Chapter Text
Allura was turning six years old today.
She was beside herself with excitement as she put on a new dress---a soft fabric made of light blue and golden trims. Her father had allowed her to select it just the other day, making her feel all the more like she was bigger and more grown-up. She was picking her own outfits and shoes now, who knew what was next.
Today is going to be perfect, she thinks to herself as she slips on a pair of comfortable shoes to match. Wiggling her toes, the young princess bounded out of her room to find Coran or perhaps Nan-Nan to show off her dress.
Better yet, maybe they could let her grab an extra treat from the kitchen since it was her special day.
Allura beamed as she skipped down the hallways.
When she reached the kitchen doors, the Altean princess paused to think. She had not yet seen her father or mother today. It was rather early in the day cycle but they must be up already and doing important things, she reasoned with herself. Perhaps she could bring them something too.
Nodding to herself, Allura then walked into the kitchen only to be greeted by Melenor herself---the Queen. Her mother.
“Oh, Mother! Good morning, have I shown you my new dress?” the girl spins, holding onto her dress. A large, gentle hand grasps her little one as the queen takes in the sight.
“I’m glad you were able to find something you would like, my dear.”
Melenor matched her daughter’s enthusiasm with motherly patience and an adoring smile of her own. Allura lightly bounced on her toes in place, expectant as she looked up. This caused the queen to laugh, a pleasant sound in the early morning.
Her mother turned to reach for something in the nearby cabinet that Allura cannot quite see. She was certain by next year that would change.
“Have this, my morning star. And bring the second to your father, why don’t you? He should be in the library.”
The little Altean is flabbergasted.
Her mother was normally more careful about sweets ever since that day she disappeared and ate roughly two platters of pastry. She was right, today really was a good day.
“Thank you, Mother! I love you,” she grinned.
When Melenor bent down to kiss either one of her face markings, the girl’s face positively shined.
“Try not to dirty your dress so much today, it’s very new after all.”
“I will try, Mother!” Allura yells over her shoulder as she sprints away. Her footsteps echo even as her dress disappears behind the corner. The Altean Queen sighs ruefully.
*
Alfor hummed a mindless tune as he carefully scrawled runes into the hologram table. He had been making headway for adjusting the size of wormhole travel technology the past year and felt he was right where he would need to be for experiments.
The theories were in his mind, the magic in his hands, and time was currently on his side.
“That should do it,” he says to himself once he finished drawing in a circle around the entirety of the rune chart.
“Father!”
The king looks up immediately, setting down his pen and book. He knelt to receive the charging bundle of energy that had broken the silence of the library room.
Laughing, he kissed the forehead of his daughter who beamed at him in response.
“There’s the birthday girl,” Alfor says while gently rubbing her shoulders. “How do you feel? Bigger? Wiser?”
“I feel comfortable,” she giggled while gesturing to her dress. The motion makes her father laugh as he takes in the sight of the dress they agreed on purchasing yesterday at the Trade Center.
“It looks marvelous, Allura.”
“Thank you,” the princess chirped before holding up the pastries her mother had sent her off with. “Would you like to have one, Father? Mother says you should have one!”
Alfor blinks in pleasant surprise before pausing. He had truthfully been in the middle of an experiment just moments ago. Turning slightly to look at the hologram desk, the king finally decides.
“Thank you, Allura. Would you like to see what I have been doing?”
He cannot respond to her questions right away as he had already bitten into the pastry---juniberry flavor, which was his favorite.
“Oh, Father! This is amazing, what exactly will you be doing?” the young Altean exclaimed once she pulled up a chair to peer at the swirling runes.
“I am trying to design new wormhole technology,” the king finally says after swallowing his bite of pastry. “Should we be successful, travel can be even more efficient.”
Nodding, Allura tried to make sense of her father’s words. She was not able to create wormholes using magic yet but maybe this coming year was the year for her to start learning how.
She sets down her napkin and pastry and leans onto the table, tilting her head this way and that to examine the curious shapes of what had been written down. Looking up at her father, she tries to not laugh at the pastry flakes that had found residence on his beard.
“What are these letters from? Is it an old language?”
“Ah, very old. It is Kritzan---an old dialect of Altea,” Alfor informs as he comes to stand beside her and peer at the work.
“Kritzan…” Allura repeats in fascination.
She leans out further and traces a finger along some of the letters. Her mind could make connections between this alphabet and its influence on current-day Altean. It was truly fascinating.
The young Altean was so entranced by the lettering that she did not realize they began to glow as she traced over each one. Nor did she sense that her own facial markings mimicked its light.
What she did notice, was the sensation of leaning forward continuously until she faintly heard her name being called. That was when Allura reached out to grab onto something before she fell any further.
Before she could cry out to her father, the world went dark.
*
*
*
“Zethrid, what was that?”
