Before The Roll
Posted on Fri May 23rd, 2025 @ 11:06pm by Lieutenant Chance Vahl & Lady Luck
Mission: Luck Be a Lady
The Vahl family estate sat high above the sea cliffs of Betazed. Everything about the family exuded wealth, power and prestige. A life filled with nannies, housekeepers, drivers and security. Exclusive boarding schools, private lessons in dance, music, languages and the arts… and then during school breaks it was little more than cold dinners with colder parents.
Chance was seventeen. A prodigy. Already mapping neural pathways most adults couldn’t pronounce. Not that her parents ever noticed. As far as they were concerned she was little more than an inconvenience to some, a paycheck to others, but to all, easily forgotten.
She felt emotions more deeply than most - because she couldn’t block them. Other Betazoids learned shielding. Control. She learned to bury. To block the voices would have meant isolation. Even in the chaos of thoughts that penetrated her mind there was connection, understanding and warning. To block those voices would be like blinding herself in a crowd. Perhaps safer, but deaf to nuance, need and danger.
Burying the voices allowed her to push the noise into the background, like tuning out static on a comm frequency. The act of burying, in her mind, reflected not only strength, but restraint - a willingness to carry the weight of others' thoughts without succumbing to them.
After a childhood of loneliness, devoid of the love and warmth she so desperately craved she didn’t want to shut people out, she didn’t want to be alone, and so she learned to pretend.
Her first taste of death came early.
A speeder crash. Three classmates. No survivors. She arrived before the medics—her mind screaming with echoes of the dying. No one else heard it.
But she did.
And she never forgot the silence when it stopped.
She graduated top of her class. Brilliant. Beautiful. Empathic when she chose to be.
But there were… incidents.
A cadet died during a training mission. She was first on scene. His injuries were non-lethal.
A professor who humiliated her in front of the class had a fatal aneurysm two weeks later. Quiet. Painless.
No evidence ever surfaced. Just rumors. Whispers.
Her fellow students joked about her:
“Chance Vahl doesn’t need phasers. She just stares at you until the universe takes care of it.”
She laughed with them.
But she never denied it.
Then came her first assignment. She wore the uniform with pride. Helped the sick. Delivered babies. Saved lives. She worked diligently, tirelessly, without complaint. She reassured, comforted and consoled, exuding kindness and empathy to all in her presence.
And then she met the Dice.
They weren’t magical. They weren’t alien.
They were a gift. A birthday joke from a friend. Six-sided, polished black. Meant for a game she never played.
The weight of them in her hand felt cool, deliberate, grounding her in a way she had never felt before.
One night, she rolled them while thinking of one of the traders on the promenade of the station she was assigned to - a man who had beaten his partner, again and again, slipping through legal cracks.
She rolled a snake eyes.
In that brief moment as they fell she was not just a Starfleet officer, a telepath, or a survivor of what she had buried. She was in control. The future was yet to happen and she alone possessed the power to decide when it would.
He died in an airlock accident the next day. Unrelated. Untraceable.
She rolled again. And again.
Each time, the results felt… true.
The dice were more than possibility,they were a ritual. A way to confront the unknown on her own terms. A reminder that fate does not always have a fixed trajectory, she held the power for it to be coaxed, courted or defied.
There was power in that moment of anticipation. Power in the quiet, power in the weight of the dice in her hand, power in the sound as they fell. Unlike the voices she can never fully silence, the dice only speak once and they always tell the truth.
Not predictive. Not Prophetic.
Permission.
Through her career she moves from post to post. Quietly requested. Never denied.
Her work is spotless. Her patients survive.
But when she rolls, and the number is right…
They don’t.
She doesn’t kill with pleasure. She kills with order.
Because the galaxy is full of chaos, and Chance Vahl couldn’t hear the universe screaming anymore.
So she decided to speak for it.
