AN: Thanks to everyone who has reviewed the story thus far. I really appreciate it, and I'm glad you all seem to be enjoying it. This will be my last update before the proposed upgrades to the site over the next couple of days, but as soon as we are able to post more stuff, I should have another one ready. Thanks again!
Chapter Nine: Cerulean BlueIt hadn't taken long to get Trance's wounds taken care of. As she had said, none of them were serious. That was extremely fortunate, Harper realized, considering the severity of the explosion they had lived through. He didn't know what he would have done if she had died. He would have hated to be stuck in her body for the rest of his life. Worse, he knew, he would have hated to lose her. However much she had changed from the carefree, innocent, purple-skinned girl he had grown to admire, he knew that beneath the golden skin, the knowing green eyes, and the dangerous abilities, she was still in there.
Or rather, she was now inside his body. Which brought him back to the present reality with brutal rapidity.
"Man, I hope those chinheads have gotten something figured out by now," he said to Trance as they made their way back toward the destroyed lab they had been working in. "No offense, Trance, but your body is really starting to feel weird."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well," he shrugged, "like... I didn't know you liked Sparky Cola so much."
She stopped suddenly and grabbed him by the shoulder, turning him to face her. "How do you know that?"
He shrugged again. "I don't know. It just popped into my head. You should have asked, Trance." He grinned. "I would have gladly shared some of my supply with you."
She shook her head. "I've never told you that. I've never told anyone that." She looked like she was going to say something more, but then stopped. "Come on," she said instead.
They walked in silence for a few moment longer before Harper spoke up.
"So when did you start liking Sparky Cola?" he asked.
She shrugged absently. "Shortly before I met you and Beka and Rev Bem. I had some at a bar on Pegasus Drift. I thought it tasted pretty good, and then they told me what was in it. I haven't had any since."
"Too bad," Harper replied. "That stuff could jump start the Maru even if she was stuck on an icy asteroid drifting in a void between the Known Galaxies."
"My point exactly," she muttered.
They were silent the rest of the way back to the lab. When they reached it, they saw that the Perseids, under the watchful direction of Professor Deedran, were hard at work.
"Any progress, Prof?" Harper piped as he followed Trance in.
Deedran straightened from where he was examining a small piece of metal and turned to face them. "Why, yes! We've made some good progress," he said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically for Harper to believe him. "Everything is going quite well!"
"Have you found all the pieces of Harper's teseract generator?" Trance questioned.
Deedran went from enthusiastic to crestfallen in a remarkably short amount of time. "Well, no, not quite. Actually, we've only found a few of the main components. But we'll find them all soon," he added, nodding encouragingly.
"Yeah, assuming they weren't vaporized," Harper put in dejectedly. "We'll be lucky if we can even put half of it back together!"
"Don't think so negatively, Harper," Trance responded. "Pessimism won't help."
"It's not pessimism," the engineer replied. "It's realism. I mean, come on, who are we gonna fool here? Something as delicate as a teseract generator can't just be reassembled after it's been blown into a million tiny pieces."
"We don't need all of the pieces," Trance said absently as she crouched to dig through a pile of debris. "All we really need is the photonic resonator."
"The photonic resonator? What? Why?"
"Yes," agreed Professor Deedran, "why just the photonic resonator, Mr. Harp – er, I mean, Trance Gemini? I don't see how that alone will help you much."
"Yeah, I'm with the Prof on that one, Trance."
Trance looked up at them, a strange expression flitting briefly across her face. "I'm not sure why I said that," she replied softly. "I just thought that... never mind. All I know is that we need to find it intact. If we can, we might have a chance of getting back to our own bodies."
Harper shrugged and shook his head, exchanging baffled looks with Deedran. "Well, we better do what she says," he suggested. "When she starts talking like that, only an Uber who's had his pride stepped on wouldn't listen. Come on, you take that side of the room, I'll take this one."
"Sounds like a plan to me," the Professor added, still nodding profusely. "Ehm... sort of."
