I have no idea why this number became my go-to number. I just like it. It’s easy to type on a keypad, as the 4 and the 2 are typed diagonally from left to right. And then the 7, 5, and 3 are typed diagonally in the same way, but from one row higher.
So it’s a zip code in central Kentucky and really has no significance in my life whatsoever.
Yet it creeps into my Star Trek fan fiction all the same.
When Travis is kidnapped for an alien experiment, he meets several people, including a ‘defective’ (not overwhelmingly alluring) Orion slave girl who has no name. But they only know her as a number. So that number is 42753.
So this storyincludes a scene of reading Porthos’s microchip. The number is 2149-42753.
The Tribe
In The Tribe, when Mary Reed is trapped in a transport that isn’t working, the number of the car she’s in is 42753.
Multiverse II
So in Multiverse II, 42753 is the panel number for where Branch Borodin has to place the pulse shot collector.
Level 2 multiverse
Later, the number also refers to the last message Levi sends to Maren O’Connor before his PADD dies.
Untrustworthy (Original Fiction)
So one rather long designation includes this particular string of numbers.
Things to come
Play contains 42753 in two places. First, it’s the number of a secure channel Admiral Alynna Nechayev uses. The second time, it’s at the end of a string of numbers denoting Dana MacKenzie’s radiation band. So this proves that she has some Mirror Universe ancestry.
Upshot
This quirky number will be back. I guarantee it. Like this post? Tweet it!
In addition, I continued posting Reflections Down a Corridor on Fanfiction.net. I added to the Before Days collection of prequel stories on Wattpad. More specifically, I added The High Cost of Dissidence, Gossip Gossip and The Mess. On Ad Astra, I added The Decision to a Weekly Free Write about Aging. The Twelve Trials of Triskelion started, and I posted Seven Women for the Ficlet Flashdance challenge.
Also, I added A Perfect Note; Dear Naurr, Dear Lili; Gilded Cage; and Gossip Gossip to In Between Days context.
I was equally thrilled to see combined reads for Take Back the Night top 10,000!
See the Stats page for individual read and review counts.
WIP Corner
I worked a bit on The Obolonk Murders but my final project plus all of the other work I wanted to do often made that wholly original story take a back seat.
Prep Work
I spent more time optimizing the blog and the jespah website. The website is now considerably cleaner and more streamlined, although it could use some design work and I really should better optimize it for mobile usage. I added several pages to the Star Trek Expanded Universes wiki as I have gotten some traffic from there and hope to get more.
My final project for Quinnipiac class ICM522 was due the first week of this time period, so I was busy getting that together and handing it in. I got a 96 on it!!
Then I had about two weeks and change before the next semester started, but I was also visiting my parents and so was offline more than usual.
ICM524 started on May the 19th and I got into the thick of writing essays and creating videos almost immediately.
They can refer to playing cards and couples, and this little story touches on both as a play on words and for a little bit of humor. In response to a Star Trek fan fiction prompt about losing, I wanted to write a story about a losing poker hand that, instead, ends up being a winner. Hence the plot.
Plot
It is maybe a year after the end of Fortune, and Treve takes Pamela home after a date. They have been going out for a good year. She has been a bit pushy about getting physical, but he has been pulling back. As of the time of Saturn Rise, they have exchanged ‘I love yous’.
This is the first time that Treve has actually gone into Pamela’s new apartment on Lafa II. She has immigrated there, partly to be near her elderly uncle, Doctor Cyril Morgan, and partly to be near Treve.
So they are a little drunk, and there are playing cards on the table. Hence Pamela suggests a game of strip poker. Since Treve has no real idea of how to play, she feigns losing and, as a result, gets her man. Treve certainly does not object to this!
So this little short story is meant to be a little silly, maybe, and a little amusing. Plus it segues rather neatly into Complications. A touch of happy ending mixed with some humor? Then sign me up.
I like oranges and they figure fairly prominently in a lot of my Star Trek fan fiction. Much of this was by the accident of the time when I was posting Reversal. The story, and its initial posting dates, both occurred near Halloween.
On the day right after Lili and Doug first make contact, Chef Slocum insists on a day’s menu with every single food item including oranges. There are oranges in every single thing made, from the French toast batter in Captain Archer‘s breakfast with Malcolm, to the main dishes at dinner and everything in between.
