Good to hear that people liked the first. Here's the second. If anyone wants to respond to the challenge themselves, I'd like to read what they write.

This is a response to Peja's Improv Challenge # 2. The required words are: 1) launch pad 2) hug 3) reboot 4) eccentric 5) hard-headed 6) legend

Characters are not mine, TV shows are not mine. No money has been made.

Thanks to Blue for the beta job. This story is for Aby

Queen of the Dead

By Kameka

Vicki Po looked up from the computer she was putting information into and toward the television set hidden on the corner. It was mainly there to provide background noise and the occasional much needed distraction. A rerun of one of the incarnations of Star Trek was playing. The noise that had caught her attention was a shuttle leaving from a makeshift launch pad.

She sighed and debated looking for the remote to either change the channel or turn the set off. When she was a teenager, she'd loved the show in both forms available: the original series and The Next Generation. That it hadn't been considered cool had never mattered to her. The premise had been great. To boldly go where no one has gone before, to meet new species, new people.

The primary attraction for young Victoria had been the message of hope. Of peace. 'Look at what people could do,' she used to remind herself. 'If they could just see past their differences, anything's possible.' Something to strive for. Who wouldn't want to? Modern day myths and legends. Cruel hopes to someone silly enough to think that there was ever a possibility of those messages coming true.

Victoria had gone through high school thinking about possibilities for the future. She was going to change the world. Even then everyone had considered her a bit strange. Daydreamer Po. The moniker hadn't bothered her. To be sure, it was one of the nicer ones. No one wants to be known as Headcase, Brainiac, Egghead, Teacher's Pet, or any other of the number of names she'd been called while in school.

Was that why she'd liked Star Trek so much? Television was proven as a great escape. Where better for someone who was too smart and who'd never fit in to escape than to a science fiction show? No one was ostracized for being different there. They were understood. Maybe some were a bit feared, but they were still accepted to matter how odd they seemed.

Acceptance. One of the goals she'd set for when she was an adult. She'd wanted to be accepted, to fit in. It couldn't be that hard, could it? Not once she was out of school, free to figure things out for herself and not held back for wanting to be different.

She'd graduated early at the top of her class and gone on to community college. One of the youngest students there, she was a Biology major who minored in social work and set her sights set firmly on med school for after she graduated. What better way to meet people and help people than to provide health care? Victoria Po and medicine: a match made in heaven. Everyone thought so; her family, her teachers, even her few friends.

With degrees under her belt and rose-colored glasses perched firmly on her face, she charged full speed ahead into the medical profession. She would fulfill her goals. She'd help people and be accepted doing it. Nothing could stop her; no obstacle was too large.

That blissful naivete that had sheltered her from the real world hadn't lasted.

She'd quickly learned that no matter how much she strove to be the ideal doctor and friend, how much she worked toward her personal vision of Utopia… It wasn't going to happen. One person couldn't make that much of a difference to people at large. She could help individuals, patch them up and send them back out into the world, but that was all. It wasn't enough.

What good did it do to patch people up and send them back out where they got hurt? A great majority of people she'd seen were ill and could be healed. Others were injured because of their own stupidity. Many were simply victims of happenstance, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Victims of violent crimes, some fatally injured and the rest living their lives with physical scars the least of their worries. The emotional and psychological ones were the deepest, the hardest to see. The hardest to fix.

How could she walk away from someone who still had so much healing to do? A person shouldn't have to. They shouldn't be penalized for wanting to help.

The last patient she'd helped in the hospital had been Arline Evans. She'd had nightmares for days because of Arline and the image of her face still haunted Vicki. Physically attacked and brutally raped, the twenty-eight year old had seemed more like a frightened child in the sterile room of the ER. Arline was out of it, the drugs used to sedate her flowing through her bloodstream, but she was nevertheless terrified of being left alone in unfamiliar surroundings.

When she became hysterical at the thought of being forgotten so whoever injured her could come back and finish the job, Victoria had been pressed into service as companion. It was supposed to be a simply assignment; Arline was sedated and Victoria wouldn't have to do anything dealing with medicine. She just had to be there, to watch her until she woke up, Arline was moved, or family came. If Vicki was fair, it would've been that simple if she'd learned to keep her emotions under wraps.

Instead Victoria'd had to deal with her own fears and emotions as a not-quite fully sedated Arline relived her attack. Moans and strangled screams erupted from the huddle on the bed as the memories became terrifyingly real to both of them. The woman on the bed thrashed as she fought the demons that preyed on her mind; Victoria sat beside her locked in the endless questions that cycled through hers.

