Shout

Posted on 19 Jul 2026 @ 10:44pm by Captain Sabrina Corbin

1,954 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Time After Time
Location: Suburban Streets of Sherman Oaks
Timeline: Immediately After 'The NeverEnding Story'

Aev said that he could.

Aster believed him.

That was not logical. Aev could not make the Veylith calm. He could not stop the Klingons or the Romulans from remembering their battle. He could not hold Sherman Oaks in place or guide the humans back to the moment before they had looked into the sky and seen ships burning above their roofs.

But he had found Aster by feeling fear instead of chasing power.

That mattered.

Aster closed his eyes.

At first, nothing happened.

The still evening remained exactly as it was, amber light lying across the lawns and rooftops, too beautiful now to belong to anything safe. Somewhere, a sprinkler ticked once and froze mid-turn. The house behind him trembled, its white siding flickering through versions of itself: burned, rebuilt, empty, occupied, impossible.

Aster’s hands opened.

Then clenched again.

“I am choosing,” he whispered.

The words were too small.

The fragment did not obey them.

The air bent sharply around the cul-de-sac. The pavement cracked open in lines of green-white light, not broken stone but broken possibility, running beneath the away team’s feet and across the lawns like veins under skin. For one second, the street became the holding frame again. A motel sign flickered where the mailbox should have been. A police siren cried from nowhere. Arawyn State College appeared at the end of the road, massive and wrong, then vanished before the eye could fully accept it.

Aster gasped.

Too much.

Too many pieces.

He tried to gather them and felt them pull in every direction at once.

Ryan and Steve.

The police chief.

Helen’s telephone.

The hurt child.

The Klingon D7.

The Romulan Bird-of-Prey.

The Veylith calf singing panic through a sky never meant to hold it.

Aster’s eyes opened wide, the blue gone entirely now. Stars filled them, bright and frightened, and for a moment the boy-shape almost failed around him. His jacket stretched into silver seams, then into something dark and mantle-like, then snapped back to the faded windbreaker as if shame itself had forced it into place.

He looked at Aev.

Not for instruction.

For the promise.

Aster was not being chased.

He was choosing.

The thought steadied him by one breath.

Then the Veylith descended.

They came through the sky like pale storms, long bodies folding out of the upper atmosphere and down into visibility, enormous and silent above the rooftops. The nearest one passed low enough that its shadow swept across the cul-de-sac, dimming the frozen sunset and drawing cold across the lawns. It should have burned. It should have torn apart. It should have cared about pressure, heat, oxygen, gravity, all the small rules that held planets together.

It did not.

Its fur streamed around it in long silver veils untouched by the air. Dark eyes turned toward the people below, not hostile, only terrified and searching. Behind it, the smaller Veylith twisted close to an adult’s body, singing too high for human hearing and somehow still felt in the teeth.

Aster’s face crumpled.

“I am sorry,” he said to them.

The adult Veylith answered.

Not in words.

The sound moved through the neighborhood like remembered wind. The lawns rippled. Windows hummed. The away team’s clothing lifted faintly as if caught in an ocean current that was not there.

Aster lifted both hands.

The Veylith resisted at first.

They had been pulled here by accident, and fear had taught them not to trust the path that opened again. Their long bodies coiled above the street, agitated and immense, stirring the visible sky into ribbons of impossible color. The Klingon and Romulan ships, still held far above, flickered into view through the tear behind them, tiny by comparison and yet bright with danger.

Aster drew a shaking breath.

“I am not taking,” he whispered. “I am returning.”

The words found more strength that time.

The Veylith calf vanished first.

Not abruptly.

It folded into a line of pale light, then into song, then into nothing the human eye could follow. The adult nearest it bent around the empty space where the calf had been and followed, body unspooling into the same bright seam. One by one, the others turned away from the false sky of Sherman Oaks and slid back through the path Aster opened for them.

The last adult paused.

For one impossible second, its dark eye seemed to meet Aster’s.

Then it too was gone.

The sky sighed.

Aster staggered.

The grass around him flattened again, but this time only in a small circle. He looked at Aev once more, clinging to the steadiness he could feel there, the deliberately held calm that was not natural and therefore mattered more.

“I am choosing,” he said again.

The warships were next.

Far above, the Klingon D7 flared back into motion, disruptors brightening, fury resumed from the instant it had been interrupted. The Romulan Bird-of-Prey answered with a damaged roll, plasma gathering along its torn wing. For half a breath, the ancient battle tried to exist here again.

Aster shook his head.

“No.”

The word was not loud.

It was enough.

The ships stretched thin, like reflections on disturbed water. Their weapons fire curved backward into itself. The D7 became a dark line of metal and anger, then a memory of metal, then a point of light slipping into the century that had misplaced it. The Romulan ship followed, damaged wing, wounded pride, unfinished battle and all.

The sky above Sherman Oaks emptied.

Aster did not smile.

He was shaking too hard.

The neighborhood remained.

That was the hardest part.