And through it all, Lili chops oranges, all day. When night time comes, she reeks of them. When she makes contact with Doug that night, he buries his nose into her shoulder and inhales, and breaks their silence for the very first time, by asking, “Oranges?” Laughing, she just replies with one word: yes.
Appearances
Reversal
As noted above, the appearance of oranges in Reversal sparks a deeper relationship between Lili and Doug.
Orange Sky
Her rather strong aroma helps to convince him that she’s real, and so he feels confident enough to speak with her, and that breaking the silence won’t also break the spell.
Her chopping of oranges becomes a source of some pain when she cuts her hand with a French knife. This gets her to Sick Bay, where she converses with Phlox about her experiences, and he conducts a physical examination that alerts everyone that what is happening to Lili is very, very real.
Apple and Oranges
Orange peel (Photo credit: AJC1)
In this short story, which occurs the day after the day of all-orange food, Shelby offers Travis an apple.
In the chow line, Tripp Tucker complains about the overabundance of oranges, and asks for fruit that is anything but an orange.
receives a gift for his birthday of various kinds of nut butters and jams, including one lone jar of orange marmalade, from Fortnum & Mason.
Temper
On vacation in Fep City at the start of Temper, Malcolm and Lili talk about earlier days, and he hearkens back to that same day during Reversal, when she smelled of oranges.
English: oranges
He equates that to “sunshine and happiness”, and remarks that that was when he first noticed her, and realized that he wanted more out of life than just duty and work.
This is why, when he sends nut butters and jams, he makes sure to include a special gift of orange marmalade from Fortnum & Mason, which is a signal to Lili and is a gift to her, rather than Joss and Marie Patrice or anyone else.
Later in the story, when she finds an empty jar of Fortnum & Mason orange marmalade on Empress Hoshi‘s ship, the Defiant, Lili knows that her house has been ransacked by agents of the Terran Empire.
The Three of Us
Because Reversal is not a part of this timeline (and neither is Doug), the reference is different. This time, it’s a harvesting party on Amity, where an orange tree has died.
Jay asks Shelby if the wood is strong and can support a lot of weight. She suggests an Osage orange tree instead, as the fruit doesn’t taste very good and it was just a fallback, which is no longer needed, as regular oranges are growing just fine. Plus the Osage orange wood is a lot stronger than regular orange wood. He accepts her recommendation, and makes a cane for the permanently injured Ethan Shapiro.
Upshot
Like a little orange Easter egg, oranges pop up in my fiction from time to time. They even make it into my original fiction.
There is no reason whatsoever to assume that human-alien sexual relations will go smoothly, particularly not the first time. Couple this with the fact that Treve is a virgin, and Calafan men can swell up after climax, and the scene naturally turned to the parties becoming a bit stuck.
Already, things are weird.
At the same time, Treve is the first boyfriend Pamela has ever had where she’s waited. He’s also the first man she has ever loved (she did not love Malcolm when they dated in Intoleranceand met again in Together. She was mature enough to never say it back to Malcolm), and he ends up being the only man she ever loves. He is everything to her, and the feeling is mutual.
Her earlier experiences have been different. They’ve been brief and unfeeling, and often laced with some S & M and B & D. She’s got a wild side. But now things are changing, and wholly for the better.
So I wrote this short story in response to a sex scene prompt. And it was such great fun to imagine it and put it on paper. This is one piece of Pamela’s happy ending, and I was glad to write it. For this character with a difficult early life, alien-human sex and its aftermath are the least of her many worries. And Treve is her happy ending.
This was a Star Trek fanfiction prompt about family. Rather than have Leonora come out, I decided to instead have her announce that she had met someone special. That person is Melissa Madden. Leonora is, of course, happy.
Plot
Catherine Bell as Melissa Madden (image is for educational purposes only)
In Fortune, I had rather vaguely established how the two women had met (and then more detail is offered in Red, which was written much later), but not the aftermath.
This was a good chance to show that scene, particularly since I already had a bit of background of Norri’s father disapproving to some extent. While Dino isn’t necessarily homophobic (albeit some people read him that way), the way I see him is that he’s a bit huffy that his little girl is growing up perhaps a bit too fast. After all, her brothers, Alex and Phil, have not yet declared their love for anyone. So this statement of hers changes everything and upends his world a bit.