====
Two hours later found the group of scientists and researchers still looking. Several of the Perseids had come up with fragments of the teseract generator, none of them in working order. Harper had even found one of the power cells, but after taking an extra half hour to completely take it apart and examine it, he could find nothing wrong with it – other than the fact that it no longer worked. Regardless, it hadn't been responsible for the power generator's overload.
One by one, the Perseids started drifting off again. Harper didn't try to stop them. There wasn't much he could do about their remarkably short attention spans, and besides, most of the room had been searched already anyway. Eventually, it was just him, Trance, and Professor Deedran left in the gutted lab.
As time passed, he gradually became aware that working while in Trance's body wasn't quite the same as it was with his own. For one thing, her eyesight was better. He found himself noticing tiny details and miniscule parts that he would have needed magnification tools to see, had he been in his original body. She didn't tire very easily, either. Despite having had no sleep since before their departure from the Andromeda, he was still going strong. Trance, on the other hand, stuck in his body, was beginning to show signs of weariness. At the moment, she was sitting on her knees, wiping sweat from her forehead and looking like she was about to drop.
"So, uh," he began slowly, looking up from where he was tinkering with another part he had found, "when I asked you what your favorite color was last time, you weren't lying, were you?"
She glanced over at him absently and blinked. "Huh?"
He shrugged, wondering if going into this again was a good idea, but right now, he needed her to stay awake, and talking to her was really the only way he could do that, while still doing anything useful himself. "You know, back on the Andromeda all those months ago, when I was trying to get you to tell me about yourself, and I said I didn't even know what your favorite color was, you said it was blue."
She shrugged back. "And?"
"You weren't lying. It is blue. Cerulean blue."
Suddenly, Trance looked much more awake than she had a moment ago. "How do you know that?" she demanded, rising and walking to stand over him.
He shrugged and looked back to the component he had found. "I don't know," he replied, fumbling with a tool that wasn't doing what it was supposed to. "I just... do."
She was silent for a moment before speaking again. "And why do I like cerulean blue, Harper?" she said slowly.
"Um, 'cause a long, long time ago, you were on a ship that passed through a nebula, and you really liked all the cerulean blue gases that were mixed in swirls through the purples and the pinks. That was when you decided that cerulean blue was your favorite color." He paused, and looked surprised. "Wow, that was a long time ago..."
"Harper, stop it!" she ordered.
"Stop what?" he asked in confusion, spreading his hands wide.
"Whatever it is that's popping into your head, stop thinking about it! Don't say anything about it, don't ponder it, just ignore it, okay?"
"Sheesh, okay, okay, no need to bite my head off," he replied placatingly. "It's not like I'm trying to, or anything." He glanced down at the component he was working on, trying to get the tool he was using to do what he wanted it to. "What the heck, this thing is a piece of junk..."
Trance plucked the tool out of his hand and replaced it with another. "Here, this is the one you want."
"How do you know?" he asked challengingly.
She shrugged. "I just do."
"Now who's the one doing whatever it is that I was doing?"
Trance sighed and shook her head. "Don't you see what's happening, Harper? Not only did we switch bodies, we also traded our abilities. And our memories. And those memories are now starting to surface in our consciousnesses."
"Holy... smokes!" Harper exclaimed. "You mean I'm gonna forget how to be an engineer, and you're gonna forget how to be... Trance?"
"Maybe," she replied. "Eventually."
"No more fixing Rommie?" Harper lamented.
"Harper, that will be the least of your concerns if you start prying into my memories," she said forcefully. "So just keep your mind on your work, and ignore whatever distracts you from it."
He held up his hands. "Right, fine, I understand completely. Oh, hey," he added as she started to turn away.
She glanced over her shoulder at him. "What?"
"Same goes for you, right? Not all of my memories are exactly public property, either."
She smirked – actually smirked at him! – and nodded. "Don't worry, Harper, I doubt there's much in there that I really want to know." She turned away and went back to digging through the rubble.
"Gee, thanks," he muttered as he got back to work.
