life and didn’t run around telepathically raping half-human women. Everything was wonderful.” He leaned his forehead on the wall. “And then there was the bomb. And every change made by any Q, ever, in that region of space, was reverted to whatever it had been before it was changed. And I was dead.” He swallowed. “And now – I’m back, but I can’t bring him back. I mean, I could, he died in Earth orbit, but how am I supposed to bring him back in a world where you idiots would declare him illegal and there’d be assassins trying to kill him?”

“Q. It’s all right.” Picard walked around a chair,  and reached up to his shoulder. “No one expects it of you. Data wouldn’t have expected it of you.”

“You did, once.”

“Apparently that was in an alternate universe. I don’t think you can hold that against me.”

“But you were right.” Q closed his eyes. “I wanted him to live.”

“So did I.”

Q sat down on a sofa that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Picard sat next to him. “Listen,” he said. “I’ve… wanted to tell you, for some time. I never realized, back in the days when you came to visit me frequently… that I’d miss you, as much as I did, if you didn’t come back.” He held Q’s hand clasped in both of his. “I… did consider the possibility that the Romulan supernova represented your civil war resuming, and that I hadn’t seen you because… you’d become a casualty. To be honest, when there were no further supernovae, of course I was relieved because unexpected supernovae are horrible, but it also occurred to me that, if there’d been a conflict among your people, you’d resolved it. And if it was resolved so quickly…” He swallowed. “I thought that meant you were alive.”

Q raised an eyebrow. “What part of me suggests to you that I’m good at resolving conflicts quickly, Picard?”

“The fact that you did. The first time.”

“Obviously not well enough, or no one would have planted a bomb.” He took a deep breath. “So. You missed me?”

“I did. Although I wasn’t going to tell you, if you came back and it turned out your reasons for not coming to see me in so long were trivial.” Picard smiled.

Q laughed. “I suppose you don’t consider death all that trivial?”

“Not at all.” He let go of Q’s hand. “I’m glad you’re alive now.”

“I… suppose I am as well.”

“You suppose?”

“So many died, Jean-Luc. So many. And I’m alive.”

“That’s survivor’s guilt. It’s normal.” He smiled wryly. “There are times when I’m still miserable with guilt that I’m alive and Data isn’t. Or Jack Crusher.”

“Was he as boring as his wife?”

Picard raised a finger and shook his head. “None of that. We’re past the stage where you insult my friends, now. I expect you to keep a somewhat civil tongue in your head.”

Q rolled his eyes. “Oh, how will I ever live up to this overbearing expectations?” He looked at Picard. “It’s like you think I’m a good person.”

“Now that I know something of the culture of the Q Continuum? I do think you’re a good person. About half your flaws are species-or-culture specific, and the other half don’t outweigh the ways in which you try to do what you see as the right thing even when you have to fight your culture to do so.”

Q smiled slightly. “I think you’ve finally gone senile, Picard.” Picard stiffened slightly. “Wait. Did… you get a diagnosis?”

“Assuming that the thing you showed me was a real possible future at the time… I’ve managed to put it off for some years, based on the warning you gave me, but it’s not curable. Yes. I have Irumodic Syndrome. Thank you for the extra years, by the way. I wouldn’t have known to take the treatments that can slow it down or put it off, if not for you.”

“And you’re just going to let this happen?” Q stood up and started to pace, angrily gesticulating with his hands. “You’re all right with just losing your mind? Your intellect, your memories? You’re going to let all that disappear in a haze of confusion and end up in a nursing home drooling applesauce onto your bib?”

Picard turned his hands out and up in his lap, a shrug without shoulders. “I don’t see where I have an alternative. I suppose I could die in the course of this quest, and then I’d avoid it…”

“No.” Q spun on his heel and faced Picard. “There’s another way. Come with me.”

“Come… with you?”

“To the Continuum,” Q clarified.

Picard stood. “Q. You know I have no desire to become something other than human.”

“It isn’t about what you desire.” Q started pacing again. “I know what you want, Picard. If I was making this offer because I care about you and I don’t want to see everything that made you you slowly evaporate before you finally shuffle off this mortal coil and I never see you again, I know you’d say no. ‘I have no desire to be anything other than human, Q’, like being human is the ultimate achievement.”

“It may not be the ultimate achievement, but it is what I am. And if you’re not making this offer because you don’t want me to die—”

“I don’t want any more Q to die,” Q said, walking toward Picard, his eyes completely focused on Picard’s. “You’re a diplomat. You’ve stopped countless wars, talked species who were torn apart by civil war into negotiating with each other. And my war isn’t over, not if someone is planting bombs. And the next one could be my son. Or Amanda. Or my ex. Irritating as she is, I don’t want her to die. I don’t want any of them to die, even my enemies.” He knelt in front of Picard, looking up at him. “Please, Jean-Luc. I’m not asking because I want to make you a god and gloat about how you misuse power – in the Continuum we’re not omnipotent, anyway. I’m not asking because I don’t want you to die – I don’t, but I know you won’t accept a reason like that, and I accepted your eventual death as the consequence of caring about a mortal back when I first figured out that you were more to me than a project. I’m asking because the Q don’t have anyone like you, someone who can compromise but who has the kind of iron will and courage of convictions needed to demand that everyone around you compromise too.”

“My ability to compromise didn’t help the people of the Cardassian Demilitarized Zone, in the end,” Picard said softly. “It didn’t save the Romulans.”

“Yes, yes, are you sure you don’t already think you’re a god? You certainly take the blame like you think you’re omnipotent.” Q stood up. “I know you’ve failed at things. But you’re better at this than me. You’re better at this than any Q in the Continuum. And they won’t listen to you if you’re a mere mortal.”

“But they’ll listen to me if I’m a brand new Q?”

“Yes. Because you’ll make them listen. And because my faction will support you.” He paced again. “You’re worried about misusing your power? We can keep you from coming back to this plane of existence until everyone you cared about is dead, so you’re not tempted to intervene. You’re worried about not being human? Well, when you’re dead you’re not a human being because you’re not being anything at all. If you can contemplate ceasing to exist, how can you refuse to contemplate ceasing to exist as you are, transforming rather than dying?”

Picard took a deep breath. “If you’d come to me a few weeks ago, I might have said yes, but… I have obligations, now. I have to find Data’s other daughter, and protect her.”

Q took a deep breath. “I know where she is, but she’s beyond my reach.”

“So she’s in the Beta Quadrant, somewhere near the area of space affected by the Romulan supernova.”

“Yes.”

“And you can’t save her or help her because she’s in a place where Q power doesn’t work.”

“Yes.”

“I already know where she is, Q. She’s on the Artifact. Bruce Maddox told me, a short while ago.”

Q nodded. “Of course you do. But are you aware that when you came in and found me, you thought you were actually back home with your Romulan bodyguards?”

Cold washed over Picard. Q was right. When he’d sensed that someone was in his holographic study, the one that had been programmed to look exactly like home… he’d thought he was home. He’d thought that Laris and Zhaban were around somewhere and that the phasers they’d hidden about the room were also here. “I… yes. You’re right. I can’t deny it.” Picard took a deep breath. “But it doesn’t change anything. As long as I have enough of my mind here in the present that I can keep fighting, I need to find Soji and protect her. She’s all I have left of Data, and… I couldn’t save her sister. I owe it to Data, I owe it to Dahj to find Soji before the Zhat Vash do.”

“And that’s more important than preventing a war. A war that will cause supernovae and kill trillions of mortals as collateral damage, if it breaks out again.”

“I don’t have long to live, Q. Do I? By Q standards?”

“You could live another sixty years and it would be an eyeblink by Q standards, but… no. No, I think you have less time than that, and you know why.”

Picard nodded. “And you told me that you could, in theory, still resurrect Data, but you don’t want to bring him into a world that has banned his species. Which implies that if I died, you could, in theory, resurrect me.”

“Not if you’re in the dead zone when you die.”

“Yes, true. But if a transporter can create copies of people or hold a pattern in a buffer for 80 years, I’m fairly sure you can copy a pattern and hold it in a buffer as insurance against my death in a place you cannot reach.”

“Are you giving me permission to do that?”

“I’m saying yes. To your request. But not now. I’m still alive now, and I have obligations here. I’m not ready to give up my human existence and leave behind everyone I’ve ever known or cared for… yet. But you’re quite right. The nature of mortality says that sooner or later… I will, whether I want to or not.”

“You’re saying yes?” Q looked stunned.

Picard smiled. “I realize that my saying yes to you is an unusual occurrence, but it’s hardly unheard of.”

“I just…” Q shook his head. “I should have known. I picked you for the ability to think outside the constraints of the human condition. I’ve known all along that I could take you at the moment of your death, assuming you’re not inside the dead zone, but I didn’t realize you knew, and I didn’t think you’d give me permission.”

“There’s nothing about death, per se, that’s particularly marvelous,” Picard said dryly. “As a species, mortality gives us a reason to strive, while we live. As an individual… I can’t live forever as a human, and I shouldn’t, and I don’t want to. But from the perspective of everyone I care for, there’s no difference whether I die and cease to exist, or whether I become a new form of life but break my ties with my former existence. And…” He swallowed. “If there is any chance, any chance at all, that I can prevent what happened to Romulus from happening to other worlds… yes. Yes, very few sacrifices are too great for that. I’m willing to give up my death, and my humanity upon my death, to try to prevent war in the Q Continuum.”

“But you’re not willing to give up what remains of your life.”

“No. Soji is beyond your reach, you’ve said so. I presume the Zhat Vash are mostly beyond your reach as well. And I don’t want you stepping in to solve my problems, anyway.”

“Don’t friends help each other?”

“Yes. But friends also don’t demand godlike exercises of power from friends. You thought I’d be upset with you because you tried to save Data, and you failed, because of the bomb. Data wouldn’t have expected that of you and neither would I… alternate timelines regardless. Perhaps my grief was more raw when I said what I said in that other timeline, or perhaps you made me so angry I lashed out. Here and now, though… I want you to understand. You are not my friend because of what you can do for me, with your powers. I’ve never wanted you to do anything for me with your powers; the only time I ever called on you it was because billions of lives were at stake, and that was worth more than my pride as a human.”

“But Soji isn’t?”

Picard closed his eyes. “If you had the power to snap your fingers and ensure her safety, I might say yes, but you’ve told me you don’t. And I don’t want the Zhat Vash deciding to target the Q, not in your people’s weakened state… yes, I know, I know, you’re still omnipotent, we mere mortals can’t possibly hope to harm you, et cetera… but I know the Borg were attempting to work on a means of capturing and assimilating one of you, and that was before you had a war and invented weapons that work on your kind. I can’t rule out that the Zhat Vash could find a way to harm you if you turned your power on them as a blunt force instrument but didn’t have the power to find and stop them all.”

“I think that’s a silly thing to be afraid of, but I’m touched by your concern.” He said it as if it was sarcastic, but the expression on his face was tender. “But very well. I’ll stay out of your quest. I’ll let you live out however long you have, in your human life. I won’t do anything either to hasten or to prevent your death. And when you die, I’ll repair your mind if I have to, if Irumodic Syndrome has taken too much of it away, and I’ll make you a Q, and you’ll come to the Continuum with me to save my people, and your galaxy.”

“To try my best, at the very least,” Picard said.

Q smiled like a man who didn’t want to smile but couldn’t help himself. “You have no idea how delighted I am to hear that.” He spread his arms. “Hug?”

Picard chuckled. “I don’t do hugs, Q, I’m far too emotionally repressed for that. You know better.”

“I do, yes.” Q laughed… and then leaned in and kissed Picard on the cheek before Picard could stop him or back away. “Is that better? I understand you Frenchmen kiss each other like that all the time.”

“Two hundred years ago. Cultures change. We also don’t use expressions like ‘mon petit chou’ anymore.”

“I can’t call you my little cabbage?”

“Not without sounding hopelessly out of date and archaic.”

“You didn’t seem to mind the kiss, though.”

“I’m too old to let myself get riled up by your pranks,” Picard said, smiling broadly.

“What if it wasn’t a prank?”

“Then I’m too old to let myself get riled up by that, either.” He gripped Q’s arms by the elbows. “But don’t wait to come visit until I’m dead and it’s time for our bargain to come due. I’m going to worry about you if I don’t see you.”

Q shook his head. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

Picard released him. “And if you want to propose to me, you have to wait until we’re on the same form of existence. The stress of trying to arrange a wedding at my age really could kill me.”

Q choked on laughter for a moment. “Well, in English, ‘commitment’ is another term for being locked up in the funny farm, and that about sums up how I feel about marriage. But I’ll be absolutely sure to take you out on a few dates while you’re still human. Wine and dine you while it matters.”

“I look forward to it.” Picard glanced at the holographic replica of a clock. It wasn’t moving. Of course not. “Well, whether you have stopped time or not, apparently I am still growing tired, and the hour was late when you came to visit. I need to return to bed.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your beauty sleep, mon amiral.”

“I think I liked ‘mon capitaine’ better.”

“I did too. You never should have let them promote you.”

Picard shrugged. “Time moves forward. We can’t desperately cling to the past, even if it made us happier. Life gives us no choice but to keep growing and changing. Even you, I think.”

“Yes.” Q nodded in agreement. “Even me.”

“Take care of yourself, Q.”

“I’d tell you to do the same, Jean-Luc, but I know you won’t. Not while there are still swashes to buckle and fair maidens to save.”

“Well. I’ll charge into danger without much regard for the odds against me, but I promise to take care of my health, at least.”

“That’s the best I’ll get out of you, I suppose.” Q grinned, and manufactured a hat, obviously so he could tip it. “Until next time, then.”

And he was gone.

[toloveawarlord]

22, 34, 35, 43!

Hello anon! Thank you asking!

22. Do you listen to music during your writing process? What music do you listen to while you are writing?

I do! I cannot write in silence because I get too distracted. Certain stories have certain songs that I listen to. Lately, if I want instrumental music, I've been listening to Studio Ghibli cafe music on youtube. Some fics do have specific songs that help get me into writing, but most of the time I find one song and listen on repeat. For example, when I was writing for Arthur's birthday, I listened to Godspeed by Veronica Bravo for almost 12 hours straight.

34. How did you find the magical world of fanfics?

I was writing fanfiction before I knew what fanfiction was. My very first "fanfiction" was for the Magic Tree House series. Then I moved on to Full Metal Alchemist. I discovered that it was a thing when I cam across Quizilla and read a ton on there. I actually didn't start sharing my work until I was in high school/college when my friend told me I should post my Sherlock fanfiction on fanfiction.net and then it spiraled into this ☺

35. What is your favorite review?

Honestly, all reviews are good. I love to get feedback on my work. The support for Alara was very rewarding and I get lots of reviews and comments on Ao3 and here which make me super happy. I also got a review on one of older works from a published author who told me that my style and storytelling was good enough to make it in the industry and that was a very good day for me as well.

43. Guilty pleasure tropes and scenarios?

If you've spent any time on my blog, you'd discover that I love suitors and children. Thats my absolute favorite trope ever (single dads and their adorable kids) and I will shamelessly write for them as many times I can.

-Ruka

[pepperstrawberry]

Verdant Flame (working title)

Okay, I’m running with the suggested title.

This post is going to be just putting thoughts out there about how I’m going to do this project, possible ideas of how to publish, and what major changes I’m going to roll with.

I’m going to put it all under the cut so I’m not wreaking havoc on your dash. X3

Before the cut: For those somehow not in the know (like, how could any of my followers on Tumblr or Twitter not have caught wind of the bonfire of gnashing teeth much of the Magic LGBT+ community is dealing with right now, I don’t know, but just in case, and especially if this post is seen later): WAR Forsaken dropped and with it Gruulfriends went from canon to retcon in a way I didn’t expect: Biphobia and erasure among other issues. I’ll talk about the mess itself later, but for now, lets adress what we are doing as a community and what I”m doing in particular.

The basics is that we are kinda rebelling against Wizards in what small way we can; but being creative, interesting and having fun with the canon. Take the means of production, canon is ours now!

But for me in specific, I’ve been playing with using Chandra and Nissa as well as the world of Magic to create frame works for stories I wanted to tell, but until now I boiled down everything to its basics because I just wanted to use frame works and use tropes as jumping off points. But now? Fuck that, I’m thinking about pulling an E.L. James, but good.

What does that mean? Well, E.L. James literally wrote a fanfic, changed some names, and published it. So screw it, going to do the same over here. I’m going to take a step or two further back then she did, since 1) Wizards/Hasbro might not be as nice as Stephenie Meyer and 2) I feel like I can be a better writer then E.L. James.

So, how will this project play out? This is where I make a cut and we get down to business:

First: How to publish?

I think if I’m going to make this a thing, I’m going to have to go with self publishing and do these in short stories. I’m not sure how short, but I feel like once I get the ball rolling, I want to just keep going. If I’m taking years to put out one book and you guys are waiting that long for it, I’m going to loose steam and you are going to loose interest. This is definitely a ‘strike while the irons hot’ situation.

And the iron is near melting right now.

Second: What is going to be the basics and how will it differ from MtG Lore ‘Canon’?

First and most obvious is that I need to figure out what I can keep and what needs to be changed.

As I said above, while I am definitely in the mood of ‘you know what, this is ours now, fuck off’, the fact is, the law is the law. If your work is too similar to another, you can get in some heavy trouble.

I’ve covered some of this in my other posts about this, but I’m pulling this into one spot with the new info to make it easier for me and others to find.

World: I’m going to use analogs of each of the planes of MtG to make countries and kingdoms. It’s a lovely short hand and will make the world building go that much faster... Tricky part (much as the characters) is renaming things and setting it enough apart that it isn’t exactly the worlds and what not from MtG.

The main ones I’m going to use are:

Zendikar: Still going to be the land my ‘Not-Nissa’ hails from. First step is to just fully expunge the eldrazi history and effect. I am thinking about having some sort of ancient thing buried there, but in a very adventure-y feel of like an old dragon or some other powerful creature.

Kaladesh: Still home to ‘Not-Chandra’, still a place of one-ness with nature and artifice. Debating on how much I should carry over the sense of Indian aesthetic. Like, I don’t want to be window dressing like the actual Kaladesh is, but at the same time I’m not sure how well I can make it feel ‘right’ in that regard. I think I’ll keep the plot idea they started, but carry it through right.

Theros: Not-Gideon and Not-Elspeth will definately have history here. There won’t be actual gods, though a great power they attribute -to- gods will exsist. Which brings me to wonder how I should handle the cosmology... especially when we are talking about

Innistrad: I envision a very gothic, germanic country side, probably bordering Not-Theros. There will be a cult that worships a great power hidden on the moon. I’m going to use this as an opportunity to do a thing that came to mind when Emrakul locked herself away...

Vryn: I’m not sure if or how I’ll use this since we know so little about it. Might just cut it and have my ‘Not-Jace’ come from somewhere else. Hell, might just cut to the chase and make him connected with my Not-Ravnica. And speaking of...

Ravnica: Obviously a major trade hub and likely a center piece of the setting. Not-Jace, Not-Vraska, Not-Kaya, and Not-Ral all would be seen here. I think i’d also take all of the Fiora stuff and fold it into this so that I don’t have too much going on in the world and can pull together a lot of neat characters from that set too. Not-Marchessa might be fun as a side... well not ‘villain’, but definitely not helpful to our heroes... usually. X3

Ixalan: Pretty easy; coastline adventure. Just use any ideas from the block for pirate based shenanigans. Not sure if I will write enough to get to this sort of craziness, but it would be a lot of fun if I do.

Amonkhet: Not sure if, when, or how I am going to use this. Though a desert region might be fun. Might combine this with Regatha and that plan that Teyo comes from.

Kamigawa: I mean, really, this is ‘japan: the setting’. They went so hard on the Japanese lore here that it’s not going to be hard to make my own with little effort or consideration. Do expect there to be a Not-Tamiyo. X3

Alara: To be honest, I was never too big on this plane, but then it was a big deal years ago and I never really ‘set foot’ there. I mean if I did use it, I could use it to sorta map the bigger world’s zones? But that feels too much like the silly ‘elemental nations’ angle. Worked well for Avatar, but won’t work here.

Eldraine: I’m thinking about using this as a rough overlay of the main areas and goverment and what not tied to and surrounding my not-ravnica. Not sure. I haven’t finished the book yet, and it’s hard to get a solid bead on the details of the world without the old uploads, the clear posting of lore that used to happen (remember how we all knew what was going on with the color pie/race spread of Kaladesh?) and just having mostly the cards to go one leaves me wanting a bit. Not to mention they aren’t making the art books anymore. FUCK. I liked those. They needed to be improved not canceled T3T ... anyhoo...

Dominaria: Given what Dominaria now is to magic lore, I think I’ll set it as the history past. This world IS my Not-Dominaria.

I’ll figure out other planes as I go along, though I might just stick with what I got here. Adding in more is going to muck up the world I’m crafting. I may be taking parts that aready exist and remixing it (which, if we are honest with ourselves, is really how we tell stories in the first place, I’m just leaving my ‘mix’ lumpy XD), but I do need to concetrate more on the characters. I can’t introduce a new land every book. I need familiar ground, routes that readers can follow, places characters can be from that matter.

Speaking of characters:

Characters: Again, the idea here is that you should be able to recognize them to some extent, but I sitll have to work with the ‘legally distinct’ Not-Gatewatch... So here is what I got so far:

Chandra: What we keep: Fire based magics, brashness, cute. What we change: Not much. Most of her changes are going to be involved with the way I change the world around her. I think the big difference is instead of having her ‘planeswalk’, when her family gets hunted, they end up traveling toward the border, and she ends up running, getting lost, and finding herself on the steps of a (monastery). Also... no one would hate me for going ahead and making her trans, would they? Like, by the story proper’s start, she’ll have a woman’s body (or maybe that could be a part of her quest?), but I do like the idea. X3 It adds more of a personal touch to my Chandra.

Nissa: Debating on if I should keep her an elf. Keeping her an elf AND keeping the nature magic might be too alike. If not Elf, what should I make her? Still, the basics of her story are that she is looked down on, shunted to the side. stuff that leads her into being more comfortable on her own. Chandra is going to help her out of her shell, but only due to her honesty and clarity.

Gideon: No inviciblity. But definately going to keep him being the classic hero type, but with a genuine heart of gold. Going to change up his armorments from the sural to a short sword, buckler, and a lance/javalin? something like that. Hails from Not-Theros, has taken residence in Not-Ravnica

Jace: Trans man. Doing that right from the start. I know it was some folks head canon for a long time, and I see nothing wrong with making it canon here. Going to have to play with his past a bit. I think I’m not going to bother with the memory erasure. Instead, he trained as a spy with some mental powers and illusions. After betraying his original handler (someone that was a part of a different country), he defects to the not-ravnica and gets wrapped up with that stuff, eventually going out to help other nations in an effort to unite the continent or something... I’m kinda forming stuff as I write this. XD

Liliana: Still a necromancer. Going to cut out the deals with the devils. Maybe one, but not four. Might still have marks, but it will be more from her own magics rather then a contract. Still served a terrible master, but maybe with less strings attatched (or at least she thinks so). A friend in a discord suggested I have her have a binding on her bother as a lich vampire hunter. I’m warming to the idea, but still need to work out the details. I like the idea of her regaining her youth, that might even be the first story where Not-Chandra and Not-Nissa interact.

Vraska: Will end up in a relationship with Not-Jace... but I’m not too keen on keeping her a gorgon. I like the look of her ‘hair’, but I might just go with straight up dreads. Someone suggested making her some form of Naga, and though I’m not big on taking away her legs, the idea of some snakish relation is not out.

Ral: Inventor. Jackass. Friend of Not-Jace, has a Gay lover? yep, keeping all that. I think most of his changes, like Chandra, will be more about how the world around him shifts do to how I write rather then actual character changes.

Kaya: Keeping the Assassin, and can fight Ghosts. Still fleshing this one out. Likely to have ties with whatever I do with the Orzhov still. I adored the whole being hired by Teysa and ending up in charge thing, though I’m not sure I’ll go quiet that far? Mmm

Jaya: Still a mentor to Chandra. Less mystery around her though. It’s going to be less ‘she was the founder of our group’ and more ‘an adventurer that chose to settle down in her old age’ or something. And yes, the cookie scene I drew a comic for a while back will be in the story X3

Karn: Golems are a thing in fantasy, I don’t see a reason to stop now. But the Urza history is going to be retired. I think he might be an invention of someone in the current world and ends up as a helper to Not-Chandra and Not-Nissa at some point. 

Jhoira: I’m thinking grand daughter to Not-Jaya. I like her and I want to keep her, but I like the adventure her. Might have a rivalry between her and Not-Chandra. like a friendly one. She might even have a bit of a chip on her shoulder as she doesn’t have fire magic, but Not-Chandra does.

Rat and Teyo: Might might not. The cast is getting big already, we’ll see. Might have them as a duo from the start with a sort of ‘adventures in the sewers’ thing going on.

Ugin: Not a dragon, but definately a powerful being. and still has that stick up his ass. Often wrong about what he thinks should be done, but his heart is genuinely in the right place. Going to make Not-Mizzet his son maybe?

Nicol Bolas: Bastard, got a plan, and it will be similarly a slow build, but he is going to be less ‘has his hands in everything’ and more a ‘mmm, I could use this’ sort.

Alesha: Fuck timelines! This woman is a friend of Not-Chandra and helped her discover herself. Whether she rides with her people near... wait... OH GOD I LOVE IT: Something I literally thought up while writing. She and her nomadic bandit team travel the roads between many lands, and they find young not-Chandra. After coming out as being a girl, Not-Alesha is what helps solidify her sense of Identity. After showing off her fire magics and how uncontroled they are, adding in how young she still is, they drop her off with the (monastery) XD I’m loving this change already.

Oviya: Still Chandra’s Auntie. Big change? Her lover is still alive, because fuck that noise.

Olivia: Plans. Hungry. 

Avacyn: Doesn’t exists at the start of the story, but thinking about having her be created during it.

Sorin: Not sure....

Still thinking about a lot of other characters. I’ll get to them as I go.

There is also the Guilds of Ravnica to consider... With those, I think I’m going to keep the identity but not quite the orginizations. At least not so directly. Like not all of them are absolute ‘guilds’. There is less straight up organization. But there are definately a strong sense of jobs and a loyalty to those you work with...

