At the end of her shift, Raven was still feeling somewhat nervous. She had managed to spend two years purposefully not looking at Arik directly when near him, always observing him from a distance. Tonight was the first time she had locked eyes with him. It was stupid really. It's not like he had smiled and waved, or even moved at all. She didn't give him the chance to do anything. The moment she had come to senses and realised that he was looking at her, she broke eye contact and continued on her way down the corridor. That was it. It was nothing.

And yet she couldn't stop thinking about it. A flutter had begun in her stomach and now, five hours later, it was turning into nausea. A torrent of thoughts crossed her mind. Paranoid, impossible thoughts, like what if he somehow found her story? Impossible, given that he couldn't leave his cell, and if he somehow ever did escape, he would be more concerned with leaving the prison, than standing in her office and reading her story. But she still berated herself for not even having the sense of mind to at least change the name of the main character.

And of course none of these thoughts crossed her mind until after she had sent her story directly to the publishers who had already agreed to print it after reading the first three chapters. She didn't have an agent because she couldn't trust them as far as she could throw them, and these days editors were hardly needed. They were still relevant as far as making sure the story sounded good, but Raven had enough faith in her own writing (despite the fact her ending still didn't feel right) to bother wasting money just to have someone read her story before it got published.

So now she worried that one day Arik Soong would be free (she didn't have much access to prisoner records, so she didn't know very much about why he was there and how long for) and he might just pick up her book in a store, and read it. Well, provided it actually sold.

"You're relieved."

Raven glanced up at her supervisor and then looked at the clock to verify it was a few minutes after six in the morning. It amazed her how she managed to be the only person who ever showed up on time. Even her supervisor could be anywhere between five minutes and half an hour late. And of course, she never got paid for the time she spent waiting for someone to relieve her.

She nodded at her supervisor, a balding man who was almost twice her size, then grabbed her readily packed bag and left. Still reeling from her "encounter" with Arik (like it could barely even be called that), she didn't want to risk leaving via his cell, and instead walked the long way around through adjacent corridors.

The orange horizon hit her eyes with force as she exited the building. She paused a moment, blinking rapidly to force her eyes to adjust. Before they could, however, she heard a deep male voice from behind her shout in a different language, and she was apprehended. Another light hit her eyes, not necessarily bright this time, and she was standing on a star ship.

Raven had never set foot in a star ship before, so it was kind of a shock to realise instantly that she was in one (or so she had to assume because there was a big viewscreen in front of her and it had a very nice view of Earth on it). After looking stupidly at the clear picture of Earth for a few moments, she remembered that this wasn't the sort of place she ought to be on, and that the person who had grabbed her hadn't sounded very friendly.

Before she could turn around to look at her assailant, however, she was grabbed by the hair on the back of her head and pulled away from the viewscreen. She found herself facing the one creature she'd thought least likely to face when abducted and taken to a star ship: A human.

To be fair, he may not have been a Terran, she knew there were many colonies out there with other humans on them, and there were even some species who looked like humans, but weren't. He could have been one of them. But this was definitely not a human ship. The only reason she knew that was because she had seen a picture of a Romulan warbird before, and that's exactly what this was.

The human, who was definitely not a Romulan, spoke.

"Take her to a cell," he said, and she quickly realised he was talking to a point just off her side, which must be where the one holding her hair was. "Let's see how the prisonee likes being the prisoner."

And before she could protest, she was dragged off the bridge and away from the cold man with the blue eyes.