Posted by Lieutenant Commander Sharah Fayth (Chief Star Fleet Medical Officer) in Unexpected Happenings

Posted by Major General Charles Tenkiller (Vice-Commander, Colonial Customs and Defense Agency) in Unexpected Happenings

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Sharah Fayth (Chief Star Fleet Medical Officer) in Unexpected Happenings
Posted by… suppressed (10) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Sharah waited for the shuttle to leave and then stepped through the door, closingbit softly behind her. The first thing she did, every time she walked in, was greet Hope. Fingers on her leaves or in the soil and just listen.

Silence

There was nothing. Sharah’s brow furloughed slightly, contemplating. She didn’t need to hear her to know the tree was healthy though.

There was no sense of presence for Charles or Yavia. Were they home? Oh it was so … odd. She moved toward the kitchen, the box tucked under her arm. She glanced toward the den and the door beyond and then the stairs. The silence was suddenly eerie. And she missed the immediate connection of feeling them nearby. It wasn’t gone forever, it was just the headband, but it was…well now she was noticing how it would change things.

“I’m home!”

Sharah

“Down here, hun!” Charles yelled from down the stairs.

Sharah smiled, and let out a breath at the sound of his voice. She moved down the stairs and paused in the doorway.

He was sprawled out on the bed in a pair of shorts reading. He looked up at her and smiled. “Hey, beautiful. How was your date?” he asked with a cheeky grin.

Tenkiller

The sight of him just felt good, and it had nothing to do with his shirtless state, though that was a bonus. She waited for that familiar warm sense of…belonging, affection, but it didn’t come. That was going to take some getting used to. “It was unexpected…” Sharah chewed her lip and looked around, “Ummm…where’s Yavia? Is…is she home?”

Sharah

Charles immediately set the book aside and was by her side in flash. “Sharah, are you ok?” he asked as he guided her to the bed to sit down. “What do you mean, is she home? Don’t you know?”

Tenkiller

Sharah followed him to the bed and took a breath as she sat. She looked up at him and licked her lip. “No…I don’t.” She set the box down and touched the two ends of the band. “As far as I know it’s just us here. You and me, no one and nothing else.” She sounded surprised and hopeful. “Umm…it’s this. The head band.” Oh wow she just realized she really had been kind of wreckless. She had been excited to try it and she had known Hyrushi meant no harm but to help her. She took both his hands. “It’s a bit of a story, but Governor Hyrushi…he had it made for me. It’s…I guess a telepathic shield of sorts. I can’t hear or feel anything with it on.”

Sharah

Charles sat next to her and took her hand, concern plain on his face. “Sharah… is it safe? Have you really looked into it? Hang on.” and he turned his head and yelled towards the bathroom “V! Get in here, will ya? Sharah’s home!”

Tenkiller

Sharah opened her mouth to try and reassure him, at least a little, but he called for Yavia. She was home. “She’s in the bathroom?” Sharah turned toward the door, both amazed and unnerved that she couldn’t feel Yavia in the other room.

In the bathroom, Yavia grinned. She thought she’d heard Sharah’s voice over the sound of the shower. The sound of the water had obscured the concern in TK’s voice. She turned off the water and pulled on a robe. Stepping into the bedroom she had a huge grin on her face, “How was your date with the gover…” The smile slipped off her face as her mind reached for Sharah’s and hit a wall of static. No sense of her presence or her feelings or anything. Something was not right. “Sharah what’s wrong?!” Yavia almost ran around the bed. Her hands settled on Sharah’s cheeks watching her pupils and then her hands began to feel along her neck and head, almost knocking the band out of place. “What happened? Are you okay?” She looked at Charles, wide eyed, and her expression and voice oozing worry, “What happened?”

Yavia

Sharah grabbed Yavia’s hands and lowered them. Sharah did not want to find out what would happen if she accidently knocked the thing off without easing the power back down. “Yavia, Luv, I’m okay. It’s probably the head band.” Sharah let go of one of her hands, setting her fingers along the metal. Her eyes settled on Charles. “I don’t know for absolutely certain that it’s safe. It’s a prototype and there isn’t anyone else like me to test it first. I’ve only had it on a couple of hours.” She looked at Yavia, “It stops me from getting all the input. I can’t hear it.” She let go of Yavia’s other hand. Their concern and worry were so clear on their faces, but she couldn’t feel it. “Here, let me take it off. It will take me a minute or so to dial the power down first.”

