Troublemakers - Getting to know the Power Duo

Posted on Fri May 15th, 2026 @ 10:00am by Captain Marie Batel & Patin

2,454 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: Celestial Temple

" So how do we keep that rusty tin can safe - when all she seems to do it get into trouble - or as much as I have seen so far" Marie shrugged - sitting down on the cloud herself and conjuring up a glass of red wine. "Hey - that's kinda cool...you just think it.. and it happens" She took a sip and regarded Patin.

Patin watched the wine appear with quiet amusement, the corner of her mouth twitching upward as Marie realized the Temple answered thought almost as easily as breath. “Careful,” she murmured around the cigar. “That’s how this place gets you. Makes impossible things feel normal.”

"You two have a long history - it must be comforting. I don't have a history of anything much. My ship got blown out of the sky thanks to the Gorn... or should we say thanks to this lot" She gestured around them at the temple.

"The only one I've been close to was Chris - and from what I see - he moves on after I get statued. Who can blame him really? It's been over a hundred years"

The humor softened out of Patin’s expression. She leaned back slightly in the air, studying Marie for a moment instead of answering right away. There was something in the way Marie spoke about him. Like someone trying to sound practical while standing too close to an old wound.

Patin took a slow drag from the cigar, ember glowing briefly in the dimness between them. “You’re handling this whole existential nightmare thing pretty well,” she observed lightly with a wave of her cigar filled hand.

She continued, simpler this time, without the usual chaos layered over it. “Would you like to?” she asked, glancing sideways at her. “See what happens to your beau, I mean.”

That made Marie stop, the pain of a lost loved one flickering across her face before habit chased it quickly away. Chris had meant everything to her - his love and kindness getting her through the toughest time of her life. Yet deep down he was human - he had loved her, and eventually she knew he would love someone else after her. It cut deeply, it felt like only yesterday they had been together, but the mystery of time meant it had been much much more.

" I.... I don't know. Part of me wants to see him happy, even if it's with someone else, the other part of me doesn't want to see him in pain and disfigured for the rest of his life after his accident." She replied softly.

“I get it,” Patin said softly, the usual sharpness in her voice easing into something quieter. She rolled the cigar between her fingers, ember glowing lazy orange against the endless white around them. “There’s always the chance he found something good after. Better than you got to see.”

Her mouth crooked faintly, though it carried more ache than humor this time. “Life’s weird like that. Keeps moving even when you don’t get to.”

She leaned back slightly in the air, one boot lazily crossing over the other. “Never really had a grand love story myself.” A shrug followed, casual on the surface, heavier underneath. “Closest thing I had was my spider brood and a pair of stubborn work horses.”

A soft huff of laughter escaped her. “Left the horses with an old drunk I trusted when things got bad. Tough old bastard smelled like turpentine and root stew.” She glanced aside at Marie. “But those horses?” Her expression softened outright for a heartbeat. “They were family. Same with the spiders.”

Patin took another drag from the cigar before adding with a crooked grin, “Mean little shits. Miss ‘em terribly.”

"Spiders? You mean like the 8-legged things that try to build webs in the corners of your windows?" Marie asked, not quite following and completely unaware of the size of Bajoran spiders.

"Windows?" Patin's face twisted in thought. "Maybe the wee little ones, the babies. Naw, my babies preferred to nest in the barn stalls and the spare bedroom. Taught a few to play fetch over the years." There was pride in her voice that rang true.

"Here," She swiped away the fog, and a visage of an arachnid the size of a medium wolf could be seen scurrying between a rustic cottage and a barn. "They initially didn't like the cold, but the longer we stayed, the more accustomed they became." The scene shifted to inside the barn, and for the first time, you could see how big they were in comparison to the horses. "Aw, looks like they are ready to build a new clutch." Several of the beasts were spinning a ball of webbing the size of a small shuttlecraft.

"Ugh!" Marie squeaked, recoiling slightly before forcing herself to watch the spiders do their work. "You were serious about the spiders, why the heck are they so big? They're the size of horses" She crept forward a little to see them better. "Why did you keep spiders??"