Story:

And then there is the story itself. I think I’m going to start it with Not-Chandra meeting Not-Gideon much like before, but the goals are that he is traveling on a mission to see what is going on in Not-Zendikar. The seers/mages/whatever have been sensing some shit going down in that area and it’s close enough to the boarders of not-ravnica to check out. He and Not-Jace pass through and Not-Chandra gets curious and follows. She is going to meet Not-Nissa on the way. The four become a team and face down a nasty threat to the land and uncover a old history of Not-Zendikar that might need to be followed up on.

That can be book one.

Book two can be Not-Liliana’s introduction. The four, having worked so well together, are made a team by Not-Ugin and charged with trouble shooting all around the realm and seeing about maybe making more allies for Not-Ravnica. They find an old woman and they help her regain her youth... and in her they find an old villain. But the world has changed since last Not-Liliana walked the lands outside her keep. And it turns out that Not-Olivia, a vampire queen, has been making a name for herself. There are other darknesses afoot in her territory. For now, she would offer the team aid... as long as it suits her.

I think that can be book two

A return home would be the third story. Yes, this is kinda following how the stories were flowing at first, but after this one things are going to shift. The return home will bring Not-Chandra in direct confrontation with her past. The big changes I made to that and to Not-Kaladesh become big here. I’m thinking this is also where Not-Jhoira hangs out. The war behind the scenes is brewing, but it’s only starting. The all out mess won’t be till a later book.

What will happen in the story though is the confrontation with Not-Baral, Not-Chandra almost nuking herself in grief, and Not-Nissa being the anchor she needed. This will be the point of confession.

And so on... I’m not sure how far I’m going to go with this, but I want to try to push as many stories, but with as high quality as I can. Can I do it? I have no freaking clue.

I’ll post more as I go. For now, the working title is Verdant Flame. If I change it, I’ll continue to use the title to tag all the stuff I do till I go back and add the new title to old posts.

Now to transfer these notes... and figure out names. you don’t know how tiring it was getting adding ‘Not’ to everything.

And for those really keeping score: Why yes, some of this -was- what Dragon Quixotic was. There is enough difference between the two worlds that I feel confident that I can keep them as separate stories now.

[alarawriting]

Hi, I’m Alara Rogers

And you probably aren’t.

I’ve been using this blog as a writing blog for several years now without any active attempt to self-promote or join up with the rest of writeblr, but I’m tired of seeing the rest of the world gushing over their WIPs and how much they love their characters without getting to do any of that myself, so here I am. Whee!

I have three major WIPs in progress I would like to post material from, but the main reason I’ve decided to do this now in particular is that I decided to try to do Inktober, except as a writer instead of an artist. (I mean... technically stories can be written in ink too, and I did that for many years before computers got portable enough that I don’t need to). So I’m going to be posting my Inktober ficlets here. I’ve gotten so little written this year, I need a challenge to kickstart me.

I am trying to avoid doing fanfic for this challenge but it might happen, in which case I’ll tag the fandoms involved.

[engagequantumdrive]

listen this is happening

finally i’m getting off my lazy butt and posting this! wowie.

So I’ve had this idea for a bit. I’m going to do an Orville au. with birds of prey. Fun times.

I’m not sure if I will be doing a comic, fanfic, or just art, but yeah. Here are the bird species ideas so far. feel free to shoot me a message/ask if you have any suggestions for it! I really don’t know if i’m forgetting anyone, tbh. Isaac is a robot bird, so no species for him.

Ed Mercer: Northern Goshawk

Kelly Grayson: Saker Falcon (leucistic)

Bortus: Egyptian Vulture

Alara Kitan: Barn Owl

Gordon Malloy: Harris Hawk

John Lamar: Red-tailed Hawk

Claire Finn: Golden Eagle

[adigeon]

Star Trek TNG  Fic Rec Post

hey what’s up i still exist, i’ve been moving between houses and reading weird amounts of trek fanfic recently, here’s some recs:

Picard/Q:

Past Duties by astolat (tumblr @astolat), 2353 words, rating T. One of the sweetest completely in-character pieces out there -- post-canon, kinda gently angsty (but, rest assured, a happy ending!). I can’t beat the summary: “Late in life, Picard has an uninvited guest.”

A Kiss Before The War by Alara J Rogers (tumblr @alarajrogers), 6795 words, rating T. Gorgeously in-character Q, perfectly on-the-boundary-of-vulnerable-and-pretentious Picard. Especially good tangling with Q’s omnipotence and his restraint or lack of restraint thereof; such cleverly clear prose on Picard, who can sometimes be tempting to get bogged down in from an author’s perspective. First-time fic.

A Far Distant Star by icarus_chained (tumblr @honourablejester, I believe -- hopefully i’m not wrong!!).  5371 words, rating G. The most h/c of anything on this list, and unrepentantly -- I love it. Charmingly and convincingly sentimental Picard;  First-time, mutual pining-adjacent, the most rom com-ish of anything on this list, totally excellent.

Data/Geordi:

the spaces between by ImpishTubist (tumblr @impishtubist). 3391 words, rating T. One of those perfect “unknown established relationship from another’s POV” pieces -- ensemble cast, perfect dialogue, wonderful pacing, just a wonderful read.

Metadata by winged_mammal (tumblr @winged-mammal).  3875 words, rating G. Possibly my favorite Data voice in a fic ever, and overall perfect crew dynamics (Riker is pitch perfect.) A slightly abrupt ending, but totally worth it. Developing relationship fic, the old school amongst us might call it ‘preslash.’

These are kinda brief suggestions for fic that is def not hard to find but if you’re a TNG fan that hasn’t dipped their toes into fic then maybe this will be interesting to you!!

[isaacathom]

man Forge really fucking tricked his daughters into thinking he’d been viciously killed by the enderdragon for like 10 years, faked a body and everything, god damn. nasty.

jesus and skye wasnt a mopey asshole. wow.

...

who the fuck is THAT character. who the fuck are you. is that alara???? is it??? SHE HAS GLASSES????????? WHAT

oh, riiiight, her eyes were grey because of the herobrine thing, and then i extrapolated that to the anime trope of grey eyes = blind, so she had glasses. got it. dunno who the fuck mira was supposed to be, but he’s here, i guess.

skye knew his heritage? huh!

“zoea forge” isaac you fucking- thats not how that works. god.

okay so i was definitely hinting at something being weird with Midnight, but im not clear what that is. cause i know that originally Maelyn was intended to be the godly one, skyes the sky one, will was the end one. which leaves Crystal (chosen one), Ash (dragon boy), and Midnight (?). what was her deal before i retconned her into being the divine one?

Surrounding her was a blood red glow, and her eyes were like fire. In fact, as far as the rainbows were concerned, her eyes were fire, streams of red hot light dancing in front of her pupils.

what the fuck does THAT mean, Isaac? what the fuck is that supposed to mean? that wasn’t an edit, right? i wouldve edited it on ff directly. so WHat the Fuck does that mean. hold on theres another solo chapter of her isnt there, lets see

“I’ve researched a bit on Crystal – as have you – and we both know that her father was going to be lord of the northern cities, until he married a Traveller and was disowned.

well fuck me apparently forge being a prince wasnt a rewrite addition, how about that. wait no of course it wasnt cause crystal notes in quartai that she looks similar to the paintings, lmao. the traveller thing uhh we dropped that, but in SB thats basically aliens? i guess? shits weird. actually yknow what itd be similar to what was going on with that chick in the post-game of Sun and Moon. Annabelle? with the whole switching worlds thing, i GUESS.

so midnight/violet has ALWAYS been fire based. so then what was the whole thing with Maelyn? why did i have maelyn as herobrines daughter originally when she never had fire imagery? what the fuck does it mean. is this bit before or after the nyleam switch???

The Nether child, the Aether child, the Ender child, the Outside child and the Traveller child 

okay so... aether = skye. ender = will. traveller is, presumably maelyn? since this would be post-nyleam switch where she gets the whole cassandra thing. outside, ash? so then nether child is midnight, right? okay.

wait, but the alara namedrop (aka the nyleam switch) happens in literally the same chapter as the discussion with midnight about travellers and that midnight is ‘special’ in some nondescript way. hmm. unless SHE’S the traveller child? that would technically be accurate to her role in the rewrites, but she would count as the nether child in THIS discussion because its like, 40 pages later when ive decided thats the go.

okay i genuinely have no idea what my angle was with Midnight prior to making the nyleam switch, though it makes way the fuck more sense to have been midnight from the start. i dont know whats happening.

sadly this fanfic isnt even like cringe its just, yknow, mediocre fiction lmao

[alarajrogers]

I’m really enjoying the fanfic by this Alara Rogers person. I wish she’d update something but it looks like she hasn’t posted any fanfic since last year. I sure hope she’s not, like, crushed under the weight of everyone in her family suffering depression because of Covid and financial problems and all that kind of shit.

[alarajrogers]

More or less quitting Tumblr

I just got some news today. For reasons to do with my health, I am more or less quitting tumblr; I may be on occasionally and I am very likely to continue posting fanfics on occasion, maybe go back to the fanfic repost project, and posting to the writing journal, but I am going to do my best to stop reading my dash, so I likely won’t be reblogging anything.

I don’t feel comfortable talking about it in public and I have few enough followers that I don’t suspect many people care, but if anyone wants to know, my email address is alara@mindspring.com and I’m fine with talking to people one-on-one about it, just not on the public internet. And since I won’t be on I won’t see chat requests or messages. There is a spam filter that blocks everyone unless they are whitelisted; if you’re a human, just reply to the email the spam filter sends, and I will whitelist you and rescue your email from the Suspect Email box.

Unlike the joke about the lumberjack, this is not a belated April Fools’ Day prank or joke. I will be continuing to write fanfic and post it in places that I post fanfic. I’m just going to avoid reading and interacting here.

[alarajrogers]

Fanfic Reposting Project, Day 50: Fri Aug 26

50 days of this, wow. I think after Aite is done I will be taking a break for a while.

If you enjoy this stuff, I have some original work available on Amazon.com, with plans to add more soon. Also, I have a Patreon account where I post sneak previews of incomplete chapters, and sometimes content that might not otherwise appear anywhere else for a long while, such as commissioned stories or stuff intended for professional publication. I've begun publishing chapters of an original novel there.

In addition, I have a new blog! Alara Sucks At Everything is a hobby blog discussing sewing, cooking, selling things online, gardening, and other things I suck at.

I’ll be doing 3 posts a day, each one from a different fandom, now including completed multi-part stories. Posts include “Everybody Wants To Be A Cat”, a Star Trek fanfic; “Aite, Chp. 3”, a Gatchaman fanfic in 9 parts; and “Be Discreet” part two, an MLP: FiM fanfic in two parts.

[alarajrogers]

Fanfic Reposting Project, Day 49: Thurs Aug 25

Continuing my Fanfic Reposting Project.

If you enjoy this stuff, I have some original work available on Amazon.com, with plans to add more soon. Also, I have a Patreon account where I post sneak previews of incomplete chapters, and sometimes content that might not otherwise appear anywhere else for a long while, such as commissioned stories or stuff intended for professional publication. I've begun publishing chapters of an original novel there.

In addition, I have a new blog! Alara Sucks At Everything is a hobby blog discussing sewing, cooking, selling things online, gardening, and other things I suck at.

I’ll be doing 3 posts a day, each one from a different fandom, now including completed multi-part stories. Posts include “Return Engagement”, a Star Trek fanfic; “Aite, Chp. 2”, a Gatchaman fanfic in 9 parts; and “Be Discreet” part one, an MLP: FiM fanfic in two parts.

[alarajrogers]

First Born Son

Fanfic Reposting Project, Day 47

Fandom: Star Trek Characters: Q Jr, Janeway, Q Publication Date:2009

Summary: In the Continuum, no one has gender -- except for Q's son, who thinks of himself as male. Janeway agrees with him that this shouldn't be a big deal. His parents, unfortunately, disagree. Written for the LGBTFest for 2009. Prompt was: "Star Trek (any era), Q, Identifying as male makes Q transgender in the Q Continuum, since most Q don't identify with a gender at all." I decided to interpret it as Q Jr, since they're all named Q. Offhanded mention of Picard/Q in the story.

If you enjoy this stuff, I have some original work available on Amazon.com, with plans to add more soon. Also, I have a Patreon account where I post sneak previews of incomplete chapters, and sometimes content that might not otherwise appear anywhere else for a long while, such as commissioned stories or stuff intended for professional publication. I've begun publishing chapters of an original novel there.

In addition, I have a new blog! Alara Sucks At Everything is a hobby blog discussing sewing, cooking, selling things online, gardening, and other things I suck at.

His father stood in front of him, arms folded over her ample breasts, her humanoid features locked in a scowl. "I'm waiting here," she said impatiently. "Well?"

With an aggrieved sigh, Q manifested as a skinny blond girl with close-cropped hair and a flat chest. "Fine. I'm a girl. Satisfied?"

"Not really." Q's father stalked around the female form he'd just manifested in, inspecting it. "You're going to run into problems with that one. Unless you girl it up with some bigger breasts or a softer face there, people are going to peg you as a boy who's impersonating a girl. Let me remind you that the penalty for that with these people is being stoned to death?"

"Because I totally care if they throw rocks at me."

"I care! We're practicing going incognito here! If they throw rocks at you and you don't die, that rather spectacularly blows our cover, now doesn't it?" She sighed. "Why are you making this so difficult? Just copy my form and de-age it."

Q looked askance at his father's statuesque, voluptuously feminine manifestation. "I just don't feel comfortable looking like that."

"Well then for the sake of the Continuum, pick a better form for yourself! Do you really want to be having to drop your pants on a regular basis to prove you're a girl, or else blow this entire exercise? Sometimes I think you want to fail."

"Well, I don't really want to be going to some stupid Amazon planet incognito! What's the fun if we can't throw our powers around and startle the natives a little?"

"I don't know. Yet. And we're not going to find out if you can't figure out how to take a convincing female form, here." She sighed again. "Look, when you're an adult, if all you ever want to do is interact with them as a Q, more power to you. You can limit yourself that way, if you really want to. But as long as you are a child, and as long as I am training you, you'll do what I say, and I say that impersonating mortals and being able to walk amongst them without revealing yourself is an important skill that every Q should have, and unless you want to go to these festivities as my slave instead of my kid, you're going to have to be a girl. And I can't believe you're giving me such a hard time over this. It's a body made of meat. Why does it even matter what gender it is?"

"It just does," Q said sullenly. "I don't like female forms."

"Well, give yourself the most feminine features you can imagine and a penis, then, if you're so desperate to have a male form. No one will bother to check if you've got an hourglass shape."

"You're missing the point," Q mumbled. "I don't want to look like a girl. The penis isn't really the important part."

Q's father shook her head. "I truly don't understand you." Ostentatiously she looked upward. "This is my punishment, isn't it, Q? Somehow you all managed to collaborate behind my back to make sure that my child would be just as stubborn and recalcitrant as I was, only in completely different ways, just to make sure he would irritate me every bit as much as I irritated all of you. It's a really neat trick, given that I thought Q and I were solely responsible for his creation. Someday you'll all have to share with me how you did it."

"I don't even want to go," Q complained. "I don't care about some stupid Amazon planet and their stupid gladiator festival."

"Did you or did you not tell me that you thought your mother's fetish for wargaming was deeply intriguing and you were eager to experiment with playing at combat?"

"Yeah, in a war! Not a gladiator festival thingy!"

"You know, the last time I brought this up, you said you were thrilled at the notion of watching so many scantily clad humanoid females try to almost kill each other."

"That was before you told me I'd have to go in a female form because the guys are all slaves and they don't get to fight. Why can't I go do a gladiator festival thingy on some planet where the warriors are men, like, oh, I don't know, ninety-seven percent of all the planet with gladiator festivals out there?"

"Because you're giving me a hard time with this. A Q can't be limited by the gender of their chosen form any more than we can be limited by the species."

"But it's okay to be limited by always having dark hair, when you're in a species with hair."

Q's father sighed ostentatiously, and the hair color on her body changed from dark brown to flaming red. "Fine. See, I don't argue for half an hour when someone points out that I'm being limited in my form choices. I just change the form."

"I just don't want to do it anymore."

The humanoid features of his father's face grew very hard, and the emotions projected on the outer surface of her aura shifted to genuine anger and grim determination. "And that is exactly why you're going to. Now take a decent form or I will choose one for you."

Q could just imagine what sort of form his father would come up with for him at this point. Probably a six-year-old girl, or a tiny little thing with disproportionately sized female accoutrements. "Fine," he groused, and made the form he was wearing just a little bit more female looking, with slightly larger breasts and a slightly softer face, while changing his tunic to one with a deep V to expose what little cleavage he was willing to have. "Is this girly enough for you?"

"Perfect," his father said. "Now let's go watch the show. If we're very lucky, one of the mortals will do something egregiously stupid and die in a particularly hilarious way."

"Do we get to laugh if they do?"

"Not where the mortals can hear it, kiddo. Just laugh to me privately."

Q had to admit the gladiator festival was kind of fun, particularly the part where his father insulted some woman's mother, grandmother, clan and general intelligence level, the woman challenged her to a duel, and instead of his father actually fighting her, Q himself stepped in and beat the woman in combat for her insults of his "mother". His father actually praised him, telling him he handled the combat "gracefully", making it look as if he really did have to work to win the fight instead of being implausibly perfect.

Afterward, his father, as usual, had better things to do than to continue to hang around with him. Which was fine by Q. He had better things to do than hang around with his dad all the time, either. Feeling rather pumped up by having managed to do so well at the festival, he decided to drop in on his mother, an activity he preferred to engage in only when his self-confidence was at its highest.

His mother was wargaming again, sitting in a bar in the form of a Klingon warrior slugging down bloodwine and eating phaser-scorched targ with his d'tagh blade and teeth. Q didn't materialize directly in front of him, since his mother would be royally pissed off if Q broke his character in front of the other Klingons; instead he appeared outside the bar, in the form of a teenaged male Klingon, and walked in.

His mother was ignoring him, ostentatiously paying attention to a bard singing some sort of obnoxious, interminable song about Klingons killing other Klingons several centuries ago. So Q strolled up to him insouciantly and said, "Hey, Mom, I wanna talk to you."

Instantly his mother was on his feet, shoving Q back up against the bar with the d'tagh blade at his throat. Which wouldn't have mattered so much, except at the same time he had also crushed off Q's feed from the Continuum, blocking his powers, so if he beat up or killed the body Q was wearing it was going to hurt, a lot. "What did you say to me, insolent boy?" his mother snarled, playing the part.

Q wanted to roll his eyes. If his mother hadn't wanted Q calling him "Mom", maybe he could just have erased everyone's memory of it instead of attacking his own son with a knife. He shielded, and since his father had some of the strongest shields in the Continuum and had trained him in creating his, he successfully blocked his mother's perception of what he was about to do. Then he kicked his mother's kneecap out.

The ersatz Klingon warrior roared with pain, his concentration broken for a moment, which allowed Q to get his powers back. He stopped time, teleported a short distance away, then resumed time and made all the mortals who were watching think he'd dodged quickly. "Yo, wasn't that kind of a rude way to greet your only son?"

"How dare you call me your mother, boy!" his mother snarled. "If you were not my only son, I would kill you where you stand." I am trying to game here. If you make me break character, I swear I will kill your avatar half a dozen times in a row and make you feel the pain each time!

Excuse me, I forgot that you don't know how to do something simple like erase all the mortals' memories, so they don't know you broke character, because you're only like five billion years old. "You can try it, old man," he said aloud.

Yes, I could stop time or erase their memories, but why should I have to? "What do you want, brat?"

"I just want to talk. What, I can't talk to my own father any more?" You're really obsessed with this stuff, aren't you?

"So talk, boy." You don't sound very Klingon. You won't convince anyone by sounding so flippant. You can be disrespectful, but not flippant. The Klingons take themselves very seriously.

I don't care about sounding like a Klingon. They're idiots. "I don't want to talk in the middle of a crowded room. Can we talk privately?"

Impatiently his mother waved his hand, and time stopped. "You are ruining my game. If you don't want to properly stay in character when you interact with me, why should I talk to you?"

Q rolled his eyes. "Because you're my mother?"

"Clearly a mistake. And why do you keep saying 'mother'? I did not carry you in my abdomen; I didn't lay you as an egg. Q and I performed the exact same role in your conception. I am as much your father as your mother, just as Q is. So when I am in a male form, why do you ruin my game by publicly calling me mother?"

Q shrugged. "Dunno. You were in female form whenever we were mortals most of the time when I was a baby. I guess I got used to it." He took a deep breath, although he didn't actually need to breathe. "That's part of what I want to talk about, actually."

"Then talk, child. My time may be infinite, but my patience is not."

Now that he'd gotten to it, he was nervous. Q paced restlessly. "Dad says that it's a big deal that I don't want to take female mortal forms. I don't understand why it's such a thing. I mean, he usually takes forms with dark hair when he takes forms that have hair at all, and no one thinks that's any big deal."

His mother looked at him like he'd manifested a second head. "Any mortal species that has multiple genders involved in reproduction tends to view gender as the primary mode of classifying sentient beings. If you can't take whatever gender would work best for the role you want to play, it handicaps your dealings with mortals. Think. If I was unable to take a male form, I'd be severely limited in what species I can wargame in, and if I could not take a female form, Janeway would never have talked Q into turning to me and you wouldn't exist. Her limited human mind would never have drawn the conclusion that Q and I could reproduce if I'd presented myself as a man."

"Yeah, but so what? Maybe I don't feel like messing with matriarchal societies. There are, like, quadrillions of species where being male works out just fine for any games I want to play. So why does it matter?"

"It wouldn't, if it didn't indicate something wrong with you," his mother said. He stalked around Q, circling him like a warrior sizing Q up for weaknesses. "No Q born Q is limited by a concept of gender."

"Amanda's a girl."

"Your babysitter was born in a mortal body. She may always have been Q, but spending her formative years in a single mortal form has warped her. We forgive the Q who were brought in as mortals and granted our power for their atavistic belief in their own original gender because their minds formed before they were Q, and we knew when we inducted them that they would have these limitations, possibly for eternity. But no Q who was created as a Q has such a limitation."

"Okay, but who cares? I mean, let's just say for the sake of argument, what if I did feel like I had a gender? Why would it matter? I'm still omnipotent, right? So it's not hurting me, or anyone else."

His mother smiled a very nasty smile. "It would hurt Q considerably," he said, meaning Q's father. "You'd be an embarrassment to him, and it would essentially destroy his chances of persuading other Q to do as we did and reproduce, if you were to have such a flaw."

It didn't matter how often Q came up against what he saw as the stunning illogic of his forebears; it was always a shock. And this one in particular hit him where he lived. His father's ambitions and goals, most of which he agreed with, would be thwarted; his father would be deeply disappointed in him, again; and his own desire for there to be other Q his own age, or close to it, would be threatened. Q kept his shields up so his mother couldn't see his sudden fear and despair.

"Good to know," he said lightly. "Thanks, Mom. You've been loads of help." He snapped his fingers, simultaneously putting lacy dance costumes on all the Klingon warriors in the room, unstopping time so they'd all be aware of it, and teleporting away, laughing. Now his mom would have to erase their memories, or his game would be ruined.

Served him right for being such a jerk anyway. Not that Q expected differently, not since the day his mother had stormed out of both his and his father's lives, declaring that his father had ruined him and she was disowning him because she couldn't stand to see him turning into his father.

He hovered aimlessly in space for a while, trying to decide what he should do next, or where he should go. Obviously his mother was not going to be any help, and his father was part of the problem, but there was no way to keep secrets in the Q Continuum; he couldn't go to any other Q without the risk that it would get back to, well, everyone, and cause whatever blowback on his father it was going to cause. As annoying as his father could be sometimes, Q did share his father's political beliefs, mostly that the Continuum was in desperate need of change, and the sooner the better. If he did something to humiliate or embarrass his father again it would damage the cause they both believed in. Besides, as much as he wanted to be flip about it and distance himself from any real feeling... he didn't want to disappoint the only Q who actually seemed to give a damn about him.

He needed advice. If the mortal timeline hadn't wrapped around itself in a circle, he'd know where to get it; ever since his father had started trusting him not to turn her into a newt, he'd gone to his Aunt Kathy whenever he'd had to deal with something that his parents couldn't help him with. But she'd died, going back in time to contact her earlier self, change the timeline to bring her ship home earlier, and save several of her most beloved crew members... as well as saving the Federation from the Borg, the true motivation that she hadn't actually shared with any of the other mortals. Since then, Q had gone back to visit her before the timesplit, on the memorable occasion when his dad had ended up making him mortal for a week and he'd become friends with Icheb, but now that the timesplit had happened, the Admiral Janeway who existed now wasn't the same being as his Aunt Kathy, and he didn't have the history with this one that he'd had with the one who'd spent seventeen years more in the Delta Quadrant than this one had.

But any port in a storm. She was still fundamentally the same person, right? She just didn't know him as well, but on the other hand, after he'd been mortal for a week on her ship, how well did she really have to know him to be able to advise him?

With a thought, Q teleported across millions of light years, materializing himself in the Admiral's office while she was doing paperwork. "Hey, Aunt Kathy! How's it going?"

Admiral Janeway looked up, startled. "Q?"

"I've got a question for you." He sat down on the edge of her desk.

"Don't sit on my desk," she said. "If you need to sit somewhere, why don't you use that chair?" She gestured at the other chair in the room.

"Because it's ugly," Q said. "But I guess I could fix that." He snapped his fingers and teleported into the chair, which he had transformed from a stationary office chair into a spinning chair. Right now he was sitting on it backwards, leaning his elbows on the back of it. He spun around in it a couple of times and ended up facing Janeway. "That better?"

"That's fine," she said. "What was your question?"

"How do you know that you're a woman?"

Her expression got hard, and he could tell she thought this was some kind of setup for a sexual joke. As if. She was his aunt. Well, technically, she was his godmother. Which, come to think of it, was an awfully strange expression given that he was the god and she was the mortal, but whatever. "I'd think an omnipotent being would understand basic human anatomy," she said in a clipped voice.

Q snapped his fingers, turning Aunt Kathy into a man. With first a look of startlement on his face, and then a look of rage, Janeway surged out of his chair, coming to his feet, and shouted "Q!" in a husky baritone voice.

"So, are you a man now?" Q asked.

"Change me back this minute," Janeway snapped.

"Why? I mean, if you were a woman because you had a woman's basic anatomy, now that you've got a man's you should be fine with being a man, right?"

"It doesn't work like that! Does your father know you're here?"

"Actually, no, he doesn't. I've got a privacy shield up. So tell me, Aunt Kathy, are you a man or a woman now?"

"I want you to return me to my normal, female form right now."

"So you feel like you're really a woman, even though you've got a penis?"

