Lieutenant Commanders Vernon Reid and Jakrin Holv sat across from Commander Mira Novak in the large office that the commanding officer occupied on the command level of Starbase 11. The group had settled into a steady routine already, as if they had been carrying on the morning sync meeting for months already. The two men would take their seats and brief important happenings from the day prior, and discuss the day-to-day operations of the facility with the practiced ease of professionals.

This particular morning meeting went by the same script the last two had, with Holv leading with reports pertaining to the station’s general upkeep, notable maintenance evolutions, and anything else that fell under his purview as the station’s Operations Chief. Reid would then go over matters of personnel, policy, and issues that arose from the station’s interaction with the local civilian population and transient visitors. Nothing about either of the men’s reports stood out to Mira in any noticeable way.

“Is there anything else I should be aware of?” Novak asked, this phrase rapidly solidifying as her go to question when she felt the meeting had reached its end.

“Actually…” Vernon said, visibly hesitant to speak up, “There was one thing that I caught wind of yesterday that you might need to know, even if only for situational awareness.”

“Very well,” Mira straightened up a little, “Let’s hear it.”

“Okay, so last night, my girls met me at Ember’s, even though they weren’t helping out yesterday since they have their school break. They told me they’d been wandering around the promenade when they noticed someone that just seemed… wrong. Because the girls started off by telling me that they’d been hunting for ghosts, originally, to stave off a little childhood boredom, I didn’t take it very seriously at first,” Reid began his report.

“Children do make up some fanciful tales to keep themselves entertained sometimes,” Holv said with a chuckled.

Novak narrowed her eyes slightly, “And why is it that, if you took no stock in it at the time, you are reporting it to me now?”

“Right. At first, I had thought the very same thing Jak just mentioned, that they’d gotten caught up in some sort of fantasy and they’d wound themselves up a bit too much. But the level of detail that Ella could recall about the incident, how visibly shaken she was when she started talking about how… whoever this was… looked dead at her and she had… for lack of a better descriptor, an existential crisis over it, I couldn’t just wave it off as a flight of fancy,” Vernon continued.

Jakrin straightened up in his chair a bit, his face shifting from amusement to concern. Mira’s eyebrow slowly rose as she caught the tonal shift of his voice and the intensity that he gave to the last part of his narrative.

“What details, specifically?” Novak asked as she steepled her hands in front of her.

“Ella talked about how people around this being they saw were acting, in details you really only pick up when it’s just truly out of place. She said everyone around this person just casually walked around them like they knew someone was there, but never once looked at them. She talked about how shopkeepers would flat out ignore the person even when they were standing right in front of them, even helping people who had walked up after the being had approached,” Vernon relayed from his memory of Ella’s story the night prior.

Mira’s lips drew down into a frown, “That does seem like more detail than a child would go to the trouble of inventing if it were just a story. Did they provide a description?”

“They did,” Reid nodded, lifting the PaDD he held up to read it. “The person had the general build of a human, roughly my height according to the girls, but the top of their head looked cartoonishly large with veiny protrusions around it. What concerned me was that Ella couldn’t readily identify what species the person they’d seen came from. I’ve come up short as well in that department. I’ve never seen or even heard about a species matching that description, and I spend a good few hours last night looking.”

Something about the way the being was described nagged at the back of her mind, but Mira couldn’t quite articulate why. Her eyes narrowed just a little further as she pursued more information about the event.

“Where exactly did this take place?” Novak asked.

“The shopping district, Ella gave me a rough map of their route after they spotted their mysterious stranger,” Vernon said, lifting his PaDD pointedly.

“Have you checked the security feeds from the area in question?” Mira followed up.

Reid shook his head, “Not yet. I was still debating with myself over how far I really needed to pursue this. I don’t want to dismiss it simply because of how I came by this information, but I also don’t want to invest a whole lot of time on the off chance the girls just mistook someone for something other than what they were.”

