Astra Undaunted

The Never Ending Quest - Episode 23165

"So, are you just going to give up?" Astra asked, her voice soft, her question simple.

Fred's faced turned red and his jaw clenched angrily, and then he replied in a voice hard but passionate, "If there was any hope that we could get out of this, that we could become human again, don't you think I'd be willing to die before I gave up on that?! But there is no hope, Astra!"

Astra did not respond for a moment but seemed to be considering Fred's words. And then, with a strange glint in her eye she said, "There's always hope."

Fred stared at her and then looked away. Almost in a whisper he said, "While there is breath in my body there is hope in my heart." There was a deep melancholy in his voice and it touched Astra deeply. Fred came from a world so different from her own, but in many ways she understood him perfectly. And then Fred raised his eyes to her, and with a grimace on his face said, "Hope, Astra? Hope for what? I mean, what's the best case scenario here? Have you thought about that? What if somehow we did manage to escape from here and we took the Crystallic with us. Then what? What do we do with it? Who do we give it to? If we don't get changed back in five days we're stuck like this forever. But who the hell can we find in five days who'll know how to use the Crystallic to undo what Minestus did to us? We're damned if we don't get out of here, but we're damned even if we do. So I ask you, what kind of hope do I have to hang onto?"

"And even if we had hope, Fred," Astra replied, her voice sharp and cutting. "Would it make any difference? I think you'd be damned even if you did get your humanity back! You've betrayed yourself, right? Betrayed your honor as a knight and as a man. So you don't have any reason to get out of this. Well I do. Listen to me, maybe we can't free ourselves of the curse, but I'll be damned - really damned - if I don't try to save others from it. Whatever Minestus did to me, to us, the Crystallic had something to do with it. And Synizn has it now. If he is the monster you say he is, then are we just going to let him have it?"

Fred sat, silent and abashed. He looked at Astra without saying anything, but she could see that her words had had some affect. And then Fred grinned coldly at her and asked,

  1. "Do you have something in mind, because if you do I'd love to hear it."

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WolfRun

12/30/2002 8:57:20 PM

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