Morgaine was not barrelling up the freeway toward her goal. In fact, she stopped at her hotel to pick up whatever she had there and pack it into the car neatly. She even stopped to get something to eat at the local burger place before getting back on the road.

Her mind went back to her time as Ricardo. She thought about how her life had seemed so uneventful until the day she met Anastasia. She was an Italian beauty. Something about her eyes were always wild. It was the experience of traveling the cosmos that gave that look to her eyes, Ricardo had been sure. Morgaine knew better though. Anastasia didn’t have the cosmos in her eyes, she had a pure hunger for knowledge that was completely unnatural in a human being. She was driven by the pursuit of knowledge to such a degree that nothing else mattered in the wake of that pursuit.

Ricardo had been a creature born into an alien world and had been easily duped by a pretty face with eyes that held exciting secrets. He had been young. His time with the woman had been something for the ages. Morgaine deeply missed those moments, but she knew who Anastasia was now, and she knows who Keung is. As vicious as Morgaine can be, she has limits, she likes to assure herself. A code of conduct. She had to admit, she didn’t remember all of the codes of her conduct and all of the rules and procedures of those on the journey. From what she could remember about Ye'randid, she had never really been all that scholastic to begin with.

Hands on was her approach. People thought of her as a day-dreamer back home, from what she remembered. Each of her incarnations here seems similar to that in her opinion. A great deal of natural intuition that carried over in many areas. She is able to cobble together that intuition into a number of great things. Hands on practice was all that she ever really clicked with. She simply didn’t need the long studious approach to much of anything.

During her time in London, she took advantage of the poverty and the upset all around her to thoroughly examine the bodies of humans, on the brink of and after their deaths. They called her mad, but weren’t they doing the exact same with rodents, pigs, and other animals? History calls her insane, but they have no idea what those actions have done to benefit them.

Her next life, she had been a doctor that had a far greater understanding of human anatomy than any other in her classes. After that, her work had produced breakthroughs that would have likely been held up for decades more. Her thoughts went back to her time in the Mögthrasir system. She understood what it was like to be fractured. That was truly the reason she was chosen for this journey, though not many within the parliament had known that. Her work in that system had made the groundwork discovery in the alien fracture process in which G’lomin-sitiri souls would be born into the population of another civilization. She had been one of the first to be fractured and born into the population of the Amalec people in the Mögthrasir system.

There she learned the secrets of their people. The warlike Amalec had been problematic in the Mögthrasir system for generations. She used her unique position to help guide their people toward a more peaceful and co-habitual existence. That was her mission. That is what she had volunteered to do. Enter the alien society and guide their people toward a more progressive end. Their politics had created a hunger within their people that ate at their world, their fellow inhabitants, and was well into changing the climate into something uninhabitable for either.

It was her people that had turned theirs around. A gentle hand to move along their progress after they became stuck in a harmful pattern. She saw the Amalec in the humans all around her. Had they been more coordinated, she believes that they could do the same here on Earth. They could easily change this place for the better, but not unless they move in a calculated and structured manner.

Anastasia was impetuous, quick acting, and dangerous. Her passion made her sloppy. She seemed to be under the impression that the G’lomin-sitiri had all the time in the universe just because they were immortal of a sort. She failed to understand that everything around them is continuing to evolve. If they didn’t pay attention to what is currently happening, they will fail to predict what might be in store for the near future. It is best to move with purpose, not with passion.

This is something that Anastasia simply did not understand, and from what Morgaine has been able to observe of Keung thus far, he wasn’t much different from his previous incarnation. Some lessons require more than one life-time to learn, and some require a stern hand and the leash.

She finished her burger and fries, got a refill of her drink, and then began her drive north. According to her GPS, it would take her sixteen hours of straight driving to get there. She smiled and made a note of how far she would likely get before nightfall. As she drove the 101 freeway north, she made hotel reservations in San Francisco. There she would stay for the night and perhaps a day or two thereafter. She needed to prepare before seeing Keung in the flesh. She needed to make a few more calls.

That night Morgaine sat in her room in The Ritz-Carlton of San Francisco looking over the GPS coordinates that Robert had supplied her with and exploring the surrounding area on the map programs available to her. There was a slight chance that Keung had dug the truth out of Robert by this point, that didn’t really concern her. She was gambling on Keung having similar arrogance as Anastasia. He would stay at this location because he would lay a trap for her, that is his way. She was sure of how his mindset worked. There simply wasn’t enough time passed that Keung would be drastically different than his previous incarnation. Likely the boy had artificially reawakened his G’lomin-sitiri soul in this incarnation. This would stagnate any change he would have made otherwise.