“Your caution is reasonable,” Novak nodded. “However, I think we should at least devote a little bit of time on this. Mister Holv, go through the security footage with Mister Reid and see if we captured any evidence of what actually took place. If the playback doesn’t support their story, we will not have wasted much in the way of time or effort on this. If, however, there is something to this, get to the bottom of it. I’d rather not have strange beings wandering all over my station that we can’t see and can’t defend against should their intentions be less than benevolent.”

“Can do, Commander,” Jakrin nodded, his face serious.

“I’ll let you know if we find anything,” Vernon said, pushing himself out of his chair.

Mira looked up at the man, “Let me know if you didn’t find anything as well.”

Reid nodded firmly, looking over to see the Bolian already on his feet and heading for the door. Vernon turned and moved around the chair to follow his friend out into the corridor and into the Station Operations Center. Instead of making their way over to the master situations display, Jakrin guided them over to the security enclave that sat at the periphery of the large circular room between the Operations Management section and Sector Control.

Holv sank down behind one of the empty consoles and looked over his shoulder to Reid, “Where do we need to start looking?”

Vernon brought up the schematic that he’d generated based on the girl’s recounting of events and showed Jakrin the screen, “Here should be a good place to start. We should be able to track their movements and get a clear picture of what actually happened during their little chase.”

The Bolian nodded and queried the computer to locate the section he’d been shown, scrolling through the feed from the beginning of the day until the computer finally logged the presence of Annabell and Eleanor Reid. Once the view from the security node had the two children in view, the playback froze. Vernon pulled up a nearby chair and joined Holv in sitting.

“Alright, move forward second to second until there’s a visible sign that they see something unusual, then we’ll run the playback,” Reid instructed.

Jakrin nodded and began the slow indexing of images until the pair saw Anna’s head move to the right and she flinched visibly. The Bolian stopped the image where it was and studied the scene being displayed as he hunted for anything that might have caused such a reaction. Vernon squinted at the image, his own eyes darting from point to point in an effort to pin down whatever it was that had spurred their strange tale.

“I don’t see anything strange…” Holv said, his tone one of mild annoyance.

“Can the computer extrapolate where she might be looking based on sightlines?” Reid asked.

Jakrin nodded, “I believe that shouldn’t be an issue. There are plenty of observation points from the security system to draw from.” He entered in the request, and the computer began drawing lines and shading in a box where it believed the most probably object could have been located based on the observations it could make. The box in question sat just in front of a market stall, but looked completely empty.

“There’s nothing but air,” Holv stated the obvious.

Vernon grunted, “Nothing there that the security footage picked up, but it’s obvious she saw something there.”

“Perhaps it was something hanging from the stall itself,” Jakrin pointed to several objects that had been included in the box outlining probable focal points.

“If it was just a trinket she saw, why would they have to chase it down the shopping district?” Reid pointed out.

The Bolian frowned, “True… I suppose we’ll just have to keep looking.” He had the computer move the footage forward in real time, the screen showing the two children scurry behind an advertisement column as they peered out behind it toward the stalls further ahead. The security footage reoriented itself to display the direction the two girls were looking down, and tracked forward as they moved.

“Stop the footage,” Vernon said after about two minutes in.

Holv pressed the appropriate command, then looked back up at the screen with a confused look, “See something?”

Reid leaned forward and put his finger on a spot of passageway on the screen, “Right there. No one has stepped through that spot for nearly a minute now.”

Jakrin cocked his head to one side for a moment, then moved the footage backward and forward until he hummed in interest, “You’re right… it’s like people really are just avoiding that spot.”

“See if that’s where the girls are looking, like you did before,” Reid instructed, his body leaning forward just a little more.

Holv repeated the extrapolation process and within a few seconds, another shaded box appeared, exactly where Vernon had indicated. Reid’s eyes searched the scene a little longer before he came upon an idea.

“Can you track where this merchant’s eyeline goes? I want to see if this… void… is being purposely ignored, like the girls were saying,” Vernon voiced his idea.

