Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 6: Perpetual Change
Scene 8: General Krank’s Quarters
6.8
General Krank’s Quarters
It was completely impossible. Outrageous. Lance Corporal Petra Spitze had fallen in love. Something her mother had warned her about - to be avoided at all costs. And something that was ultimately completely unavoidable.
Every Spitze woman had fallen in love at some point during her journey through the U.S. Marine Corps. Spike’s mother. Her grandmother. Her great grandmother. And love always betrayed them. Always wounded them worse than anything they ever encountered in battle - and all of them had fought on the front lines in every war. That’s what it meant to be a Spitze. To be Spike (as all of them had, in their own time, because of their last name, been called.)
And to heap insult upon injury, it was a klingon she had fallen in love with. Spike hated klingons. She could appreciate them for the amazing warriors they were. Klingons had saved her life and the lives of her fellow marines on many occasions. Klingon humor was infectious. But during the Klingon-Cardassian War, klingons had killed far too many of her fellow marines… her friends… her best friend… slaughtered mercilessly after he had surrendered… It was too much for her to ever forgive.
It had started innocently enough. She had started regularly visiting General Krank in his quarters to learn Tri-D chess from him. He was a master. And she proved to be an apt pupil. The horrendously complicated game with all of its bluffs and stratagems made perfect sense to her. Appealed to her strategic and combative nature… To her generations long instinct for survival and victory in battle.
Every time he explained a particular open, or mid-game, or end-game strategy, it made intuitive sense to her and she got to the correct conclusion before he could complete explaining it. At her request, he began to teach her some of his martial arts techniques that had made the assassin Tarron Rerg such a terrifyingly capable fighter.
Then the universe turned inside-out and they had become isolated in Krank’s quarters. If you could call this isolation… Their game had expanded: Instead of 32 chess pieces, 48 spaces across three planes, plus 16 spaces distributed among four moveable attack boards, their game board stretched across nearly 10,000 cubic lightyears, along with its adjacent sub-spatial complement and included thousands of stars.
The stars could not be destroyed, only captured and held motionless for a certain number of rounds. The rules were negotiable, but based on Tri-D chess… Very loosely…
Because moving the stars required physical combat.
But it wasn’t physical combat with the intent to harm, but rather to overwhelm their opponent with pleasure while not giving in to it themselves. They didn’t actually have bodies to accomplish this… it was in the movement of the stars… Two massive egos wrestling and enthralled with each other… Each trying to overwhelm the other with some inexplicable blend of intellectual, emotional, instinctive, and physical pleasure. With the stars as their playthings.
Or perhaps they had become the playthings of the mad stars…
6.8