“Technically Bajorans call 'em Palukoos,” Patin said, sounding almost offended on the species’ behalf. “And they’ve got their uses. Back during the Occupation we ate the little bastards often enough just to survive.”

She rolled the cigar slowly between her fingers, smirking around the edges of the memory. “But truth be told? They’re loyal creatures. Smarter than people give ’em credit for too.”

A spark of amusement lit in her eyes. “Their venom’s fun as well. Compress it right and it turns into a toxic gas.” She lifted a shoulder casually. “Makes your enemies quite literally shat themselves to death.”

Then came the grin. Sharp. Dangerous. “Side note,” she added, leaning back into the cloud like she was sharing a treasured piece of trivia, “the females mate, decapitate the male, then eat what’s left.” She took an invisible breath. “Honestly? I can sympathize.”

Something piqued in Marie's brain, apart from eating giant spiders for food and all the other things she had had to wrap her brain around recently.

"Who hurt you? Why do you hate men so much?" She asked gently, not expecting a real response.

Patin’s grin disappeared so fast it felt stolen. The cigar paused halfway to her mouth. For the first time since Marie had met her, the chaos in her expression went still. Still in the way storms became still right before they broke things apart.

She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, the Temple shifted. The mist peeled backward in ragged layers until heat bled into the air around them. Smoke. Hunger. Metal. Bajor under occupation. Cardassian banners hung over shattered streets like bruises someone had pinned to the sky.

A younger Patin stood in the middle of it all, lean and filthy, wrists bruised, one eye swollen nearly shut. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. A Cardassian Gul circled her slowly inside a holding room lit by harsh industrial lights. His voice carried that oily confidence predators always seemed to share.

He spoke to her like she was already owned, already his. Marie could feel the intent in him long before he touched her. The younger Patin didn’t cry, didn’t plead, didn't beg. She only stared at the table nearby, where torment instruments had been abandoned after some previous interrogation.

The scene skipped. Blood. So much blood. A resistance medic shouting. Hands trying to stop the bleeding. The younger Patin was half-conscious on the floor, jaw clenched so hard her teeth cracked. And beside her... a ruined instrument, dripping, crimson.

Patin inhaled slowly around the cigar, eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the memory. “He didn’t get to take anything from me,” she said flatly. No humor. No performance, just fact. “I did. Before he ever had the chance.”

The Temple itself seemed quieter now. Patin leaned back slightly, smoke curling from her nose as bitterness crept back into her voice like armor sliding into place. “They can't own all of you,” she muttered, “when you're not whole to begin with.”

Only then did she glance sideways toward Marie again, one brow lifting faintly despite the ache sitting underneath it all. “So yeah,” she said dryly, “might’ve developed a few trust issues after that.”

"I had no idea, that must have been horrible" Marie said quietly as the ghosts in Patin's closet were shared. She had seen plaents suffering before, but deliberate occupation was rarely seen in her day. Apparently the Cardassian's decided to change that percentage rating. She rewound time, going back to Bajor before the occupation. Of poets, dreamers and explorers. She saw the Cardassians arive with their words and their weapons, claiming the planet as their own and enslaving its population, plundetrng its resources and killing those who dared oppose them.

Patin snorted softly at that, “Yeah well,” she muttered, staring out across the memory of Bajor before the fires came, before the uniforms, before children learned how to identify phaser fire by sound alone. “Turns out gods are real selective about when they suddenly discover morals.”

The images shifted around them. Bajoran artists carving stone. Children running through markets untouched by hunger. Rivers clean enough to drink from. Then Cardassian boots crushing through all of it like history was something soft enough to bruise.

Patin watched it without blinking. “At first the Spoons came smiling,” she said quietly. “Trade agreements. Resource partnerships. Promises.” A bitter laugh escaped her. “That's the funny thing about predators. They always show their teeth last.”

The occupation rolled forward around them in fractured pieces. Executions. Labor camps. Smoke rising over monasteries. A farmer beaten in front of his children for withholding grain he’d grown himself.

Patin’s jaw tightened. “And this lot?” She gestured upward toward the unseen Prophets with the cigar clenched between two fingers. “Silent.”

