Occupation: Surgeon and Medic, sometimes chaser of escaped prisoners for Aengle; occasionally does 'business' for Kali and doesn't mind when she sends her to kill bad men

Also occupation: Ambassador to Draco Prime from the Kshau protectorate

Yveen had already lived a long time. She'd seen a huge number of changes in technology and science, her birth year was when the telephone was created, but it sat along side magical items such as scrying balls and speaking mirrors. The society from which she came had long been one of sexual equality, after all when neither gender had a real disadvantage it only came down to which species you were born. She had been born a predator - but on the scale of big cats, cheetahs ranked pretty low.

They were preyed upon regularly, but not in the same ways as 'wild' animals did. This came in the form of social predation, mockery, abuse. But Yveen was also blessed from the start with the wit to seek out people like herself.

Sadly, she's a rotten judge of character. Like most Sangers are.

When she fell for the handsome and strongly built puma Roald it was because he was running a magic-tech seminar on drug and surgical assistance. Her chosen fields of interest lay in medicine, so it only felt natural that she ask him to help further her abilities.

He did so. At such a cost... At first she allowed him to experiment on her freely - but when he then wanted to 'test' the results, she had seen plenty of evidence that he'd killed others with these tests. Others, women like herself: cheetahs. She spent a decade in a sort of thrall to him, being pumped full of weird semi-magical substances, being made to endure starvation, torture, isolation. All this changed the way Yveen looked at life, certainly.

By the time she was thirty, she knew that her family was all dead. She'd found a letter confirming it among Roald's items, and when she confronted him with this, all he did was laugh at her. Of course they'd been killed. How else would he keep her here this long without anyone asking for her?

This all but broke the woman, but what came next made her more strong by far. On one night, after being abused and held for others to use as they pleased, Yveen was locked back in her 'room' (little more than a closet with a drain in it). She did something that even in her childhood was rare for her family. She prayed. But this time she did not do so to her family's typical host of middle-eastern gods.

She prayed to Kali, the devourer, the cleansing goddess who embodied everything that Yveen was not.

And unlike in many other universes where prayer occurs... Hers were answered. Directly.

It appeared that Kali had taken notice of Roald's activities before, but been unable to attend because of whatever godly duties she had - and because gods require payment. This time, with willing Yveen to host the vengant goddess she spilled the blood of the party-goers upstairs and broke the chain of horrific killings that had plagued the places Roald had lived. He himself suvived - but is now of course rather wary of cheetahs.

With good reason, it seems.

But now, without any home to return to and (though she'd be absolved of it should an inquiry include a priest's examination) accused of multiple murders, Yveen had to run. It was something she did rather well, physically, and with Kali's remaining blessings she would not tire the way a typical cheetah would after a mile or so. She could cover a mile in moments, and run for half an hour without needing to rest. And not smack into walls or corners, while she did so.

Before her brief stint as Kali's avatar ended, Kali guided the young woman to Lady Aengle and Alabaster Tower. Known to be both above the law and devoted to pursuit of it, Alabaster turned into an ideal home for Yveen. The Lady Aengle, a silver-furred stoat, and her entourage needed steady hands for helping fix the wounds that her bounty hunters endured.

It was to be known after a while to Yveen, that Aengle too was blessed by a goddess, a different one, and they spent two more decades pursuing justice and freedom for those oppressed in the city.

***

Yveen knew that something had changed, in her sixth decade working at Alabaster Tower. Some of the gods were roaming freely among the people again, which was always a good sign. But there were other things afoot - things which she herself seemed more privy to than most.

One of her dopplegangers in another parallel universe had 'broken through' to a neighboring world. One by one dozens if not hundreds of other worlds followed, sometimes in sequence and sometimes at the same time due to the Sanger predisposition to invent things. Many of them invented the same devices.

Many of them were about to, capable of, or curious about the things themselves, but in worlds which weren't quite up to actually doing so.

So by the time they reached Yveen's world, she had been busy fixing up a scrying tool that allowed her to look directly into the world which was itching at the back of her expanded mind. Aengel of course wanted to know what she was going to find - and she found that she too had parallel folk on the other side of the looking glass.