Hence I feel it is more that Dino is a bit blindsided by the declaration. Belinda, his wife, sets him straight, and the story ends with a promise to have Melissa over, and soon, so that she can meet the family. There is even a brief reference to her brother Phil’s violin playing, another shout out to Fortune.
In particular, to get Norri in front of more readers, I think the little story works pretty well. At some point, I’ll write their first dinner together, I imagine.
Spotlight on an Original Nonsentient Species – Perrazin
Perrazin were almost an afterthought originally.
Background
As I wrote the In Between Days series, it became necessary to create nonsentient food animals for the Calafans. Furthermore, I had already established that both Doug and Melissa enjoy hunting, partly for sport, but mainly for food. In Together, I briefly mention perrazin and described them as big, blond buffalo. By the time of Temper, I wanted to start that book with a hunting scene, so it was time to show perrazin.
Origins
Perrazin (these animals are actually Highland cattle)
When I first came up with the idea, this absolutely was what I was thinking of. These animals are actually Highland Cattle.
Imagine them with tusks and you’ve got perrazin (puh-RAH-zen).
Omnivorous and nasty, perrazin will graze and will eat olowa much of the time. But if the opportunity presents itself, they will also eat linfep. Prickly and unpredictable, they will charge at anything they find strange. And, as Doug says while hunting them with a phase bow, they find a lot of things to be strange.
They graze and hunt in packs, almost like a cross between cattle and wolves. During the hunt, it’s also revealed that they’re rather lazy hunters, preferring that a meal simply fall into their metaphoric laps. When presented with the opportunity, they can also be cannibals, a fact that shocks Melissa.
They also, according to Lili, taste like a cross between beef and pork. She jokes to Naurr, in Dear Naurr, Dear Lili, that she’s practically eating one all by herself during her pregnancy with Joss.
Upshot
Every culture and every society needs animals. Often, in canon, animals were overlooked when planets were explored. It seemed as if most places were animal-free! And that’s just not reality here, and I seriously doubt it would be the case on any planet where we find life.
I feel that there will always be diversity, and there will be animals that maybe don’t look like this, but they might fill similar niches. Viva perrazin!
Furthermore, I posted the two TOS Mirror Universe stories, That’s Not My Name and It Had to be You, as one work, called The New Captain’s Woman. Because these smaller groupings of stories seem to get the best reception, I added the four slash-type stories, under the general name, Future Matches. So those stories are Detached Curiosity & Idle Speculation, The Way to a Man’s Heart, There’s Something About Hoshi, and There’s Something Else About Hoshi. And in order to add to the read counts for the Gina Nolan universe, I started spinning out Hold Your Dominion, which will also include Good-Bye.
To round out Clockworks: Times of the HG Wells, I added Calendar Turning Event #3111, Mirror Masquerade, Paradox, kes7’s Survey Says …, Stocking Stuffers 2013 (Auld Lang Syne only), and Meeting of the Minds. Hence this finishes up context for the time being for that series. For the monthly challenge, which is about the origins of holidays, I posted Legends.
In addition, for Valentine’s Day, I added Finnan Haddie to Archer’s Angels.
On the G & T Show forums, I finished posting The Continuing Adventures of Porthos – The Future Cat. I also made a promise to post the Emergence series next as there was interest in it. I decided to begin with Intolerance, as that is essentially a prequel. This is the M-rated version of that story.
Milestones
He Stays a Stranger made it to 10,000 combined reads! On TrekBBS alone, Reversal went over 5,000 reads! See the Stats page for individual read and review counts.
WIP Corner
I worked on the wholly original story, The Obolonk Murders. I started a wholly original short story, Truth in Advertising.
The character, of course, is Star Trek: Enterprise canon, and is the Mirror Universe counterpart to Hoshi Sato.
Declaring power
However, the Enterprise series only showed her declaring her power, and never actually consolidating or wielding it, as the show was cancelled far too soon. I have tried to rectify that, and I recognize that the official books have done so as well. But I think Star Trek is a big tent, and there’s room for all sorts of fanfiction interpretations of what happens next.
Portrayal
As in the series, the Empress Hoshi Sato is played by Linda Park.
Personality
Empress Hoshi Sato on the Bridge
Suspicious, nasty and ruthless, Hoshi makes a perfect Mirror Universe Empress and all-around villain because she will stop at nothing.