The Temple flexed faintly around them. “Oh don’t puff yourselves up now,” Patin scoffed immediately. “You watched fifty years of slaughter and decided cryptic poetry was the appropriate response.”

The air tightened. For a brief second the stars above them dimmed. Patin only grinned wider, vicious and unapologetic. “What? Truth sting a little?” She looked back toward the memory of Resistance fighters moving through the mountains like ghosts with rifles.

“Thing is...” she said slowly, “maybe the Bajor I knew only becomes Bajor because of all of it.” That landed heavier than the sarcasm.

“The poets became soldiers. The dreamers became survivors. People who never would've looked twice at each other died protecting one another.” Her eyes tracked a younger Nozz dragging wounded resistance fighters through snow while Patin covered their retreat with stolen Cardassian explosives. “Ugly thing to admit, but suffering welded people together.”

She paused to breath in, “I just don’t know if that makes their silence forgivable.”

Marie could feel the change in the atmosphere, the hesitation, or was it shame, or guilt? She took in all in, absorbing the narrative as well as the mood.

"And here they are again" the scene shifted to the Pah Wraiths being cast out of the temple, residing as the Vezda for millennia until recently. "It was them. All of it."

Patin watched the Vezda twist in their containers like old scars reopening. The light from them painted sharp lines across her face for a moment before she exhaled smoke toward the ceiling of the Temple and gave a tired little shrug.

“Yeah,” she said simply. “And?” There was no reverence in it. No fear either. Just exhaustion sharpened into defiance over a lifetime of carrying things too heavy for one person.

“They’re gods,” Patin went on. “They do what they want. They justify it afterward with riddles and destiny and all that mystical nonsense.” She waved the cigar vaguely upward. “Same story every bloody time.”

The Temple flexed again around them, quieter this time. Patin smirked at it without even looking.

"I think you have them on that one" Marie laughed, lightening the mood a smidge. "And you've been trying to get them to see differently?"

“I’ve been trying to teach them,” she admitted after a moment, her tone lowering into something more honest beneath the sarcasm. “Trying to make them see people aren’t pieces on some celestial game board.”

Her thoughts drifted toward the memory of Nozz fighting beneath impossible odds. Toward Marie. Toward the countless lives dragged through suffering because some unseen hand believed it led somewhere worthwhile. “But they’re stuck,” she muttered. “Locked into some grand design only they can fully see.” A bitter little laugh escaped her throat.

“And getting them to explain it in a way we understand?” She shook her head slowly. “That’s like trying to breathe after you’re dead. You remember how it worked, sure. Your body just doesn’t.” For once, even the Temple had no immediate answer to that.

"It's like teaching a Fog what it is to be mortal... to fear death and the cessation of everything." Marie looked into the distance of the mist. "So how do we do that?" The question was entirely rhetorical.

"They have identified a need to change within themselves, otherwise, you wouldn't be here. We just need to leverage that need somehow." Marie plopped down onto a cloud and rested her chin on her knees. "That's the tough one."

“They invited you here, too,” she reminded her quietly. “Don’t forget that part. We’re technically guests in their house.” A crooked grin tugged faintly at the corner of her mouth. “Rude guests, mind you, but still guests.”

She drifted lower in the air until her boots almost brushed the cloud beneath Marie, posture loose despite the heaviness threaded through her voice. “Sounds like a challenge, though,” Patin admitted after a moment. “Teaching gods how to think like people. How to hurt like people.” She let out a soft breath through her nose. “I’m just not sure how much longer I’ll be around to help with that particular lesson.”

Her gaze wandered outward again, toward unseen timelines folding over one another beyond the mist. “Besides...” she murmured, quieter now. “Until we know what they actually have planned for their little Messiah...” Her eyes watched the distant shape of Rhenora moving somewhere beyond sight. “...what’s the point in fighting so hard to make them change? To make them understand what we call mistakes?”

Patin rolled the cigar slowly between her fingers, studying the smoke as it curled upward into infinity. “Mistakes are a matter of perspective, ain’t they?”

The Temple around them gave no answer. Which, somehow, felt like one anyway.


TBC

 

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