Kindred Spirits

Commander Neumann's transformation continues, bringing up questions both about his future and his past, as the mystery of the Kindred deepens, forcing Captain Ral to make a tough decision...and Cade isn't too happy about it! The cryptic answers of an ancient computer raise even more questions about its origins, and the truth behind the Arista Three's ultimate plans! And what do the Hearth have to say about all of this? Across light years and eons, the forces that divide us are never as strong as those that unite us as...Kindred Spirits!

## Opening Log

> Thirty-six years ago, on my first assignment out of the Academy, my ship ran afoul of a powerful dampening field being projected from the uninhabited ruins of an unknown ancient civilization that drained the ship of power.  I was able to disrupt the system enough to shut down the field before our ship was completely disabled, but the site was so badly damaged, and the technology so vastly different than anything known, that we couldn’t decipher how it worked. Instead, the pieces were packed up and shipped off with the mission data to Starfleet Science, and the subsequent research classified.  A device this powerful has great potential for use as a defense measure, or as a weapon.
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> As an eager and brash young engineer, I thought I might be able to unpack the mystery myself, and continued my own research in my spare time.  I even ended up keeping a small shard of the crystal at the heart of the device that was left behind - a tiny inert thing, just another rock in my collection.  Over time, my noodling with the data became less about finding answers, and more of a meditative exercise, a reminder of just how much I still don’t know.  I think I gave up on actually solving the puzzle a long time ago.
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> Now here we are, in another part of the galaxy, with what appears to be an identical device, this time perfectly preserved, and hidden under a thriving civilization called the Hearth (with its own mysterious ancient past) that could be put at risk by the dampening field.  And we happen to have a key - not my crystal shard, but a member of our crew - a human, raised in an obscure Terran religion that somehow has ties to the ancient Hearth, and which required he be covered in tattoos at a young age.  Those tattoos apparently activated this ancient device, which in turn appears to have activated some sort of mutation within his cells.  His DNA is being rewritten, and latent genes - code that looks to have been inserted, in violation of Federation law - are being activated.  To what end?  We have no way of knowing.  There is no record of similar genetic structures in the Starfleet database.
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> We once again disabled the device, and put Commander Neumann in stasis while we tried to work out the puzzle.  Even with all this new information, we still have not found the answers we need.  In the interest of protecting the commander, the ship, and the people of Hearth, we’ve proceeded with an overabundance of caution, and have made very little progress.  Having exhausted most of our avenues of research, we have been left with one clear but risky option: We have to turn the thing back on.
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> Neumann is awake under Cade’s watchful eye, and leaving the reach of the dampening field on the Mazu. Captain Ral, Lieutenant T’Shek, and I are planetside with the device and some of Hearth’s finest minds.  We have to take this leap, to save Neumann, to protect Hearth, and to find out what the survivors of Arista III wanted with this powerful ancient technology.
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> I also have to admit, as terrified as I am of meddling with such powerful unknown technology, I'm also kind of thrilled at the prospect of finally getting some answers to my old puzzle.
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> It’s time to be eager and brash again.
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