Disquiet
Posted on Fri Nov 14th, 2025 @ 3:51pm by Patin & Captain Rhenora Kaylen
2,191 words; about a 11 minute read
Mission:
For Bajor!
Location: Celestial Temple
The temple shifted, its harmonic whimsy edging towards a quiet discord, with an almost hesitant breathe being held. For once, the future was uncertain, in all things. In the distance the celestial beings hovered over a representation on what was happening on the planet below. A murmur rolled around the group as they pondered intently.
The ‘Nozzie’ is in peril. Is this a new lesson? They asked all at once.
Patin folded her arms, brow arched. “Lesson? It’s about to be a funeral if you lot don’t quit gawking.”
We do not meddle.
“Right. Except when you do. You meddled when you pulled me in here. You meddled when you named me Prophet of Chaos and Boom, which, might I remind you, comes with certain… expectations.”
Expectation?
“Explosions,” she said flatly. “Well-aimed ones. Sometimes metaphorical.” She leaned closer to the swirling image of the shuttle caught in the blast’s glow. “That right there, that’s chaos out of balance. Unchecked destruction. You can’t just watch that.”
Intervention risks distortion of the stream.
Patin grinned, teeth flashing. “Distortion is the stream. You taught me that.”
We observe to understand.
“Then observe this...” she rolled up her sleeves, energy flickering around her hands like mischievous lightning. “You wanted a prophet? Time to see what the Boom part’s for.”
You would descend?
“I’d call it a field trip.”
A ripple passed through the temple. The Beings conferred in silent harmonics, until one finally whispered...
The Prophet of Chaos and Boom… will act in our stead.
Patin gave a mock salute, then smirked. “Damn right she will.”
With that, she stepped forward into the vision’s light. The temple flared, white, gold, and impossibly loud, and Patin vanished into the ripple between heartbeats, headed straight for the doomed shuttle and the Nausicaan’s cannon.
The world held its breath.
Snow fell in slow spirals, each flake suspended in an invisible web of halted motion. A moment ago, the shuttle had slammed into the hard ice pack, smoke curling from its ruptured thrusters; now it was silent, on its side, holding steady like a breathe in the cold air, like a painting come alive and then suddenly trapped in amber.
The fireball was still expanding, an incandescent bloom of orange and blue, devouring oxygen with a hunger that would never complete. Its tendrils reached outward through the fractured viewport, each shard of transparent aluminum frozen in flight. They caught the light like a thousand dying stars, reflecting an impossible beauty born of destruction.
The Nausicaan lay sprawled in the snow, half-buried, face pressed against the crystalline earth. His death mask was serene, oddly reverent, as though he’d fallen mid-prayer. Steam rose from his body and drifted upward, never dissipating, forming a gray halo that refused to move.
Then she arrived.
Not appeared, arrived. Like sound returning after an impossible silence.
Patin’s figure shimmered into being between the frozen flames and the fractured glass. Her hair stirred in a wind that wasn’t there, and the faint shimmer of energy around her suggested she alone still belonged to the flow of things. Her boots touched the snow without sinking. Her eyes, alive and molten, studied the carnage with a mixture of sorrow and detached curiosity.
“This music sounds familiar,” she murmured. Her voice slipped into the quiet like the first note of a requiem. “Let’s change the tune a bit.”
She raised her hand, fingers flexing with the casual grace of a pianist mid-performance. The air quivered. A pulse of pale light coalesced in her palm, then elongated, spinning itself into a dial, translucent and hovering, a device half-mechanical, half-metaphysical. It pulsed with the rhythm of the universe’s heartbeat.
The first time she’d touched it, she had spun the dial, reckless, unrestrained, summoning chaos from the ether, rewriting the rhythm of stars and storms. But not this time. Not today. Now she moved with reverence. Each twist of her wrist was deliberate, measured, a conductor guiding time’s orchestra back through its own symphony.
The fireball began to breathe backward. Flames collapsed inward, folding like petals in reverse bloom. Shards of transparent aluminum pulled themselves from the air and reseated perfectly into their fractured frame, until the viewport once again gleamed like a mirror of untouched ice. Smoke rewound into the shuttle’s wounds. The shriek of torn metal played backward, a keening lament returning to silence.
Patin’s eyes reflected every frame of it, as if she were watching creation unmake its own mistake. When the motion stopped, the world stood poised at the edge of possibility. The Nausicaan was once again kneeling on one knee mid-fire, weapon extended, the blue pulse of his shot frozen in midair, humming with lethal intention.
Patin tilted her head. The energy ball hovering inches from the shuttle’s hull, its light bathing her face in cerulean flame. “Better,” she whispered. Her fingers traced the glowing outline of the suspended blast. The energy seemed to recognize her touch, flickering, trembling, alive.
Then, slowly, with the ease of a god taking a breath, she reached into the air and pulled. A ripple spread outward from her hand, a distortion of light, sound, and logic itself, and from within that shimmering distortion, another form began to emerge.
Rhenora Kaylen, frozen mid-motion, began to separate from her moment in the timeline, drawn toward Patin like a moth toward a star.
And there, in that terrible stillness, one woman standing outside time, the other being pulled from within it, the air itself began to hum, as though the universe knew it was about to witness something it had no language for.
In one final flick, Patin touched Rhenora's forehead, setting off a ripple that sounded like a small bells chime. Rhenora blinked, entering Patin's space of existance. Patin smiled, "Hiya Nozz."
