Sorry for gaps between updates, my computer got stolen and I'm lazy yadda yadda yadda.
You may notice that I revised the first two chapters. Hoping it is more satisfactory.
I fought the decisions that call and lost; my mark has the relevant piece in this… I will come reformed!Coheed and Cambria: The Crowing
Chapter 3"Ahhh-ugh." Krystal nearly gagged as ROB jabbed the tongue depressor into her mouth. The robot was simultaneously shining a light in her ear.
After a few seconds, the slab of balsa wood was removed and the light was flicked off. ROB tacitly drew back, disposing of the used medical equipment and studying a rapidly appearing computer chart.
Krystal let her vision wander around the room, taking this near-silent moment to wonder what would happen next.
The other three were sealing off her quarters in every way they could think of and trying to find time to mourn their fallen companion in between outbursts of tense shouting and roaring power tools, and the occasional thump from inside the room.
Krystal didn't need her extrasensory methods to feel the heavy layer of distrust that was beginning to spread through wherever the remnants of the Star Fox team walked. It worried her. Psychological attacks, she knew better than most, were the most dangerous. They were the roots of the sapling of chaos. The aparoid was the sunlight.
What was the water? And where was the soil?
The answer, or part of it, shook her out of her silent reverie. "Miss Krystal. You are late."
She blinked. "Late? For what?"
There was a pause. "You mistake me. You are with child."
For a few seconds, Krystal went numb.
Then feeling came back to her in a whirling, disorienting rush of emotion and memory. The scent of hers and Fox's mingled passion touched at her nostrils as she saw him beside her, then a sudden acute awareness of the tight feeling in her belly jerked her attention to the present, then suddenly the pathways to the past shut as quickly as they had opened. She was sitting on the table again.
She inhaled deeply through her nose and let it out slowly in her mouth, praying that the oxygen would calm her seething mind. She couldn't let the others know about this. They would fall over themselves trying to keep her better protected and put themselves in danger more. There would be resentment toward her and Fox for having the gall to make love without contraception out here in the middle of nowhere.
On an impulse, she relaxed her body into a prone position, shutting her eyes and systematically removing her connection with the physical senses. She triggered a synapse in her mind that opened its awareness beyond the imagination of one who has not experienced it.
There were millions upon millions of existential doorways just beyond her reach into places and dimensions she had never known, past and present. Minds floated in her field of non-vision, distorted by the thoughts that transformed them. Some patterns she recognized, knew well enough to explore, others were locked mysteries.
She narrowed her mind a little and focused on willing herself through the gateway to this time, this place. The billions of minds was slimmed to only a few. There was a mind stretched taut, giving off emotional heat and still twisted in a spiral with tense feelings, anger and anxiety. Krystal saw the patterns of thought in the mind and searched for the encryption that would translate into the closest she could come to mind reading.
She found a fit. Instantly the jumbled signals became less vague emotions, and to an extent even vision and sound. But most important were the unspoken words that were heard as if they were thoughts of Krystal's own, within her head and nowhere else. They were thoughts of frustration and worry, and to only a slightly lesser extent concern for Krystal herself. Krystal found the doorway opened by the idea of her in the mind and followed it down thousands of hallways simultaneously to memories, hopes, thoughts and dreams, all about her. The mind undoubtedly belonged to fox.
She concentrated and ripped herself away from the mind, already missing the comfort it gave her. She focused harder, this time searching for a mind whose patterns she did not recognize.
She found one.
As soon as she began to explore the unfamiliar patterns, she realized that they were unfamiliar because they were on the verge of not existing. The usual deep-running jumbles of signals were in this case nothing but a few basic impulses that were not even acknowledged inside the mind itself. It had to be interpreted from an outsider.
It was the mind of Krystal's baby.
The mind reacted to its mothers touch, wrapping around it as a child's hand to a parent's finger. It explored the warmth brought by this new mind, and suddenly Krystal felt patterns in her own brain become sorted out and organized into something close to a level of understanding.
With a shock that broke the telepathic connection, Krystal realized: the child shared her power.
The possibilities danced in front of her eyes. Could it be a Cerinian child? With Fox's help, was it possible that she could restore the blue-violet vulpine line of her homeworld? No one knew if the genes that made a Cerinian so distinctive were dominant or recessive, as they had only bred among their own—recessive genes would have surfaced with almost the same frequency as dominant ones. If they were dominant… who knew? An entire race could be rebuilt from the ashes…
In Krystal's excited musings, she failed to interpret something she had noticed.
During her telepathic search, she had looked for unfamiliar minds. She did not stop for a second to realize how odd it was that she had only found one.