Just havin' a little funnnn. And by that I mean A LOT OF FUN. Seriously. I just pounded in all the Star Trek and Skyrim quotes I could and called it good. Star Trek is Paramount's and Skyrim is Bethesda's.

Reviews are greatly appreciated, but this will likely be continued without them (I'm planning to update every Friday...). Because I haven't had this much fun writing in... well, maybe a few days. But seriously, this isn't meant to be serious. So if you can think of a way to make it more fun (Can someone steal Spock's sweetroll?), drop me a message and I will be more than happy to try to include it in future chapters! Also, sorry if I get some Skyrim details/lore mixed up. The Elder Scrolls world is ENORMOUS and I did my best...

Oh, but there is a plot. And this is actually going somewhere. Somewhere fun, hopefully.

Chapter One : Meant for Something

A year in the Whiterun guard, and this his first dragon. They had been ravaging his country for years, now, for as long as he had been alive… Almost exactly as long as that, actually. James wrung the grip of his sword in his hands and watched the dragon twirl and come about for another pass, even though his vision was foggy and his head was light from blood loss. But he couldn't take even a moment to assess the wounds he'd received. One of them was a dragon bite.

"Gods!" one of the Whiterun guards cursed, and dashed for cover behind a broken wall of the fortress they were attempting to defend. "This is a big one! James!" James ran to follow him, his Whiterun leathers slapping and clanging as he jumped over a low retaining wall that once surrounded the now fallen heap of rubble that was once a watchtower.

James slammed his back against the stone wall and listened to the dragon screech. "Haven't you guys faced a dragon before?" he asked the Whiterun guards gathered there. Whiterun was in the near-center of Skyrim, in the shadow of one of the tallest mountains that was a perfect hiding place for many small dragons. James assumed they might have faced more dragons than any other hold or village in the land.

Instead of an encouraging nod or words to the effect that, yes, they had faced dragons before, they Whiterun guard exchanged glances with one another, wide Nord blue eyes. "Yeah," one of them finally said, and the others nodded in dumb agreement. "Yeah, we have."

"Well, how did you defeat it?" James asked.

"Dumb luck."

"Dumb luck…" James breathed, laughing ever so slightly to himself. He seemed to have plenty of that.

"Here it comes again!" one of the guards screamed before James could follow that train of thought to its conclusion. Maybe it was good he hadn't, or he might not have even had the thought to jump from behind cover and run out into the open field to face the dragon.

"James!" one of the guards shouted at him, but James didn't stop to answer. All he could hear was the furious screech of the dragon, the scream of a guard being snapped up in its powerful jaws, and the pullback of a bowstring somewhere to his left. "What are you doing? James!"

As soon as the dragon had finished up with the guard before it, it turned its black glassy eyes on James, chest heaving as it drew in a breath. James picked up his shield to cover his face just before he was engulfed in the fiery inferno of dragon's breath. His round shield, of Nordic make, only covered his face and half of his torso from the frontal onslaught of flame. James wished he was a mage of some sort right then, a wish he'd never made before, as flame snaked around his legs and arms, singeing and burning.

The dragon seemed surprised when James actually reached him, growling in its throat and taking another breath.

James had to admit that he was surprised, too. But he had come here, endured the breath of the dragon and the possibility of its teeth and claws, for one reason only: to kill it. He could feel his strength quickly giving way beneath him and his short sword slowly slipping from his grip, but he held onto it. Even if just for a bit longer.

"What are you doing?" one of the Whiterun guards shouted at him again, loosing an arrow at the dragon's wing webbing before drawing his own sword from his belt and rushing toward the landed dragon. "Get back!"

Not a chance… James thought. Not since he was practically here.

He shed his shield and scrambled up the dragon's nose, finding himself eye-to-eye with the massive creature. It growled and seemed to be speaking to him with just a look. Even if you kill me, I will come back. It was true: dragons were impossible to kill. A dead dragon would only come back to life at the shout of another powerful dragon. Skyrim was doomed. This dragon would return to destroy Whiterun and all in it, and James would have done all of this for nothing…

"But Whiterun will live another day!" James told it, lifting his sword and plunging it into the dragon's skull.