Janeway scowled at him. "Yes, Q. I'm really a woman even though you changed me into a man, and if you changed me into a rabbit I would still think of myself as a human, and when you were a human... or an amoeba... you still thought of yourself as a Q. So change me back. I strongly doubt your father will appreciate these shenanigans."

"Here's the question, Aunt Kathy. Why are you a woman? Your body's male, your DNA's male, you could be a dad if you got it on with some woman, so exactly why are you a woman?"

Janeway sighed, his tone sounding deeply put upon. "I've been a woman all my life. That isn't going to change because I spend a few minutes with male anatomy."

Q snapped his fingers and restored Janeway to herself. "So you're a woman because you've always been a woman?"

"I suppose so."

"But aren't there humans who are born feeling like they're boys even though they're girls? So if you were one of those people, you'd feel like a man even though you've been a woman all your life. Right?"

"Well, yes, but if I felt that way they'd run some tests in early childhood and as soon as they could confirm that my self-concept was fully male they'd perform a sex change, preferably before puberty. We don't make people live with the wrong bodies now that we have the technology to make their bodies match their self-concept." She walked around her desk and looked him in the eye. "Q, what is this line of questioning about? Is this just idle curiosity about human gender constructs?"

He shrugged. "We don't have gender in the Continuum. It's an interesting thing."

Janeway looked skeptical. "If you don't have gender in the Continuum, how is it your parents were able to have you?"

Q rolled his eyes. "You don't get outside your box much, do you, Aunt Kathy? Did it look to you like my parents had sex to have me?"

"Well... no. It looked as if they touched fingertips. They did seem to enjoy it, but no, it certainly didn't look like sex."

"You do know that all that stuff was a metaphor, right? No one was really dressed in Civil War uniforms? There weren't really any trees? No one ever really pretended to be a scarecrow?"

"You weren't even born when I went on those trips to the Continuum, Q."

"Yeah, but the thing about being omniscient, see, is that I know everything. Including the things that happened before I existed. I know what you think you saw, and I know what it really was." He got out of his chair and paced. "The way my parents made me was more like the way you'd... uh... I don't know, weave a rug? Or a tapestry. Anyway, it's more like weaving. They took parts of their own, um, I don't know what you'd call it... their essence? Something like that. And they wove those parts together into me. It used to be, when the Continuum needed new Q, the whole Continuum would do that, sort of spontaneously generating a new Q out of the, uh, the fabric of the whole Continuum at once."

"I thought the Q never reproduced."

"No, that was just my dad's line of extra grade bullshit. Come on, Aunt Kathy, how does anything exist if it never got made in the first place? The Continuum didn't always exist, we evolved, like you. Only a lot longer ago and with a lot more success at it."

"So the Q did once... have children? In the past?"

"If you could call them children. When the Continuum did it, they were... well, like I am now, without going through the whole part about being a baby. They just got made as teenagers, poof. But the Continuum had a lot of control over exactly what they were going to be like. More like your doctor guy, programmed to have a certain personality, so as they got older they could get more experience and stuff and their personalities could get more complicated, but they started out being something that the Continuum pretty much knew what they were going to be. My dad's great idea was to put it on just one Q, or a couple of Q, to reintroduce randomness, make it more of an art than a science, and plaster his big ego all over the Continuum 'cause what the Continuum totally needed was more of him."

"And why did that stop the war?"

Q parked himself in the chair again and spun around. "Oh, come on, Aunt Kathy, you were there! I didn't stop the war, you did. Well, your crew. And my mom. She gave your crew weapons that mortals could actually use, 'cause up to that point only Q could use the weapons, and because mortals are really tiny in the Continuum and hard for anyone to see, the other Q had no idea how many of you there were around pointing weapons at them, and they weren't dumb so they surrendered. I was just supposed to be proof that change can be positive. Everyone thinks I'm supposed to figure out how to make the peace permanent, except that's totally stupid because that comes from my dad's first idea, the one about having a kid with you. Having a half-human kid might bring new traits to the Continuum that would've helped us learn diplomacy and stuff, but I don't have any traits the Q didn't already have, so where's this idea that I'm going to figure out stuff none of the people who are billions of years older than me could figure out come from? I'm just a symbol, that's all. And unless more Q decide to have kids, I'm a pretty useless symbol."

"I see. Is that why you wanted to talk about human gender? You want other Q to have children?"

"Well, no, not exactly. We don't need gender to have kids. One Q could make a child, although it'd probably come out as practically a clone. Six Q could make a kid, if they could keep from fighting about it. We don't have sperm and eggs and stuff. We just combine the energies from our patterns. So my mom is not female and my dad is not male, which neither of them apparently ever get bored reminding me, and if my dad had done the smart thing and hit up his bald captain dude for a spermly contribution to the baby making thing instead of asking you, he could have had a half human super diplomat kid instead of a screwup like me."

Janeway almost choked on her coffee. "I don't really think Captain Picard would have been any more eager to have a child with Q than I was."

"Shows what you know. They're totally doing it. I mean, okay, they weren't before the war, 'cause falling in love with a mortal was against the rules in those days so my dad was trying to pretend he had some plausible deniability even though everyone in the Continuum knew he had it bad, and I think he picked you because he could tell everyone he just wanted you for your DNA, whereas no one would've believed him if he'd tried to tell that particular whopper about Picard. Also, he was too chicken to be pregnant himself, 'cause the way you human women make babies inside you? That is totally gross."

Janeway blinked repeatedly. "Captain Picard is sleeping with your father?"

"Technically I don't think any sleep is involved, but that's really got nothing to do with my question."

"Which is what? I'm still not sure what your point is, Q."

"I already said." He swung himself out of the chair again and paced over to the wall, where he grabbed an imaginary skyhook and used it to walk halfway up the wall, then kicked off the wall, flipped around and landed in the chair, which spun around several times as he hit. When it stopped spinning he said, "I want to know how you know you're a woman. I mean, you say it's because you've had a female body all your life, but there's those humans we talked about who feel like their bodies aren't the right gender, so how can that be it?"

She sighed. "I don't know. I never really thought about it, since I do feel my body and my sense of self are in accord. You'd be better off asking a human who's had a sex change."

"You know any?"

He could hear her think about her childhood friend Bill, who had been a girl named Andrea until they'd both been about 8 and who had had the reassignment procedure and name change done then. Then she thought about how Bill, who she hadn't seen in years, would likely react to an obnoxious teenage entity turning up on his doorstep to ask all kinds of intrusive personal questions about a decision he'd made when he was 8. "No," she said, "not really."

Q considered calling her on it, but he decided that he really didn't want to have a conversation with this Bill guy anyway. "Right, I can see you offering me a veritable plethora of choices of people to talk to who aren't you."

She sighed. "Why exactly does this topic fascinate you so much? This seems like a little more than mere curiosity."

That was kind of what he'd been afraid she would ask. Q swung himself around in the chair so that instead of sitting facing the back of the chair with his arms on the back, he was sitting with his back against the back of the chair. He tipped it back as far as it would go before gravity would unbalance it, and then tipped it back farther than that, using his powers to keep it from falling over. Looking at the ceiling, he said, "I, uh, I think I might, uh..." Oh, great. Tongue-tied. That certainly made him look sophisticated and powerful. He took a deep breath and blurted, "I think I'm a guy."

"Well, you are in a male form."

Q hit himself in the head ostentatiously. "Aunt Kathy, could you have missed the point any harder if I'd fired it off in the opposite direction, twenty million light years away from here? It's got nothing to do with being in a male form. I'm in a male form because I think I'm a guy, not the other way around."

"Okay." Janeway got up and walked over to him, crouching down next to the chair so she was still on her feet but much closer to eye level with him. "Why is this idea upsetting you? You feel as if you're male, so you're in a male form. I don't see the problem. Your people can be any gender they want."

"Right, what we look like to you. But what we really are, we don't have a gender. I haven't got anything any other Q hasn't got. Well, except parents but I'm talking about dangly bits, innies versus outies. When my parents made me, they used their entire essences to do it; we don't have genitals, so we can't have gender. So I'm not male."

"Yes, of course."

"Except I am." He stood up suddenly, the chair almost smacking Aunt Kathy in the nose as it suddenly fell over without his power sustaining its lack of compulsion to follow gravity's rules. "I can't explain it. But I just feel like I'm male. Even though, physically, in my true form, I'm not anything."

"Why is this a problem? Your father seems perfectly content to be seen as a man."

Q stared at Janeway, the staggering weight of her misconception appalling him badly enough to leave him tongue-tied again. He almost flashed out in utter disgust at her mind-numbing stupidity, until he realized that in fact, Aunt Kathy had only ever seen his father in a single form. He sighed. It was so hard to remember that mortals didn't know everything, and that you couldn't hold their ignorance against them because it wasn't their fault they were primitive weaklings.

"A week ago, my dad and I went to this gladiator festival thingy on the planet Sereles, in the Beta Quadrant, way waaay out there." He gestured in the general direction. "Men are slaves there and women are warriors, so we had to go as women if we wanted to see the fighting. Then I went and had a conversation with my mom, who's wargaming in the avatar of a male Klingon warrior, and he practically slit my throat just 'cause I called him 'Mom' to mess with him. Because, if you want to get technical about it, my dad is not my dad and my mom is not my mom. They're both my parents, but the only reason I call one dad and the other mom consistently when I'm talking to you is you don't know who I'm talking about when I say Q."

"I'm sure your father... or if you prefer, the parent who originally wanted you to be born in the first place... is perfectly comfortable taking female forms, but he and your other parent did sound as if he's most often male, when they talked about their history."

"What, you mean the part where he claimed to be tomcatting all over the galaxy and she claimed to be all jealous and stuff?"

Janeway blinked. "I'm fairly sure she really was jealous."

"Oh, totally, because a mortal who's gonna live, like what, a century tops, is such a threat to an immortal omnipotent being who goes for ten thousand years at a time without saying hi to her supposed loverboy."

"Well, jealousy doesn't need to be rational."

"I think I know my mom better than you do, Aunt Kathy. She wasn't jealous like, 'I'm a woman and this mortal skank is macking on my man!' She was jealous like 'You do all this to try to convince me that I should join your side in the war, and when I tell you I need to think about it because I'm not sure I believe in your cause, you run off to try to get a mortal to help you! Whatever happened to actually trying to persuade people instead of giving up on them and turning to mortals instead?' Of course she wasn't gonna explain all that, so she just short-handed it. When you see two Q talking to each other in front of you, we're using metaphors and translations so you can understand us, and if it would take a long time to explain the real reason we're mad at another Q, we'll just make something up that's plausible and expresses the emotion we wanna express in a way you'll understand it. And then my dad played along with it because you human women are more likely to mate with a guy if other women are interested in him than if you think he's a total loser who couldn't get laid for money."

"So your mother was never actually jealous of your father's interest in me?"

"Well, she was, but not because he wanted to sleep with you. She wouldn't have cared about that. She was jealous of the fact that he was going to you for help. But if she said that in front of you then oh noes, the mere mortal would know the mighty Q can actually get their feelings hurt, so she turned it into something she wouldn't have to explain or look bad about because you'd expect that kind of thing."

"And your people do this... often?"

"All the time, Aunt Kathy, all the time." He plopped himself down on her desk. "What you don't get is, it's all an act. I mean, most of the time it's a true act. Like, you can't actually understand what we really are, so we translate our feelings and our behavior into something that you'll understand, and sometimes you'll understand it better if it's not technically 100% true. So we might be kind of lying in order to express something that's more true, that you wouldn't get if we told the truth. Or, you know, we might just be putting on a show because we feel like it." Janeway had walked over toward him, as if she were heading back to sit at her desk. He looked up at her. "My dad takes male form with humans because he started out taking male form with humans and if he changed it now, you might not be able to get your tiny mortal brain around the idea that it's still him. Also, he takes male form with a lot of humanoids because a lot of humanoids think men are scarier and he's usually trying to make people scared when he first makes contact, because that's what he does. But that doesn't mean he is actually male. If he's got a role that would work better if he was a woman, he'll be a woman. Or an androgyne. Or a giant cloud of soul-sucking energy. Or whatever." Q shook his head. "But I'm different."

"So what you're saying is that your parents, and all of the rest of the Q in fact, have no inherent sense of gender, and just pretend that they have one to make it easier for us mortals. But you, in fact, have a sense of yourself as male."

Q looked at the floor dejectedly. "Um... yeah. Yeah, that about sums it up."

"All right, I think I understand what you're saying so far... but I haven't heard yet why this is a problem."

"Because," an adult human male voice said, "only mortals and primitive throwbacks have genders, and if the first child born in the Q Continuum ever were to show such a tremendous defect, it would call into question the entire decision to allow reproduction and suggest that the Continuum is on the verge of de-evolving."

Q whipped around the moment he heard the voice. How had he not sensed his father reading through his privacy shield, let alone coming in? "I had a privacy shield up! You're not supposed to be listening!" he yelled, rather more shrilly than he'd wanted to.

His father gave him a very patronizing, condescending look. "The next time you want some privacy from me, you might possibly want to consider not dragging yourself and your privacy screen into an area that I'm frequently watching? For example, one of my territories? Like, I don't know, my second favorite human ever? Just maybe, you'd think, seeing a giant Q privacy screen suddenly block my ability to see one of my favorite mortals might possibly tip me off that there's a Q there who doesn't want me to see what they're doing? Do you think?"

"You're supposed to leave a privacy screen alone!"

"You're also not supposed to intrude on another Q's territory. Which meant that either the Q I couldn't see was breaking the rules and quite possibly up to something nefarious that I would have to investigate to protect my interest in these mortals, or it was you, and you're not supposed to hide what you're doing from me."

Janeway took a deep breath. "Q, I appreciate that you're concerned for your son, and I'm glad you came to investigate to make sure we weren't being attacked by any renegade Q, but you do have to give your children some space to seek advice from adults who aren't you. If Junior had wanted to come to you with his problem, he would have."

Q's father rolled his eyes. "You're thinking of mortal children and mortal needs, Kathy. The Q have no real expectation of privacy from one another. Junior's been there for any number of things I'd have preferred to shelter him from."

"Yeah, like all that weird stuff you did with the other--"

"That's quite enough of that, thank you," his father interrupted. Q smirked.

"Still, if he'd wanted to discuss the problem with you I doubt he'd be here. Why would a Q go to a human for advice if he felt he had any other options?"

"Because he doesn't like his other options, which are to stop telling fantasy stories about himself, or itself, or Qself to be accurate, and quit pretending that he's the oppressed last bastion of masculinity in the Q Continuum or something like that." His father glared at him. "I should be impressed. I wouldn't have thought you'd be able to come up with a way that would irritate me nearly so much without actually breaking any laws."

"Because I'm totally doing this just to irritate you. My entire life is all about you, after all."

"Well, why else would you be doing it? You can't possibly be sincere. The Q don't have gender."

"None of you do?" Janeway asked. "You don't feel the slightest preference for a male form? No Q has a preference for being one sex or the other?"

His father scowled. "I have a strong preference for a male form when dealing with humanoids, because the fact that your males are bigger, stronger and not burdened with childbearing, coupled with the fact that you are all primitive barbarians who think might makes right, means that in most humanoid species the males enslaved the females for millennia and even some of the ones that have warp technology haven't fully gotten over it. I rather prefer that mortals' first assessment of me is not generally based on how well I conform to their notion of the ideal servant and sex toy. But that's not my problem, that's your problem. As for Q with gender, all the ones who are rigidly attached to some notion of what sex they are were actually born mortal. We have five Q who were mortals given the power of the Q and inducted into our ranks, and one child who was born in a mortal body and naturally manifested her Q nature as an adolescent. It's understandable, even forgiveable, in them that they can't quite get past what they imprinted on in their early development. But Junior here was born a Q, in the Continuum. He has no excuse."

"No human looks at women as ideal servants and sex toys anymore, Q. You're going to have to do better than that if you're trying to explain why you always appear male. And if the Q are capable of having a perception of gender... why couldn't a Q be born with such a perception? Humans can be born with a sense of gender that doesn't match their bodies, or a sense of having no gender, so why can't a being that has no biological gender be born with a sense of one anyway?"

"Because the Q are vastly more evolved than you are. And I think you would have an entirely different opinion of humans if you could read minds."

"I've met plenty of Betazoid women who don't seem to think that humans all consider women to be inferior. And wasn't the entire point of fighting your war to introduce new things, new ideas to the Continuum? Didn't you have a child to bring change and transformation? So now he's brought a change, a sense of having a gender, and you don't like it. Well, tough, Q, no one ever said change would always be changes you like."

"This is not a change the Continuum needs!" his father shouted. "I wanted a child so we could stop de-evolving into primitives like we did with the war, not so we could find new and different ways to regress to your level!"

"Q, neither your son nor I asked you to come here, and if you're going to stand in my office screaming at me the least you could do is restrain yourself out of consideration for your son's feelings!"

Q had to interject there. "Yeah, Dad, wasn't arguing with Mom in front of me about whose fault it was I'm such a screwup good enough for you? You gotta do the same thing with my godmother too?"

Q's father actually winced, and his aura flashed a momentary spike of guilt and pain before he closed himself off again. "Fine." He turned on Q. "Go. Get. The grownups are talking here."

"I was here first!"

"And as you clearly expressed that you don't want to listen to me arguing with someone about you, again, I'll spare your oh-so-sensitive feelings. Go."

"It's all right, Q," Janeway said gently, this time to him and not his father. "Your father's right; if we're going to have this conversation it should be privately. And since he insists on having this conversation, it would be better if you left."

"Fine," Q said, ostentatiously rolling his eyes. "It wasn't like I wanted to listen to the two of you blathering anyway."

He left, and his father put up a privacy screen. But, of course, he did want to listen to the two of them blathering. He was a Q -- he couldn't willingly blind himself to information. So he turned on the recording function of the cameras and other scanning devices in Janeway's office, and re-routed the feed directly to his mind; Starfleet had a full complement of recorders in every room in their facilities that wasn't a bathroom or sleeping area. It was generally standard Q protocol to disable the recorders to prevent from being interrupted by random security grunts who somehow thought their phasers would do something against a Q, so Q had turned off the feed when he arrived, and the fact that he'd been the one to turn it off meant that he could easily turn it back on surreptitiously without his father noticing.

Getting nothing but sound and visual, nothing of what they were really thinking except what he could guess from their words and body language, was irritating, but not as irritating as being shut out completely would have been, and they'd be more honest if they thought he wasn't watching. His father and mother fighting about him when he'd been a little kid had hurt still hurt, to be truthful, but he was a big Q now and he had defenses. He could handle the truth.

Janeway was saying, "...so adamant that this is a step backwards? Honestly, I don't see what impact it could possibly have. So he feels like he's male... why is this even an issue?"

"You can't possibly grasp the nature of the challenges we face as Q."

"Maybe not, but you and Quinn managed to explain to me the nature of the challenge of immortality. How hard can the challenge of gender be to explain?"

His father paced. "All Q are equal. It's the fundamental underpinning of our society. We're all the same, deep down. There isn't supposed to be any hierarchy, any class system... admittedly honored more in the breach than in the fact, but that's why we had a war, and I don't want to see another one start. It's vitally important that all Q be able to fully and completely empathize with every other Q, or we will suffer discontinuity interruptions in the Continuum, breakage points that allow us to develop enough hate and mistrust of our fellows that we can actually bring ourselves to take up arms. And now that the arms have been invented and actually used, it's even more critical that we avoid anything which could create artificial distinctions between Q."

"I'm with you so far."

"Well, that's the crux of it. Gender is a totally meaningless distinction that every mortal species which has one makes an enormous production out of, and nine times out of ten a caste system results where one gender dominates the other. A mere four hundred years ago, Kathy, you would not be an admiral, or a ship captain, unless you had disguised yourself as a man and your disguise was so perfect that it had lasted for years. You think you have problems with isolation in your romantic life now, imagine never being able to express love for anyone because it might give you away."

"Yes, but humanity isn't like that now."

"No?" His father looked at Janeway hard. "Tell me, Admiral, what percentage of starship captains in the Fleet are female?"

"22%. It used to be a little higher, but I was promoted out of the captain's chair and Captain Riker was promoted to it, so the numbers have shifted a bit."

"And how many cadets at the Academy are female? Percentage-wise."

"53%, but not all of them enter command track. And not all of them are human."

"What percentage of the human cadets are female?"

"I don't know, I've never seen that statistic."

"56%. A number of the alien species have serious imbalances in favor of male cadets. What percentage of officers are female?"

"I think it's very close to 50%."

"Yes. 51% of Starfleet officers are female. But 22% are captains. What's that tell you?"

"That no one thinks a pregnant human should be out there risking herself in the captain's chair, so when captains decide they want to start a family they are promoted to admiral or made commanders of starbases and stations. We don't have a shortage of women in the captain's rank, Q, we have a shortage of women who are actually captaining starships, and that's just biology."

"Really? I was unaware that being pregnant was so strenuous for your species. I suppose that's why Commander Troi just got exiled to Betazed to have her baby. Oh, wait, no she didn't. She's still serving aboard the Titan with her hairy beast of a husband as her captain.. And I clearly recall how you told Samantha Wildman that she should stay behind on Deep Space Nine because her medical record showed that she'd just become pregnant. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, that didn't happen either. In fact I think she took a total of four weeks off her job, and this was after she'd suffered the trauma of watching her baby die in front of her, so regardless of acquiring an alternate universe replacement baby right away you'd think she would have had a bit of psychological dysfunction to work through before being able to return to work. But no, she picked up the reins and went back to her job right away."

"Yes, but it's different when you're the captain."

"Given that the captain is supposed, according to regulations, to stay safe aboard the ship while the first officer takes all the risks, why? A starbase isn't any safer than a starship for a person who never goes down to a planet to get shot at by aliens with bumpy foreheads."

"Q, starbases are much safer. That's why we allow children and families aboard starbases, and not aboard starships generally."

"And that's why starship captains who are fathers all drop out to command starbases." Q's father smacked himself in the forehead. "Wait, I'm sorry, they don't! They continue to run gallivanting around the universe and let the mother of the child raise the kid back on that safe starbase. Unless the mother is dead, and then they take that lateral almost-demotion to a starbase. So would you like to tell me why the rules are different for mothers versus fathers, and how it ends up that the proportion of men to women changes from one-half to almost four-fifths by the time you get from Ensign to starship captain, and yet human beings don't distinguish between their sexes at all?"

"I--"

"Or how about your name? Isn't it sweet how when Gretchen Conway married Edward Janeway, they gave you his name and your little sister Phoebe her name? Oh no, I'm wrong about that too, aren't I? It's Phoebe Janeway. For that matter it's Gretchen Janeway. Because despite the fact that Gretchen Conway's parents did all the work of raising her, the fact that she was marrying a fellow was more important than marking her ancestry, even though supposedly that's what you have those extra names for. And despite the fact that she did all the work of pregnancy and donated her mitochondrial DNA to you and did most of the work in raising you... you have your father's ancestral name. But human men and women are exactly equal!"

"Fine," Janeway said, her tone clipped and sharp. "Perhaps humans have some way to go before we achieve full equality between the sexes. But there must be some species that manage it. What about the Vulcans?"

Q's father laughed. "That has to be the worst example you could have thought of, Kathy. Just because they hide the ways that they keep half their race enslaved to the biological needs of the other half doesn't mean they don't do it. Were you aware that by Vulcan law, a married woman can't leave the planet without permission from her husband? Oh, they get permission all the time, but on principle a Vulcan man could trap his wife on their homeworld. Or how about the fact that a Vulcan man or his family can call off a marriage before it happens, but if the woman doesn't want to marry the fellow she's betrothed to, she more or less has to get a boyfriend to go kill him? And she'll end up the property of whoever wins that fight, with no acknowledged rights as a person?"

"That can't be true."

"Oh, but it is. Ask Tuvok. He'll probably tell you they don't talk about it to outsiders, but ask him anyway. But why am I only picking on males? The Hamalki have such advanced physics, they've been known to create proto-universes, but they can't be bothered to figure out a way to avoid having their females eat their fully sentient male partners during mating. Who knows how far they could have advanced, if half the species didn't have a fraction of the lifespan of the other half due to being eaten by the other half? And then there's the Beryllians, who agree with most humanoids that males should be the warriors, but derive from this the notion that the females should run everything because they think if warriors are in charge all you'll get is war, and men are expected to go fight and die on the orders of mothers and sisters who will never personally risk themselves in combat. And if they think this is a bad idea, they're strongly encouraged to castrate themselves, wear women's clothes and declare themselves female, whether they 'feel' like women or not."

"All right, fine, there are a lot of species with gender that do some degree of segregation or oppression based on it. But there are some that don't. Why do you assume the Q Continuum would fall into a pattern of segregation that you don't already have? For that matter, why do you assume that just because your son feels like he has a gender, it means that any other Q would? If this isn't a trend, if it's just how he feels, then what difference could it possibly make?"

On the video screen, Q saw his father sit down heavily in the chair he himself had created. "Because if this is real, and not some elaborate joke on me he's invented solely to embarrass me in front of the Continuum... the only way it could be real is if there is in fact a natural tendency for Q to have gender, a tendency the Continuum has been suppressing as it creates us. Which would mean that if our species starts reproducing by procreation as I have been arguing for... we're going to develop genders. And if we do that it's only a matter of time before one of the genders starts trying to oppress the other." He shook his head. "And that means that my opponents are right, and my strategy for bringing change and growth to the Continuum really will destroy us."

"It's just one Q. Couldn't it be a natural variation?"

"That comes up the absolute first time anyone tries to procreate? He's the only Q created by procreation within the Continuum."

"Well, procreation does tend to involve gender. Maybe your species has some means of reverting back to a gendered nature if you start using sexual reproduction to produce children instead of... whatever it was you used to do."

"I can't see why procreation needs to involve gender. I mean, yes, for mortals making sex cells it makes sense to have one cell mobile and one cell stationary, or they'd tend to miss each other completely, but the Q don't do it like that. Why would we need to specialize roles when we're quite capable of reproducing without having inherent gender?" Q's father looked up. "And it's a clever trick, kiddo, but I know you're watching. You may as well come in."

Q teleported in, trying not to look sheepish. "Hey, I'm not the one who bugged her office. If the mortals in the security office can look in, why can't I?"

"Because I told you not to, but that's beside the point." His father glared at Q. "Just explain something to me. What exactly does it mean that you feel like you're male? You are aware that biologically you have no determinate gender, right?"