The tall woman snaps her head to look at her commanding officer. She nudges her head towards the console, signaling for him to see for himself.
“We’ve used every scanning protocol equipped on this ship and we still don’t know what the hell this energy surge was!”
She growls in frustration, hunching over to punch in another command code.
Lotor looks on quietly, bright eyes calm and calculating. One more look at the main screen, another glance to his General.
“Axca, did you pinpoint the source?”
He turns his head to the side, towards the other end of the large console. A solemn nod from the other Galra woman is given as she hands over a tablet---it was open on a finished scan of the cruiser ship.
“I compiled the scan data and found a general area of focus. It was not from Haggar,” Axca explains while enlarging a specific portion of the image. “We took the energy hit around the back-end of the ship. Storage level would be the best guess.”
Nodding at her report, the Galra man looked up to examine the control room. Zethrid was still running diagnostics and was growing increasingly frustrated with the buffering system. Each tap of her finger seemed to grow louder, making him wonder if they would need to replace another board if it went on longer.
Perhaps we should let Ezor barter for the next one, Lotor notes. Their budget could not be consumed by just replacing broken parts unrelated to battle.
“Sir, I can accompany you to investigate the storage units.”
Axca would need to stay here and back up Zethrid should something come up. He could find Ezor or Narti, he thinks to himself before declining.
“Stay here and boot up that particle barrier we’ve been developing once the systems are all online again.”
“Understood,” came the reply from both Generals.
*
Allura wakes up with a throbbing headache and a sore neck.
She groans while pulling herself off of the hard ground, rubbing her head as she slowly opens her eyes. Where had she fallen?
The room was dark even after repeatedly rubbing her eyes. The young Altean frowned, unable to make out anything in the minimal lighting. After a few seconds, her eyes begin to adjust and she can make out box shapes.
A storage unit?
Allura reaches out toward the closest object. It’s a cold, metal slab that touches her fingers. Not the same metal as the Castleship either, she realizes. The material feels different beneath her newly energized hands; there’s something subconsciously obvious to her sinking in the fact that she was not at home anymore.
Wherever she was now, her parents were not here with her.
Heart hammering, the princess begins to think.
She had somehow made a wormhole which brought her here. Where exactly, she could not tell but surely there was a way to return to the Altean library. Now if only she could remember the rune letters.
“Who’s there?”
Looking over her shoulder, she freezes as a door slides open with an ear-stabbing squeak. The spilling light momentarily blinds her but she tries not to close her eyes for long, staring at the silhouetted figure.
Blinking rapidly, her eyes widen when she sees unfamiliar armor.
The immediate response is to scoot back as fast as she can, cramming herself between the boxes and making herself as small as possible. Allura can barely take a breath, her body trembling as she tries to keep quiet. The roar of blood in her ears is awful loud too after the sudden panic.
“Hey, come out!”
The voice is female.
She listened carefully but cannot recognize them---it was certainly not her mother. Before she can try to guess if she’s ever heard this person before, there are footsteps. Someone else was coming.
Weakly sucking in air through her mouth, Allura tries to listen in.
“Ezor, what have you found?”
The man’s voice was not familiar either, causing her stomach to sink. She was normally very good at remembering these things but nothing struck her memory here.
Allura now cannot imagine where the wormhole took her. It was clearly not just into another room of another ship.
“Sir, I think we have a stowaway.”
“You did not check the crates when we were leaving the market port?”
“We did! You checked, I checked, even Narti checked!”
She sounds upset. It makes Allura’s hands ball up into fists as she anxiously continued to listen. Who knew what would happen if they found her here?
“Very well, I leave it to you then.”
The man left, his boots softly fading down the hall again.
Silence falls.
Allura’s heart beats harder as she strains to detect the slightest noise.
“Let’s see what we have here…”
The voice is closer.
Alarm spreads over her as she feels them approaching the crates she chose to hide between. Silently, the princess begs for them not to see her.
“Oh, lookie here!”
Allura immediately screams when a cold hand wraps around her ankle. She kicks with all the might her body can muster, all of her training tested under fire as the woman now pulls her from the hiding spot.
“Hey, kid, what are you doing here?”
The woman is dodging her thrashing feet and hands so easily. Allura desperately tries to land a strike, wincing at the grip on her foot tightening as she struggles more. In the back of her mind, she wonders how dirty she would end up getting after all.
“Woah, woah!”
Allura smiles internally when her foot finally lands on the offending hand gripping her other leg. Once it releases her, the little Altean scrambles to her feet and races out the door. She does not stop when the woman calls for her.
Blindly turning left and right down corridors, she just ran.
The lights along the walls are darker, dimmer. It makes the hallways an indecipherable puzzle and Allura only comes to a stop when she reaches a fork in her path with a large, glowing symbol.
She peers up with a frown, wracking her brains for where this symbol could be from.
Either way, this was definitely not the Castle of Lions.