The dragon quivered and whipped its head from side to side for a moment, James holding on for dear life even though he was sure it was probably over anyway. He looked at his arms, burnt, the lower edges of his yellow Whiterun uniform, reduced to blackened slag. He dared look no further.

The dragon managed to throw James and his sword from his head, but a moment later collapsed into the waving grass just as the sky turned pink with the sunset. James pulled himself up just in time to see the dragon's scales fall away into ashes, the thing engulfed in a swirling whiteness that seemed a mirror to the sun itself. The ribbons of light rushed around the meadow like a living thing, encompassing him and the dragon in its bright white tendrils.

The Whiterun guards stood at a distance, cursing, but watching. James looked around, like they were, but he wasn't sure what he was seeing. Just as the dragon was nothing more than a skeleton lying in the field, the light seemed to swirl around and through him…

James dropped to his knees, his sword slipping from his fingers, as he keeled over into the soft grass. The Whiterun guard gathered around him, whispering. He couldn't be sure, since he was seeing nothing clearly, feeling nothing real… but he thought he heard one of them whisper… Or perhaps it was a shout. Dovahkiin.

...

He awoke to the feeling of a hard stone surface of beneath his back and the sound of running water in his ears. He blinked at the ceiling and then turned his head… The Temple of Kynareth? "Bones?" he whispered.

One of the resident priests, a skilled healer without a single social grace to his name, which James didn't know, whipped around from another wounded man on a stone table not far away and half-grinned. "Good, you're awake." He tucked a tome of healing into his blue sash and crossed over the shallow bridge in the pool until he was standing beside him, inspecting his wounds and looking at his legs. James was afraid to look… he was certain they were pretty bad, though. "Heard you ran your sword through a dragon's head. I guess you're none the worse for wear for that…"

James chuckled weakly as he watched Bones pull out his healing tome again and flip through it. "I thought I was dead," he admitted. "There was this… swirling white light."

"Huh," Bones grunted. "I would just as soon assume I couldn't see death coming."

Bones finished by slamming his book shut and looked straight into James's eyes searchingly. Bones was a Nord, and had the light brown hair and ice-blue eyes to prove it. James had similar eyes himself and sunny lank hair, being half-Nord. But he was also half-Imperial, and even though he didn't have any of the physical characteristics of an Imperial, he did have a name thanks to them. James Tiberius Kirk, his middle name a diminutive for an ancient Emperor long passed.

"Besides," Bones went on, "the guards saw it, too."

"They did?"

"I want you to stay here another day," Bones said, not bothering to answer James's question, not even looking at him anymore. "You hear that Farengar?"

"I wouldn't want to irritate our dearest healer," the court wizard said sarcastically from his seat to James's left. James turned his head to look at him. He was a shady-looking person, James had always thought. But he had been loyal to the Jarl Balgruuf for longer than James could remember and if the Jarl trusted him, then so did James. "I suppose our purposes can wait. We don't want to send out a half-dead guard to duty, do we?" Farengar slipped up from his seat like a moon on the rise.

Bones shrugged and pulled at a string of finger bones that wrapped around his waist—where he had received his sobriquet. James had found that it was a sort of nervous habit of his. Bones might have been the most-skilled healer in all of Whiterun Hold and much of the surrounding countryside, but, like other mages in the area, he answered to Farengar in skill and hierarchy… As if mages had any, James scoffed within.

"To duty?" James repeated. "What sort of task would… the Jarl have for me?"

"Don't get so excited," Farengar warned. "It's a task for me."

Same, same… James thought, but didn't voice that thought. The question still begged to be asked: "Why would the Jarl's house want to hire me specifically?" Farengar looked at him, amused, as though to say he hadn't wanted James on his task specifically. "If you're willing to wait for me," James pointed out. "And why else would you be here? Unless you wanted Bones to do something for you," he added with a smile.