"Duh, dad. That would be kind of hard to miss." He struggled to come up with a way to explain to a being who had no idea what it was like to feel fundamentally male or female what that would mean, and came up with a blank. "I can't describe it, okay? Either you get it or you don't. I'm just... the same way you know you're a Q, I know I'm a male Q."

"Except there's a slight problem with that. Biologically, you are a Q, and so am I. Biologically, you are not a male Q."

"Yeah, but when I was human I was still a Q. For that matter when I was an amoeba I was still a Q. The Continuum made you human once, didn't you feel that way? Like it was wrong to be so, so small and limited?"

"Well, of course it's wrong. Who would want to give up power and immortality?"

"Riker did, dude."

His father's aura flashed embarrassment. "That was different. Jean-Luc talked him out of it. Jean-Luc could talk anyone out of anything. I'm rather surprised he wasn't able to talk the Borg Queen out of attacking Earth."

"I don't think it is different. Riker didn't want to be a Q because he wasn't a Q. Amanda decided to be a Q because she was a Q even though she'd never known she was a Q before. You and I want to be Q because we are Q... yeah, and because it's infinitely cooler than being a mortal, but like I said, Riker didn't think so. So if you are something, and it's what you feel like you are, and then you turn into something different, it doesn't feel right."

"But no one turned you into a genderless being. You were born that way."

"Yeah, and Amanda was born a human, but even after you spilled the beans on the Continuum killing her parents she decided to be a Q because she was a Q, even though she thought she was a human. Right?"

"I didn't tell her about her parents, Picard did."

"That's not my point!"

"Your point?" Now his father was angry. "Your point is that you have any number of elaborate rationalizations but when it comes down to it, you can't explain why you feel 'male' or in fact what 'feeling male' entails, and since you're as Q as I am I have to conclude that your inability to explain yourself to me means there's no there there. You can't explain what doesn't exist. You're making all of this up solely to embarrass me. And your mother, I suppose, although she's beyond being embarrassed by you. And I can tolerate the ridiculous stunts, I can tolerate the general havoc and chaos you like to cause, I can even tolerate your playing with the Borg even though I must have told you twenty thousand times not to touch them, but if you're going out of your way to publicly humiliate me in front of the Continuum I will not tolerate it!"

"You know, the whole universe doesn't revolve around you, Dad. It's all about I'm publicly humiliating you, I'm going out of my way to annoy you. Why would I even do that?" Q started out calmly enough, but as he went on, his human voice got louder and more agitated, and his aura projected more and more of his anger and hurt. "In case you didn't notice, you're like the only being in the entire universe that cares about me at all! You're definitely the only Q who gives a damn whether I exist or not, so why would I even want to go out of my way to humiliate you? You think I don't want what you want for the Continuum? You think I wouldn't love it if some other Q would hurry up and have kids so I wouldn't be such a freak, being the only one? You seriously think I'd do anything on purpose to prevent that?"

He was furious enough that he used his human avatar to grab his father's body's upper arms and yell directly in his face, though he knew better than to use any Q-specific means to express his extreme displeasure, since his father could still beat him in a powers fight. "Look, you stupid excuse for a parental unit, I know you're the only Q in the Continuum that loves me! You think I wanted to disappoint you? Make it hard for you? You are such an asshole! It's not all about you, dad, sometimes my life is about me! Did you ever think that maybe sometimes my life is about me?"

The human body was tearing up, eyes watering and chest getting tight. With a thought, he controlled it, but he couldn't stop broadcasting his distress in his Q aura. "This is real. I'm not making it up. I wouldn't, not something like this. I don't want to be a bigger freak than I already am, but I'm not gonna spend eternity lying about what I am either. And I thought you taught me to be honest about who and what I am and not be a big hypocrite. Were you the hypocrite all along? Did you want me to try to lie to the Continuum about what I am? Or just to you?"

"I can't deal with this," his father muttered, and vanished.

Q stared for several seconds at the space where his father had been, not really seeing anything, trying to bring up his shields and block off his emotions so the whole Continuum wouldn't know how upset he was.

Janeway put her hand on his shoulder. It was a measure of his distress that he hadn't actually noticed her coming up behind him. "He'll come around," she said soothingly. "I'm sure this is hard for him to deal with, but he really does love you."

"Yeah, so did my mom. Didn't stop her from disowning me for being a fuckup," Q said bitterly, and teleported away. He didn't need a human mouthing platitudes at him about how everything would be okay. He knew better.

For a long time he floated in nowhere, not doing anything in particular, just watching the universe go by. Someplace there had to be something interesting to do, something going on worth watching, something that would distract him from the vast emptiness he felt. He should have known it was only a matter of time, after all. Probably the whole Continuum was laughing at him for letting himself be hurt by something that could have been predicted from the moment of his birth. When one of the most selfish members of a fundamentally selfish species is the only person who loves you, you should know that it's conditional and it won't last forever. His father had been willing to put up with him for exactly as long as it took Q to find something that upset or embarrassed him too much to endure his son's company anymore, and it wasn't like it would matter to a Q that it wasn't Q's fault.

Someone was behind him then, but it wasn't his dad (or his mother, as if there was any chance of that happening), so he didn't care. "Go away."

"That was fast. Don't you want to know why I'm coming to see you?"

It was an older Q, one of his dad's faction. "Honestly? Not really."

"Yeah? How come?"

Q sighed. Ignoring older Q never actually got them to go away, but he lived in hope. He focused his attention on the older one. "Aren't you the guy who got my dad kicked out of the Continuum?"

"Sure, for about a day. Only took him that long to decide to kill himself." The older Q grinned. "I gotta hand it to you, kid, you totally beat your dad out in that department. You stuck it out a week, with a lot less whining and complaining, and you even managed to make yourself a real friend. Pretty impressive considering that your dad folded like a wet paper napkin."

Part of Q warmed at the praise. Another part squirmed at the embarrassing description of his father. Regardless of his father's opinion of him right now, the entity was still his dad, and he didn't like to think of his dad's faults and failures except as they directly impacted him. On the other hand, the reason he'd done so much better than his father was that his mother enjoyed wargaming in mortal forms and had taken him on several of her campaigns when he was little, so he actually had experience going without his powers, experience his father had never had because his father had never voluntarily gone without power. But if he actually mentioned that, he would be acknowledging that his mother had ever done anything good for him whatsoever, and he wasn't willing to do that. So he shrugged elaborately. "You buttering me up for something? 'Cause if you're hitting on me, I'm totally not interested."

The other Q laughed. "Hitting on you, kid? Trust me, as weird as you think the idea of joining with one of us oldsters is, it's nothing compared to how weird it would be to think about doing it with someone you saw making himself out of a seed." He leaned forward conspiratorially. "'Course, that must make it rough on you. Seeing as how you're the only Q of your generation, and the only one who even comes close used to be your babysitter. It's gonna really suck to be you if no one ever has another kid."

It already really sucks to be me, Q thought morosely, but didn't let the emotion out into his aura. "You got a point here, or are you just rubbing it in?"

"I'm doing an assessment," the other Q said. "You said some pretty interesting things today."

"Fine. I'm sure the whole Continuum is laughing about my little delusion, right?"

"What, that you're male? Naah, most of the Continuum really couldn't care less. No, the part I thought was interesting was the part where you think that your father's the only Q who cares about you. I guess I never thought about how it looked to you."

"How what looked to me?"

"Oh, kid." The other's aura was warm with emotions one almost never saw from a Q-- tenderness, affection, all the things he hadn't gotten from anyone since his mom walked out and his dad had decided he was too old to actually see any direct affection from any other Q and he needed to learn to read between the lines like all the other Q in the Continuum did. "You're the most interesting thing in the Continuum in a billion years! Well, the most interesting thing that isn't killing us all, like the war did, anyway. Most of the freedom faction and half the uncommitteds have been practically in love with you since you were born. We're all interested in how you're doing, we're all practically in awe that you even exist. But in case you didn't notice? Your dad is kind of a jealous ass. After he managed to push Q away from you so he could have you all to himself, and she was actually your mother, we all figured none of us would have a chance to develop any kind of relationship with you until your father backed off."

If Q had been in human form, he would have blinked. This... was not what he'd expected to hear. "So how come the Continuum almost kicked me out for good?"

The other Q shrugged. "You know we don't have the numbers, and the order faction really does hate your guts, you're not wrong about that. It's not about who you are but what you are... although frankly who you are doesn't help. But did you ever check up on the stunt your father pulled to get you reinstated?"

"He said he threatened to quit the Continuum."

"Like that would have worked all on its own? No, he went to us, and we rallied behind you. We all threatened to quit... or, more precisely, create our own Continuum, which would pretty definitively have started the war up again." He grinned. "You're not exactly the savior of the Continuum anyone was expecting, but you've never been boring, and for that alone you've probably held the Continuum together your entire life. None of us want to start the war back up if there's any chance that would mean we don't get to see you grow up."

Q was totally confused. His entire life, it had been an openly known fact within the Continuum that no one wanted to babysit him because he was a brat and too much work. The idea that no one had wanted to babysit him because, as much as his father begged other Q for help with him, they all knew that if he showed any sign of being personally attached to them his father would take it out on them, was completely new. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Just this," the older one said. "He's the only father you've got, but he's not the only Q who gives a damn about you. And he knows it, even if you don't. I don't care how freaked out he is by your supposed grand revelation there, but most of us aren't nearly as invested in trying to believe you're perfect; we know you're weird. You're the first child we've ever had; you couldn't help being weird. I'm gonna admit, the idea of a Q who thinks he's male is pretty freaky, but that was kind of the point to Q making you; you were supposed to bring new things to the Continuum and teach us stuff about ourselves we didn't already know, and no one ever promised anyone it'd all be stuff we'd be happy to learn. So none of us care nearly as much as he does about you being a bit odd. If he doesn't figure out how to accept you for what you are... he's gonna lose you to us, the way Q lost you to him, and he's never gonna put up with that."

The idea that there were other Q who would fight his father for his attention if given the opportunity was actually sufficiently appealing that he was having a hard time believing in it. "So if I, say, went up to one of you guys and wanted to tag along with what you were doing, you'd be okay with that?"

"Sure, long as you remember that if you're the tagalong, then the senior Q's got authority over the project and can tell you what to do if you want to participate."

Q grinned, then lost it. "Even if it's true, my dad isn't going to believe it. He acts like he thinks you all hate me."

The older Q smiled broadly. "Oh, he's gonna believe it. No worries on that score."

"How do you know that?"

The other's smile got bigger, almost malicious, though the malice wasn't directed at Q himself. "Because I'm transmitting this entire conversation directly to him."

His grin became more focused on Q himself. "So if I were you, I'd be expecting a visit from your dad very shortly. If you don't get one... I'm building a planet out of an asteroid belt over in the Andromeda galaxy. Feel free to come help out if you want."

He vanished.

It was, by mortal standards, an hour later when Q's father showed up, which by Q standards was virtually instantaneous. "Has Q been trying to seduce you into his planet-creating project? I have to warn you, the whole thing's hideously dull."

It did sound hideously dull, actually-- why bother to make a planet out of an asteroid belt, when you could just snap your fingers and make the planet out of nothing?-- but Q wasn't going to say so. "I don't know, it could be cool."

"I think you'd appreciate my idea a lot more," Q's father said. "I need someone to pose as the son of the incarnation of ultimate evil on the planet Kadysta, and I'm already being ultimate evil so it'd be a lot less entertaining to play against myself."

"What's on Kadysta?"

"They've got a repressive theocracy trying to stifle space travel, population control, and anti-pollution measures. We're going to insert ourselves into it and then reveal that we're behind it. Completely discredit the theocracy, support the dissident religions, drop some hints to the atheists that actually we're evil aliens and not really demons at all, save the planet and have lots of fun tormenting people while we're doing it. Sound like fun? I saved the antimessiah role for you because I know you like to actually get down and dirty with the mortals."

It was tempting to take the offer-- not the explicit offer, he was obviously going to take that since his father was right, it sounded like a lot of fun-- but the implied offer that they would just sweep the entire conversation under the rug and pretend it hadn't happened. But that wouldn't exactly be honest, and after his whole speech to his father about not being a hypocrite, he wasn't going to knuckle under and pretend to be something he wasn't just to make his father more comfortable. So he looked askance at his dad. "Are we just pretending we didn't have that conversation earlier today, or did you actually want to retroactively alter the timeline?"

His father sighed. "Would either one change anything about you?"

"Uh, let me think. Hmm. No."

"Well, then what good would it do?"

"It'd make you feel better. Apparently."

"Look." His father did the Q equivalent of throwing up his hands, half peace gesture, half exasperation. "I've had it pointed out to me that if this is a joke, I'm falling for it; if it's a phase you're going through, you'll grow out of it; and if it's real... well, if it's real it's not as if I can exactly change it, now can I? So my choices aren't, have a son or have an appropriately ungendered child; my choices are, have a son, or have a son that hates me and wants nothing to do with me. If I am absolutely stuck with having a son... well, I've already dealt with the fact that your basic pattern is heavily modeled on me, and I'm convinced that somehow the Continuum planned it that way as revenge, so I would be forced to raise myself. Next to that, I suppose the gender thing is objectively fairly trivial."

"If it's objectively fairly trivial, it's funny how you acted like it was going to destroy the entire Continuum."

His father looked at him intently. "The faction for order thought that allowing a Q to choose death would destroy the entire Continuum, and we're all still here. I'll be keeping an eye on you, mind, and if others choose to procreate and the children end up gendered, I suppose we'll have to do our best, as the adults in the situation, to prevent you all from deciding to oppress each other. I'm not happy about this development. But--" he shrugged. "You're right. Your life is about you, not about whether I'm happy or not. And if I can't change you by disapproving of what you are, then there's really not much point to me doing it, is there? It's not as if you can change it just by wanting to, or you would have by now."

Q wasn't honestly entirely certain of that. The Q considered it a horrific taboo to change another Q by force, or even with consent, and it was axiomatic that a Q couldn't change their own fundamental nature, but if he were suddenly granted the power to change himself into someone else just to please his father, he wasn't at all sure he would take it. What upset him was not that he was what he was, but that his father and possibly a large number of the Q in the Continuum would have a hard time accepting what he was, and he'd rather they changed their attitudes than that he changed his nature. But since as it happened no Q actually did have the power to change their own nature or consent to be changed, the issue was moot, so he didn't point it out. "You think everyone's going to be so shocked and bothered by it that they won't want to have kids?"

His father smiled sardonically. "I'm hoping to spin it in such a way that it inspires them to try to have children to prove that they're better breeding stock than me, or something."

"Didn't work the last time you tried that."

"Last time I tried that, the problem was that you were a brat. The thing about your little gender issue is that, since there's nothing I can do to affect it, it doesn't actually require any extra work out of me. Whereas you being a brat made everyone think about all the work they'd have to do."

Q grinned. "I'm still a brat, you know. Just because I'm a boy brat doesn't change any of the rest of it."

"I'm well aware of that, believe me." His father made a face. "But you're my brat. Which means that when I'm looking for someone to help me out and participate in one of my little games, you've got a better than average chance of being interested in it. So?"

"I always wanted to be an antimessiah. Can I call myself the Prince of Darkness?"

"Once we do the big reveal, absolutely."

"And I don't have to play a woman at any point in this game?"

"These people've got that oppression by gender thing going full blast. They'd never believe in a female antimessiah, or a female of any high rank in the theocracy anyway."

"Well, then, count me in. Do I get to start any wars?"

"No nuclear ones, or any using weapons that would devastate the biosphere. Otherwise, the more the merrier. I mean, they're supposed to believe when we're done that their theocracy serves their personification of evil. It's rather hard to be a servant of the personification of evil if you won't start any wars."

Q's grin got broader, and he had to restrain himself from practically bouncing with excitement. "This sounds like it's going to be awesome." Maybe it was true that his father was falling all over himself to make peace only because he was jealous, and afraid that Q would find other Q to spend his time with, but he wouldn't be jealous if he didn't care, right? His mother had never tried to make peace with him or mend fences. If his dad was reaching out, obviously the being male thing wasn't the dealbreaker for his dad that being a total brat had been for his mom.

"Let's go, then," his father said, and they both vanished.

[alarajrogers]

Fanfic Reposting Project, Day 47: Tues Aug 23

Continuing my Fanfic Reposting Project.

If you enjoy this stuff, I have some original work available on Amazon.com, with plans to add more soon. Also, I have a Patreon account where I post sneak previews of incomplete chapters, and sometimes content that might not otherwise appear anywhere else for a long while, such as commissioned stories or stuff intended for professional publication. I've begun publishing chapters of an original novel there.

In addition, I have a new blog! Alara Sucks At Everything is a hobby blog discussing sewing, cooking, selling things online, gardening, and other things I suck at.

I’ll be doing 3 posts a day, each one from a different fandom, now including completed multi-part stories. Posts include “First Born Son”, a Star Trek fanfic; “Traitor Chp. 5”, an MLP:FiM fanfic in 5 parts; and “A Letter to a Friend”, an X-Men fanfic.

[alarajrogers]

Voyage of the Harmony (out of context excerpt from MLP SF AU)

Notes: This is a My Little Pony SF space AU, though they’re not in space yet. Humans exist in this universe as another spacefaring race, but there are none in this excerpt. Ponies are ponies, not anthros; they’re just in space (or going to space).

Draws inspiration from the works of Cordwainer Smith, particularly “Scanners Live In Vain” and “The Game of Cat and Dragon”. Also, C. S. Friedman’s “This Alien Shore”, which is also inspired by Cat and Dragon. Also, I am embarrassed to admit, Piers Anthony (one of his only short stories that was actually any good.) 

This is the part where Twilight and Spike go to persuade the reclusive xenomedic Fluttershy to join their crew. Word is, she owns a draconequus.

I think the rest of what you need to understand this excerpt is in the excerpt itself.

Warnings: description of some fairly awful child abuse.

With Spike on her back, Twilight trotted eagerly down the road.  The Dark Queen had gifted Equestria with an especially bright moon tonight, and the close-stars beamed tiny patches of mostly red, warm sunlight, drawn from the sun so far away. It wasn't anything like the light and warmth of Queen Celestia's solar array, let alone an actual sun, but it was better than the perpetual, chilly gloom from when Queen Moon had taken power.

Queen Celestia... No. Twilight wasn't going to think about the lost queen. Not now, not while she was on Equestria. She had to stay focused. Get her crew, load up the ship, and go.

Fluttershy was the last one on her short list. Her backer, Rarity, had introduced her to Rainbow Dash, whose piloting credentials were impeccable.  Rainbow had introduced her to Applejack, apple farmer turned engineer when night fell ten years ago and apples could only be grown in hothouses with grow lamps anymore. Applejack had introduced her to Pinkie Pie, an experienced cook and a mare of sufficient exuberance and cheer to make a fantastic morale officer, and no ship out there risking the Pain of Space dared to go without a morale officer.

All of them were in agreement. The mysterious Fluttershy, hardly ever seen in town, was Ponyville's best xenomedic – which would have sounded awfully like the best gardener in Cloudsdale, except for Ponyville's proximity to the Everfree Forest. Fluttershy had experience treating animals no one else on Equestria even had names for.

Also. She had a draconequus.

Twilight had only worked with the savage, snappish creatures once. The snakelike chimera had been dangerous enough that its handler had kept it muzzled and leashed all the time. It was unpredictable, randomly aggressive toward ponies for no good reason, and ornery, refusing its handler's commands more than seventy percent of the time. She'd counted.

But it had flawlessly navigated the ship through Deep Warp, allowing them to cut transit time to a third of what it would have been in the Warp Corona, and eight times faster than transit in shiftspace.

Even with Rarity's backing, Twilight could never have afforded a draconequus. They were too sadistic and prone to rage to breed well; the species was slowly dying out. And that made them fantastically expensive. Without them, ponies would be limited to transit through the Warp Corona, and would lose their technological edge over humans – who bred some small number of their kind for deliberate insanity so that they could navigate Deep Warp, but humans, like ponies, were fundamentally a harmonious species, dependent on the bonds of friendship. The disharmonious, solitary, nasty draconequui would always be better at handling the chaos of Deep Warp than even an insane human, and ponies weren't capable of manifesting the type of insanity that would let them travel Deep.

If this Fluttershy was willing to join Twilight's crew, and was either a qualified draconequus handler or was willing to lend her draconequus to somepony who was, Twilight's mission could be accomplished in a fraction of the time.

"You think she's really got a draconequus, Twilight?" Spike asked. "They're not exactly pet material, you know?"

"She lives by the Everfree and she treats the wild animals in there," Twilight said. "Who knows but maybe there are feral draconequui hiding in that forest, and she managed to tame one?"

"You don't tame a draconequus."

"Fine, she managed to get one to let her handle it. Maybe she found an egg. Ponies sometimes do find unusual eggs, you know. " She turned her head and grinned up at him.

Spike grinned back. Ponies finding an unusual egg was exactly why he was her assistant.

Fluttershy's house... had magical lamps. All over. Shining sunlight onto what would have been a charmingly bucolic scene – a bubbling brook, a garden, birds chirping in the trees – if not for the black shadows cast in the places where the lamplight fields didn't quite touch each other. Twilight frowned. She should have seen the light shining through the trees, or she should have felt a magical shield. She hadn't perceived either one. And wasn't this Fluttershy a pegasus? She couldn't have enchanted all these sunlamps. Also, didn't Fluttershy know this was dangerous? So many sunlamps would likely brand her a sun-lover, and she'd end up in a dungeon in Canterlot, or worse... Tartarus. When Twilight was a child, the legendary prison had been home only to the worst of the worst, criminals so violent and dangerous they had to be imprisoned deep underground. Now she heard rumors that Queen Moon had been throwing ponies in there for being dissidents, and she believed them.

She trotted up to the door and knocked. Once, twice. Nothing.

She knocked again. And again. Still nothing.  Was Fluttershy even home?

The top of the door – it was in two parts that swung independently – opened a crack, and she caught just the faintest glimpse of a pink mane and a pony face before the pony behind the door stammered, in a whispery feminine voice, "Nopony's home, sorry, we're not buying any, you can leave now!" and slammed the top door shut again.

Twilight tried to open the door with magic, but the inhabitant had already locked it again. She banged on the door with her hoof. "I'm not selling anything!" she shouted. "I'm a friend of Rainbow Dash!"

The top door opened again, a crack. "Rainbow Dash?" the soft, breathy voice asked.

"Yes. I'm the captain of the Harmony, a trading vessel heading out in a few days, and I've hired Rainbow on as the pilot."

"If you know Rainbow Dash," the voice said, almost accusingly, "then who is her favorite Wonderbolt?"

Twilight blinked. "Uh... she never said who her favorite was.  She went on and on about a few of them – I think one of them was named Spitfire? And, uh, Soaring? Sorry, I don't follow sports and I didn't know I'd have to take a quiz."

"Why are you here?"

"Uh... well, Rainbow told me you were the best xenomedic in Equestria." This, like everything else Rainbow had said (except her braggadocio about her own talents – the Pilot Rating Board, and the sports news that Twilight had Spike pull from archives at the library, backed her up on those), was probably an exaggeration. "I wanted to ask you to join my crew."

"Not interested!" The door slammed again. Then opened slightly again. "Um, if that's okay with you." And slammed again.

Spike had been wandering around, looking at the property. He came up to the door. "This is amazing, Twilight! She's got, like, an entire habitat arranged out here. Just like in space, except she's doing it on a planet!"

"She'd kind of have to. She's got very limited sunlight to work with... though I still wonder how she gets away with that. Everything I've heard of Queen Moon... well, let's just say I haven't heard a lot of good things."

"You shouldn't talk like that," the crack in the door whispered. "Her spies are every—wait, is that a baby dragon?"

"I'd like to think I'm a little bit older than a baby," Spike said, somewhat indignantly, puffing his chest out.

Some hasty whispering behind the door, too quiet for Twilight to make out, and then the top door opened again, this time all the way. "You are! You're a baby dragon! Oh, wow, you're so adorable! I never thought I'd see a baby dragon!"

The mare who was suddenly gushing about Spike had to be Fluttershy. She was butter-yellow, with an immense, perfectly styled waterfall of pink mane that Twilight suspected Rarity had to be jealous of, and big blue eyes that were now lit with excitement. "Miss... if I let you in to talk, will you let me pet your dragon?"

"Yes," Twilight said.

Spike puffed his chest out even more. "It isn't up to her, it's up to me. And I say... I never turn down pets from a beautiful mare. I'm Spike the Dragon, and if you let us in you can pet me as much as you like."

"Suave, Spike," Twilight whispered, amused.

"I try."

The bottom door finally opened. "Come in. Would you like tea? I have tea brewing. Oh, but do dragons even drink tea?"

"I love tea," Spike said. "The hotter the better. If you put hot spices in it, like cayenne pepper or something, even better."

"Oh! Oh, I do have some very hot tea. Di – uh, a house guest of mine likes very hot and spicy things too. Oh, and you, miss?"

"I'm a captain, actually, but you can just call me Twilight. And yes, I'd love some tea. Earl Grey, maybe? Hot?"

"Oh, of course, Captain Twilight," Fluttershy said hurriedly. "Let me just go get the water started."

She didn't, in fact, just go get the water started. What she actually did was disappear into the kitchen until the tea kettle started whistling, and then came back out with three cups of tea. "Here you go," she said, setting them down. She then knelt down next to Spike and started stroking his head. "Oh, you're so warm."

Spike leaned back, an expression of apparent bliss on his face.  Twilight knew him well enough to know he wasn't bowled over like he'd been when he'd first met Rarity, but Spike loved attention and affection.  In space, most ponies had assumed he'd be an arrogant jerk, like most gunnery dragons (and probably most dragons, period, regardless of profession), and had steered clear of him. Twilight had always thought that was tragic; Spike was the sweetest person she knew.

"I assume you're Doctor Fluttershy?"

"Oh, um, just Fluttershy is okay? If that's all right?"

"Well, then I insist that you just call me Twilight."

"But... but you're a ship captain. That's much more important than being an animal doctor, isn't it? I mean, you must, uh... lead your crew. Through space." She shuddered. "Space is so scary."

"Space isn't scary," Twilight said. "It's... just another environment. Just like floating cities. You're a pegasus, so you probably came from a floating city, didn't you?"

"Cloudsdale," Fluttershy whispered. "But it was a very scary place. I don't like to fly."

"We've got habitats in space that look just like the area around your cottage!" Spike said. "Except we only run the water when the artificial gravity is on, of course. But lots and lots of animals! And tons of plants!"

"But don't you send animals up to die from the Pain of Space so ponies don't have to?"

