Patin's Lessons Part π – Controlled Chaos
Posted on Thu Nov 6th, 2025 @ 8:25pm by Patin
1,803 words; about a 9 minute read
Mission:
Character Development
Location: Celestial Temple
A Lesson in Detonation, Momentum, and Divine Misunderstanding
The Celestial Temple shimmered in its usual quiet hum of eternity, light folding and unfolding on itself like breathing silk. Patin sat cross-legged in midair, boots gently spinning as though gravity were an opinion. Every time she looked at that endless light, she thought of oxygen — beautiful, invisible, and absolutely useless until it met a spark.
She flicked her thumb and caught a sphere of light, it pulsed like a heartbeat, the faint sound of a fuse burning somewhere inside it.
“Patin of Bajor,” the voices said. They never spoke together, not really. They echoed each other, layered like different drafts of the same idea.
“Your temporal path is... turbulent.”
“Turbulent?” Patin scoffed, letting herself float sideways. “You make it sound like I sneezed wrong in a sandstorm. I call it being efficient.”
“Why accelerate destruction?”
hat made her grin. “Why not? Sometimes the universe needs a good shove. I just happen to be the kind of girl who uses a detonator instead of a sermon.”
The nebula around her shifted, threads of gold twisting into the shape of a sphere, pulsing like a heartbeat. The Prophets were listening. That meant it was story time.
Patin blew a loose strand of hair out of her face, the look of a teacher explaining basic mechanics to a very patient but profoundly sheltered class. “Because,” she said, letting the light-ball roll across her knuckles, “sometimes the universe builds things wrong. Bad wiring. Rotten beams. You don’t fix a structure like that with a hammer. You fix it with a spark.”
“A spark,” another echoed, curious. “For illumination?”
“For kaboom.” She smiled, wolfish and proud. “You ever watch a mountain breathe fire? That’s the universe’s way of saying ‘my bad.’”
“Show us.”
“Alright, fine,” she said, spinning the glowing sphere between her palms. “You want to understand? Let’s start with something simple. The bridge at Yarin Gul.”
She flicked her wrist, and the Temple bent. The light dissolved into rain, a swirl of colors like oil and water, the lightball in her hand swelling into a full scene.
The Bridge at Yarin Gul
The world remade itself in the smell of rust and thunder. Rain hammered down on duranium planks stretched over a deep ravine, where a refinery’s waste poured like black veins into the valley.
Patin crouched beneath the bridge, a small, wiry figure in a poncho three sizes too big, her fingers working a series of fuses like a composer tuning strings.
“Six charges, six seconds, six Cardassians, tell me that isn’t poetic,” she whispered to no one in particular. Her breath fogged against the detonator casing as she grinned.
Her partner, a wide-eyed farm boy from Relliketh, hissed, “You’re insane! The humidity’s too high! The nitrate’s unstable!”
Patin chuckled. “Oh, bless your sweet terrified heart. You think explosions care about humidity?”
She tapped the charge with the tip of her boot, testing the vibration. “They care about timing. Timing is everything. Chaos isn’t random, it’s just physics too fast for people to keep up with.”
Above them, boots clanked. A Cardassian patrol crossed the bridge, laughing. She could hear their voices echo off the steel. Patin waited. Listened. Counted heartbeats like a drummer keeping time.
One... two... three... She flipped the detonator cap open with her thumb. “Boom,” she whispered.
The world bent. Fire rolled like liquid glass. The explosion rippled outward, curling into the rain, bright, perfect, sculpted chaos.
When the noise cleared, the boy was staring at her, mouth open. “You— You didn’t even look away!”
Patin smirked, brushing soot off her cheek. “One never blinks when you’re making art.”
The scene froze mid-ember. The rain turned to starlight again.
Back in the Temple, the Prophets hovered like heat haze.
“You equate creation and destruction.”
“You find... joy in entropy.”
Patin rolled her eyes. “No, no, no. Joy in precision. Destruction’s the side effect. You ever see how a seed breaks before it grows? Same principle. Just louder.”
“You claim mastery of chaos.”
“Control’s a myth,” she said, waving a hand. “You guide chaos. You dance with it. You give it just enough leash to bite, but not enough to swallow the world.”
“Explain... ‘controlled chaos.’”
She grinned. “You asked for it.”
She snapped her fingers, the Temple flared, and the air filled with the acrid scent of recycled water, cheap soap, and unfiltered regret.
The Latrine Incident
“Ohhh, this one’s a classic,” Patin said, pinching her nose. “Smelled like victory and bad plumbing.”
The flashback solidified into a dim, steaming pit of a Cardassian outpost, makeshift walls of corrugated durasteel, grime thick enough to chew. She stood over a barrel of something volatile, a rag stuffed into its mouth, fuse sizzling.
“Sabotage the main reactor, Patin,” she mimicked in a deep voice. “Disable the enemy’s logistics, Patin. They never said which reactor.”
Her squadmate Rhenora, Nozzie to her friends, had been in the next room trying to hack a console when the smell hit her. “Patin,” Nozzie shouted, “what is that?”
