Things that you don't remember to talk about before marriage that rattle your mate in the first ten years but then become laughable by year 19:
“A whole lot of people keep trying to kill you by sending beautiful, deadly things, Vlarian.”
“Well, Mark, you know like attracts like.”
It all started with me, just a lowly lieutenant commander in those days, foiling a plot of a very powerful individual to smuggle this gem here out of his planet's crown jewels to give to his lover:
Nothing was ever proven, and the gem was simply returned. Things were kept quiet. I didn't get or expect any credit; it was just what had to be done to keep peace in the portion of the galaxy my fleet serves.
But, because the thing was kept quiet, I knew that when said person was elected to a very high position and then wanted to remember me in my semi-retired full fleet admiral years that they were up to absolutely no good.
Said individual made a huge deal about my service to the people, in a show of hypocrisy I have rarely seen rivaled. Had I the proof, I would have destroyed him then and there, for he was still an enemy of the people.
However, he was going to put himself into my hands anyway.
It is pretty well known across the galaxy that I love gems and gardening, and it turns out that the gem that I had returned to its proper custody was modeled after one of its planet's most beautiful flora: the Didhdra plant. The above is its most typical form, but there are versions that are spread almost like one of our ray flowers of Earth …
… and still another form comes in delicate plumes...
… and that one in variations of color that include a rose hue and a glow-in-the-dark version...
They also have a lovely scent, like vanilla with a bitter note … bitter almonds, that is.
The Didhdra is not cultivated across the galaxy despite its beauty, and only grows wild on its own home planet, because it is the flower that will deadhead you if you do not know to deadhead it.
I wasn't supposed to know that, of course. I'm only the fleet's highest-ranking science officer ever, and its only female full fleet admiral at the moment. I only had 53 years of a career under my quarter-Vulcan belt at that time.
But you know, I still look like a middling middle-aged housewife even now at 80 years old, and folks just thought semi-retirement had whittled me down to the point that I didn't just go to the computer and check things out, like people have been doing since search engines came along in the 21st century. Folks just thought I forgot how to access fleet resources too.
It is amazing how stupid you can get, sitting around being angry with people for decades who weren't even thinking about you, sitting around angry with a person who you really do not want to be thinking about you again, because you scarcely survived the first time.
I was a lieutenant commander at 32 years old when this individual's folly came my way the first time. I was almost 74 years old, a full fleet admiral already for 21 years and the mother of five children with some still small, when his folly came my way for what I made the last time.
I wrote a beautiful letter of thanks to the individual for the packet of seeds; he had sent me all varieties and I cleared off a space in the Kirk holdings in Ohio to grow them all out and document their growth. I deadheaded every bloom but one, and enjoyed their beauty and fragrance in my home and the homes of my friends all summer while the last one broke down …
… and then formed this gorgeous but lethal seedhead:
I noted the smell of vanilla and bitter almonds earlier … the Didhdra protects its compound seed with an armor of cyanide-tipped darts. Touch one seedhead and it explodes; being startled would likely cause a victim to explode several of them. The results would be instantly fatal with three such seedheads, and for a child, just one seedhead would be enough.
One seedhead caused the death of the individual who intended to murder me – it provided the evidence of the attempt at my murder, which allowed the fleet marshals to go get him. He put up resistance, and was killed in the process. It became an interstellar incident, and everything came out all the way back to his theft of the gem that could not be proven the first time around.
Like I said to my husband, like attracts like, and I marvel that people forget every few years that I am the most beautiful deadly thing in the galaxy if I have to defend myself, my family, or the areas of the galaxy I am sworn to defend. I suppose a reminder is necessary from time to time, but no one really wants me to provide it to them – believe that!
One fractal in Apophysis 2.09, in seven different variations -- and even that's not all of them ... but more than enough to let beautiful and deadly Admiral Vlarian Triefield enjoy her beautiful and deadly flowers while defeating her hapless enemies!