Twilight sighed. "No. No, that's... not a myth, exactly, but it's not true either.  In the beginning of space travel, ponies would go into shiftspace under spells to not feel anything – literally anything, no emotion, no sensation – because being cut off from a web of life turns out to cause a lot of pain to harmonious creatures. Ponies who went up with the ability to feel would very quickly suffer from suicidal depression and blind rage, and a lot of physical pain. The humans discovered that if you send animals up, the Pain of Space eases up, but humans don't know much about magical or metaphysical effects, so they thought the animals were somehow absorbing the Pain, and that they'd die in the humans' place. We ponies discovered that what was actually happening was that the magical fields in shiftspace, what we call the Nightmare Force, trigger any creature but a cat, dragon or draconequus into these horrible black feelings, and what resists those fields is a lifeweb in harmony. So we bring the animals up, not to die for us, but to live for us. The magic of their lives, their harmony with the habitats we create, creates a shield against the Pain of Space."

"Oh." Fluttershy considered. "Oh!  That's so much better. I am so glad you explained that to me! I've always had nightmares about space, and the Pain of Space killing poor innocent creatures.  I'm so glad to hear it's not true!"

"Would that make you feel better about joining the crew as our xenomedic?"

Fluttershy rapidly shook her head. "Oh, no no no. Space is still so very scary.  It's up so high, and there's no gravity, except when it's artificial. And a tiny little rock could break your hull open and all the air could leak out and you'd explode in space!"

"Ponies don't explode in space," Twilight said, slightly exasperated.  This mare seemed to have somehow picked up every negative myth about space there was. "That's not what explosive decompression means. And the ATK field protects us against tiny little rocks."

"But there's so many other scary things."

Twilight tried a different tactic. "I heard you have a draconequus?"

Fluttershy blushed. "Well, I don't have him. I mean, he's my friend."

Twilight was sure the chickens in the coop, the tweeting birds in the trees, and the rabbit who was... glaring?... at her, were also Fluttershy's friends, but it said a lot for her prowess with animals if she really had managed to make a pet of a draconequus. "Why do you have a draconequus for a pet if you're so scared of space?"

"Well, he needed someone to take care of him, and somewhere to live."

"But you know they're never happy unless they're in Deep Warp, right?  Don't you think it's cruel to deprive him of space?"

"I... I'm sure Discord could go to space anytime he wanted to... and he is happy.  He's very happy here with me."

Twilight had never heard of a happy draconequus, and didn't think such a thing was possible. "If you won't join our crew, then maybe you'd be willing to lend us the draconequus?  Maybe he's very happy here with you, but I'm sure being in space would also make him happy."

"I'll ask him." Fluttershy put her forehooves to the sides of her mouth. "Discord!" she called. "Could you come down here, please?"

You couldn't ask a draconequus anything. They were animals. They couldn't talk, and their disharmonious nature made them incredibly difficult to train. And they were stupid even for animals. Cats who were trained in gunnery could communicate if they had language implants, as long as they were hooked into the gun system or some other system that could read the output of their implants. You couldn't put speech implants in a draconequus anymore than you could put them in a gecko or a fish.

Twilight did not point this out to Fluttershy. If she'd tamed a feral draconequus, maybe she did have fantastic levels of insight into their behavior and what it meant.

And then a tall, slender creature with a snakelike body, but on legs, walked – on two legs, like a human, a minotaur or a baby dragon – down Fluttershy's staircase. "Fluttershy! You have guests?" it said, in a voice exactly like a stallion's. "You should have called me down sooner!"

Twilight stared at the draconequus in shock, her eye twitching slightly. "That – that draconequus just – talked."

"How rude! Calling me 'that draconequus' like I'm some exhibit in a zoo! Discord, master of chaos, at your service, madame captain." He bowed deeply, with a feathered hat in his hand that hadn't been there a moment ago.

Twilight felt acutely nauseous, and cold, and her vision was graying out at the edges. She'd just felt the flux of chaos, only a flicker, like she was suddenly and without warning in Deep Warp for a nanosecond only. "It—how – I don't—"

"Twilight! Calm down!" Spike said, but his voice was sounding strangely far away.

"Oh dear. She seems to be going into shock? Spike, get some damp, cool towels please. I have a stack of towels in the kitchen, on the counter; just run cold water on a couple of them, squeeze them out so they don't drip, and come back quickly."

"On it!"

"Was it something I said?" the draconequus asked, in a false-soliticious voice that had the undercurrent of a chuckle in it.  "Here, let's get the dear captain onto the couch."

And then she felt it all around her, chaos, seething and mind-breaking like the Deep Warp, lifting and surrounding her. It was too much for her. In terror and shock, Twilight fainted.

When she opened her eyes again, Spike was next to her, pressing the cool compress against her forehead. "...come on, Twi, you gotta wake up. You don't faint from unusual things happening! What's wrong? You gotta wake up and tell me what's wrong!"

"I believe she may be entirely too magic-sensitive for her own good," a male voice said. Who was that? There hadn't been a stallion... no. No, wait. That was the draconequus.

"Oh, dear, is she reacting to your magic? Is there anything we can do for her? I'd bring out the smelling salts, but I don't have a lot of experience with unicorns... or ponies, really, at all..."

Twilight sat up and pointed a hoof accusingly at the draconequus, who was still standing on two legs. And wearing clothes. Aside from the top hat, she hadn't noticed earlier, but he was wearing shorts and an open jacket. "You talked!"

"I did. I do that rather often. It's actually one of my greater pleasures in life."

"Draconequui don't talk."

"Humans didn't believe in unicorns before they met you ponies, and look where you all are now."

"And they don't have magic!"

Discord smiled very thinly, the oddly pony-like jovial expression he'd been wearing replaced with his red eyes fixating on her coldly. Twilight shivered. She'd never been attacked by a draconequus, but they were nasty, fierce beasts. She'd seen plenty of training videos of what not to do near draconequui if you weren't a handler, and knew ponies who'd been nearly ripped apart by one of the beasts. "The interesting thing about magic is that to perform a spell, you have to be sapient. You can have plenty of natural magic, and there's no shortage of magical creatures on Equestria, but they don't do spells. Their bodies just perform the magic for them, and generally it's only one or two things."

"For instance," Fluttershy said eagerly, "timber wolf recombination into a mega-timberwolf. That's very much like a magical spell, but it's instinctive. They can't vary it the way you unicorns can, or the way a pegasus can approach a cloud in different ways, assessing what they want to do and how to do it."

"But draconequui aren't sapient!"

"I've been listening to him for the past five minutes, Twilight," Spike said dryly. "Pretty sure he's sapient."

"How? Are you genetically engineered or something?"

"Ma chère capitaine, you have it backwards. I'm not the one who was interfered with." He sat down on Fluttershy's coffee table. "A little bit sensitive to magic, are you? Either you swooned at my astonishing good looks and incredible erudition, or you sensed the very, very tiny opening I made to the Realm of Chaos.  Do you pass out every time your ship goes in there, or have you never flown with a draconequus?"

 "You--  opened a portal to... the Realm of Chaos? Is that the same thing as Deep Warp? It – it felt like I was suddenly surrounded by Deep Warp. Without a shipfield to protect me. Did you do that?"

"And I'll do it again, as often as I like. If you want me and Fluttershy on your crew, you will most definitely have to get used to it."

"Discord, we're not going to be her crew!" Fluttershy said. "I'm not her crew! I can't go to space!"

"How are you talking?" Twilight asked.

"The same way you are. Once upon a time a mommy draconequus and a daddy draconequus loved each other very much, and then the mommy draconequus laid an egg, and I came out, and they talked to me until I started talking back. Is there something particularly difficult to grasp about this concept?"

"Don't be rude, Discord. She doesn't know the history."

Discord stood up so quickly his swishing tail knocked the coffee table over. "She should know the history!" he snarled suddenly. "Ponies like her are the entire reason—"

Spike jumped onto the couch, trembling, possibly shielding Twilight with his body or possibly taking cover within the range of a magical shield if she cast one, Twilight wasn't sure. But Fluttershy, showing no fear, put her wing on his arm. "Discord. Please. She doesn't know. And if Rainbow vouches for her then I'm sure she's the kind of pony who would be very upset if she did know, and I'm sure she would take your side."

Discord was breathing hard. "She's a spacer. Ponies wanting to go to space and control every last aspect of how they do it is why I was in Petrifax for three hundred years."

Twilight's eyes widened. Petrifax was the legendary ultra-secure ward of Tartarus, itself a maximum security prison. It was almost a death penalty. The Way of Harmony, practiced by all of Equestria for hundreds of years, would never tolerate executing a captive criminal, but Petrifax sealed criminals into magical sleep. Forever, in theory.

"But you're not there now. You're out. You're safe."

"For the moment."

"I... hate to ask, but... why were you in Petrifax?" Twilight asked hesitantly.

"That depends on who you ask. You want the pony version of the story?" He chuckled. "If you listen to ponies, it was because I was a terrorist, fomented chaos, and attempted to overthrow Queen Celestia and take over all of Equestria myself, and came dangerously close to doing so because I'm the most powerful chaoticist, probably ever, but certainly alive back then."

"Uh... how much of that is true?" Spike asked anxiously.

He chuckled again. "All of it."

"Discord..." Fluttershy said warningly.

"What? They won't believe me anyway." He smiled widely, cheerfully, but it never reached his eyes. "And it doesn't matter anyway because I am reformed! Fully and completely obedient to the lawful authority of Equestria, not a single spark of a desire to rule over ponies, or anyone, in my heart." Discord leaned forward into Twilight's face. "I'd give myself a halo to get the point across, but I certainly don't want you fainting again, Captain Sparkle."

Fluttershy sighed. "Discord doesn't want to tell you his version of the story," she said. "Because if he did, and you didn't believe him or you didn't care... that would be very hurtful. He's much more sensitive than he pretends to be."

"Fluttershy, you're doing this all wrong. Don't you have to wait for my back to be turned to gossip about me behind my back?"

"But I don't believe that anypony that Rainbow would have referred to me could be that cold-hearted. Have you met any of Rainbow's other friends?"

"Uh, yeah. Rarity's our backer, and she may come with us as a cat handler because her cat Opal is licensed for gunnery and Spike's still an apprentice. Applejack's signed on as our engineer, and Pinkie Pie's going to be the cook and morale officer. Which is why I need you! Not only are you a xenomedic, but you're obviously experienced at creating the kind of multi-animal habitat we need in space, so I won't need a habiteur."

Fluttershy shook her head. "We're not talking about that right now and anyway I'm not going into space. My point is, that if all of those mares vouch for you... then I think you can be trusted with this information." She turned to Discord. "Do you want to tell her, or should I?"

"Well, since you have your heart set on spilling all my secrets, who I am to stop you?" Discord asked sharply, bitterness in his voice.

"I... I mean, if it's going to cause strife in your... uh, friendship, you don't have to tell me. I was just curious."

"All draconequui are sapient, Twilight."

Twilight blinked at Fluttershy's quiet words. "...What?"

"Or they would be, if... if ponies didn't break them." Her voice went very low and quiet.

"I—" Draconequui were easily the stupidest, hardest to train animal Twilight had ever met who were physically more complex than a small lizard. They couldn't be sapient.  "That doesn't make any sense."

"It does. We... uh, we do things to them. So that... so that they become like animals."

"How? How would you turn a sapient creature into something that isn't? And why?"

"Well, to begin with the how," Discord said, in a tone of false cheer that was completely at odds with what he was actually saying, "you capture adults, and when they lay eggs, you take their eggs from them. And when the baby draconequus hatches, you cut off its thumbs." For the first time, Twilight noticed that Discord had four digits on his mismatched paws, not the three that every other draconequus had, and his were longer and didn't move as a group. "You tape the fingers together so they can't move them independently. And you put them in a tank of warm water, like their egg, but with no light or sound." The bitterness he obviously felt about this was coming through more and more strongly in his voice. "You put a breathing mask on them, with a nipple in it for drinking their food, and you put them in the tank, and you close the lid. For two years. Two years of no sound, no light, no real sensation at all. No one to touch them or hold them or talk to them."

Twilight's jaw worked. She swallowed. "They'd die.  Foals... foals don't live if no one touches them."

"Oh, but these aren't foals, they're draconequui, so it's all perfectly okay. They survive it just fine. Of course, after that they won't let anyone touch them, and they don't comprehend that language even exists, and they live in a state of aggression and fear that keeps them from learning much of anything. Also, did I mention that the solution they're fed isn't draconequus milk, or pony milk, or formula, but something specifically designed to have inadequate proteins and vitamins for brain growth? Physically they recover. Mentally, they do not. Ever." His voice cracked. "Pony foals have an advantage. Ponies are herd animals. Without the herd, they die. Draconequui can live through having no parents, no family, no caretakers, no one to love or care for them at all or even talk to them. You'd think that would be an advantage, but it's not. We can live through being turned into brute, mute beasts. Which means that anyone who wants to exploit our talents can do that to us, and we'll survive, so we can still be used."

Spike said, in a choked voice, "That's... that's horrible."

"They'll get around to doing it to you dragons too, Spike. Just you wait. Sooner or later, oh, what a pain it is to have to pay dragons to ride our spaceships and kill boojums for us! Wouldn't it just be so much better if they could be pets, like cats, and couldn't take care of themselves?"

"That won't happen," Fluttershy said firmly. "Dragons get too big. It takes a very strong pony to be able to restrain a draconequus if it attacks. No pony would be able to restrain a dragon."

"True. And they always have the option of using cats. Humans don't even have dragons – their gunnery teams are always a cat with a human partner. Whereas what draconequui do... is irreplaceable, and no one else can do it. As much as humans like to think they can master chaos, they can't... and ponies, at least, know better."

"Why... why didn't Queen Celestia do something about this?" Twilight whispered.

"A sun-lover, are you?" Twilight's shock and fear must have shown in his face, because he laughed. "Oh, don't worry. No one's going to rat you out to Moonie the Great.  My shield spells don't allow anypony to hear or see anything near the cottage until they get close enough that we can hear them."

"Well." Twilight swallowed. She'd just met Fluttershy.  The fact that Rarity, who shared Twilight's goals, had referred her to Rainbow Dash and Rainbow Dash had told her about Fluttershy, suggested that Fluttershy was not a moon loyalist, but that didn't mean she was on the side of the sun either. "It doesn't really matter what I thought of Queen Celestia, anymore, does it? She was banished or killed over a decade ago, and she's not coming back. We all live under Queen Moon now, and that's just the way it is."

"Very pragmatic of you," Discord said. "So. Now that you know the deep, dark secret of the draconequui... can you see why possibly I might have wanted to foment a little chaos, back when there were any free draconequui who could have benefited from it? Why I thought it might be a good idea to terrify ponies with the wrath of the free draconequui, so they'd make an outcry to their government to stop stealing and torturing our children? Why, when a pragmatic, sensible Queen was just looking out for the interests of her people in a universe that suddenly had another spacefaring race in it, I might have turned to an emotional young Princess for aid, and when she refused to betray her sister for the sake of countless draconequus cubs being tortured into mindlessness, I might have thought it a good idea to depose them both and rule by force?" He went down to one knee, his voice softening. "Why I might have wanted to drive ponies mad, drop the Realm of Chaos on their heads and use my magic to make them terrified, aggressive, paranoid and barely intelligent anymore... just like they were doing to my people's children?"

Twilight bowed her head. "I... I guess... if someone was doing that to pony foals... someone who ruled over me but wasn't even a pony... I might think about doing the same sorts of things." She sighed. And then added hastily, "But of course, Queen Moon has the best interest of our foals in mind. She's not doing anything like that, and obviously she's a pony too! So she'd never..."

She trailed off. Discord's head was bowed as well, but whereas her head bow had been in respect and guilt... he was shaking, eyes tightly closed, tears running down his cheeks. Fluttershy was kneeling by him, her forelegs around him.

"It's all right," she said. "You can cry if you need to. No one here will blame you. It's all right."

"It's never going to be all right," Discord choked out. "It's never going to be all right, Fluttershy, because I failed—there aren't any left—our culture, our civilization, gone, and none of us but me are anything other than animals—"

"I know. I know. It's terrible. But you're alive, and you're free, so you can have hope, right?  Even if you can't ever do anything for the other draconequui, there's one draconequus who can think left and you can make sure he has as happy a life as you can."

"I'm sorry," Twilight said to him. "My race did this to you, and I'm not even sure why—wouldn't intelligent draconequui make better navigators?"

"Oh, much better," he said, lifting his head and wiping the tears off his face with the back of his lion arm. "You've never worked with as amazing a navigator as I am, I can promise you this. But—" He shrugged. "We didn't like some of our working conditions. We wanted the right to be captains ourselves, not just navigators. Or to occupy any position... just because all of us can navigate the Realm of Chaos doesn't mean some of us might not have preferred to be doctors, or cooks. And ponies said, if they gave in to our demands, before long we'd be the only ones running the ships. Because we're the only ones who can take you through what you call Deep Warp, and if we can hold every other position as well, what would stop us from shutting ponies out completely? So we went on strike, and shut down space... or at least, any ships trying to go through the Realm. Right after we'd all discovered that humanity was also in space, competing with Equestria for colony worlds and trade routes." He lowered his head again. "In retrospect... that was a rather big mistake."

Twilight's heart sank. She'd been thinking, surely Queen Celestia couldn't have known, couldn't have had anything to do with it. Queen Celestia was kind, and compassionate.

But if this had happened just after ponies had made first contact with humans, the only other race to have discovered the secrets of the Deep Warp... a race that, while based in harmony as ponies were, was also more aggressive, more xenophobic since they'd had no other intelligent races on their world, and less willing to share territory? A race more willing to kill? And if the draconequui going on strike had run the risk that humanity would take over the stars and leave ponies with nothing, and if giving the draconequui what they wanted had seriously seemed as if it, too, might cut ponies off from space, leaving only the draconequui to cross the stars from Equestria?

It had been wrong. It was still wrong, and she couldn't comprehend how Queen Celestia could have let it go on for three hundred years. But... that initial decision... yes. Yes, the pony who'd been her teacher for five years, before the stars had aligned and her banished sister had returned and deposed her, could have made a cold and practical decision like that. Which made Twilight feel even more guilty.

"Oh," was all she could say, and then, again. "I'm sorry. I know that doesn't really help, but... I'm really sorry."

"Would you free us if you could?" Discord asked, looking down at her (even on his knees he was taller than she was). "Would you take the risk that maybe we might hog space travel all for ourselves, to let children who should grow up to walk and talk and think be free to do that?"

Twilight nodded. "There are humans who can manage the Deep Warp. Even if ponies can't, who's to say that maybe griffins or minotaurs couldn't learn the same trick the humans use? And ponies get along with humans – and most races, honestly – better than griffins, and pegasi and griffins make the best pilots, and if your ATK field fails you're definitely going to want a powerful unicorn aboard, and most habiteurs are earth ponies for a reason. Space travel works best when it's ponies collaborating with other races; the crew I've put together so far is mostly ponies, but we have a dragon, and probably a cat, and I'd be honored to have a talking draconequus for a navigator, if you wanted. And if I ever saw an opportunity to help you free the babies who haven't – who aren't hopeless, yet, and the eggs, and make sure they're raised by good people of whatever species... I'd take it. Because what we're doing to your kind is just wrong."

"Well then." Without warning, Discord flopped at Fluttershy's feet. "Please! Please, please, Fluttershy, please let me go to space! You have no idea how long I've longed to feel the Realms again, you can't even imagine it. Pleeeease."

"Um... I would never want to stop you, Discord. I'd miss you, but I would never want to stand in the way of you doing what you love..."

"No, you don't understand, I need you. I can't manage on my own! You have to come with me, or I can't go!"

"Discord. You can so perfectly well manage on your own, if you're in space with friends. I know that here on Equestria you can't go out in public, but of course if Captain Sparkle knows you're intelligent, you'll get along just fine with her and her crew."

"No, I won't. Ponies don't even like draconequui. And even if they did..." He looked up at her plaintively from his position on the floor. "I'm going to need a handler. I always did before, we all always did. Someone has to help us come back to ourselves when we come out of the Realms, someone has to vouch for us, and make sure we eat, and... and all those things, and I can't trust a trained draconequus handler because they'll think I'm stupid and they'll always be fighting with me to try to make me obey, like an animal. I need you." He lifted his head almost all the way to her head, which was impressive considering that most of his body was still sprawled on the floor. "Please. I promise I'll protect you from space, if you come with me and... and help me."

"But... the animals..."

"If I leave you'll have to turn the sunlamps off. My enchantment won't hold when I'm gone. If you bring them and you come with me, they'll have a nice, bright, sunny habitat, without a madmare trying to micromanage how much light they get. They'll be happier! I'll be happier! You'll be happier because you won't feel like you have to hide out at the edge of the Forest!"

"But it's space," Fluttershy said helplessly.

Spike sauntered up to her. "So, I was looking at your bookshelves and I saw you have a lot of books about animals, and notebooks where you were writing down all kinds of nature watching stuff and things from studying animals you meet?"

"Um, yes," Fluttershy said, obviously as nonplussed by the apparent non sequitur as Twilight was.

Twilight had faith that Spike wasn't just randomly interrupting, though, and his next words bore out her faith. "So, wouldn't you like the opportunity to study a dragon? At close range? A safe, pony-friendly, ba – juvenile dragon, who's used to being a research subject and can even help you organize your notes?"

Fluttershy swallowed. "Um... maybe?"

"And we might be visiting a lot of colony worlds where the flora and fauna haven't been fully catalogued yet," Twilight said. "You might discover an animal no one's ever encountered before."

Discord, now sitting next to Fluttershy rather than sprawled on the floor, pulled her onto his lap, holding her gently. "I know you're scared, Shy," he said. "But I'm scared of what might happen if I leave you here. What if Moon's goons ever do figure out who shut down Cerberus and busted me out of Petrifax?"

Twilight's eyes went huge. "He's... he's not really a computer," Fluttershy whispered. "He's three dog brains, running the whole system. They used dogs because they don't get bored being on watch all the time, but... he's wired in. He never gets to run and play. And if you know some programmers..."

"You broke into Petrifax and released a prisoner?" Twilight stared at her. "You broke into Tartarus?"

"It, um... if you know that the security system is actually kind of a dog, except with three heads instead of one... I'm not really that special. I just had insider knowledge."

"How?"

Fluttershy shook her head. "I can't tell you. I can't even tell Discord. Can't take the risk."

"But if I left you behind and the Mooninites figured out you were the one... Fluttershy, they'll interrogate you, and they'll want to know your accomplices. And they'll torture you. I'm... I can't leave you behind. No matter how much I want to feel the Realms again. You freed me." Discord's head bent and turned sideways so he was looking directly at Fluttershy despite the fact that she was still in his lap. "Please, Fluttershy. Please come with me."

Fluttershy bowed her head and said something in such a tiny voice it was incomprehensible. Discord said, "What was that?" before Twilight had a chance to ask.

She lifted her head. Still in a tiny voice, but at least audible now, she said, "I'll go."

"You will?" Discord stood, lifting Fluttershy into the air as he did so. "Yes! This is wonderful news!" The nauseating feeling of raw Deep Warp fluxed around Twilight for a second, and confetti fell from the air. She swallowed the nausea back down. If he was going to be her navigator, she had to get used to that. It was probably a small price to pay to get a draconequus navigator who was intelligent enough to understand orders and self-controlled enough to not try to rip every pony's face off.

"Great!" Twilight said. "Um, we'll have to make arrangements to get you to the ship. I'm pretty sure you're not going to want to travel in a draconequus cage."

"Given how distinctive in appearance we all are, and the fact that I'm a fugitive from the law... you're correct about that. I could fake being mindless and snarly for a few minutes, but all it would take is one Wanted poster."

They didn't actually use Wanted posters anymore, but the PlaNet probably hadn't existed when he'd last been free, and Fluttershy actually had very little information technology in her home. Discord might not even know what the PlaNet was. He might have to be trained on how to use computers at all. Though the amazing thing about a talking draconequus was not whether or not he knew how to use computers, but that he knew how to talk.

"I'll make some arrangements." Applejack had been a farmer before she'd been an engineer, and farmers had to ship product. Maybe she knew someone discreet who could smuggle a person aboard a ship. "And I'll call you when I've got the details hashed out."

"I don't have a phone," Fluttershy whispered. "They're so loud when they ring."

She could change their ringtone, but Twilight was gathering that Fluttershy's anxiety levels were pathological. And wondered if she'd been this bad before she broke a prisoner out of Petrifax. And how she had done so, and how she had known of this particular prisoner, and why. But she wasn't going to get any of those answers tonight. "All right, I'll send Spike with a message, or come myself."

"Or you can send Rainbow. She knows Discord's smart."

Twilight breathed deeply. Rainbow had said that Fluttershy had a draconequus, but that he was "a royal pain to deal with." She'd been grinning when she'd said it. Dash was another spacer, used to draconequui; of course she'd known that Twilight would take her meaning to be that Fluttershy's draconequus was ornery, like every other member of the species. "I think I'm gonna have a little conversation with Rainbow about that."

"Wait, does this mean I get to work with the most stupendously awesome pegasus pilot ever, Rainbow Dash?" Discord clasped his paws in front of his heart, or where his heart probably was, anyway. "Be still my beating heart!"

"Discord, be nice," Fluttershy advised.

"Oh, I'm sincere. I'd very much like to see if that pilot is even half of what she claims to be." His clasped paws turned into a cat's cradle, steepling and running through each other, like Spike did when he had an idea that he thought was devious.

"If you can't work together with my pilot, you can't be my navigator, Discord," Twilight said. "Whatever's between you and Pilot Dash, can you keep it professional?"

"I am the very soul of professionalism. Besides, by the standards of every other draconequus out there, I could put a whoopee cushion on her seat every day and fireworks in her breakfast cereal and I'd still be infinitely more professional and easier to work with than they are."

He had a point.

Once they were out of Fluttershy's house, Spike took out the smartbook before Twilight even had to ask him to. "So I'm checking off xenomedic, draconequus, and draconequus handler, right?"

"And habiteur, don't forget." She grinned. "I think that's everyone. This is really happening, Spike! I'm really going to be the captain of a crew! Of my very own ship!"

"Well, it'd be kind of silly to register a ship in your name, get a backer, and hire crew members if it wasn't really going to happen," he pointed out.

