fateandfortune | Transporter Beam Accidents Do Happen

An anomaly.

Space was full of them, but all of the points of instability no matter how small in the Sol system had been exhaustively catalogued. Grade school children took field trips to collect redundant data on them to analyse over apple juice and animal crackers. Or kelp wafers, or whatever they fed people now. Khan had encountered a few undocumented anomalies in his longer-range scans and tended to avoid them whenever possible in his transporter experiments, but he hadn't even bothered scanning first this time. Why would he? The coordinates he was using were in the path of Earth's orbit, no region of space had been better studied than that one.

There were several distant anomalies in the known galaxy which could warp local space-time into crumpled aluminum foil, but this one didn't have the right energy signature. It wasn't a false reading, even though by all rational standards it should have been. These subspace energy patterns never occurred naturally, not in the vacuum of space. It looked almost like a life-form signature that had been abandoned mid-transport, no stabilizing beam either from point of origin or destination, and somehow hadn't disintegrated in the process.

Well, no sense in ignoring the interesting finding. Ultimately, Khan intended to use transwarp teleportation with living subjects anyway. While he wasn't prepared to start sacrificing lives at this stage, this wasn't his doing. Whatever this creature was, or had been, it essentially didn't exist right now. Its matter was no longer part of any known or theorized parallel universe. It wasn't alive, so rematerializing it in his test chamber wasn't going to kill it no matter what went wrong. He might as well bring the thing in and have a look at it before blasting it back out into the vacuum of space.

After recalibrating his instruments to lock onto life signs, Khan locked onto the signal with far more precision than the instruments currently in wide use could have done. Khan was alone in his workshop with no weapons and he really should have considered calling in a xenobiologist first, but he had no interest whatsoever in expanding the frontiers of shared knowledge for the rabid warhounds of Starfleet. A few more buttons punched and the golden swirls began forming on the platform inside the spherical force field. Khan would have to shut the field off in order for sound waves to cross the distance between them, but right now he should be able to see what was inside well enough to determine if it should be jettisoned immediately. That would definitely be necessary if it turned out to be too large for the containment field, no sense in triggering an explosion of guts all over the sensitive instruments.

Of course, if the life form reassembled correctly and actually possessed senses corresponding the the human visible light range, it would also be able to see him. It would appear at roughly his chest-height on a warm white disc three metres in diameter, the force field bubble completely transparent but hard as glass to the touch. The room was a small deserted hangar built of dark metal, well-lit but almost empty, with nothing else in it but a large desk sized console, a chair, and a dark-haired man with a quiet curiosity. Khan stood up from his console and took a step closer, watching the form take shape out of the whirling photon-emitting spirals.

Threaded | Flat

She should have known something would go wrong. It was simply too much to hope that, after everything she'd done, all the blood on her hands, that it would be as easy as this. Help send Logan back, change the timeline, wake up and remember absolutely none of it. A second chance at life, hopefully in a world more tolerant of mutants where they could actually have lives and not be hunted like animals.

Rogue had felt the timeline shifting, had seen the Sentinels disappear as Logan's connection to the past broke and the universe shifted to catch up. But then there had been a light and the last remnants of Kitty's power had done... something. Perhaps her own survival instinct had kicked in, the various borrowed powers combining to save her because suddenly she was everywhere and nowhere, between time and then next, and then she wasn't. The light faded and she could see her bare hands pressed against a white surface where she crouched, huddled in on herself. She was still wearing the grey jumpsuit they'd called her 'uniform', the unzipped sleeves draping over her hands to cover all but her fingers.

Looking up slowly, she took in the sight of the hangar, the metal that was dark against the light that filled the space, and her eyes finally stumbled across the man. A man she didn't recognize who was staring at her. It was pure instinct that had her scrambling back, hoping to climb down off the strange white disc and get somewhere she could regroup and figure out what was going on.

But she didn't get far, of course. Even though she couldn't see it, there was something blocking her way. Rogue pressed her hands against it, pushing, even slamming a fist against it, but it did nothing. She was trapped, back in some sort of cell that she didn't understand and there was nothing she could do to stop the panic that rose in her chest. "No, no please," she whispered, her expression crumpling as she shook her head and glanced back at the man she could only assume was her captor.

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