Sharah didn’t know what would happen but promised herself that no matter what happened she wouldn’t scream or show pain. That would only scare them. She reached up for the left stud as she looked down at her lap. She grabbed it in her fingers firmly and quickly dialed it back several levels. There was a sharp sensation, like a strong electric shock, but in reverse. Sharah held herself stiff even as her head swam slightly. There was static again and snatches of mental voices and flits of emotion. The throbbing she’d noticed wasn’t gone but subsided noticeably. Turning it off apparently wasn’t as difficult as turning it on. She turned the power down steadily paying attention to how she felt.

By the time she had the power all the way down, and pressed both studs to turn it off, Sharah swayed slightly, no more pain than normal, but disorienting in the volume and sheer force. She slipped it off and set it on top of the box, then she took both their hands.

Sharah

Charles was out of his depth… and he knew it. Of the three of them, he was the only one with no telepathic or empathic ability. So while Sharah spoke, he could grasp the principles of what was going on but not the specifics. He squeezed Sharah’s hand and said “Ok, hun. Just… just start at the beginning. Tell us about your date, and how that turned into this.” and he tapped his temple with a finger.

Tenkiller

Yavia let the breath she had been holding and relaxed a little when the static stopped and she was able to feel Sharah clearly. She squeezed Sharah’s hand. With her other, Yavia’s finger tips touched briefly on Sharah’s head where the band stud had been. She wasn’t trying to ease pain or sense anything, just felt the need for the contact. Yavia slid the box out of the way, making room for Sharah to be between them, and took Charles’ other hand. Seeking that connection and circle.

Yavia

Sharah nodded and squeezed both their hands. She breathed in deeply. “It started before tonight. Before you found me in the park and brought me home.” Slowly she explained about her chance meeting with Hyrushi at the coffee cart and his offer to try and help her. She explained about the trip to the giant geode cave. The restriction and secrecy Hyrushi had put on it. Her overnight stay, the effect the cave had. “He asked me if I would help with the study of the cave and its properties. I gave him the scans I took of myself while I was there, but never heard anything from the researcher he’d sent it to. I didn’t think anything else of it.”

“After we left the botanical garden we went out to the bluffs by the old ocean floor. He gave me that.” She nodded toward the box. “The box contains a small PaDD interface. It explains the basics of the band. I’m not an engineer, but my understanding is it works as a type of white noise machine. It operates on the theory that telepathic input is similar to radio frequencies. I dial into the frequency that I hear and then turn the power up until it…kind of negates those frequencies. It blocks the input from reaching me. Or at least that’s how I understood it when I read it.”

Sharah

Charles chuckled. Maybe he wasn’t out of his depth after all. “That’s… that’s actually kinda brilliant. I mean. The premise is old as dirt. Since any species began communicating over distance, others have done whatever they could to eavesdrop on or interrupt those messages. Frequency scramblers, signal jammer, wave disruption generators… all of ‘em work on the same basic concept. If you can’t stop the sender from sending the message, you stop the receiver from receiving the message. So the headband is just a stripped down signal jammer. Find the frequency, broadcast a louder signal at the frequency. Just… drown out the original.”

Tenkiller

“That’s probably why I thought something was wrong,” Yavia said. “It blocks you from getting signals but you were nothing but static and a wall.”

Sharah nodded, “It’s exactly like that. It makes it so I can’t receive it, but I can still feel my telepathy working. The man who made, Dr Solomon Kane, he made…”

“Hey isn’t he the one Ok’jiv was going on about. Created that new fetal life support system and the external artificial womb?” Yavia asked. Sharah nodded, “That’s him.” Yavia’s eyes went wide and she looked at the band with a little more interest instead of wariness.

“Dr Kane made one other one. Apparently the person has similar difficulty with control that I do, but not nearly the input. He used the mineral from the geode in it. It made the device work better. The power the band generates is intense, he said it would harm any other telepath. It didn’t work right at first and the governor called him. He walked me though,” that was the nicest way to put it, “calibrating it. The instructions included assumed, that like most telepaths, I operate on one frequency. I don’t. We realized I operate on three different frequencies with very large band widths.”

She tightened her hand around Charles’ palm. “I don’t know if there will be any adverse effects. Calibrating it was…difficult,” she sighed. No hiding and no lies. “It was excruciating right at the end. Enough that it makes me nervous to try again. But once we got the power all the way up, everything stopped. No more pain, no more noise. There was a dull throbbing after about two hours. I can’t say what specifically caused it, but the box collects and returns the data to him, and I can input information as well. It’s made so I can adjust the power and frequency. I can choose what to let it and how much, or that’s the idea anyway. I’ll have to experiment with it.”

Sharah

Charles said “Ok. But I’d strongly suggest that until ya get it where it needs ta be, you do that tweakin’ here at home with both of us here with ya. Ok?”

Tenkiller