[alarajrogers]

Pandora’s Hope

Fanfic Reposting Project, Day 46

Fandom: Gatchaman Characters: Sylvia Pandora, AU versions of Ken, Joe, Jun, Berg Katse and Count Egobossera Publication Date:1989

Summary: This is one of those evil-goateed-universe AUs. Rather than creating Galactor, Sosai X infiltrated the ISO when he came to Earth; Ken is his brainwashed puppet figurehead, Zencho no Tori (bird of ill omen) and Jun, under the name Shiratori (Swan), is his second in command. Thus the "heroes" of the story, the Predator team, are the villains of the original -- crime boss Giuseppe Asakura, his son Joe, the twins that never got turned into Berg Katse in this universe, and a young Egobossera who's allied with Asakura. In this story, Sylvia Pandora (the only actual "good guy" in this universe, mother of villain Gel Sadra in the original) goes on a quest to avenge her husband's murder at the hands of the ISO, and ends up getting involved with the Predator team.

Warnings: Story involves mention of rape, also torture and a lot of the general sexism that permeated the original canon. Also, villains commit domestic violence as well as a lot of the other kinds. Also a lot of random Spanish and Japanese, though it’s generally translated right away. Also, exactly no research was done on the Mafia, largely because Gatchaman the series didn’t either. Also, possibly still way too many ellipses.

If you enjoy this stuff, I have some original work available on Amazon.com, with plans to add more soon. Also, I have a Patreon account where I post sneak previews of incomplete chapters, and sometimes content that might not otherwise appear anywhere else for a long while, such as commissioned stories or stuff intended for professional publication. I've begun publishing chapters of an original novel there.

In addition, I have a new blog! Alara Sucks At Everything is a hobby blog discussing sewing, cooking, selling things online, gardening, and other things I suck at.

Zenchô no Tori smiled down at the broken man. "Now see where all your resisting brought you?" he said, almost cheerily. "In the end, we got what we want. We always do."

"Do you want me to kill him now, Zenchô-sama?" the Condor asked.

"Wait. I'm not done talking to him."

People like Domingo Pandora really annoyed Zenchô-- sneaking around, pretending to be legitimate ISO agents, then turning out to be spies. Pandora had, apparently, been a narc who got in over his head. What annoyed Zenchô most about Pandora was that he'd gotten information about ISO off to his wife, and then refused to tell them where the wife lived.

But he'd talked. They always did in the end.

"Guess what, Pandora-kun," he said, still in the same viciously cheery tone. "Now that we know where your wife lives, do you know what we're going to do? If you'd just told us, and spared us this trouble, we would merely have killed her. But since you did have to give us such a hard time, this is what we're going to do: We're going to go find your wife and baby daughter, and then we're going to kill them both, as slowly and painfully as we've tortured you. Aren't you happy to know that?"

Domingo closed his eyes in agony. "Sylvia," he whispered, his lips moving almost silently. "Forgive me..."

"Kill him now," Zenchô said.

The moment Domingo died, Sylvia knew.

She'd suspected it was going to happen. After the letter, she'd lived in fear for him, and then when she never got his phone call...she had known, intellectually, that Domingo was either dead or going to die, and she fled, abandoning her now-- unsafe home. But the moment he actually did die, she felt a shattering emptiness, as if something that had been with her so long she'd ceased to notice it had gone, and she knew her husband was dead.

Sammie in her arms began to cry. Sylvia rocked her baby, tears spilling down her cheeks, as the train carried them farther and farther from their old life. Did you feel it too, my Samantha, little Samita? Did you feel your papá die? She held the little girl as if Sammie were the only spot of comfort in an increasingly cold world.

Mamá Pandora met them at the train station. At first, seeing her by the car, Sylvia felt a moment of real fear-- what's she doing driving? She'll kill herself! Then she realized that someone else ws the driver, a young woman. I hope you can trust her, Mamá, Sylvia thought.

"Sylvita! Mi cara!" Mamá was not young anymore, and limped a trifle as she ran toward Sylvia. "Let me help with the luggage, dear."

"I didn't bring much." Sylvia handed Sammie to her mother-in-law. "Mamá, you take Sammie, and I'll carry my bag, okay?"

"Bueno, bueno. Ah, Samita--" she hugged the baby-- "see how happy Grandmamá is to see you!" Sammie gurgled happily, a beaming smile on her tiny face to match her grandmother's. "Let's go, Vita. Pilar here will drive us home."

They got into the car. "When's Dominguito coming to see me?" Mamá asked.

Sylvia felt gray suddenly. She should have expected this. She'd told Mamá about what happened to Domingo on the phone, but nothing unpleasant stayed in Mamá's poor ravaged mind. She was nothing but a cheerful shell of what had been a passionate, brilliant revolutionary.

“Soon, Mamá," she lied, and had to strangle back a sob. Domingo was never coming home, never again.

As they ate supper, back at Mamá's house, Sylvia found herself wishing bitterly for the old Mamá back, the woman who had saved her from the policia negra, so long ago.

"You do understand that Sammie's in danger," she said. "You'll take care of her, won't you, Mamá?"

"Hijita cara. Of course I will! The old lady's still got some tricks left in her." Mamá spooned up the last of her bean pilaf and leaned back. "Why, when I was with the Bandera Azul..."

That meant another one of Mamá's stories was forthcoming. Sylvia listened only long enough to realize that it was one she knew by heart already, and tuned it out.

Once, Amaranta Castila y de Costa had been a Spanish revolutionary, fighting the oppresive regime formed before WW III. She'd been forced to flee to South America, where she'd changed her last name to Pandora and continued as a revolutionary, fighting with the Bandera Azul-- the Blue Flag-- to liberate countries from military dictatorships. In her time, she'd been a feminist, a warrior, a brilliant strategist-- and then, someone had dropped an overdose of a drug into her wine at a party, and now all that was left of her was kindly Mamá Pandora, who never thought unpleasant things anymore, who could barely remember from day to day what her original name had been. Sylvia remembered the woman that had been with painful clarity-- it had been Amaranta Pandora de España that had saved her life, back when she was a 14-year-old intellectual's daughter fleeing from the Black Police... and it had been that woman's son, Domingo Pandora,that she'd wanted to spend her life with.

They had been excited and tense when Domingo first began investigating ISO's connection with the South American drug traffic. It had been dangerous, sure, they'd known that, but if he pulled it off--! A promotion, a hefty bonus, to help pay for Sylvia's last year of medical school, put off for the sake of a bundle of love named Samantha... And then Sylvia had gotten the letter from Domingo, outlining the terrible scope of ISO operations. The International Science Organization was after nothing less than world domination, and Domingo and Sylvia Pandora had been the only ones who knew it.

And then Domingo had died.

Sylvia finished the last of her bean pilaf. "I'd better feed Sammie," she said. "There's a store around here where you can buy her formula, isn't there?"

"Of course," Mamá said. "Pilar buys everything for me." She glanced at the woman who'd driven them home-- a shy, dark girl who kept looking down. "Isn't that right, Pilar?"

"She might be sick for a few days, with the change from breast to bottle feeding..."

"Hijita cara, my dear daughter. I did raise a son, you know. Samita will be fine in my care."

Sylvia lifted Sammie out of her carry-bed, as the baby began to cry with hunger. "No te molesta, mi Samita," she said softly. "Don't worry, my little Sammie. Mamá's here." She pulled her halter down and put Sammie to her breast, marveling again at how small and soft and tender the little life nourishing itself from her was. Oh, Sammie, she thought, and the tears burned down her cheeks again. I love you so much, I would rather do anything than leave you...but I must. If you're ever to have a happy, safe life, I have to see your father's murderers brought to justice.

The next day, back at the train station, Sammie began to cry hysterically as Sylvia gave her to Mamá. Sylvia looked at her daughter helplessly. "She knows I'm leaving," she whispered softly. "Mi hijita, my little daughter, I'm coming back. Mamá will come back if she possibly can."

Mamá Pandora rocked her. "She'll be fine with Grandmamá," she said to Sylvia. "Go on. Catch your train. I'll take care of la pequeña."

Please, Sylvia thought. Do take care of my little one. She turned and walked up to the platform.

For a moment, watching her, Mamá allowed the old spark to burn in her eyes. Take care of yourself, Sylvita cara. No harm will come to your child while I still have breath in my body. This, Amaranta Pandora de España swears.

Then she turned to Pilar and let the old lady vagueness dominate her appearance again. "Let's go home, Pilar. The soaps are almost on."

I'll take care of Samita, whatever happens. Go, Sylvia. Punish the men who murdered my son.

Giuseppe Asakura, as a general rule, did not like men of the law at all. They were either corrupt, taking money from the men of power to look the other way, or they were rigidly moralistic fools.  He was far more honest, as a don and criminal power, than most men who enforced law-- at least he wasn't a hypocrite.

However, as lawmen went, Toshio Yamaki wasn't half bad at all. Like Asakura, he was a man with a strong set of ethics and a flexible set of morals, permitting compromise without corrupting himself. He had been a high--ranking officer of the Japanese police force, and had been largely in charge of everything to do with ISO's illegal operations. It had been his decision to make a deal with Asakura, to turn a blind eye to Asakura's operations as long as Predator kept ISO in check.

ISO had struck at him for it.

He stubbed out a third cigarette in Asakura's ash tray, after lighting his fourth with it, and said, "This isn't just an interesting story, Asakura."

Asakura took a deep puff on his own cigarette. "Do tell."

Yamaki was getting defensive. "It isn't just that ISO's got plants in the Japanese police. That's important-- damned important-- but from your point of view and mine, not the most important thing. I'm out of a job, and you no longer have a liasion with the police. They'll break you if they can, Asakura."

"In other words, you think it's in my best interests to help you get reinstated?"

"It is in your best interests."

"I'm not all-powerful, Yamaki," Asakura said, with a trace of irritation in his voice. "And I've got even less pull with the Japanese police than you do now."

"I know." Yamaki's fingers played nervously with his cigarette as he talked. He was enormously tense. "But I also know that you don't leave yourself this vulnerable. Buntaro Akechi could break you into tiny pieces, with the information in our files about your operations-- and he will. Predator's a major nuisance to ISO, you know that. You have a plan for dealing with this?"

"How stupid do I look, Yamaki?" Asakura asked. "Yes, I have a plan. Whether it involves somehow miraculously getting you reinstated or not, that remains to be seen."

"Just remember this," Yamaki said. "Even if you go kill Akechi, no doubt he's got superiors who'll get somebody to replace him. Even if you weed ISO out of the police entirely, you'll still be a criminal to the men that are left. ISO's perceived as a bunch of kindly, harmless old eggheads, and in any contest of truth, everyone will believe them before you. It doesn't help that Nambu was so damn charismatic, either."

"No, it doesn't," Asakura agreed.

"You're still going to need a liasion with the police. ISO's going to make you look like the bad guy, every time, unless someone in the police understands the truth."

"Believe it or not, I do understand that, Yamaki. I'll see what I can do." He leaned back and stubbed out his own cigarette.

Yamaki recognized it as a dismissal. "I'll get you whatever information I can," he said, putting out his cigarette and standing.

"You do that."

Yamaki nodded and left.

Asakura swiveled around to face the large mirror. In it, his own image looked back at him, a dark-haired, lean man more than pushing middle age, but still with the devilish good looks of his youth. Now his appearance was tempered by streaks of gray in his hair, lines of experience on his face, giving him a more maturely dangerous look than he'd had when all this began.

"You can come in now," he told the mirror.

It slid aside, and four slim, leonine young adults entered the room, moving with the grace of martial artists. First was the tallest, a slender, almost pretty young man with brilliant, intense eyes that were never still and a thick pile of red-gold hair. His sister was not even half a head shorter, very tall for a female, with a bony lankiness and a beautiful face, hair down to her waist but in many respects her brother's mirror image. The third was a young man with a scarred, feline face and an ice-cold remoteness under pale sun-colored hair, the removed look of one who considered himself above the common run of humanity. And the fourth, smallest and youngest at 18, was a tightly compact young man with shoulder-length red-brown hair, blue eyes burning with inner passions, his face bearing striking similarities to Asakura's own.

They were in many respects different, and in many respects the same. The children of organized crime, they were unlikely saviors of humanity-- but they were the Earth's only hope, the Predator team.

"Opinions?" Asakura asked them.

"Yamaki's scared shitless," Kari said, tossing herself into the plush armchair in the back of the room and contorting herself until she was sitting in it upside down. Asakura glared at her.

"Helpful opinions."

Sergio took the other chair, the one Yamaki had quitted, and Joe perched on his father's desk. "Getting Yamaki reinstated is something we should look into," Sergio said calmly. "It's useful to have a man we can control in the police force."

"Do you think we could control him?" Berke asked.

Sergio closed his eyes and smiled. He opened them slowly, turning to look at Berke, who was currently leaning an elbow on top of Sergio's chair. "If we reinstate him, he should be grateful to us. And if he's not sufficently grateful, we could always remind him..."

Berke shook his head, a sharp, rapid movement. "I'm not sure I agree. If we manage to help him get reinstated, that's a taint that's going to be on him for the rest of his career. He won't dare stick out his neck for us."

"When did he ever stick out his neck for us?" Joe asked.

"Get off my desk, George," Asakura said. "He had one thing right-- we need a liaison with the police. The question is, is it worth the trouble to reinstate him, or should we take the trouble to bring someone else over to us?"

"Reinstate him if we can, what the hell?" Kari said. "If we can't, that's his tough luck. The big question is what do we do about the police plants?"

"Right," Berke said. "Should we let them live, and give them enough rope to hang themselves, or..."

"I say we should kill'em, but I'm almost sure somebody won't agree," Kari said. "Nobody ever does."

"That's because you're a kill-crazy maniac with no understanding of subtlety," Sergio said coolly.

"Really," Berke said, matching his tonelessness.

Joe, acutely uncomfortable at the storm warnings of another major argument in front of his father's impatience, said, "If we don't kill them, we have to come up with some other way to take them out or neutralize them. It might be easier to just kill them."

Giuseppe, grateful for his son's intervention (although he would never admit it), nodded at him. "All right, then, George. When you think of killing someone, you have to think out all the possible consequences. What are the possible consequences of killing Buntaro Akechi?"

Joe's brow furrowed in thought, working out both the obvious and less-obvious answers. His father interjected a few hints. "Remember, the man's a high-ranked police officer, well-liked by his colleagues. He's Zenchô's tool, but most of the world doesn't know Zenchô exists, or that the ISO is anything more than a harmless collection of brains. What would happen if we killed Buntaro Akechi?"

Joe opened his mouth to answer, when Sergio said, "It's obvious. The death would be blamed on us, and the police would move against our operations in Japan."

Asakura glared at him. "I didn't ask you, I asked George." He was well aware that his young "partner" Sergio was more strategically minded than Joe-- he didn't need to hear the answer from him, he was trying to build Joe's skills. Right now Joe was way too impulsive to ever inherit the "business", or even act as a halfway decent second, and Asakura was trying to change that.

Joe scowled at Sergio. "Fine, genius. So what if we kill Akechi and make it look like ISO did it?"

Sergio shrugged. "What motive could ISO possibly have for doing such a thing?" he asked sardonically. "The general public isn't aware that ISO has any illegal connections at all."

"Perhaps," Berke said softly, "we should make them aware."

"That," Kari said, twisting her body up so that she was now right-side up, "is the best idea I've heard yet."

"How so?" Sergio asked.

"Kill Akechi. Let it point to the Birdbrains, not us. Meanwhile, Yamaki is ‘collecting' information on ISO. Let it turn out that Akechi was on the take, tried to defect back and got killed because he knew too much. Whatever information we get out of Akechi before he dies, use that. Yamaki turns up with a dossier on ISO operations-- corroborated by other sources if we can possibly arrange it-- and, since Akechi had him fired, motives begin to look suspect. Yamaki is exonerated by his own people, with no indication that the Egobossera/Asakura Syndicate is involved at all. However, we should outline the plan to Yamaki, record his agreement-- and if he ever forgets the debt he owes us, offer to play the tape for him, as a reminder-- perhaps when he's talking to his superiors?..."

Sergio smiled. When Berke got going, he could be deadly sharp-- it was why Serge maintained a dossier on the twins' darker secrets. Right now he trusted Berke, now when they were all united to destroy Zenchô no Tori and Sosai X, but later, later when ISO was no longer a threat and Sergio Egobossera was old enough to take the reins of his Syndicate...well, he didn't know if Berke Katzen intended to threaten his power or not, but he was taking no chances. He said, "I like it."

Joe nodded. "I like it, too," he said. "I think there's a problem, though."

"Really," Berke said.

Joe was annoyed. "Don't go all defensive on me, Berke. But I don't know any way to get information out of somebody and still make it look like they got killed for knowing too much. Nobody interrogates people they kill for knowing too much."

"Dump the body in a vat of acid, burn it, whatever," Kari said. "Maybe the Birdbrains are just sadists. Or we could use drugs to loosen Akechi's tongue-- he probably doesn't know enough that he'd've been made allergic."

"i thought of that, actually," Berke said. "I'd planned to blow up his house. We get his wife and son out of there for the night, come in, get his information, and then blow up the house. I already checked-- it's far enough away from other houses that nothing else would get hurt."

Asakura nodded slowly. "Good thinking, Berke. Have you thought of a way to get the wife and kid out?"

Berke shook his head. "All I know is that he has them. I don't know enough about his family life."

"All right," Asakura said. "The four of you do the research, work out the plan, and come to me when you're done." It wasn't merely to hone their skills that he often had them plan missions-- he didn't have as much time as he'd like to plan out Predator's missions for them, since he ran the Egobossera/Asakura Syndicate and had to spend most of his time worrying about that. Besides, both Berke and Sergio had minds at least as devious as his own, if not more so, and neither Joe nor Kari were stupid. So he usually let them work out their plans, and he checked them when they were done-- it worked out better all around.

Sylvia Pandora disembarked from the plane at an airport near Tokyo and looked around. The area was milling with people, Japanese and foreigners alike, and she felt very much alone. I mustn't be afraid, she told herself firmly. It's terribly important that I get this information to the police. She suspected that someone on the Argentinian police force had betrayed Domingo, so she couldn't go to them, but she had to tell someone. The letter Domingo had mailed her, with a detailed report on ISO operations, was safe in a safety deposit box back home, where only she or Mamá could open it. She carried a Xerox with her as her proof. The Japanese police had to believe her.

ISO is trying to conquer the world, and only I know about it. It was why she was here, instead of safe in Argentina with Mamá and Sammie. She had to see ISO stopped, to ensure that Sammie would have a safe world to grow up in.

"Care for a cup of coffee?" Chief Akechi asked her.

"No. Thanks." She was jittery enough as it was, without coffee making matters worse.

"Well." Akechi folded his bulky form behind his desk. "If you've come to ask about your husband, I'm sorry, but he hasn't checked in with us..."

"He's not going to." Sylvia took a deep breath. "Chief Akechi, you worked with my husband when he was investigating the drug trade here. Did he tell you who, precisely, he was investigating?"

Akechi shrugged. "I had the impression it was some sort of large Japanese corporation..."

"No, I'm afraid not. He wrote me and told me what he'd discovered...which is why I'm here. They intercepted his reports to his superiors somehow...I'm the only one who has this information."

"And that is?"

"The International Science Organization is trying to take over the world."

Akechi stared at her in frank disbelief for several seconds, then seemed to recollect himself. "That seems a rather large extrapolation for a narcotics investigator," he said.

"It's true. Here's the report." She opened her purse and removed it, handing it to Akechi.

Akechi looked at it and studied it. "This is the only copy?"

"There's another copy in safekeeping. My baby's guardian has it." Actually, what Mama had was access to it, not the document itself, but it was the same thing.

"I see," Akechi said. He pulled out a lighter from his pocket, lit a cigarette with it-- and then touched it to the report.

"What are you doing?" Sylvia cried.

"Destroying the evidence," Akechi said. He took a puff on his cigarette, and smiled. "Thank you for so obligingly dropping yourself into my hands. You were the one thing that worried us."

Sylvia threw herself out of her chair and yanked open the door. Time seemed to twist, everything slowing down with her fury and terror. Two policemen entered; she knocked one down with a shoulder chop, took the other out with a swift knee to the stomach--

--There was a gunshot, and pain shot through her shoulder. The world twisted, grew very far away…

As her vision slowly focused, she heard a male voice say, "Wake up, sleeping beauty." She blinked, and focused on the speaker-- a tall, lithe and muscular man, at least 6 ft. and maybe more, with golden skin revealed under a stylized bird mask. Long, luxuriant wavy brown hair fell down his back, almost to his waist. What little she could see of his face indicated a soft, almost pretty appearance, but there was nothing soft about the hard muscles under the tight tunic and pants. He had a presence that was somehow very chilling and deeply disturbing, a person whose actions could not be predicted.

"Where...am I?" she asked groggily.

"In my hands," the man said. "Which is all that matters. Would you like to know who I am?"

"Yes..."

He smiled viciously. "I am Zenchô no Tori, the Bird of Ill Omens, ruler of ISO. And, at the moment, your own personal demon, Pandora-san." The honorific was laden with sarcasm, and Sylvia felt suddenly very much afraid.

"You're the man who killed Domingo, aren't you?" she asked bitterly.

"Yes. I promised your husband that I'd hurt you as badly as I hurt him, you know, and you've given me a wonderful excuse. Where is the original of the report?"

"I've said. The only person who has access to it is my baby's guardian."

"And who might that be?"

Sylvia forced a laugh. "If you think I'll betray my daughter's life, you really are insane."

"Oh, but your husband betrayed you. Everyone has a breaking point, Pandora-chan. I'll promise you this: tell us right now how to get at that report, and I'll ensure your baby doesn't suffer. But if we have to go to the trouble of forcing it from you, the baby and her guardian will be tortured as slowly and painfully as you will be."

Oh, Sammie....I will never see you again, will I? "I'll die before betraying my baby!"

"You misunderstand, Pandora. The choice isn't death. You don't die until I'm good and ready to kill you. We will break you, sooner or later. You can spare yourself and your child a lot of pain by telling us what we want to know now."

"Never!" Sylvia spat.

Zenchô shrugged. "It's your funeral-- and I do mean that quite literally. Condor."

"Hai?"

For the first time, Sylvia noticed a huge man in a fright mask, standing slightly behind Zenchô. Or rather, she had noticed him before, but attached no importance to him. Now, his stylized bird mask seemed to her to be like an executioner's hood. She listened in growing terror as Zenchô said, "We'll start on a low level and work our way up slowly, that ought to be effective. Keep the first session or so short, and use... outside inducements. It might be best if you took her, what do you think?"

"I think that's an excellent idea, Zenchô-sama." The man leered at her.

"I thought you'd think so. All right, you can have her after the first session, before she gets too badly damaged. Don't hurt her too much-- we want to save the real fireworks for later."

"Thank you, Zenchô-sama." The Condor looked down at Sylvia with an expression of animal hunger. "You're going to be sorry you didn't talk, bitch. Real sorry. But I'm not going to be sorry at all."

Sylvia closed her eyes and tried to force her terror away. I'm doing this for Sammie...Sammie...I must remember that. I cannot break, or Sammie will die. It didn't seem to be affecting her terror, but it strengthened her resolve. I am already dead, she thought, trembling. Nothing that happens to me can matter. I must do my best to ensure that Sammie doesn't follow me.

"She'll probably last about three days or so," Zenchô said. "What a nuisance. You can handle the first session by yourself, Condor-- it'd bore me out of my skull. I'll be in my quarters. Have fun."

On the way out of the interrogation chamber, Zenchô nearly slammed into a white-costumed young woman. "How can you torture her for not betraying her baby?" Shiratori cried.

"Shiratori!" Zenchô stared at her, startled and angry. "How long have you been listening?"

"I came to get you."

Zenchô shrugged her off amd began striding swiftly toward his quarters. The Swan kept after him. "Zenchô, you don't honestly expect her to let you kill her baby!" she cried. "If she's a danger, then kill her, but don't give her to the Condor! That's disgusting! You know that man is no better than an animal!"

Shiratori made no secret of her dislike for the Condor, and though she never openly challenged her lover on such things, Zenchô was sure she was ticked at him for overruling her decision to strip the Condor of his command. Actually, Zenchô didn't much like the Condor either-- the man was stupid and ruled by animal passions-- but he was damned useful as an interrogator, especially since Zenchô didn't have the attention span for prolonged questioning. "Even if you have to interrogate her, you could have used drugs-- you didn't have to give her to the Condor. Zenchô..."

Zenchô closed his eyes and wished fervently that Shiratori would leave him alone. Maybe if he ignored her, she would go away. She didn't, however. As he entered the rooms that served them as personal quarters at this base, she followed him in. "Zenchô, what does it matter if she doesn't tell you where the baby is? You don't have to--"

Zenchô shut her up with a look, a poisonous ice-cold glare. He stripped off his mask, revealing large, beautiful but somehow very cold blue eyes. "Shiratori, you little fool. The baby's guardian has a copy of Domingo Pandora's report on us-- the only copy that exists. If Pandora's superiors get their hands on it, we're in serious trouble. Sosai says--"

"Sosai says! Sosai says! Zenchô, can't we ever think for ourselves?"

Zenchô stared at her. "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, Shiratori. Besides, in this case as with most cases, Sosai is obviously right. Pandora is a danger, the baby is a danger, the babysitter is an especial danger. I have to find out where that damn kid is. Besides, I promised Domingo Pandora that I'd kill his wife and brat as painfully as I killed him, and I always keep my promises."

"You only keep your evil promises," Shiratori said bitterly. "The good ones you break all the time. Zenchô, why must we do such evil things?"

"What do you mean, ‘evil'?" He stared at her in consternation. "That word doesn't mean anything. Everybody calls their opponents evil. Are you my opponent, Shiratori?"

"You know I'm not. I love you, Zenchô. I don't want to see you hurt, ever-- but you don't have to torture her! How would anyone ever get that report? You could just kill her--"

"No! Sosai wants me to have her tortured--"

"And are you just what Sosai wants? Don't you want anything yourself?" Shiratori cried.

That hit close to the bone. "Damn you, leave me alone!" Zenchô shouted, and struck her. Shiratori went flying across the room, her own mask falling off, and landed in a heap, beginning to sob.

"I'm sorry," she wept. "I'm sorry, Zenchô..."

Oh, great. Now she was crying. "Will you shut up?" Zenchô asked. "I don't need to hear you bawling...oh, damn. Shiratori. Shiratori, don't cry. Don't cry. Really."

She fought to control her sobs as he lifted her off the floor gently and held her, trying in his own way to comfort her. As the weeping started to abate, he silenced her the only way he knew how, bending his mouth to hers and kissing her passionately, and the last of the tears stopped as she responded. Just as he himself had been programmed to be X's servant, Shiratori had been programmed to be his lover, no matter what the circumstances. He waved at the door sensor to lock the door behind them. Then he lifted Shiratori, who melted against him as if he were warmth and she were butter, and carried her to the bed they shared.