Jakrin’s lips began to float upward, “I think I see where you’re going with this.”

The Bolian made another few inputs, then ran the footage backward to when the strange void had opened up. The sightline of the merchant moved from side to side, but never once did it penetrate the box that had been formed using the twin’s center of focus.

Vernon clapped his hands after watching the playback, “There is something there!”

“Well… to be exact, there is nothing there, and there should be,” Jakrin corrected.

“Well yeah…” Reid said a bit deflated, “But that’s what we were looking for in the first place.”

The Bolian chuckled, “Yes, I know. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Right now, we only know their story isn’t just that, a story. What we still don’t know is what they saw or where it went.”

Vernon sank back in his chair, “You’re right, Jak, but the more important thing here is that the girls weren’t wrong. Now I won’t have to feel like a monster when I tell Ella that I followed up on it and have to say I think she imagined it… because we clearly see the pattern she talked about, of people avoiding looking at one specific spot.”

“Shall we see if it is consistently, rather than just this one particular place?” Jakrin nudged his friend.

“Right,” Reid nodded, “There was more than just the one time. Let’s see if that part of her report holds up.”

Holv grinned at the shift in his friend’s demeanor. He’d been a bit on the fence about the validity of what he’d heard about the Reid twin’s little ghost hunt, but even Jakrin couldn’t dispute that it was starting to shape up into something… even if he couldn’t put his finger on what that something was.

The pair watched the footage, this time with the computer extrapolating sightlines from passersby as well as the merchants at the stalls. The longer the images scrolled along, the more solid the twins’ story became. And then they happened upon the moment of confrontation that Ella had described with such intensity of emotion, filtered through the lens of a fourteen-year-olds’ limited vocabulary. When Reid saw his daughters’ recoil, one in absolute terror and the other one in something close to the borders of insanity, he leaped out of his chair before he even realized what he was doing.

“Where is that?!” Vernon demanded, any semblance of calm evaporated in his mind.

Holv called up the station’s schematics and displayed them next to the playback image, “Section 43 Charlie.”

“Grab a phaser, we’re going down there,” Reid said, obviously shaken up by what he’d seen.

Holv’s hand snapped closed around his friend’s wrist, halting his movement, “Hold on a minute, Vernon. Let’s take a second to calm down and think through this rationally. The girls are fine. You know that, you saw them right after this happened and they weren’t hurt or maimed or anything else. They were just spooked, and that was all. The phaser might be a bit much for something that’s already done and over with.”

“Jak, you saw how they looked,” Reid began to argue angrily.

“Yes, I was sitting right here, I saw it. And as much as I care about the girls too, flying off the handle and chasing after something we might not even see right in front of our faces isn’t going to do us much good. I’m not saying we don’t go down there, but maybe we don’t do it armed… just yet,” the Bolian said in a placative tone.

Vernon’s arm tensed in Jakrin’s hand as if he were about to snatch it free, then slackened a heartbeat later, “You’re right, Jak… If we’re not picking this thing up on internal sensors, and no one else was able to look directly at the thing the whole time the girls were chasing after it, there’s next to no chance we’ll be any more aware of it even if that thing is still down there.”

“Perhaps not,” Holv said, finally letting his friend’s wrist go, “But that doesn’t mean we can’t still poke around, ask some questions, maybe check out this dead end the girls talked about. Maybe if we ask people the right things, they’ll notice how odd it was and maybe remember something similar happening before. Could help us track how long this being has been here, figure out what it might want.”

Reid nodded, “Yeah. That sounds better than whatever stupid thing I was going to go do in the heat of the moment.”

Holv rose to his feet and gave Vernon’s shoulder a warm squeeze, “You were just worried about your family, Vernon. Nothing to be ashamed of. And besides, what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t stop you from charging off blind, when we can do a little homework and catch ourselves a ghost before it knows it’s being caught?”