She’s just a bit campy in canon, but I make her truly dangerous. In Throwing Rocks at Looking Glass Houses, she violently takes charge, beginning a bloody reign by first killing off Phlox and Ian (Malcolm‘s counterpart), and then moving onto the Emperor Philip IV (counterpart to Colonel Philip Green) and, eventually, T’Pol.
Machiavellian
As a true Machiavellian, she eliminates the Emperor’s entire family, in order to prevent the people from perhaps, in the future, rallying around a successor. This includes the Emperor’s infant daughter, Anastasia, a reference to Princess Anastasia of Russia, killed when the Bolsheviks came to power. This also establishes Hoshi’s reign as having the potential to become totalitarian, which is confirmed with later stories. But that’s nothing new. In The High Cost of Dissidence, her predecessor has proven to be just as immoral.
In Paving Stones Made From Good Intentions, Hoshi pits Doug, Aidan and Chip against each other, in order to get someone new to run Tactical, as she has had Ian killed. However, rather than eliminate or emasculate his rivals, the victorious Doug decides to have them work under him, in a more cooperative type of venture. This continues to the time of Reversal. Aidan repays Doug’s kindness by cuckolding him and trying to take his girl, Jenn Crossman.
By the time of First Born, Hoshi has decided that she wants an heir. When Rick Daniels goes to the Defiant on a mission, they hook up, and she becomes pregnant. She proves to be a horrible mother, having Beth Cutler care for her son with Rick. By the time of Coveted Commodity, her childbearing years are coming to an end.
And by the time of Shake Your Body, Milton Walker seizes an opportunity and comes calling.
Relationships
Maximilian Forrest
This canon relationship is shown in the two ENT Mirror Universe episodes.
Forrest’s Captain’s Woman
Both actors have said they believe she loved him. However, he may or may not have loved her. I go with this, that his love for her is ambiguous, if it exists at all.
Further, she is ambitious. Even if Forrest had survived, it would not have been enough. She would have left him, at some point, unless he could go a lot further, a lot faster, in their careers.
Even then, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have stayed for long.
Jonathan Archer
Another canon relationship, Hoshi cheats on Forrest with Archer. But when Archer proves to be too slow to get ahead, she offs him.
Travis Mayweather
MU Hoshi and Travis
The final canon relationship, Hoshi turns to Travis for help in dispatching Archer.
The way I write them, they stay together, but she is dominant in every single way. In Coveted Commodity, this becomes all-too clear, as he reminisces about how, every time she’s had a child from someone else, she’s told him that it’s for her security.
Travis is mainly interested in his own security, so he goes along with it. And, in Commodity, he comes to understand that he’s better off where he is, rather than to try to usurp her.
Richard Daniels
In January of 2156, Rick goes on a temporal mission to the Mirror, to fix the Defiant. With poor cash flow and no money to pay him, plus an urge to make it with a time traveler (he foolishly reveals that detail about himself to her), they hook up. Nine months later, Jun is born, and the Temporal Integrity Commission has to scramble. Because Rick wants his temporally paradoxical son to live, Jun has to be sterilized, and Rick is forbidden from returning to the Mirror at any time during Jun or Hoshi’s lives, not even long before conception or after her menopause or even after her death.
Rick’s boss, Carmen Calavicci, fakes Rick’s death by arranging for wreckage to be left on Daranaea. She also applies delta radiation in utero and Jun is thereby sterilized.
Aidan MacKenzie
Aidan, her second baby daddy, is seduced at the end of Reversal, an act that Doug wisely resisted. Hoshi makes it very clear that she does not care at all for Aidan, but he’s got good genes. By the time of the alternate timelines in Temper, Aidan is the designated babysitter for the royal brats.
José Torres
By the time of Brown, José is already trying to make time with the Empress, following up some small flirtation during Throwing Rocks.
Francisco Ramirez
At the same time that she is involved with Torres, Hoshi is also involved with Ramirez.
The Perks of Being in the Inner Circle
Chandler Masterson
Chip is next in the passing parade, and is thrown over when Hoshi has his children.
Andrew Miller
After Travis’s death, Hoshi goes after Andrew, who is stuck with her until he leaves via suicide. He is, in this instance, cheating on her, with Melissa Madden, who dies, pregnant by him, in a shuttle crash. When he refers to MM in his suicide note, Hoshi changes the note in order to favor herself and gratify her ego.
Milton Walker
After Andrew’s death, Milton shows up, as he is on the run from the authorities. This former Eligian Order monk hasn’t been with a woman in decades, but Hoshi is older and less attractive, so she grabs onto him anyway.