For a moment Rhenora blinked, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together in her mind. She was supposed to be dead, the last parting gift of the dying Nausican. If Patin was here, then she must be walking the path of the Prophets again, but yet the shuttle was now intact, not a flaming pile of molten metal. Confusion confounded her brain.
"You are here?" The words were whispered, "or am I there?". A simple enough question, who was dead...still nor not quite.
"Bit of both really," Patin answered, her normal snarky self evident in her voice, but there was also the echo of the Prophets there too, resonating. "The Prophet of Chaos and Boom was allowed to meddle, just a bit. Reversed time, nothing too amazing." She looked at the back of her hand like she had just cleaned up a mess of Tarkak droppings.
"To what end? To interfere? And they LET you?" Rhenora's jaw dropped as she stood before her friend in this sacred space between death and life. "What is the consequence? There is always a consequence"
"You know me, consequences be damned. In fact, I didn't really give them much of a choice in the matter." Patin smiled, her familiar crooked smile. "They have a soft spot for you, I think. I can't say much. If they ever figure out anger, they might be angry with me for pulling you out, which is why I will have to put you back. But... I couldn't come down and not say hello, ya know?"
Patin, unable to keep still, reached out and plucked the frozen blue orb of energy from midair, spinning it lazily on her fingertip like a Globetrotter toying with a basketball.
"But if you put me back, I die, along with all the others" Rhenora replied, deadpan. "Unless you change something. What are you going to do with the cannon blast? The Nausicaan is already dead, you can't change the trajectory... or can you?" The words hung, her mind struggling to master the concepts that Patin now lived with every day.
She tossed the energy ball back and forth from one hand to the other, a wild look on her face, "I didn't come all this way, across time and space ya know, just to let you die Nozz." She stopped fidgeting with the orb, placed it back where she got it, then like a bowler lining up her shot, she used her thumb as a crosshair and adjusted the blast so that it would hit a fuel barrel close to where the enemy was standing. Not enough to kill, but enough to knock them for a loop.
"Besides, this is where the Boom part of my new title comes in. Controlled Chaos. You've only got, what..." She looked over at where the enemy was standing, then above at the Runabout and the small fighter. "Three enemies? Is that all? You've got this by sheer numbers alone." Her smile rippled, but her eyes reflected how much she missed being a part of the action.
Rhenora scoffed, marvelling at the ultra simplistic view of it all. "Perhaps, but one of them has a cannon blast not a metre from my face at this point in time." Her words trailed off, and tone became more inquisitive "They gave you a title? By the Prophets Themselves I thought you were going to advise them, not turn them to your chaos." She looked back at the scene before her. "So what are you going to do about them? Or us?"
“For Prophets’ sake, only one of them’s going to be an issue, eventually. Future, past… whichever way the stream’s flowing today.” She gave her head a brisk shake, as if trying to fling the thought loose. “Time’s got knots,” she muttered, twirling a hand beside her temple in a mock halo of confusion. Then, abruptly lighter, “Now, tell me you’ve been keeping that babe of yours alive. The meatsack too? And young Bonnie, still a danger to herself and others, yes?”
"Bonnie is brilliantly trying to outsmart a mirror version of herself and seal the gateway, and will most likely trip over, stub her toe or crash in the process. Remal is well and Patina is growing way too fast. Although I wish to see more of her, the balance isn't as easy as I thought it would be" Rhenora's eyes were downcast for a moment. "And you, chaos in the Temple?"
Eyes distant, "Always, but also more boring than I expected. I've been trying to teach them, which is going about as well as you would expect with beings who understand nothing." She chuckled and the air around her rippled. "They watch, they learn, they claim not to meddle, yet here I am because they allowed it."
She smiled, that sideways, irreverent grin she wore when she was about to break three rules and a metaphysical boundary., "Now... I'm going to put you back but I need to tell you some things first. A pause. Her eyes drifted, unfocused, as though a thousand overlapping timelines tugged at her thoughts like children pulling at her sleeves. “Or maybe I’ll tell you later. Or earlier. Hard to keep track.”
She blinked sharply, reclaimed herself, and huffed. “Ah, screw it. They may get pissy, but you need to hear this.”
"Keep Meatsack close. There may come a day when you'll lose him and you'll regret not telling him just how much you love him." Her gaze glassed over, not with grand cosmic vision, but with the smaller, sharper pain of memory. "I didn't say it enough. Turns out understanding isn’t always the same as hearing the words.”
"She exhaled and steadied herself. “Patina,” she continued, “is going to be extraordinary, and adored. And her sibling… well, that one’s fuzzy. Like trying to read prophecy through a fogged window.”
“Keep the shield carrier close. Dodge left when instinct screams right. And...” She leaned in until their foreheads almost touched. “She fires three shots. Then the gun jams. That’s your window.”
Patin stepped back, hands slipping behind her like she was resisting the urge to hug or shake her , something mortal, something real. “You know,” she said with a sigh that carried centuries of unsent letters, “I miss talking to you. Truly.”
A spark of mischief returned, brightening her whole face. “So come by a temple sometime. Ask for the Prophet of Chaos and Boom.” She gave a showman’s grin, wide, dazzling, and hiding more truth than she’d ever admit. Then without another word she reached out and touched the bridge of Rhenora's nose, emitting a sound like a small bell that rippled through time.
And with that Patin was gone, leaving Rhenora in the plane of non-existence for a split second, long enough to attempt to digest all the information Patin had revealed and wish they had more time. "I miss you too" she whispered before the non-existence shattered and she was back in the burning shuttle. Time itself, was about to get a lesson from the Prophet of Chaos and Boom.
TBC
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