Ships and Veylith belonged to paths. Paths could be opened and closed. But Sherman Oaks had become full of people who had looked at him, spoken near him, feared him, misunderstood him, and taught him that wanting a moment to last was not the same as asking someone to trap it.

Helen on the telephone.

Danny Miller’s healed knee.

The woman who asked whether tomorrow was still coming.

The mother who pulled her child away.

The radio repeating itself.

The smell of charcoal and cut grass.

The ordinary, impossible evening.

Aster held all of it and felt, for the first time, the difference between an observation and a life.

He was not sure he liked knowing the difference.

He was very sure he could not unknow it.

The houses began to soften.

Not collapse. Not burn. Not vanish as if they had never mattered. They softened, edges loosening first, then colors, then sound. The station wagon in the driveway became a shimmer of green and wood paneling. The sidewalk became dust beneath light. The lawns drew themselves inward. The sprinkler finished one last click and was gone.

For a moment, the cul-de-sac existed in layers.

Sherman Oaks beneath the frozen sun.

A college town that had never been real.

A police station built to guard a holding frame.

A motel room where two Starfleet officers had remembered themselves.

A red mineral planet under alien light.

Aster held them all.

Then he let the wrong ones go.

The sunset moved.

Only for an instant.

A thin, final shift toward night.

Then Sherman Oaks folded out of sight.

The air changed.

The smell of grass and charcoal disappeared, replaced by dust, dry minerals, and the faint metallic tang of a world that had never known a California summer. The ground beneath the away team was no longer lawn or pavement but red-brown grit scattered with flat stones that caught the low alien sun. In the distance, broken ridges rose against a thin sky. The atmosphere was present, but light. Breathable for a time, not comfortable. Not home.

No houses.

No cars.

No children.

No radio.

No impossible golden hour.

Only the uninhabited planet the Arawyn had found before all of this had begun.

Aster stood a few paces from them, no longer quite dressed as a local boy. The windbreaker remained, but it looked like an apology now, faded and human and too small for what stood inside it.

He stared at the empty place where Sherman Oaks had been.

Then the air behind him opened.

A line of soft, pale light appeared, taller than the boy and steadier than anything Aster had made. Within it were shapes that did not become fully human, though the mind tried to make them so. Several figures. Older. Brighter. Watching with the stillness of people who had arrived after being called by consequence rather than invitation.

Aster’s shoulders rose.

Then lowered.

He did not turn around at once.

One of the figures spoke.

The language was not Standard, not exactly, though the away team’s translators struggled and offered meaning where sound refused to behave.

“Aster.”

He closed his eyes.

That one word carried no anger the way humans used anger. It carried something worse.

Disappointment.

Concern.

Relief that was trying very hard not to become scolding before the important facts were gathered.

Aster turned slowly toward them.

“I put it back,” he said.

The nearest figure tilted its head.

“Yes.”

Aster’s hands found his sleeves again.

“I did not lose the Starfleet people.”

“No.”

“I returned the Veylith.”

“Yes.”

“The humans will not remember.”

“Most will not.”

Aster winced.

One of the other figures made a sound that might have been a sigh if it had needed lungs.

“You opened observation windows into combat, migration, and a protected developmental culture. You intervened biologically without permission. You stabilized a light state because a local population expressed appreciation for weather. You constructed a holding frame around two sentient observers using identity structure as support. You then hid inside a pocket within the unstable frame.”

Aster seemed to shrink with every sentence.

The figure continued.

“You did this during a supervised juvenile assignment.”

“It was not supervised at that moment,” Aster said, then immediately looked sorry he had said it.

The silence that followed was devastating.

Aster looked down at the red dust.

“I know,” he said quietly.

Another figure stepped closer, their outline bending gently around light. “You were frightened.”

Aster nodded once.

“You were also curious.”

He nodded again, smaller.

“You must learn that curiosity does not make other lives into instruments.”

That landed harder than the rest.

Aster glanced back toward the away team, toward Aev first, then the others. For a moment, the boy’s face held something older and more honest than fear.

“I am sorry,” he said.

This time the words were not only for his family.

They were for the people of Sherman Oaks, who would never know him.

For the Veylith, whose song had trembled through an alien sky.

For the ships pulled from old anger.

For Ryan and Steve, who might carry memories they had not asked for.

For Aev, who had stood near his fear and not used it against him.

For everyone who had become part of an experiment that had stopped being an experiment the moment he cared about the answer.

The pale figure nearest him extended one hand.

Aster took it.

The light around them began to draw inward.

Just before it closed, Aster looked back one last time at the red mineral world, the away team, and the empty place where Sherman Oaks had been.

His expression was miserable.

Mortified.

Exhausted.

And, despite every correction waiting for him, despite the scolding that had only begun, despite the knowledge that he had made a mistake large enough to be felt across worlds and windows and frightened mortal lives, one thought slipped through the shame before he could stop it.

It had been very interesting.

Then Aster and the others were gone.

Aster
Juvenile Stage Four of the Meridian

 

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