Card of the Week: King of Blades

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal.  But nothing can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.

The King of Blades is a stern leader, shrewd and cunning.  With a cool and detached demeanor from long experience, he is not easily moved by emotional appeals to sympathy or pity.  Intelligent, objective and rational, he can also be critical and demanding.  He is not uncaring, but he firmly believes that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and must act on those principles.

Inverted, this King may take his leadership style to even further extremes and become a danger to those under him.  Beware if his decisions become capricious or, worse, predominantly self-serving.

In “Day of the Dove”, the Enterprise responds to an apparent distress call from planet Beta XII-A, but finds no evidence of any colony there.  A Klingon battle cruiser arrives, and its commander Kang accuses Kirk of destroying a nonexistent Klingon outpost.  When Kang’s ship suddenly shows crippling damage, Kirk has all Klingons transported to the Enterprise for safety.  Then the humans and the Klingons find themselves facing off in endless rounds of hand-to-hand combat.  Modern items mysteriously transform into swords, injuries magically heal, and hatreds are fanned, even by false delusions.  Eventually an enigmatic energy alien is discovered to be driving the entire scenario in order to feed on the raging emotions generated.  Kirk and Kang cooperate in ceasing all hostilities, and laugh as the energy alien weakens and finally departs.