Theme Music
Offspring
Jun Daniels Sato
The first born ends up running the Empire, with Kira, after Hoshi’s death, in Who Shall Wear the Robe and Crown?Prior to that, Jun runs Communications on the Defiant.
Kira (Kirin) MacKenzie Sato
Kira (sometimes called Kirin, which means giraffe) is the tallest of the children and, by rights, was supposed to be the eldest. He runs the Tactical station before becoming co-Emperor with Jun, but predeceases his elder brother.
Arashi Sato
With a head for business, Arashi is the only of the children of the Empress Hoshi Sato who is born without the Y Chromosome Skew. His parentage is allegedly unknown, but Torres does not have the skew, whereas Ramirez does. Therefore, it’s a lead pipe cinch that the head of the treasury is Torres’s son.
Takara Masterson Sato
Takara, the only girl, is the elder of a pair of twins, and eventually becomes the forebear of the successor to Jun and Kira – Charles Tucker VI, AKA the Emperor Charles I. She is removed from the Empress’s influence at an early age.
Takeo Masterson Sato
The younger twin, Takeo is a gay man, and is rescued from a life with the Empress by his father, Chip, and Chip’s wife, Lucy Stone, taking him away at a young age.
Izo Mayweather Sato
The youngest, son of Travis Mayweather, almost dies in utero, as Izo has a hole in his heart. Travis’s sacrifice suffers Izo to live; he grows up to run the Empress’s (and, later, his brothers’) Secret Police.
Quote
“Get me my ships! Get me my legions!”
Upshot
Empress Hoshi Sato is just the character that goes on and on, the gift that keeps on giving. I love writing her, putting her into difficult and easy circumstances, and generally giving her evil some buffoonish tendencies as she inevitably misses the mark in some areas as she all too accurately hits it in many others. I guarantee her return.
In order to better round out Clockworks, I added Preparations and It’s not a Reset if you remember it. In order to round out Hall of Mirrors, I added Escape. To fill in the E2 stories a bit better, and to answer a prompt about officers acting childishly, I added a piece about Sandra Sloane‘s business, called Supply and Demand.
To answer a prompt about personnel who clash, I wrote Worry.
I also experimented by adding A Single Step to Wattpad. This resulted in a tiny read count. Once I got a follower, I added more stories to complete my profile there and see what would happen. These are from various eras and series, to cast a wider net than usual. I added Before the Fall,Party on Risa, Milk, The Black Widow and D’Storlin. I also began to add the Bron and Sophra stories as a package in order to see where that takes me. They are all under the umbrella title of The Reptile Speaks.
I added Transported separately, given that the rating is different. The site is probably outside of my demographic wheelhouse but there might be traction for a story like Widow. I also noticed I am getting some site traffic from Wattpad. It might not be too useful for read counts, but instead could be a source of social referrals.
Fictionpad
I also joined Fictionpad and copied my Fanfiction.net stories over there. The site is in beta but it looks promising. I am already getting some small read counts on a few short stories. Hopefully, once that site is out of beta, I’ll start to see the numbers really rise. In response to a request, I started writing another Porthos-centric story. This one is a prequel (despite its title) and is called The Continuing Adventures of Porthos – The Future Cat.
Milestones
Individual Read Counts
For individual read counts, the following stories have 20,000 or more on one URL –
Again, these numbers are all coming from Ad Astra.
Combined Read Counts
Apart from the others at over 5,000 reads for just one URL, the following combine to 5,000 – 9,999 reads when all postings’ URLs are taken into consideration –
I continued working on Play, the second story in the Barnstorming series. I separated Reflections Down a Corridor into chapters in preparation for posting it on Fanfiction.net
Prep Work
I added more depth and detail to the Star Trek Expanded Universes Wiki, as I am getting traffic from it.
NaNoWriMo 2013
In a fit of insanity, I signed up for NaNoWriMo and will see how that goes. But I do have a decent idea for a wholly original science fiction story.
I have not done completely, 100% original writing in a while, so that will prove interesting.
So I hope I don’t get too busy!
This Month’s Productivity Killers
As per usual, looking for work took up a lot of my time.
It’s easy to type on a keypad, as the 4 and the 2 are typed diagonally from left to right. And then the 7, 5, and 3 are typed diagonally in the same way, but from one row higher.
