Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 16: And You And I Part I - Cord of Life
Scene 13: Watching All of the Worlds
They won’t hide, hold, they won’t tell you
Watching the world, watching all of the world
Watching us go by …
16.13
Watching All of the Worlds
There are countless seas, but only one ocean.
We but flow from one to the next.
Feel the depth. Adjust to the salt.
Feel the life that carries us down to the depths.
Deep, where all the seas are linked.
Linked by a river of life.
All life serves the deeps, from whence it came.
Rock was, arguably, the strangest of the children of John Sevork, Stephanie the Space Shrimp, and Rocky, the rock encrusted, interdimensional mushroom. Of the 12 children, only 4 were shape shifters, each with their own shape-shifting limitations. Rock’s limitation was probably the most restrictive – Rock could only take liquid form. As a result, her lepreshroom land thorn environment had been uniquely designed. Instead of a flat tabletop, Rock rested in a steep bowl and remained in direct contact with the lepreshroom through a number of extremely narrow capillaries in its rocky crust.
Captain Ronald Howard, XIV, Commander Rhonda Carter, Pel and Shadow sat on a lip that had been created around this bowl. While each of Rock’s visitors was wearing an Extra Vehicular Activity suit, designed for their species and tailored to their size, they had removed their helmets, which floated nearby, tethered to their suits. Using principles that only masters of warp field theory could try to explain, the childrens’ mushroom hosts each maintained a bubble of pressurized and shielded environment, at a comfortable temperature for the vulcan-human-mushroom-shrimp child (and for their occasional humanoid visitors) that each supported.
When she had been born and while she lived onboard the U.S.S. Escort, Rock could only take the form of a puddle and had to flow quickly across the deck to avoid getting stepped on. But in the weightless, spacebound environment provided by her lepreshroom, she could express herself as a mist, or take any form she wanted to create.
For the benefit of her visitors, Rock displayed herself as a lightly rippling sheet of liquid about 8’ tall and 6’ wide – and less than an inch deep. At that depth, her body was translucent, reflecting the light of the ASA star and the U.S.S. Arizona’s running lights from behind her visitors and refracting the light of the ASB and ASC stars behind her.
“Beautiful,” observed Shadow, the genetically modified purple secret agent.
“I hate to admit any favoritism,” started Commander Rhonda Carter, “But I think Rock is the most beautiful of my godchildren.”
“You won’t get any argument from me,” observed Captain Skip Howard.
“She better not,” added Pel. The ferengi trader had become almost as fond of the godchildren as their godmother.
“They abandoned space travel.” Rock’s voice was the hushed, rushed voice of a river, sibilant, and wet with subtle reverberations. If a river or a water fountain could speak, this is what it would sound like. “They found another way.”
Part of Rock’s liquid body flexed and took on the form of the 12-tentacled squid that Professor Newellewell had referred to as, variously, the tinkers or the old gods. The form appeared, then seemed to seamlessly swim through Rock’s form, vanishing from one part of her body and reappearing in another. Then it did it again, the parts of the creature vanishing in one part of her body appearing in another as if it were simply swimming through a portal from one point to another rather than transporting.
“There are many seas, but only one ocean,” said Rock. “And they swim through the deeps from Brail to Beth to Beidth, the worlds you know as ASA 2, ASA 3, and ASA 4. But they have gone much farther than that. They have been to your homeworld. They recognize your DNA. They have experimented on creatures from your world. You fly through space. They swim in the deeps of the oceans and they go much farther than you. They are not concerned with what we do with their space junk. But they are very much aware.”
“What do they want?” asked Skip Howard.
“I do not think they want in any way that would be explainable,” Rock replied in her echoey, whispery, watery voice. “Desire is not something they seem to feel. Your emotions were so very strange to my mother. Emotion itself seems to be completely alien to them. They have no language for it. They do not have a language that you could hope to understand. They go where they go. They do what they do. I don’t think they ever stop to wonder why.”
Rhonda Carter gave an exasperated sigh. “Great. What did I tell you? Cthulhuloids. No empathy. No purpose. Just gods doing whatever it is that they do.”
16.13