Fujiko Nikatsu, an old lady who happened to be the mother-in-law of Police Chief Buntaro Akechi, received in the mail notification that she'd won a special sweepstakes. The prize was an all-expenses paid trip to the Disneyland in Japan for two adults and a child. Fujiko wondered how the sweepstakes people had known how desperately she had wanted to go to Disneyland, ever since she was a young girl-- but sighing, with the appropriate self-sacrificial spirit of an aged mother-in-law, she offered the tickets to her daughter and son-in-law.

Buntaro Akechi, privately annoyed that his mother-in-law would even think he would drop everything he was doing to go to Disneyland, for gods' sakes, which might be all right for women and children but which no self-respecting police chief would be caught dead at, graciously offered his ticket back to Fujiko. She could go with his wife and son. Fujiko and her grandson were overjoyed-- Yuriko Akechi was a tad annoyed, since she didn't want to go either, but it would make her old mother happy, and so she agreed to go. Buntaro Akechi's home would thus be occupied by Akechi alone for the next three days.

Kari thought the whole operation had been a ridiculous waste of time and money, not to mention that it might blow their cover-- ISO would certainly not have been so soliticious of innocent lives, and probably would have timed their strike in order to kill Akechi's wife and son as well. Of course, it was nice that the wife and child wouldn't die, but Kari saw no point in going through this whole elaborate rigmarole to save them-- if they died, they died. Shit happens.

However, Berke had come up with the plan in the first place, and so Kari hadn't complained-- not too loudly, at any rate. From her vantage point on Akechi's roof, she could see Berke, Joe and Sergio, dressed in the white bird-styles of ISO's security people, walk up to Akechi's door and knock. It had been decided that, since ISO rarely hired female security guards and since anyone who wanted to check could learn that there were four Predators, the three men would go in with the disguises and Kari would slip in the ninja route. Akechi's home might be traditional Japanese in many respects, but the top window was made of the most modern unbreakbale bulletproof glass. That didn't bother Kari, since the windowsill under it was wooden. A laser cutter on low power burned through the wooden windowframe like it was nothing, and Kari lifted up the window and slipped in soundlessly.

She padded through the house, her grey uniform blending with the shadows, checking to make sure there was nobody else in the house-- and no hidden bugs, either. The debugger whined thinly when she got to the kitchen, and she pressed the button for electromagnetic pulse, frying the microwave oven's circuits along with the hidden mike.

Presumably, the living room where her teammates were chatting with Akechi was clean of other occupants-- she checked the cellar and then came back up, walking brazenly into the living room. "Nobody's around. What did I miss?"

"Yo-- you!" Akechi gasped, backing away from her. "You're-- "

"Predator," Berke said.

"Joe!" Sergio moved blindingly fast, accompanied by the Panther, who hadn't needed his prompting.

In seconds, they had Akechi pinned against the wall. Kari frisked him expertly, deliberately allowing her hands to linger uncomfortably long in certain areas, and by the time she had removed all of Akechi's weaponry he was in a cold sweat. "I don't understand-- I have nothing to steal-- why are you--?"

Joe twisted one of the man's arms painfully. "Don't pretend you don't know, Akechi," he growled.

In a single fluid motion, Berke ripped off his Bird Guard disguise, revealing himself as the Red Wolf. "Calm down, Joe," he said. "You'll have to forgive the Panther here, Akechi; he really dislikes hypocritical slime like you, so he's inclined to get a trifle rough if I don't stop him."

Akechi laughed shakily. "Are you trying to use Good Cop and Bad Cop with me? Come now, Red Wolf, you're insulting my intelligence."

Berke's eyes glittered coldly. "Perhaps we've got reason to. Let's see." He and Kari pulled over an armchair-- Akechi's living room furniture was Western style-- and screwed cuffs into the arms. Then they helped Joe and Sergio muscle Akechi into the chair and cuff him in.

"If we were actually the Birdbrains, we would probably torture you for what we want to know," Berke said. "Fortunately for you, we don't enjoy causing others pain. We have a much simpler solution." He removed a needle from somewhere in his uniform, and raised it.

Light glittered off it as Kari pulled up Akechi's sleeve, none too gently. For a moment he noted the terrified eyes fixed on the needle, and something unpleasant stirred within Berke's psyche. He forced it down and jabbed the needle in.

Akechi's eyes glazed over slowly. Sergio stepped away from him and raked the room with his eyes. "Have we left enough of a trail to ISO?" he asked quietly.

Berke shook his head. "It depends. If anyone was watching us come in..."

"Getting rid of the wife and kid was the weak link," Kari said. "ISO wouldn't do that."

"So you think we should have killed some poor innocent kid, to make this look good?" Joe asked disbelievingly. "You're sick, Kari."

"Akechi's probably ready now," Berke said. He raised his voice. "Buntaro Akechi, can you hear me?"

"Yes." The voice was flat, monotonal.

"Tell me who your superior is. Who do you report to?"

"Shuichi Kaieda."

Kaieda! One of the most influential men in the police, a prefecture commissioner and liasion with international police operations... "What other ISO plants are there in the Japanese police?"

"Kimo-- aaahagahagaggggh!" Akechi suddenly started to scream and writhe, foaming black at the mouth. Black ate through his abdomen, spurted out in gouts of liquid.

"Get away!" Berke shouted, and they all scrambled for a safe distance from Akechi as the black stuff ate his body to a skeletal corpse, then nothing but a puddle on the tatami, slowly eating its way through the reed mats.

"Shit," Berke muttered.

"What the hell was that?" Joe was the first to leave the hiding place and examine the gooey puddle on the floor.

"Don't touch it!" Berke shouted. "Do you want to end up like Akechi?"

"I'm not touching it. Give me a little credit, Berke."

"I agree with Joe," Sergio said. "Berke, what the hell was that?"

"I'm not sure, but I suspect some sort of compound that reacts violently to truth drugs. Damn."

Joe looked up from the goop. "We got one name at least-- Kaieda..."

"Yeah." Berke let out a tight breath. "Do you have any idea how difficult it'll be to get in at Kaieda? And he's probably wired for death 18 different ways..."

"We're hot stuff. We'll manage," Kari said carelessly.

"We can worry about it later," Sergio said. "Since we're obviously not going to get any more out of Akechi..."

"Right." Berke nodded. "Let's do it."

They used very little finesse-- Kari exited the way she had come, and the three men put the bird suits back on and strolled out. As soon as they were out of blast range, Joe pressed a controller box, and Akechi's house went up in a most spectacular conflagration. They got into the car, and Joe drove them off, circling around the woods to wait for Kari. She wasn't long. By that time, they had re-shed the costumes and changed the appearance of the car. When they screeched back out onto the road, it was as a pack of young people, college students maybe, with no resemblance to the killers who had just demolished Buntaro Akechi's life.

Sylvia huddled into herself on the hard little cot, brutalized and violated. Her jailers had gotten the impression that Mamá had the report herself-- desperately she wanted to tell them it wasn't true, that the report was in a safety deposit box, and not in Mamá's hands at all. But if Sylvia died here, Mamá was the only hope-- and a slim hope she was-- of getting the information to the world. Telling ISO about the safety deposit box would change nothing. They would still want to find and kill Mamá, because only she could get at the report... and because they wanted to find Sammie, too, taking sick pleasure at the notion of killing her.

Sylvia did not honestly know if she could have held out for Mamá's sake. She hoped so, but didn't know. But she did know that she could, and would, hold out for Sammie's sake.

Oh, god, it was so hard though.

Bitterly she wondered what sort of sick mind took pleasure in the idea of killing a harmless small baby... and answered her own question. The same sort of sick mind that took pleasure in doing the things the Condor had done to her tonight... no. She refused to remember, walled off the memories of the past several hours and tried to focus on the idea of escape, because it was the only thing that would take her mind off her fear.

Sylvia was no stranger to pain and violation... she had been in the hands of the policia negra, and in escaping, she had encountered many brutal men-- revolutionaries, police, criminals, it didn't much matter. But she had never before been the object of a concerted effort to break her. Tonight's cruelty had just been a foretaste of what was to come... and the knowledge terrifed her badly. If the Condor had been going easy on her, she didn't want to find out what a real effort would look like. Death was beginning to look like a pleasant alternative.

But no. She had one weapon, tiny as it was. Her interrogator had mentioned, when he was describing the horrific fashion of her husband's death, that a man named Kaieda, a policeman, had betrayed Domingo. If she could escape, she could get direct revenge on Domingo's killer. It was an objective of hatred, and thus stronger amidst her pain and impotent grief and anger than her more humanistic reasons for wanting to live were. She knew that Kaieda and Akechi were her enemies-- she could not reasonably hope to bring down Zenchô and the Condor, even if she got her report to receptive hands, but she could hope to bring down her betrayer and her husband's.

At that point, the door opened. Sylvia cringed back, fearing the return of the Condor, but the shadowy figure was too slim to be her tormentor. She levered herself up. "Who-- who are--" she started.

And the slim shape rushed at her. There was not even time for Sylvia to scream before hands found sensitive points and sent her spinning into unconsciousness.

When Sylvia awakened, it was to total darkness. She could feel that a blindfold had been pulled tight around her eyes. Her hands were unbound, though, so she lifted them to the blindfold-- and felt slim fingers close around her wrists. "No," a feminine voice said softly. "You can't take off the blindfold yet."

"Who... are you?" Sylvia asked.

"Someone who doesn't think a woman should be tortured for not betraying her baby. I never had a baby, and I don't remember my mother... but I had a father, sort of, and I know he never would have betrayed me..."

"Are you of ISO?"

"Yes. That's why I have you blindfolded. Zenchô will be very angry with me if he learns I let you escape... Come on. Stand up." The hand took her own and helped her stand. "Now walk stright forward. I'll help guide you." The woman's hands rested lightly on Sylvia's shoulders.

"Why are you helping me?" Sylvia asked, trying to keep her mind off this terrifying business. Shuffling forward, in total darkness, without any indication where she was going or what lay ahead...

"I told you. I don't approve of Zenchô torturing you."

"If you don't approve of ISO's methods, why are you here?"

The woman sighed. "I don't expect you to understand... I don't think anybody can understand what I'm going through."

"I'm listening. Please try to explain."

The hands tugged on her shoulders, and she turned in the required direction. Her rescuer said, "Zenchô's not completely evil. He can't be. There's so much good in him, if he'd only let it out..."

Sylvia recognized that tone of voice from her days of high school and college, listening to other girls' confidences, and thought she understood. "You're in love with him, aren't you?"

"You do understand!" the woman said eagerly. From her voice, Sylvia guessed she was young, maybe 17, 18-- certainly younger than Sylvia's 25. "He's really a good person-- it's not his fault he has to do such evil things..."

Sylvia wasn't going to argue with her, but that sounded like a very tall statement to make. "Whose fault is it, then?" she asked.

"I can't tell you that. Bad enough that I'm releasing you-- I don't want Zenchô to get hurt... You won't hurt Zenchô, will you? You'll go home to your baby, right?"

"I won't hurt your Zenchô," Sylvia said, and mentally qualified it: because I won't get a chance. If I thought there was a chance in the world that I could bring Zenchô no Tori down, I would try...but I don't think there's any chance at all.

"All right. You're in front of the exit. As soon as I pull off your blindfold, go out and run, as fast as you can. There'll be an alarm soon."

"I understand."

The blindfold suddenly ripped from her head. Sylvia spun, trying to see her rescuer, but all she caught was a glimpse of white vanishing through a door. She turned back, shoved open the exit door, and ran into the night.

Berke stood in front of the mirror, looking at Zenchô no Tori, and frowned. "Something's not right."

"The trouble is that you're a perfectionist, Berke." Sergio leaned back in his chair, sipping a snifter of brandy. "That disguise would fool me if I didn't know better."

"It's supposed to fool you when you do know better." In the mirror, Zenchô's features scowled in a very Berke-like expression. "Shit." Something about the scowl changed subtly, and it became a characteristic expression of Zenchô's.

"Try it with the mask on," Kari said.

"No. I have to get it right with the mask off before I can use props."

"Perfectionist," Sergio said again, and poured more brandy. Joe stuck a snifter in front of him-- he looked at Joe, raised an eyebrow, then finally shrugged and filled it. He handed the bottle to Joe.

"What's this for?"

"You can fill the glasses from now on, since you can't seem to be bothered getting it yourself."

"I think it's the lips," Kari said. "Zenchô's lips are a bit thicker."

"Yeah. I think you're right." With expert precision, Berke dipped some beige stuff from a bottle onto his lips. "Gaah."

"What's wrong? Get some in your mouth?"

"The smell is awful. Good thing it wears off so fast." He looked at it, then experimentally folded his arms and said in Zenchô's voice, "Not bad, if I do say so myself, puppy."

Joe slowly applauded. Zenchô's image turned a cold look on him. "You think some thing's funny, cubling?" he demanded. Joe snickered.

"Will it fool Kaieda?" Berke asked in his normal voice.

"It'd fool me," Joe said.

"You're easy to fool. Serge?"

"I told you. It's fine. It was fine half an hour ago. It'll fool Kaieda. Now will you stop fooling around with it?"

Berke turned back to the mirror and examined himself critically. "It wouldn't fool X or Shiratori," he muttered. The genius of Berke's impersonations was not so much that he looked like the person he was imitating, but that he mimicked their mannerisms, their body language, so well that people saw what they expected to see. He had, in the past, performed impersonations well enough to fool close relatives of the victim, but that was after much longer studying than he'd had here. Hopefully, however, neither the Swan nor X would be around to challenge the disguise.

He scooped his mask off the desk. "All right," he said in Zenchô's voice. "Let's begin!"

Kaieda's face on the screen looked very startled. "Ah-- Zenchô-sama!"      

"Very good, Kaieda, you recognize my face. Perhaps next you'll graduate to deciphering my handwriting."

"Zenchô-sama, this is an unexpected honor. I didn't expect you to be calling--"

"Were you in bed? Give my regards to her. This can't wait, Kaieda. I have word that Akechi's dead."

Kaieda sucked in a breath. "Asakura's brats again?"

Way out of the pickup's earshot, Joe muttered, "He better watch who he calls brats."

Berke jerked his head impatiently. "Probably, but at the moment that's not a consideration. You know more about your department than I do-- who do you suggest as a replacement?"

"If you're asking my advice, Zenchô-sama, I'd suggest Nagasone. He's bright and capable."

"Maybe. We'll discuss it. Also tightening security, I want to know who the hell gave Akechi away."

"Could it have been that woman?"

"Which woman?"

"The one Akechi turned over to you. Pandora's wife."

"And I always thought Pandora was a woman," Kari muttered.

Off-screen, Berke made a "shut up" hand signal at her. "Why do you think she might have betrayed Akechi? Did she know about Akechi?"

"Well, not before he captured her, I'd presume, but after he turned her over to you..."

"Are you insinuating that a prisoner of mine managed to get loose and betray me, Kaieda?" Berke asked in a tone of silken danger.

"Oh, of course not, Zenchô-sama..."

"Good. I'm going to be coming over to discuss this. Get things ready." He broke the connection.

"Who's going with you?" Joe wanted to know.

"Kari." His tone implied an "of course." "You and Serge will be backup if things go rancid. Bring the motorcycles and the binocs, and stake yourself out in some tree or whatever."

"That's right, Berke, treat us like children and tell us the obvious," Serge murmured.

"I thought you said Zenchô doesn't employ enough female guards. Who's Kari going to go as, Shiratori?"

"Sometimes you're so dense I wonder why you don't collapse into a neutron star," Kari said. "I'll go as a man, idiot."

"Knowing you, you'll have fun doing it, too," Joe said.

"This is grade school?" Serge asked pointedly. Joe and Kari both scowled at him, then Kari shrugged and headed for the change room. Berke walked over to the mirror again.

"I'm not sure I have the skin color right," he said. "Opinions?"

"Oh, good God," Joe muttered.

When Kari came out, she was transformed. Somehow her body-- never voluptuous in the first place-- had acquired the slender uniformity of a young man's figure. She had disguised the softness of her jaw with a scraggly yellow beard, and her entire stance had shifted, making her appear unmistakably male.

"Very butch, Kari," Serge said.

"Shut up." Her voice had also shifted slightly, roughening and sounding more masculine. "We ready, Zenchô-sama?"

"All right, let's go!"

Sylvia went to the bank, first, to replace the travelers' cheques she'd lost when Akechi captured her. She explained to the cheque people that her purse, with her cheques and all her identification, had been stolen. They were very nice about it-- after verifying her identity through thumbprint, they were courteous about making her up a new set of checks, and a temporary ID, and wished her luck in retrieving her purse. She saw no need to tell them that she knew she was never getting it back.

Knowing that there were police involved in the ISO conspiracy made her frightened and unsure of where to turn. Who was innocent? Who would help her? She knew who was guilty-- Buntaro Akechi and Shuichi Kaieda-- and she meant to make them pay. But she didn't know where was safe, where she could get her information to authorities who would do something about it.

First things first. Although essentially a gentle woman, Sylvia had been raised to believe that if someone hurts someone you love, you pay them back for it. She was unable to purchase a gun-- the Japanese had very strict gun control-- but she knew how to use throwing--knives, and so she bought some, as well as a switchblade. Then she checked the phonebook for Akechi and Kaieda.

She first took a taxi to Akechi's home, but it was a burned--out ruin, and she had no idea how to go about hunting him down. So she headed for Kaieda's house instead, with every intention of killing him. Kaieda was an evil man. He had murdered her beloved Domingo. He was going to die.

Then Sylvia would go home, flee to the United States with Sammie, and raise her baby in safety. If she ever found someone she could trust with the information, she would give it to them-- but she wasn't going to get herself killed looking. Her baby needed her alive.

She slipped in silently through Kaieda's window. When she was a child, on the run from the policia negra, she had learned to be a thief, to slip into people's houses silently, pick locks, and defend herself with throwing-knives and handblades. She'd never thought to use those skills again... she was by vocation a doctor, not a killer... but circumstances changed.

As she slipped down the stairs, she heard a familiar voice, and froze. Zenchô no Tori!

From the safety of a landing, she peered down. There were three people down there: an older man, a young man in an ISO guard's outfit, and Zenchô no Tori. Her hatred crystallized. Kaieda had betrayed Domingo, but Zenchô had been the one to actually torture and kill him-- and tortured Sylvia as well. Zenchô would die.

The guard would be a problem. Sylvia recognized martial skills hidden in the slim man's wary stance. She looked, and saw a doorway to the side. If something clattered there...yes. There was an earthen jug full of flowers just inside the doorway. Sylvia took one of her knives and flung the hilt at the jug. It made a satisfying clattering noise, the guard and Zenchô started toward it, and all three of them were distracted. She flung another knife at Zenchô's exposed back, and leapt down with her switchblade out.

"Shit!" The guard shoved his hand in the way of the blade as Zenchô rolled out of the way. Damn, Sylvia thought, but there was no turning back. She flung a knife at Kaieda, hitting him in the shoulder, as she ran at Zenchô. "Die!!"

"Not today." Zenchô dodged to the side and grabbed her arm. She twisted, but he pulled her in and knocked the blade out of her hand. Sylvia aimed a knee at his groin and he shoved her, the guard behind her getting her in a headlock. "Kari, no! Don't kill!" Zenchô shouted, as the headlock threatened to become a head removal.

"Go ahead," Sylvia shrilled. "Kill me! I'll die before I go back to your torture chambers!"

"Zenchô-sama," Kaieda gasped, holding his wounded shoulder, "what is the meaning of this? Who is this woman?"

"The bitch tried to kill you," the guard said in German-- which Sylvia spoke, the result of a German nanny imported from Europe. "My hand is killing me, and I'd really like to make her pay for it. Is there any particular reason why I shouldn't kill her?"

That was the way an equal talked, not an underling. As Sylvia swiftly revised her understanding of the guard, Zenchô replied in the same language, "Think about it, Kari. Who'd she attack? Red Wolf, or the Bird of Ill Omens?"

"Oh. Right, I get it. So what do you want me to do with her? Since we can't kill her, and Kaieda's going to be expecting something nice and barbaric--"

"I think it's time for the finale." Zenchô pulled a gun and aimed it at Kaieda, confusing Sylvia even more. As Kaieda began to stammer in outrage, he said in Japanese, "Listen carefully, Kaieda, and you'll learn the meaning of this. In the meantime, don't move."

"But-- but Zenchô-sama, what are you-- "

"Shut up." He turned to Sylvia. "You just made a very understandable mistake, miss. As a matter of fact, I'd have been very annoyed if you came in here to kill Zenchô no Tori and didn't go for me. The fact remains, however, that I am not he." In a single fluid motion, he ripped off Zenchô's mask and face, revealing an intense, beautiful blond man.

"I don't... understand," Sylvia whispered, as her captor released her.

"You-- where's Zenchô no Tori?" Kaieda shouted. "What did you do?"

The guard yanked off the yellow beard, revealing a feminine face, and strode over to Kaieda. "No panicking here, Shuichi baby," she said in an unmistakably female voice.

"You-- you're a woman!"

"Give this man a gold star." She shoved Kaieda into the wall. "Berke, what should we do with him?"

"Well, we already have the names we need... Perhaps, since Kaieda-san is after all a policeman, he can contribute corroborating information for us."

"Corroborating information?" Sylvia asked. They looked at her as if they'd forgotten she was there.

"She's seen way too much, Berke," the woman said in German, and Sylvia began to feel cold. Just because these people were Kaieda's enemies didn't mean they were her friends.

"Why do you ask?" Berke asked in Japanese.

"You-- do you know about ISO? That it's trying to take over the world?"

Kari rolled her eyes, but Berke said, "Yes. How do you know--"

"My husband was a narcotics investigator--"

"A narc," Kari muttered disgustedly.

Sylvia ignored that. Obviously she'd made an enemy when she'd hit Kari in the hand. "He was investigating ISO's connection to the drug trade, and learned that ISO is trying to conquer the world. He sent me a report--"

"A legitimate policeman's report?"

"Well, I'd guess so-- he was a legitimate policeman..."

To the tune of the Lone Ranger, Kari broke into song. "It's a narc, it's a narc, it's a nasty narc, if you've got any pot better keep it dark. To and fro, let him go, up the wrong tree--"

"KARI!"

"Yes, Red Wolf, niisan, sir."

"I'm sorry if I sound dense," Berke said to Sylvia, "but I want to make absolutely sure I have this straight. Your husband, a legitimate, licensed policeman of some country--"

"Argentina."

"--made a legitimate investigation of ISO-- did anyone know he was doing it?"

"His superiors in Argentina, and Akechi and Kaieda here, at least. Kaeida betrayed him to Zenchô, and he died."

"Even better." Sylvia was shocked, but the young man didn't seem to realize how callous his last remark had sounded. "And you have a copy of this report?"

"In a safe place, yes."

"That's it! Kari, we have it! Do you see?"

"None of you," Kaieda interrupted, "see anything."

Sylvia, medically trained, recognized the feather-light smell before anyone else did. "Gas!" she shouted.

"Damn!" The woman Kari smashed out the door, took two running steps-- and collapsed, as her brother and Sylvia both spun into the darkness.

Zenchô was furious. He kicked the Red Wolf's limp body savagely. "How dare he impersonate me?!" Kaieda remained silent-- there was nothing safe to be said to a question like that. Zenchô went on, "And how the hell did Pandora escape?"

*You fool. There is obviously a traitor in your organization!*

Zenchô was thrown off balance by X's sudden interruption. But who, X-sama? he thought back, startled.

*Find out. Never mind the report, for now-- before long we will be in a position to withstand it. Besides, no doubt an investigation of Pandora's background will uncover the child's guardian. Concentrate on finding out who betrayed you!*

Yes, X-sama. "Strip them and load them into the van," Zenchô ordered his men. "Since Red Wolf and Grey Wolf like playing dress--up so much, let's see how they fare with nothing." The guards bent to their work and swiftly carried out Zenchô's orders. Then they all left for the base.

It hadn't escaped Zenchô's attention that only two of the Predator team were here. The other two doubtless knew about Kaieda. Kaieda had become a weak link.

The conflagration behind them turned the day to red, as a weak link in ISO's security met a fiery end.

The destruction did not escape notice.

"SHIT!!" Joe was up in a tree, fine--focusing on the scene in a second. He swore again as he saw the blacked--out van pulling away. "Some great backup we've been, Serge!"

"I do see it, Joe. There's no need to scream at me." Serge used his own binocs to scan the van. "All right. We'll follow it."

Joe leapt down onto his motorcycle, and the two young men pulled onto the highway, moving at a ridiculously fast speed. They flicked on the mufflers as they drew within sight distance of the van, and kept a good distance back from it all the way to its base.

The base was a low building in the deep woods, very Western--looking, with a sign, "Kodansha Laboratories. Unauthorized Personnel Keep Out-- No Trespassing." Serge and Joe parked their cycles in the woods, hidden in underbrush-- they were special lightweight models designed for that sort of thing-- and slipped past the sign toward the building, two colorful shadows moving through the spattered light and dark of the woods.

As Berke slowly came to consciousness, he realized several things, in the following order: he was in a soft reclining chair, he was shackled to it, he was naked, and Zenchô no Tori was standing in front of him. He brought the room into closer focus, and realized that Kari was across from him, also bound and naked. It was an obvious attempt to demoralize them, so Berke didn't let it. He raised an eyebrow. "No clothes?" he said. "Which of us did you want to look at, Zenchô? Or do we both turn you on?"

Zenchô scowled. "You both like playing dress-up so much, I wanted to see how you'd do without props."

"In other words, you're pissed that I impersonated you."

"Let's just say that because you did so, I'm going to take even more pleasure than usual in torturing you. You do realize that I could have had you killed for that. I still could."

"Oh, do tell."

"But I've decided to show restraint. You have information that is valuable--"

"You mean X's decided. You're not known for your restraint, Zenchô," Kari said.

Zenchô whipped around and backhanded her. "I don't have to take that tone from you, bitch! You're my prisoner and don't forget it!"

Berke forced himself to laugh. "Very good, Zenchô, beat a naked, defenseless, bound woman! This must be a major turn-on for you, na? What's the matter, doesn't Shiratori let you play these games with her?"

"Damn you!" Zenchô raised his hand to strike Berke, then apparently thought better of it. "Well, at any rate you will be punished for what you did. The two of you are both going to suffer horribly, and I will enjoy every minute of it."

