Five foot eight inches tall, rumored to be white with short dark hair and perpetually wearing sunglasses, the woman behind the Stellar Queen was mysterious.

She was at least eight hundred years old, well-established because she’d lived on the Stellar Queen for that long. Such a long life on one ship leads to rumors….

I lived for fifty years as a child and man on the Stellar Queen, enjoying my second childhood on the ship after I initiated my Do-over, so I was always watching out for her. I was never certain I saw her. There were rumors….

Her appearance was challenging not just because she was rarely seen but also because she practiced genetic designing to shape shift, leading her appearance to often change, even becoming an animal, such as the panther that was claimed to live on the Stellar Queen, or one of the unicorns in the forest. At least, those were were the rumors….

The Stellar Queen was her baby, along with Doctor Jharun Pollux, great-granddaughter of Doctor Jerol Pollux. Doctor Jerol Pollux was the famous discoverer of the dark elements. The elder Doctor Pollux, a funny point to write, was but twenty-four when she made her discoveries a hundred years before her great-granddaughter’s birth. Jharun Pollux and Her Lady were said to be contemporaries in their youth, and struck up a relationship from that era. ‘That era’ was when space exploration and colonization began blossoming, thanks to the dark elements of the elder doctor’s findings, but it was almost three hundred years later that the two women began collaborating on the Stellar Queen’s design and construction.

Most critically for the Stellar Queen, Doctor Pollux incorporated power generators using asteridium, chiridium, and lumenirium. Asteridium was the black element most commonly used in starships for propulsion but Pollux used it with a small lumenirium core to create the artificial sun that graced the Stellar Queen’s bio-dome, rising in the east, and setting in the west.

Chiridium was the more interesting choice for the ship’s power. Chiridium, named for chi, after the life force, is rarer, more difficult to mine and control. Myths related to its name and Doctor Jerol Pollux’s comments about it, can never be put down. As a dark element, some say it’s a dark life force. Both Doctors Pollux laughed about that, but with its AI ship overseer, many inhabitants and visitors thought the Stellar Queen was alive. Majorities of people recounted stories and gave interviews stating that something different was felt as soon as you boarded the ship.

Her Lady never made comments about it that anyone ever recorded. As odd and intriguing as her eight hundred year life aboard the Stellar Queen was, her disappearance without notice when she left was equally intriguing. She only told Rei the baker, famous for his goods from Trudy’s Valley, that she was leaving.

Being the only source, naturally, more rumors arose. One rumor was that one of her shapeshifting processes was disrupted, rendering her a monster that couldn’t be fixed, and that she still lived in secret on the Queen. Others claimed that she had never existed, that she had not created the Stellar Queen, but that it created her because the woman who had begun the project had died before it launched. More quietly, it was suggested that perhaps it wasn’t correct to think of the Stellar Queen as two separate entities, but that they were one, yet another project of the great Doctor Jerol Pollux, and her great-granddaughter.

Imagination can be a wild, untamed creature.