Patin grinned around the fuse she was biting. “Improvisation!”
The charge went off a half second too soon, not dangerous, but spectacular. The entire facility erupted in a geyser of steaming waste and smoke. The Cardassians ran screaming. Rhenora stumbled out, covered in gray sludge, blinking through the chaos.
Patin saluted her, dripping and unrepentant. “Congratulations, Commander! You’ve just participated in Bajor’s first biological warfare experiment!”
When the flashback froze, the Temple shimmered with what might have been laughter, or confusion.
“You glorify failure.”
“Oh, it wasn’t failure,” Patin said proudly. “It was redirection. Think about it, we crippled their morale, their plumbing, and their sense of smell in one strike.”
“And this is... controlled?”
Patin shrugged. “Controlled enough that I’m the one telling the story.”
Symphony of Fire
Without waiting for approval, she spun another memory into being, this one pure kinetic poetry.
A canyon at dusk. Resistance fighters dragging crates of stolen fuel rods through shadows. Patin walking backward, lighting detonators with the calm of a woman humming a lullaby.
“See, by then I’d learned explosions are like music. You need rhythm. Space between the beats. Otherwise it’s just noise.” She pointed to the horizon. “That one? That was my opus.”
A tick of time passed and then the canyon went nova. Rocks bloomed like petals. The shockwave painted the air in slow motion.
The Prophets’ light shuddered.
“You shape time with chaos.”
“Damn right,” Patin said, dusting her hands. “You don’t change the world by waiting for it to behave. You shove it. Hard.”
“You delight in... acceleration.”
She winked. “Well, it beats being bored.”
The Temple brightened suddenly. The Prophets began murmuring — a harmony of thought spiraling outward. Then, with no warning, light condensed around Patin into a perfect sphere... and detonated in utter silence.
Everything slowed. Time melted into syrup. Sparks drifted like snowflakes.
Patin floated through the frozen explosion, laughing until her ribs hurt. “Oh... you magnificent glowing maniacs, you actually did it. You made controlled chaos!”
“We... seek understanding.”
“Then you’ve got it,” she said, clapping her hands. “You see? Fire isn’t the end of something. It’s how the universe breathes.”
The light subsided. The Temple reset.
“You are... instructive.”
Patin stretched, smirking. “You’re damn right I am.”
She looked down and found, floating near her feet, a tiny glowing detonator made of starlight — a gift, maybe. She pocketed it.
“Guess the universe finally learned how to dance.”
The Temple settled back into calm, as calm as infinity ever got, anyway. The bright currents slowed, fading into long, gentle streams of light that hummed like distant wind. Patin floated cross-legged in the air, arms behind her head, grinning at the faint smell of ozone that lingered.
“Controlled chaos,” she murmured to herself. “Bet they didn’t expect me to turn theology into a fireworks show.”
“The pattern endures,” one of the voices said, rippling through the calm. “You disrupt... and yet restore.”
Patin chuckled, eyes half-closed. “Story of my life. You blow something up, clear the rubble, and somehow what grows back is stronger. Cleaner. Freer.”
A pause. Then another voice, slower, deeper: “Does destruction bring you... peace?”
She tilted her head. “Yeah, but also Nah. Peace brings boredom. I like motion. Chaos reminds the world it’s still alive. That I’m still alive.”
For a long time, none of the Prophets answered. The lights pulsed faintly, as if considering her words, or perhaps struggling to understand what “boredom” even meant.
So she filled the silence herself. “It’s not about the fire, you know. It’s about what happens after, that breath, that heartbeat when everything’s smoke and dust, and you don’t know what survived. That’s the part I love. That’s where people show who they really are.”
“The stillness after the boom.”
“Exactly.”
The space around her dimmed to an almost-shadow, and she reached down. From the fabric of starlight, she shaped a pair of old combat boots, scuffed, dirt-stained, soles cracked from years of running. They hovered before her like relics of a time she half-remembered.
She touched the toe of one and smiled faintly. “Didn’t think I’d miss you,” she whispered. “But even chaos needs good footwear.”
The Prophets observed in silence.
“You preserve... memory through objects.”
“That’s what mortals do. We keep little pieces of the past, boots, songs, burn scars, just to remind ourselves we mattered. You lot keep light and time. I keep leather and soot.”
For a moment, she stood, in the middle of eternity, and slipped her boots back on. They fit perfectly.
“Will you create again?”
Patin laughed softly. “You don’t create chaos. You invite it to dance. But next time, I’ll bring a bigger stage.”
She took a long, slow breath, watching the glow ripple outward like heat off stone. “You know,” she said at last, her voice quieter, “sometimes I wonder if every explosion I ever made was really me trying to light up the dark.”
“And did you succeed?”
Patin smiled, that same irreverent, defiant smile that could ignite a rebellion. “Still burning, aren’t I?”
The Temple shimmered, amused or enlightened, maybe both, and the lights folded around her like laughter.
TBC
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