When Arline had jerked awake for the umpteenth time, Victoria was startled but still by her post. 'It's okay,' she crooned, 'there's no one here but the two of us. You're safe.'

Arline had lifted tear-drenched eyes to meet Victoria's and she shook her head. Through cracked and swollen lips, Arline quietly murmured that she was wrong. That she'd never be safe.

As Victoria thought that the monster who'd done this was still roaming the streets unscathed and uncaught… She didn't have the heart to disagree with Arline's assessment. No matter how much she wanted to reassure the older woman. How much she wanted to reassure herself. They sat in an uncomfortable semi-silence broken by Arline's hitched breathing and the muted sounds of an ER that never slept.

When Victoria couldn't stand it anymore, all of her emotions screaming about what was needed, she inched closer to the woman on the bed and began a series of soothing nonsensical words. The never-ending murmur calmed Arline down enough so that she didn't draw back when Victoria rested a hand on her arm. Instead, she looked down and swallowed before nodding, the jerking motion meant for both of them.

Slowly, carefully, she inched closer, stopping whenever Arline tensed and waiting for an invisible sign to begin again. Finally, an eternity later, Arline stifled yet another sob and reached over to place a trembling hand on Victoria's. Taking that as a signal that everything was all right, Victoria leaned forward and enveloped the trembling woman in a hug. One accepted with a series of softly broken sobs.

And it had been all right, for a while. They'd been able to help each other, offer safety and a shoulder to cry on, to lean on. Even after the police were unable to find Arline's attacker, she had been a quiet well of strength. Until her life was once more swept out from under her feet. Persisting flu-like symptoms had led her once more to seek medical attention; a doctor's visit that plunged her back into the cycle of fear and hopelessness she had never left.

Arline Evans was pregnant; what did she want to do? Have the child and give it up to strangers? Keep the child with her, a loved but graphic reminder of her assault? Or did she want to get rid of the results before everyone knew what she had gone through?

She picked the last choice; unable and unwilling to give up that much of what little was left of her control. This was her body, her child. Could she give up something that she nurtured to life? On the same side, could she live with the reminder the child was sure to be?

Grief for her unborn child compounded her problems; guilt over her choice left her unable to truly live, unable to make choices. The facade that Arline had shown to her therapist, to her family and friends, to Victoria, cracked and the tidal wave pushed to the fore. She was at the mercy of uncontrolled emotions that twisted without warning. Until, finally, she broke. Writing notes to her friends and family, apologies for not being strong enough, Arline left seeking the peace she had sought for months.

I guess I'm just not as strong as I wanted to be. I can't face myself in the mirror. I'm sorry, Victoria.

A twenty-two word note that changed Victoria Po's life. She thought that she'd been helping Arline, a woman who needed a friend. She'd failed. How could she have been so arrogant to think she could make a difference? Then, as Victoria looked at her career choice, she saw just how she could have thought that. Medicine. "Come to us and we'll fix you." Sure, they could make a difference, but not to everyone. Not to enough people.

She left that world as she sought answers within herself. Victoria stopped worrying what others thought. Became more stubborn as she fought to find validation for her own beliefs. She wouldn't be dismissed, by anyone. Slowly but surely, Victoria metamorphosed into Vicki, the woman she was today.

Vicki chuckled without humor and reached over to save the information to a disk and rebooted the computer. That was the problem with looking into the past: the present often got impatient. As it came up, she looked around her 'office.' The cool room was far removed from what she had dreamt of when she was a child. The morbid aspect of her work never imagined.

She looked again for the remote to the television in the corner, getting up with a sigh when she couldn't find it. Turning the television off, she smiled at the crew of the Enterprise-D once again saving a people against insurmountable odds. She didn't fly to the rescue in a space ship or wield a scalpel to perform life-saving surgery. Her job wasn't that glamorous.

But she made a difference. That was the important part. Vicki had lost a part of herself, an that was innocence out of place in the real world, but gained something even better. Self respect. There was never a morning that she couldn't look at herself in the mirror. Never a day when she felt too helpless to do anything. She had a mission, a job that made a difference.

She provided the answers that helped get monsters off the street. She was behind the scenes, providing hope to the victims who desperately needed it.

Victoria Po had been laid to rest years ago. Vicki Po was alive now, content in her basement office as the hardheaded and wildly eccentric queen of the dead of the eleventh precinct.

The End