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She had cleaned her plate of her bacon and bleu cheese burger she had specially ordered from the kitchen, as well as her fries. She drained her milkshake and found that they had added a salad to her cart for some reason, a salad which had been promptly dumped out the window and wind tossed randomly around the cars and street below.

Plugging in her streaming stick to the TV, she turned on a television show at random and took out her laptop. Before her full realization she had been a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]. Her thoughts went back to those days just a few years ago. She was born Krystal Grace back in 1995. Her intelligence as a human being was impressive. She had raced through her grade school classes before she was fifteen years old and had been at MIT for over two years before her realization.

She could hear the couple next door turn up their television louder to drown out her show. She just turned her TV the louder. They were now talking loud between each other about her volume. Morgaine rolled her eyes.

When the memories of her past lives raced through her, she found herself in a strange position. Being an alien from an advanced civilization would have given her a great edge in her field of programming and robotics, but she had little experience with the computers back home and only this lives understanding of them today. Then there were the issues surrounding the death of Ricardo, her previous incarnation.

The neighbor smacked the wall a couple times, an alert to turn down her TV she was sure. She ignored the fool and turned the TV up louder.

Ricardo had been an abused man, horribly mistreated and made to scrape by in a life doing the work an immigrant can find on the East coast of the most wealthy nation on the planet. Dish washing, cooking, scrubbing, and cleaning. Those he worked for were verbally abusive and those days were rough. She had a theory that she had blocked the majority of those memories out to save herself from reliving them. That seemed like a pattern throughout her time here. A lot of blocked out negatives and a few happy memories. It was odd.

She can remember events that would predictably have led to something negative. However, once those memories got to the negative part, that point where you are sure that something bad happened, it’s just gone. Nothing, not foggy, just gone. At first she started a journal to record what she was attempting to puzzle through, then she wrote a program, then another. Now she keeps a record of her thoughts and even video and audio memos with a logging system to keep them in theme on her cloud.

She has worked through a lot and the only conclusion she has been able to come to is this: Anastasia had edited her IFA and taken her memories from her. In this case, unlike a true edit on an IFA that is done with a razor-like precision that blends the memories seamlessly when you attempt to recall them, this is sloppy, barbaric, and messy.

Her face contorted in anger. Anastasia had experimented on her. She had stolen pieces of her life away from her and left her with questions and patches of memory just lost. She let out a scream in frustration. The neighboring room slammed the wall and shouted something so she threw her boot across the room and into the television with a crash.

“Shut up or I’ll come over there!” she shouted at the wall.

She reached out with her thoughts and found the mind of the man next door and that of his girlfriend. He stopped slamming the wall and turned around, his girlfriend had gotten up from the bed and walked beside him. He looked at her silently as she slapped him hard across the face.

He looked at her in shock, shock that was mirrored on her own face.

They both spun around toward the bedroom and walked in, turning off the light and got into bed, silently. Every so often the woman would ball up her fist and plant a punch in the man’s stomach hard, until they both went to sleep.

Morgaine opened a video of a calm stream and soft rain, then went into a meditative state. She soon fell deep within herself.

In her meditative state she was able to access her psyscape, a mentally constructed dimension wherein she is the greatest of authorities. Her own world with their own buildings and rooms. As she appeared she took on a reflection of her human body, though the environment was clearly alien.

She walked through the area looking at each of the buildings. This is how she sorted and separated her memories from one life to another. She walked to a humble looking home, a small shack off the beaten path. She focused and reached into her pocket to pull a key free. She unlocked the door, disarming the traps she has within.

The interior of the home was dramatically bigger on the inside. Within there were several tall glass cylinders against the wall, two of which held subjects in stasis. Those within were G’lomin-sitiri, or more specifically, they were the fragments of other G’lomin-sitiri minds that were trapped here in her psyscape when they were trying to invade her thoughts. The subjects floated in the tanks suspended in a yellow/gold liquid, drifting lazily within. She knew the subjects. They had both been part of the special counsel on the advisory committee in exoplanetary intrinsic field travel.

Before going on the journey, each of those volunteering were required to submit to deep mental scans in order to get to the truth of their intentions as well as to see if there was anything within the volunteer that would be a poor representation of their people. Neither of the subjects are missing these fractions of themselves. In essence, her trap just ensnared a shadow of the two agents, a moment of their existence that had been cut away from them upon opening the door to this area of her mind without being invited in by her. Those thoughts. What they were thinking at that moment, what they saw, being startled, and what they were suspecting to find here, were all caught. A captured moment in time that will be lost to the subjects forever.

It was while in her psyscape that Morgaine dove into a plan to capture Keung and likely Robert.