A/N: This story starts in the year 2365 in the TNG timeline (near the end of season three). There will be appearances of TNG and Voyager characters and later on, some references to events from the Star Trek books that depict what happened after Nemesis and Endgame. But the main focus is on two characters of my own invention, so no worries if you haven't read the books.


Part I: Birth of a Star

1. The New Girl

She hated real food.

Or maybe she only hated the kind of food her mother cooked – or tried to cook. She wasn't very good at it, but every now and then she insisted on being 'domestic'. Whatever that meant.

Her mother was good with words. She was a holo-novel author, so her whole world consisted of words and characters and plot twists. Anything else was just in the way.

Like being a mom.

Or managing a household.

"Jacinda?"

The only thing she hated more than real food was her given name.

"Aren't you hungry, dear?"

Jacinda eyed the squishy food on her plate. "I like replicated eggs better."

Her mother sighed. "I know you do. But I thought you might appreciate it if I took the time to cook you breakfast myself."

"Maybe I would if you could actually cook."

There was a short pause before her mother burst out laughing. "Oh honey, you're becoming more like your father every day. He was too honest for his own good, too."

Jacinda looked up in surprise. "Honesty is not a bad thing."

"That is very wise and very Betazoid of you to say."

"I'm not Betazoid," Jacinda muttered. Technically, she was half Betazoid and half human. So she was really neither.

"What you are is late for school if you don't eat up," her mother said.

Reluctantly, Jacinda took a spoonful of the runny eggs. "Do I have to?" she asked after swallowing slowly.

"Of course not," her mother said and smiled, even though she was sad and more than a little disappointed that her breakfast adventure hadn't turned out the way she had hoped.

Jacinda hated that. More often than not, her mother's smiles were lies rather than truths. Of course, if Jacinda had been human like her mother, she wouldn't have known that. But since her father had been Betazoid, Jacinda knew that smiles were rarely to be trusted. Nevertheless, she really didn't want to eat those eggs, so she took her mother by her word and got up from the table.

"Shall I walk you to the transporters?" her mother offered.

"I thought your agent was coming over," Jacinda reminded her.

Her mother jumped to her feet. "Right! I almost forgot! He's going to love my latest cliffhanger. I'll walk you tomorrow, okay?"

"I'm twelve. You don't have to walk me…" But her mother wasn't listening to her anymore. She was full of excitement and a true kind of laughter, which could only mean that she was thinking about her novel.

"All right, love you, honey." Her mother kissed her on the head and sped off.

That one wasn't a lie at least, but it wasn't the whole truth either. She loved the holodeck more.

"Bye, Mom."

Jacinda left their apartment and joined the usual crowd of people on their way to the nearest public transporter. There were other kids who dreaded having to go to school, adults who dreaded having to go to work, adults who were excited to be going to work, and lots of adults who were too preoccupied with their personal lives to care about work. Jacinda didn't pay attention to any of them. It was easier that way. All of their hopes and dreams and fears and plans and whatever else they might be feeling just became a constant background noise.

The only person Jacinda paid attention to was the admiral. Well, she wasn't a real admiral. Admirals weren't in the habit of using public transporters. But this woman was a Starfleet officer, and apparently, she lived in the area because she used this particular transporter every morning, and she always had a padd in her hand. Like Jacinda, she never paid attention to anyone else, just her padd. She had a kind of concentration and laser focus about her that had Jacinda convinced that this woman would make it to admiral one day.

She envied her.

But for now, Jacinda had to go to school. The admiral would probably be the first person to tell her how important school was. It just didn't feel that way to Jacinda.

When she arrived at her school and walked up to the entrance, she continued to ignore the usual mix of emotions from the other kids – worry about homework, worry about grades, worry about a crush they had, about their popularity, about having no friends, about not being good at Hoverball, and a million other things that had nothing to do with learning. Despite all that worry going around, most of the kids were smiling and talking about the weekend as if that made everything okay.

A new voice surprised Jacinda by breaking through the shield she had erected between herself and her classmates. There were no words per se, just the sound of laughter, and it surprised her because it came from somewhere above her head – from somewhere in the trees. But when Jacinda looked up, she only caught the shadow of something that must have been jumping from treetop to treetop and was now already gone. It must have been some kind of human being, though, because the laughter had been accompanied by a trace of joy. And Jacinda couldn't sense the emotions of animals.

She really liked animals.

The bell rang (their principal loved 'the good old days' as he called it and had reinstated the old Earthen custom of ringing a bell to signal the beginning and ending of individual periods), and Jacinda hurried to get inside.

Class was slow. They had been talking about Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight for weeks now, and Jacinda already knew all about it. Well, she knew about Cochrane's life and about the first contact with the Vulcans, how the warp drive actually worked – not so much.

When it was time for lunch, Jacinda stayed behind for a moment to check the newsfeed on her learning terminal. The Federation had just successfully established political relations with the Legaran. The negotiations had been led by none other than Ambassador Sarek. But the famous Vulcan, who was over 200 years old, apparently suffered from something called Bendii syndrome and had only been able to overcome the symptoms thanks to a mind meld with Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise. Jacinda shuddered at the thought of a mind meld. She couldn't imagine baring her soul to someone like that.