Farengar sighed at even the implication. It was fairly well-known that the rivalry between Farengar and Bones was almost as much a blood-feud as that between the Greymanes and the Battle-Borns. "Good point. Perhaps I'll leave that to our priest of Kynareth to explain. I'm needed back at Dragonsreach. You'll tell me if there is any change?"

Bones just grunted at that, which Farengar apparently took for a "yes," and left the temple.

James looked at Bones, about to ask him what he knew of Farengar's task, when Bones interrupted. "I want to show you something, Jim."

"All right…" James sighed, and waited while Bones moved off over the bridge to the side of the temple and through a door. Bones and the other two priests lived back there, Bones senior of them. James couldn't imagine what was back there that he would want to show him.

While Bones was gone, James worked himself up onto his elbows and took stock of his remaining limbs. Miraculously, they were all there, underneath the blue-white robe he was wearing. His legs, though, looked slightly… charred. Like burnt wood. He sighed and laid back, hoping that Bones' healing abilities went beyond simple bites and scratches.

Bones returned with the familiar yellow uniform of the Whiterun guard, except this one was so burnt and torn up it was only barely recognizable. James stared at it and recognized it as his own. Well… he wouldn't be wearing that again. "Is that…?" he started, but Bones wouldn't let him finish.

"I'm as surprised as you are that you survived this," Bones admitted. "You'll be fine in another day or two. Or five," he added. "But I don't think Farengar's errand is as urgent as he's making it out to be. You killed a dragon, Jim. And it hasn't come back, yet."

Maybe the other dragons were just busy… James sighed and smiled.

Bones grinned. "What?"

"Just killed my first dragon," James said with a slight shrug. "Can I get up?"

"If you feel like it," Bones answered. "Just don't try to run or anything stupid like that. And I've given you a potion to kill the pain. It's at work on your wounds right now."

James looked down at his arm, where he remembered the dragon's teeth raking through his flesh, and saw that it was mostly healed now. There was just a pair of scars, running from his shoulder almost to his elbow. "I'll have to thank Arcadia, won't I?" James asked with a grin, leaving it to Bones' creative imagination just how he might do that.

Bones snorted in amusement and turned away with an obvious roll of his eyes. "Yeah, Jim, you do that."

Bones went back to the other wounded guard, who slept under the influence of a spell, and Jim stared up at the ceiling for a moment before sitting and testing the strength in his legs. He put his bare feet flat on the stone floor and wiggled his toes on it. They seemed fine anyway… He carefully stood from the stone bed he had been lying on since the dragon—Dovahkiin, he remembered. He didn't know what that meant, but it seemed familiar… a story somewhere on the edges of memory.

"Bones?" Bones answered with a grunt again. "Have you ever heard the term dovahkiin?"

He laughed. "Of course. It means 'Dragonborn.' A story near and dear to the Nord heart. The Dragon-Slayer. I'm sure you've heard the tales."

James nodded slightly. His mother was an Imperial, his father a Nord. Since his father had died when he was very young, he hadn't heard much in the way of Nordic tales except those that the bards in inns usually sang, like Ragnar the Red and such. "I only barely recognize it." He looked up from his feet and nearly fell over backwards with a gasp.

"Jim, what is it?" Bones demanded, whirling around.

"Don't you—don't you—?" James asked, waving a hand in front of him. There, in the corner, in an aura of swirling blue, stood a strange man he'd never seen before. James couldn't see much of his face, since it was obscured by an off-white hood, but he could see that the stranger was an Altmer, a High Elf. He scrambled back on the stone bed as he approached, the stranger from one side and Bones from the other.

"Don't I what, Jim?" Bones demanded, looking around.