"Zenchô, I get the feeling sometimes that you're denser than a black hole," Kari said. "How many times have you tried to torture Berke or me for information? Ten? Twelve? Has it ever worked? I mean, go ahead, bring on the rack and thumbscrews, I've got nothing better to do and it's certainly no worse than being forced to listen to you, but--"

"It'll work this time, I can guarantee it," Zenchô said, smiling nastily. "You see, I've discovered your weakness, puppy-chan."

"My weakness? Oh, do tell."

"You see," Zenchô said, turning to Berke, "I've figured out why we've never managed to break you, Red Wolf. No matter what we do to you or your sister, you're too damn stubborn to give in. You don't want to give me the satisfaction, and you don't want to look bad. So, although we could break you eventually, it'd be long and difficult. And you, Gray Wolf--" he turned to Kari-- "have the least amount of self-preservation instinct I've ever seen. As far as I can see, you simply don't care too much if you get hurt. But now if we hurt your brother..."

Berke went ice cold, realizing what Zenchô meant to do-- and it would work. When he and Kari had been children, living in the hell they'd called home, both of them had learned to bear up remarkably well under their own pain. But they both had had too much of a protective love for the other. They had been kept in line by threats to their twin.

Since then, Berke had deliberately walled himself behind cold, ruthless deliberation. Everything he did served a goal, and he had had to learn to deny his feelings, sometimes even his love for his sister. But Kari had protected herself, not by suppressing or denying her feelings, but by not caring what life did to her one way or another. And Kari's protection could not help her against this, because she couldn't make herself not care about Berke.

If Zenchô tortured Berke, eventually Kari would break, to spare him the pain. It was that simple, and Zenchô had figured it out. So Berke laughed quietly.

"What sort of fool do you take me for, Zenchô?" he asked. "I know the weaknesses of every member of my team, and my sister's best of all. I know I'm Kari's weak spot-- don't you think I'd take steps to prevent my being used as such?"

Kari caught it and played along. "Berke, you bastard, don't! If you kill yourself, I'll never forgive you!"

Berke closed his eyes. "I'm sorry, Kari, but I'm afraid you won't be around to forgive me or not." He opened them and looked at Zenchô. "You see, Zenchô, I figured that if I was ever in a situation to need this, you'd probably be around. And although I'd've liked to have lived to destroy your precious alien, I guess taking you with me will have to be good enough."

"NO!" Zenchô shrieked, and slammed his hand down onto a console. Berke had time only to feel a grim satisfaction before a stunwave of electricity ran through him, and his body jerked as darkness swamped his mind.

"Damn," Zenchô muttered, looking at Berke's unconscious form. It had been such a good idea, too. "Well, I guess we do this the hard way, puppy."

Kari smiled. She understood what Berke had done, and was grateful to him for it. As for herself, she didn't fear pain. Whatever Zenchô did, she'd probably suffered far worse at the hands of her dear deceased papa. She knew, of course, that she had to have a breaking point-- everybody did-- but Zenchô'd never get her there before she found a way to escape, or Berke did, or Joe and Sergio rescued them both.

"Go ahead, Birdbrain," she said. "Make my day."

Inside the base, with several unconscious Bird Guards behind them, the Panther and the Leopard slipped down to what was obviously a prison level. Neither Berke nor Kari had signaled them-- this would have to be done by hand.

"That looks like a torture chamber," Sergio murmured almost inaudibly, jerking a thumb at the massive doors at the end of the hall. "I'll take it. You handle the cells." Joe nodded sharply, and slipped off in the opposite direction.

The device he was carrying, a heat sensor, could tell him if a cell was occupied, though not who was in it. He slid among the shadows, examining each of the cells-- until the indicator dial shifted to the right, and he knew there was a captive. Joe Asakura removed his lockpick from his belt buckle and gently inserted it. Carefully, with all the patience he never demonstrated anywhere else, he rearanged the tumblers inside, until there was an audible "click." With no sound, he opened the door--

--and long nails tore into his face, his stomach, aiming down for his groin. Joe swore in fury and hurled his attacker from him, backing away and staring at her.

" Qui-- quién eres?" she gasped, staring back.

 Joe found that he could not find his voice. His assailant was a beautiful young woman, completely naked, with a pile of cherry cordial curls-- recognizably red, but with strong tones of chocolate brown-- and huge, violet--blue eyes, the color of a stormy sea-- stop that! He glanced up, hurriedly, realizing that he'd been staring at a naked woman and embarrassed about it. Then his brain caught up to him, and, due to Spanish's similarity to his native Italian, he realized that she must have asked, "Who are you?"

"Do you speak Japanese, or Italian?" he asked, in Japanese. "I don't understand Spanish."

"Yes, yes, I speak Japanese-- but-- who are you? You're not ISO..." The last was almost phrased as a question.

"No, I'm not ISO, are you?"

"Why would I be a captive here if I were?"

Good going, Joe. Get the brain back on line, will you? "I'm the Panther, of Predator." His eyes kept involuntarily straying to the shadowed curves of her body. "Uh, would you like to borrow my shirt?" She was just too distracting. What would Serge do in a situation like this? he thought, and answered himself cynically, Try to figure out how to get into her pants, most likely. Except she hasn't got pants...STOP IT!

"Oh, uh, yeah. Thank you. I'd appreciate that." She was huddled into a tiny knot, trying to keep as much of her modesty as possible. Joe pulled the shirt over his head, tossed it to her, and turned around. "It's not too big, I'm afraid..."

"Well, thank you." He heard her stand, and began to cautiously turn around, waiting for her to say to stop. Since she didn't, he finished turning and faced her again. She was tugging her shirt down around her legs, trying to conceal as much of herself as possible, and it wasn't quite working. The shirt was just not long enough. When she finally let it go, it crept up to the very edge of her private regions, exposing a tiny sliver of buttocks in the back. That meant Joe shouldn't look at her legs, which was too bad, as she had really nice legs, long and smooth-- STOP IT!!

"If you're not ISO," she said, glancing down at the hem of the shirt nervously, "are you by any chance here to rescue me?"

"I was looking for my friends, actually."

"Are they a pair of blonde twins?"

"You know them?"

"I got captured with them. Zenchô no Tori said he was going to interrogate them first, then me." She looked down at her legs again, and laughed nervously. "Since you've already seen so much about me, I suppose I should tell you my name. I'm Sylvia Pandora."

"You can call me Joe, I guess. If they're in the interrogation room, my partner's probably found them. Why don't I get you out of here?"

At that point the bulky form of Zenchô's lieutenant, the Condor, strode into the room. "You're not going anywhere, brat," he growled. "Zenchô-sama said you'd be in here. I'm going to finish you off."

The door to the interrogation chamber opened without trouble-- since its victims were usually bound, Sergio guessed, Zenchô didn't bother keeping the door locked. Major mistake. He slipped in catlike, like the Leopard he'd styled himself as, and slid to a hiding place under a table.

He could see Berke, unconscious and naked in a reclining chair, and he could see Zenchô, the Condor, and several Birdbrains clustered around a table. An odd strangled noise was coming from that area, and Zenchô was saying something about the value of slow techniques as opposed to swift brutality. Sergio wasn't listening-- he had a decision to make. Would it be best to free Berke, then take X's agents out, or strike the ISOers first? On the one hand, he'd never so far successfully taken Zenchô out-- nobody had. On the other, freeing Berke would take some time, time in which the ISO agents might notice Sergio and stop him from accomplishing either of his objectives-- and at the moment, ISO's shûryo seemed to be totally engrossed in what he was doing, and possibly more vulnerable to attack than he ever would be again.

There was a sharp cry, cut off, and Zenchô snickered. Kari's voice, strained and obviously trying to project a nonchalance she didn't feel, said, "Hey, is that the best you can do? I've had worse poking myself with cigarettes by accid-- ah!" That decided it. Kari was a teammate, and a woman, and obviously in pain. Sergio took a handful of poisoned blades. He flung the first two at Zenchô's exposed back, two at the Condor, and the rest at the Birdbrains.

Zenchô, impossibly, hurled himself out of the way, without ever seeing the blades. The Birdbrains died, and the Condor simply caught his two in the flesh of his arm, yanked them out, and growled, dropping them on the table holding Kari. Sergio had no time to stand and be shocked-- Zenchô had his machine gun out and was spraying it at him, and he had no intention of sticking around for it. He knocked the table into Zenchô's line of fire, leapt to one of the light fixtures, and tossed a small bomb at Zenchô, who rolled out of the way. The Condor came charging at him-- Sergio drew his sword and brought it slashing across---

"STOP!"

The sword had already begun to bite through the Condor's neck. With superb muscular control, Sergio froze it, and slowly turned, already suspecting what he'd see. Zenchô had a short blade pressed against Berke's exposed throat.

"Drop the weapons. Now." Serge did, putting his hands up in the air. Damn-- I knew I should have gone for Berke first, he thought.

The Condor belted him, hard, and he went flying into a table. "That's for trying to kill me, bastard!" The massive form advanced on a slightly dazed Sergio.

"Condor, cover Grey Wolf. I'll handle Egobossera." The Condor growled and turned. "Where's your partner, Leopard? We wouldn't want him to miss the fun."

"Not here, obviously," Serge said, getting to a sitting position.

"That's not good enough. You see, I've got 2 hostages. I can afford to kill one if you don't cooperate..." Zenchô pressed the blade deeper, and a thin trickle of red welled up, staining Berke's neck.

"Damn it, tell him, Sergio!" Kari shouted. "Joe can take care of himself!"

Sergio shrugged. He wasn't going to betray any of his teammates, neither Berke nor Joe-- it was not the sort of thing he did. "He came in with me, and we split up. I honestly have no idea exactly where he is right now."

"Condor, check Pandora." Zenchô sheathed the knife, and picked up his gun again. "If the Panther's looking for his teammates, he might run into her."

"Yes, sir."

"Get up." Zenchô waved the gun at Sergio, who stood carefully, eyes probing for a way out. "Don't bother making a break for it. From here, I could gun down you or either of your teammates."

"And of course, it takes such skill to machine-gun a person down," Sergio murmured.

Zenchô scowled. "What was that?"

"I'd heard you were a really formidable fighter," Sergio said coolly. "That you'd been superbly trained in unarmed combat, swordfighting, ninja skills... but all I see is a frightened little boy clutching his equalizer."

"I am not a little boy!" Zenchô shouted.

"Aren't you?" Sergio said mildly. "Then prove it. Fight with a man's weapons, not a child's toy. Any unskilled fool can use a machine gun-- it takes real skill to use something like a sword." He touched his with his toe. "How good are you really, Zenchô? My guess is, not very."

Zenchô opened his mouth angrily, as if to accept Sergio's challenge-- then froze, and closed it again. "Very good, Leopard," he said. "You almost had me there. But the fact remains that I'm the one with the gun. What that says about my skill doesn't matter—all that matters is that I have the ability to kill you. Sit down over there."

Sergio obeyed, angrily. Damn! I nearly had him-- what happened? ...X must have intervened. Damn! "Am I supposed to sit here kicking my heels all day, or do you have something else in mind?"

"Oh, something else." Zenchô stepped closer, but nowhere near Sergio's striking range. "It seems to me, Egobossera, that you might be a bit more amenable to persuasion than your teammates the Wolf Twins. From what I know of your operations, I know you're the nominal head of your Syndicate. Going to come into a great deal of power someday...if you live that long. Right?"

"Go on." Sergio's tone was utterly flat and emotionless.

"So here's the deal, Egobossera. Either you talk-- tell me what I want to know, right here, right now-- or I blow your head off. Right here, right now. What do you say?"

"Fat chance," Joe said.

He sized up the situation quickly. On the plus side, he was faster, lighter, more agile, more intelligent and undoubtedly better trained than the Condor. On the minus side he was smaller, not as physically strong, and had a noncombatant to worry about.

So. When in doubt, attack. As the Condor started toward him, Joe attacked, leaping with his feet poised to crunch the man's head off.

Surprise! The Condor was considerably faster than he'd expected, grabbing Joe's legs in his meaty paws and flinging him hard into the wall. Joe righted himself as best he could, but he still had the wind knocked out of him, and before he could do anything the Condor had him by the neck and was pulling back to deliver the death blow.

Slim hands suddenly wrapped a shirt-- Joe's shirt-- around the Condor's face. He bellowed, and clawed at the shirt with one hand-- which gave Joe all the opportunity he needed to brace his feet against the Condor's stomach and kick free. He landed on his feet as the Condor went down, and leapt, coming down on the other man's chest. Several more good kicks, and Zenchô's lieutenant lay motionless.

Breathing heavily, Joe looked up. Sylvia had retrieved the shirt and was holding it in front of herself. "Is he dead?" she asked calmly.

"Should be," Joe panted. "You-- saved me, didn't you. With that shirt. That was good thinking."

She smiled a little bit. "I haven't been using much of that lately, I guess, or I wouldn't be in this situation." She looked down at the Condor's unmoving form. "His shirt's a lot bigger. Do you think you could turn around while I get it off him?"

"You saved my life," Joe said. "The least I could do is get it off him for you." He got the Condor's tunic and cape off him, handed them to Sylvia, and turned around. In a few moments, something cloth brushed his back. He turned, and found his shirt being offered back to him.

"Thanks." He took it and put it on.

Now that he could look at her without embarrassment, she was still beautiful. The Condor's tunic was too big for her-- she had the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, creating the illusion of puffed shoulderpieces, and it hung to what was probably her mid-thigh or so. She had wrapped the Condor's cape around her as a skirt-- it hung to her ankles, but kept parting as she moved to reveal tantalizing bits of leg. Her face was open and lovely, sweet, and she wasn't much older than him. And her eyes were still mesmerizing stormy seas-- oh will you knock it off! he told himself angrily, as she said, "Thank you. If you hadn't come..."

"We're not out of the woods yet. Let's go, before Zenchô sends some of Party Animal's friends."

They stepped out of the room-- Joe quickly looked both ways, checking for trouble. Two guards were walking lazily down the aisle, chatting. Joe ran to them silently and chopped them into unconsciousness, then signaled to Pandora.

They got out of the base without incident-- either Zenchô was slipping, or otherwise occupied. Knowing his teammates, Joe suspected the latter. He found his motorcycle, then turned to Sylvia. "My friends might need me. I'm going back to help them. If anyone comes along, hide."

"Right." Already Joe liked this woman. No whimpering damsel in distress, here—she obviously knew how to keep calm in a crisis. He turned and headed back into the base.

Sergio shrugged. "Have it your way, Zenchô. What do you want to know?"

"Good." Zenchô smiled. "I thought you'd be intelligent about this. Where's your headquarters?"

"Where else? Castle Egobossera. If you know anything at all about my background, you know where that is."

"Asakura was willing to drop his base of operations in Italy to go live at your home?"

Sergio carefully kept all of his attention focused on Zenchô. "Why not? It's considerably more impressive than the villa he lived in before." Only another moment, keep Zenchô distracted another moment...

"All right, then. How much do you people know about ISO?"

"That could take a very long time."

"I have all the time in the world," Zenchô said, and a slim white arm encircled his neck, pulling him back.

"Do you, now?" Berke asked.

"Gaah-- Red Wolf!"

Kari, who had freed herself and her brother with the knives the Condor had stupidly left within her reach, shoved one of them against Zenchô's neck. "Don't forget me, Zenchô," she said coolly, apparently unselfconscious of her nakedness.

"You-- what do you want?" Zenchô's eyeshields had tilted down slightly, trying to focus on the knife.

"Clothes, for starters," Kari said. She grinned at her brother. "I feel naked without my weapons, don't you?"

"Kari..."

"Okay, Zenchô, I'm going to count to ten, and to help me keep count I'm going to cut notches in your face. When I get to ten, this goes in your eyeball." She lifted the knife to his face. "Where are our clothes?"

"That cabinet-- over there." Zenchô pointed-- and Berke grabbed the hand and twisted it behind Zenchô's back, eliciting a gasp of pain.

"No sudden hand movements, idiot," he hissed.

Sergio walked over to the cabinet, picked the lock, and withdrew clothing. There were strange wires connected to the lock. "I don't like the looks of this," he reported.

 "Let me see. Cover Zenchô with the gun." Berke walked over, pulling on his clothes, and examined it. "Shit, that's an alarm!"

And about 40 Bird Guards came racing in, with guns drawn.

Zenchô laughed shakily. "Stand-off, as you see, my dear Predators," he said. "You could try to hold my men off by killing me-- but there's only one of me, and three of you. If it came to a tradeoff, ISO'd be in better shape than you."

"What good would that do you?" Kari demanded. "You'd be dead!"

Zenchô tried to smile, and failed. They could all see the stark terror in his face. "These men have been sent by my Master," he said weakly.

In other words, it was X proposing the tradeoff, and Zenchô was considered expendable. "All right," Berke said. He put his hands up. "We surrender."

"And me without my clothes," Kari muttered. "Chee."

Zenchô did smile, now that the danger to him was past. "Excellent," he said to his men. "My thanks. Now, what should I do with you annoying three?" He tilted his head slightly and froze, as if listening to something that none of them could hear.

And the hilt of a throwing-knife struck him in the back of the head, crumpling him.

"Zenchô-sama!"

One of the men had the presence of mind to put a gun to Berke's head. "Whoever you are, show yourself, or your leader gets it!" Then a knife landed in his arm, at just the right neural junction. He dropped the gun, howling, and Berke took him out.

"Let's go!"

The three of them went into action, with Joe joining the fray as soon as things got too confused for his throwing-knives. Together, the four Predators fought, martial arts training and good old fisticuffs combined to take out the Birdbrains.

*Get up, you fool! Get up and run!*

Zenchô opened his eyes groggily. "Whu-- what?"

*RUN!*

Galvanized into action by his master's command, Zenchô got to his feet and fled. Sergio, seeing him, flung his sword like a javelin, but it clattered to the wall as Zenchô ran through a flipping door. "Damn." He retrieved his sword as Kari pulled her clothes on. She raised an eyebrow at him.

"Headquarters at Castle Egobossera, Serge?"

"Inventive," Berke murmured.

Sergio smiled. "I had to say something."

"How did Zenchô get drop on you guys?" Joe asked. "I'd never have thought..."

"Zenchô didn't. X did." Berke strapped the last of his weapons on. "When those men came in, Zenchô told us, basically, that if we didn't surrender X was willing to write him off to kill three of us. And, since X can probably replace Zenchô more easily than your father can replace us, I figured we'd wait till you showed up to save the day."

"And what if I hadn't?"

"Joe, I know you. You'd show up to save the day if you were dead. So don't argue with me."

"Why don't we blow this place?" Kari said.

"Why waste ammo?" Serge asked. "Zenchô won't use a base that's been compromised. If he doesn't blow it himself, he'll leave it to crumble into dust by itself."

Berke nodded. "That's right. We can just leave it here, and come back later to make sure it's been abandoned. Which way is out?"

"This way," Joe said, pointing. "We're going to have a tight fit on the motorcycles-- I rescued a girl from this base, so someone's going to have to triple up."

"Red hair, purple eyes?" Berke asked interestedly.

"More like violet-blue-- kind of like a stormy sea," Joe replied. Serge put a hand to his forehead and shook his head slowly.

"Then that's the one. Great! We can use her."

"For a scratching post?" Kari asked innocently.

"Kari..."

Introductions were made on the ride home. They didn't give their real names, but Berke explained what they were-- Predator, an anti-ISO strike force financed by "special interests", trained to stop ISO's bid for world conquest. For various reasons, Berke said, it would be very useful for them to get a policeman's report on ISO as corroborating evidence.

When they brought Sylvia before Asakura, he was more honest-- he admitted that he was the head of a criminal syndicate. Sylvia was shocked-- she was dealing with a Mafia boss here! These criminals were going to save the world? But growing up in a war-torn South American country, where the police had persecuted innocent people and she had had to be a thief to survive, gave her an open enough mind that she listened to the rest of Asakura's story. He had made a deal with the police, through one particular man, that his operations would be permitted, within limits, if he kept ISO in check. The man who'd made the deal with him, however, had been framed and fired by Akechi-- who was dead now, as was Kaieda-- and it was necessary for him to prove that ISO was a threat in order to be reinstated.

Domingo's report would give him the necessary proof. Sylvia came to the conclusion that Asakura was, in his own way, an honorable man, and since she had wanted nothing more than to give the report to somebody who would bring it to the public's attention, she agreed to give it to him.

"You know," Asakura said, when that was settled, "my team's given me very favorable impressions of you. You say you're in medical school-- we have no physician here. I could pay for your education..."

"No," Sylvia said firmly. "I'm not a criminal."

Asakura shook his head angrily. "I'm not asking you to be one-- and besides, the last time I checked, attempted murder of a policeman carries the death penalty in Japan. I'm asking you to help avenge your husband's murder. You went after Kaieda, didn't you? Kaieda was just a tiny piece. Even Zenchô is just the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that there's an alien named X, bent on conquering this world for its own twisted purposes. I don't propose to let it. I won't see my children grow up slaves. Are you willing to?"

Sylvia shook her head. "I have a child," she said. "A baby girl, who's waiting for me to come home. I came to Japan to give my report into the hands of someone who would do something about it. So now I've found someone, and it's not my problem anymore. Thank you for your offer... but no. Sammie needs me more."

"Zenchô will not forgive you," Asakura said. "ISO will keep chasing you until they catch you."

"I'll hide." She smiled. "The report's in an Argentinian safety deposit box. Do you want me to mail it to you, or-- "

"The mail isn't safe. I'll send my son Joe to Argentina with you."

Joe spent the whole trip questioning her on her life, her baby, her family, et cetera, until finally she asked, "Did your father tell you to pump me for information?"

Rage and hurt glittered in his eyes for a second, and he turned away from her. Finally he said, "It never occurred to you I might be interested in you?"

Sudden embarrassment flooded her. The poor boy was trying to be friendly, because he likes me, and I-- ! "I'm sorry," she said.

But his anger didn't seem to ease until they finally reached their destination. Then he said quietly, "I'm sorry, too."

She glanced quickly at him. "You forgive me?"

"No point in holding a grudge. I'm probably never going to see you again, so..." he shrugged.

She got the report from the bank and handed it to him. "Thanks," he said. "Uh... Father offered you a job, didn't he? And you turned it down?"

"That's right. I have to take care of my baby."

He nodded. "I understand. But if you ever change your mind, or if you get into trouble-- here."

She looked at the folded piece of paper. It was an address and a phone number. "Yours?"

"Not headquarters. Our house. If you ever do get into trouble, you can call there, and I'll help you. Or my team will."

"Not the young lady." Sylvia smiled. "I hit her in the hand with a knife when I thought she was an ISO security guard. I don't think she likes me very much."

"Oh, don't worry about it. Kari's just a piranha around other women. She's afraid they're going to go for her brother or something."

Sylvia laughed, then sobered. "Thank you for all the help you've given me, Joe, but I've got to catch my train. Maybe someday we'll meet again, nee?"

"Maybe." He half-grinned at her. "Okay. Go on. Catch your train. Your baby's waiting."

But when Sylvia arrived home, it was to nightmare.

She stared at the firebombed shell of Mamá's home disbelievingly. Mamá? Sammie?

"Señorita?"

Absently she showed her wedding ring to the policeman. "Señora, por favor." Mrs, please.

"Forgive me. Señora Pandora. You were the daughter-in-law?"

"What happened? What happened?"

"It was bombed," he said simply. "We found no bodies."

"No bodies? But-- no survivors, either?"

"I'm sorry."

Tears burned down her face, and she made no attempt to wipe them away. Numb anguish overwhelmed her. Had it been ISO? Mamá's enemies? Terrorists? Did it matter?

"Sammie!!" she suddenly shrieked, and fell to her knees in the ruins, sobbing.

"Señora, come away. Come away. Please." The policeman half-lifted her, and helped her back to his car. Domingo had been well-liked-- a man from his department had offered to let Sylvia stay with him and his wife for the time being. Sylvia went, hardly caring.

Sammie... No! NO!

An investigation was conducted, but turned up nothing. And while it was being conducted, a thought occurred to Sylvia.

She had not felt Sammie die.

When her father had died, she had felt it. Her brothers, her mother-- her husband, who wasn't even blood kin-- she'd felt all of them die. But she hadn't felt her own daughter, flesh of her flesh... She had known, on occasions, when Sammie was in danger, and saved her. But this time she had felt nothing.

Was it perhaps that she had been distracted with her own sensations at the time-- perhaps she had been being tortured when Sammie died? Was that why? Or was it that... Dared she believe that... Sammie was not dead after all?

Sammie! she called in her mind. Where are you?

There was no answer. She'd expected none. But could she hope that her little girl had somehow survived? That somewhere, Sammie had to grow up happily? Even if she, Sylvia, never saw her again?

She could hope. She had to hope. And if it was true... "I won't see my children grow up as slaves. Are you willing to...?"

If it was true, then she had to do her best to ensure that Sammie didn't grow up a slave. She could not protect Sammie directly-- she could only do her best to stop ISO. And Asakura had offered her the way...

"Hello, operator? I'd like to put through a call to Italy..."

"What changed your mind?" Asakura asked, when she met with him again.

"My daughter... disappeared," she said softly. "I don't think she's dead, but I can't protect her myself. I have to do my best to make sure, that wherever she is, she grows up safe and happy."

Asakura nodded. "I understand."

"So I want to help you fight. I won't let Sammie grow up a slave. I want to destroy ISO..."

Asakura leaned back, took a puff on his cigarette. "In that case, would you consider actually joining the Predator team?"

"I-- I'm afraid I don't understand..."

"I've been told that you can fight fairly well for an untrained person. You think well in a crisis, and you have medical background, so that if someone's injured on the job, you'll be right there. You'd undergo 8 months to a year of intensive physical training, as well as finishing up your schooling... You're 25, aren't you?"

"Yes..."

"After 9 months or so, you should be ready to take up a place as a full-fledged member of the team. What do you say?"

She stared at him for several long seconds. She was a doctor, not a warrior... but hadn't she fought to protect herself, or something she valued, so many times before? To be a fighter, to avenge Domingo, and never be helpless again...

"Yes," she said quietly. "Yes. This is what I want to do."

"Wonderful!" Asakura laughed, tension seeming to leave him. "What shall we call you?" He scrutinized her. "The Fox, I think. The clever fox."

Sylvia thought about it. The fox, trickster of European legend, who outwitted its hunters at every turn. "I like it," she said slowly.

He offered her a drink. "To the Fox Sylvia!"

And somewhere, Sammie would live safely. She vowed it to herself. And someday, my daughter, I will find you...