Her train of thought was interrupted not by her growling stomach, but by a strong mix of emotions nearby – insecurity, fear, and the need for dominance – a typical bullying situation. Jacinda sighed. She usually kept her head down and pretended not to notice. Just because she couldn't help sensing these things, she couldn't be expected to get involved, now could she? If she reacted to every hurtful emotion that came her way, she would never stop. Plus, she was old enough to know that humans rarely thanked her for pointing out their feelings. Apparently, it was everybody's favorite pastime to hide their true selves.

But for some reason, Jacinda left the classroom and decided to investigate.

Just this once.

As expected, she found three boys from one of her classes, who had cornered a lonely girl, who must have been new in school and gotten lost on her way to lunch. The girl, however, was a surprise. She looked to be of Jacinda's age, even though she was smaller than Jacinda, who had always been too tall and too lanky for her age. The new girl had red hair that fell to her shoulders, but more importantly, she had two reddish-brown cat-like ears as well as a reddish-brown tail and gleaming cat-like eyes that were bright green.

"What kind of freak are you?" the human boy named Jones asked while the others laughed. It was obvious that the girl's unusual appearance had drawn them to her.

"Yeah, was your mother assaulted by her cat?" his friend Riley sneered, and they all snickered, pretending to be greatly amused by this when they were secretly a little scared.

As they should be. This girl was not half human, half cat, of course. One of her parents must have been a Lamar – a humanoid species with feline features like the fur and the tail as well as the claws and teeth, which made them ferocious fighters if they wanted to be. But this girl was predominantly human and not at all aggressive. She wasn't even all that afraid. Mostly, she seemed curious, somewhat confused, and a little sad.

"I think the only mother who was assaulted must have been yours because you're too dumb to recognize a Lamar when you see one," Jacinda decided to speak up.

The three boys winced, but their surprise quickly faded when they saw that it was just her and not a teacher. "Move along, mind reader. Nobody asked for your opinion. You always cheat anyway."

Jacinda huffed in exasperation. No matter how often she explained that she was in fact not a mind reader because she was only half Betazoid, it made no difference whatsoever. The other kids still didn't trust her, didn't trust their secrets to be safe around her.

"I think Mr. Calor would be very interested in my opinion of what's going on," she said.

"Why? We were just talking to the new girl!"

"Oh, sure. And you were also just accidentally copying Seril's answers on that Vulcan history test last week."

Jones paled visibly, clearly taking her words as a threat that she would rat him out. He quickly decided that the new girl wasn't worth that much trouble. "Stupid Betazoid!" he muttered under his breath before he turned and left, his friends following him.

This incident wouldn't exactly help her prove that she couldn't read minds. He would never believe that Jacinda hadn't read his thoughts, but that his feelings of guilt and exhilaration when they had gotten their test results back had told her all she needed to know. But it didn't matter. She wouldn't want to be friends with them anyway.

"Are you okay?"

Jacinda blinked in surprise when the new girl suddenly spoke for the first time. "Why wouldn't I be? They were bothering you, not me," she replied.

The girl cocked her head. "But they called you stupid and a cheater."

"They said worse things to you." Jacinda shrugged.

"It's the tail. It throws people off," the girl said surprisingly cheerful and wiggled said tail.

"Uh, I can imagine," Jacinda said and turned around to finally go and have lunch.

The girl followed her. "My name is Mayra."

"Jacinda."

"Oh, that's a pretty name!" Mayra gushed.

"No, it's not."

"Yes, it is."

Jacinda looked at her irritably. She had often been told that her name was pretty, but those were just empty words people felt they needed to say when they were confronted with an unusual name. They didn't realize how stupid it was to compliment a Betazoid when you didn't actually mean it. To Jacinda's surprise, she couldn't detect any insincerity in Mayra's words. It threw her off more than the tail did.

"Why are you following me?" she asked her.

"You're going to have lunch now, aren't you?" Mayra asked in return.

"Yes!?"

"What a coincidence! So am I." Mayra smiled at her, and when she did so, she revealed two sharp canines.

Jacinda wanted to tell her to stop mocking her, but she wasn't. As far as Jacinda could tell, Mayra really was happy to have lunch and to have company. Her happiness suddenly reminded Jacinda of this morning. "Do you like to climb trees by any chance?"

"Oh, I love it!" Another smile, another truth. "It's really easy, too. Well, if you have a tail, that is."

"You should probably learn to defend yourself rather than climb trees," Jacinda suggested.

"Why?"

"Because if you look like a Lamar, but won't fight like a Lamar, then you'll get into trouble."

Mayra's ears twitched. "And what if you look like a Betazoid, but don't want to use your gift, then what does that make you?"

"It's not a gift, and it's certainly none of your business!" Jacinda hissed, cursing her pitch-black eyes and dark hair that betrayed her not quite human heritage.

"You're not very nice for a Betazoid," Mayra stated matter-of-factly.

"And you're not very impressive for a Lamar," Jacinda shot back.

"Then I guess we're both failures," Mayra said and shrugged as if there was nothing to be done about that.

Jacinda tried to suppress her surprise, but people weren't usually this honest. "Is that why you changed schools?"

"No, this school has a better advanced science program. My old teachers said that I've become too smart for them." Surprisingly, she wasn't bragging. She was just telling the truth.

"Sounds like you're anything but a failure," Jacinda said.

"Sounds like you can be nice after all," Mayra replied.

Jacinda rolled her eyes but hid a smile when she entered the cafeteria.


A/N: Just getting started here… And in case you were wondering, the Lamar are not canon. I thought it would be more fun to make them up.