It always seemed that Engells had a little different time of it than Sangers, but in the end, when Aengel and Yveen were brought to the Healing Den for a bit of a Sanger Convention, they had a ball discovering the similarities between each of their dopplegangers - and the differences. For never let it be said that any Engell isn't blessed with a superior intellect too!

"But there are dragons," said one of the Sangers, "and many worlds to explore with them. Would you like to try for that?"

"I'd like to," Yveen said, nodding. "We'd like to establish ties to other worlds, as well. I think that is what the Lady wishes, at any rate."

"We've had an ambassador program going," Baeris Kshau said, indicating the hallway with multicolored room themes and a few stray folk from other dragonries there. "You could use the Den to find a place, the guys have opened portals to whereever they need, you don't even have to leave your own quarters at Alabaster. The dragons can roost here, everything's connected."

Yveen nodded, "yes, it seems that way." She glanced around, "I know where I'd like to be," she said, and indicated Draco Prime. "It intrigues me. And it is new to you too, I see."

Baeris nodded, smirking. "You can tell that, huh?"

"More alike than different," some other Sanger reminded the healer. They got to work on making a permanent link between their Alabaster Tower and the Den, and summoned someone to bring Yveen to Draco Prime.

It wouldn't be too hard to imagine floating off into deep space, sitting in a space station. And while some people did all they could to avoid thinking on it, Yveen was apt to watch minute bits of debris floating by and wonder what it must be like to be that debris.

She was in a mood, of course. One which normally would have been headed off by one of the folks at the Tower, but they weren't here. She was out of her element, and feeling a bit overwhelmed. As a distraction, Yveen decided that she'd try and help out at the medical lab, and discovered the ways that alien life forms differed from human. (Human of course being a relative term - it meant 'anthropomorph', with bonuses like tails, hooves and second stomachs.) She kept herself busy, and then things started happening.

She felt it first, a tiny strange quirk of her anatomy and senses. Like one distant light being switched on and off, gently, at first. She could hear other people in worried tones discussing something she'd hardly imagined could exist. A 'ghost ship' - just a pocket of electromagnetism.

A little could go a long way, apparently. For by the time she and the others ready for the dragon eggs to hatch were brought together, the gravity, lighting and doubtless the life support systems were shutting down at random. They occasionally floated around in the sands - which were difficult to get out of her fur, once they'd gotten in.

And why oh why would anyone place a statue in a ship? She gazed at it, somewhere in the middle-space of the hatching dome. Because the gravity was off again, she was floating freely just like it was. And then the gravity had the nerve to turn itself back on.

A split moment of thought was something that Yveen had time for - and in it she could think of far more things than anyone else. She wondered, maybe, if this trip hadn't been for one reason only - to die? Would that be such a bad thing after having a life like hers? With children she'd never met, stolen from her at their births, with perhaps three good friends in the world?

The statue and she were falling, but she'd hit the floor first and it would certainly strike her dead.

"Not on my watch," said one of the young hatchlings, who bolted between Yveen and certain doom, pushing her aside and narrowly clearing where the statue banged down and made a dent in the floor.  "One such as yourself must be protected," he said, matter-of-factly to Yveen. "I am Shandoor, please allow me to be your bond."

Yveen was surprised, this was rather suddenly not anything like what she'd been imagining. "Bond? Well I've only come here to sponsor..."

"You may sponsor others," Shandoor shrugged, "But you will always be mine, first and foremost."

"All right," Yveen said. "And thank you for saving me, by the way."

"Only doing my duty, ma'am," was Shandoor's reply.

Yveen chuckled, that wasn't something she heard too often. But she might get used to it... Especially coming from this dramatic and strong willed dragon.

***

There was a party, but Yveen attended only long enough to glance over everyone and determine that most folks got off pretty easy in the haphazard falling around they all did that day. Someone had a broken arm, another busted her snout open on a bad face-first landing. But otherwise most of the station's people had the sense to hold on to things bolted down, for the duration.

"Why do you pay so much attention to everyone else, but none to yourself?" Asked Shandoor, carefully, just as Yveen was slipping into sleep. She muttered something about not being interrupted by silly things before a good night's sleep.

There would probably be other dragons in her life, certainly. But right now, this one stood guard over Yveen and waited for the morning to come.