"Don't you see—?" he tried to ask, but he never got the chance. The stranger reached out his hand, and his fingertips brushed his face. A moment later he was staring at the stranger across the smoky blue temple… Bones seemed frozen like ice. "What did you do?" James demanded, looking up at Bones, still searching around the room for this stranger he apparently couldn't see… But as still as the face of the mountain.

"I did nothing," the High Elf answered. "There is no need to be alarmed. I merely provided an opportunity for us to speak in private."

"Who are you?"

"Who I am is unimportant, Dovahkiin," he said. "All that you need to know is that I am of an order of mages called the Psijic Order, and we have been unheard of in Skyrim for over a century. We still watch from a distance, safeguarding magic from those who would misuse it, and I have been watching you." At that, he tilted his head ever so slightly and looked at James.

James was momentarily at a loss for words. "This is what you call 'at a distance'?" he asked, motioning at the precious little distance that remained between them. He could, if he wanted, reach out and touch the Altmer's robes if he wished. But there was nothing he wished for less. "And what do I have to do with magic?" he demanded. He had never used magic himself, not once. So how could he misuse a thing he never once touched?

"Nothing," the stranger answered. "You have nothing to do with magic…" He seemed confused. At least, on that, they could relate. "But there is something focused upon you that is misusing it. You—" He paused, took a breath, and started again. "The day of your birth was a dark day for Skyrim. Things happened on that day that should not have. And now that we know you are also the Dovahkiin, the Order believes that it cannot possibly be mere coincidence."

"I'm the what?" James interrupted before he could go any further.

"Dovahkiin," he said. "Dragonborn. A mortal body born with the blood and soul of a dragon. You alone have the ability to wipe a dragon from existence, the ability to quickly learn the dragon-language, and absorb a dragon's knowledge and life-force. You know this; your namesake Tiber Septim was also a Dragonborn." James found himself laughing, though he wasn't sure at what. "What do you find so amusing?" the stranger asked, his head tilting to one side again.

"I have no idea," James admitted, still chuckling. Just that it was so… impossible. "Please, go on."

The stranger, obviously nonplussed by James's cavalier attitude, took a deep breath and looked around. "The appearance of the dragons on the day of your birth, the death of your father, and your presence at this time and place—none of it was supposed to be this way. We have seen this; but we could not trace a common denominator until you emerged from your battle two days ago as the Dragonborn."

"Well, what am I supposed to do about it?" James asked.

"You are more capable than any other to do something about it," he said. "But this future is different from the one that should have been. I have no way of knowing how to correct it."

"So… you come to tell me that my whole life has been wrong, I need to fix it, but you have no idea how to do that," James recapped. "Did I get that right?"

"Your flippant attitude helps nothing," the Altmer pointed out. "But I believe it begins with your quest for Farengar."

"Oh, well, great. Thanks," James said sarcastically. The Altmer frowned at him, as though to say, I'm doing the best that I can. James sighed and shook his head. "So business as usual," James muttered.

"I suppose…" the Altmer said with a shrug. "Except now you are looking for something entirely different as well. How would you know you had found something except that you were looking for it?"

James shrugged. "I don't know. So on a quest for Farengar and…" He paused and looked around the frozen temple. "Come on, tell me your name. I can't do business with a person I don't even know the name of. What do you think this is? The Thieves Guild?"

The Altmer sighed and shook his head. "You are, indeed, stubborn. I will indulge you, if only because you are the Dragonborn. My name is Spock."

"Alright, then, Spock," James agreed. "I'm James."

"I know who you are," he assured him. "I must depart. It might be better for you if you did not tell anyone of our meeting."

The Altmer walked away and straight through the wall. As soon as he disappeared from vision behind the stones of the temple, the place was suddenly unfrozen, Bones' hand coming down full-force on his shoulder. "Don't I see what, Jim?" he demanded again, looking around.

James sighed and hunched over, gasping for breath. He felt as though he had just come up from a long dive or… or something like that. "I don't know…" James answered with a shake of his head. "I really have no idea."