voidtreckernet | Orchestra Day 14

[Video]

[Yondu's opting for a video post though he did consider audio. But he really wants to put out there how important this is to him. He needs help and he can finally damn well practice what he preaches and ask for it.]

[Okay, deep, uneasy exhale before explaining.]

I uh.... before I showed up here, the same day even, there was a mutiny aboard my ship. Had a buncha folks decide they didn't like I was takin' cheaper jobs to keep from doin' stuff I weren't comfortable with. I was usually able to make excuses- we still made plenty but a few outspoken bastards were real upset I didn't always pick the options with more in our pockets, and then my first mate got jealous. Called me out in front of everyone. 'Caused a shitstorm. [He's a little distant in describing that.]

He didn't know how bad it'd get. The traitors... they uh... Hell... Alright if you're a kid or you don't gotta deal with a lotta death, just turn this off. Get the hell outa here. It ain't for you. [He takes a moment for them to do that if they care to. Alright? Good. Carrying on.] I was detained proper at the time. Couldn't use my arrow, couldn't fight, too hurt to get loose. They shoved 'em one by one out an airlock an' I couldn't save 'em. We're talkin' a hundred plus men dead, one by one. It was not just a few. Just left to float like garbage thrown out a window and they laughed about it and mocked 'em as they watched 'em go.

[There's a moment of shaky-breathed anger, but, you know, what's done is done. Assholes what done it are dead now, they cain't do it to anyone else or use his ship to go make the universe an even worse place or harass his family. He's good.] Dyin' in space is like freezin' and drownin' at the same time. Every moment of it hurts 'cause you feel your outside freezin' in, an' at some point you know even if you was saved the life left in ya wouldn't be worth it. [He can say that from experience. There's a little bit where you know how bad the damage is.] Almost three decades some of those men had been with me. Good and bad. I didn't make a lotta friends but they did mean somethin' to me. And someone gave me the idea maybe I could put 'em to rest if I could do somethin' memorialwise. I don't want the last thoughts directed at 'em to be their own crewmates bein' happy about 'em dyin'.

Ravagers... when we die, usually we're remembered. If our bodies cain't be picked up, we're toasted by our crew. If our bodies are there, we're put in the ship's engine. Turned to stardust, get to travel forever. And the one that's usually for captains is a ship flying its Colors- you do this big light show. Well, no crew here besides myself to drink to 'em, and their bodies ain't anywhere to be found [not to mention a hundred-some people is a lot] so I figured I'd ask anyone that can do lights an' illusions if they'd help me out to fly them the Colors whenever we're at a stop where our lives don't depend on it and there's a sky overhead. They weren't captains but they was loyal enough. I don't know if I could pay ya, but I been sittin' on knowin' what happened to 'em and I ain't been able to think of a way to really make it right.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Long story. Easier to tell here, because everyone involved except me is a stranger to you, but something I'd rather not broadcast. I don't know how much detail I'd need, but it has to do indirectly about why I was transformed.

I'm gonna head to the library in a few. [Just to keep moving around, keeps his head from settling.] If you wanna meat me there or somethin'.

Right.

[that's time enough to settle into the library, though Yondu might well beat him there.]

This is going to involve some of the more metaphysical stuff from my world. I'll explain as I go.

When I was starting out, I was working with a small group. Nominally we were independent, but we had a hidden patron. A famous white magic user, who was capable of healing almost anyone. Charitable acts don't exactly pay for food and shelter, so he had us go after bandits and other problems for the reward, then donate some of the extra to him.

[He's leaving out a lot of details here. If Yondu cares, he'll ask.]

[Yondu doesn't grab anything off the shelf like he was meaning to. He holds off. Instead he just goes and sits as soon as he sees Zelgadis.]

Sounds like clergy. [That's his first assessment.]

How much extra did he want out of ya?

[Zelgadis snorted]

Good guess.

The money wasn't bad. I was young and naive, but other people were still getting enough that they could put away some money for when they were too old to swing a sword.

Of course, our patron was the person who decided to turn me into a chimera. And then I found out it was because he'd needed test subjects for where his own magic was failing him. He was blind from birth and had given up on using white magic to let him see, so was trying less ethical uses of power. Which... hell, I didn't know if anyone else would believe me about his motives, and even if they did, we weren't exactly up to taking on a mage who was nearly a century old, even if he still looked like he was in his prime.

And that sounds real selfish, for a guy supposedly able to heal about anything. [Doesn't even sound like he got into it for beneficial reasons. Which he normally wouldn't hold against people except when it involves such a heap of hypocrisy.]

And that's what happened to ya, then. That's why you was stone for so long.

What happened to your teammates?

Right.

Our last job was to get some magical artifact from a bunch of bandits that didn't know they had it. Someone else got there first, so our patron told us to go after her. We managed to capture her, but she'd handed it off to her partner and told him to get lost. She told me that our patron had approached her before her capture, and tried to get her to give the artifact to him directly; he'd said I was planning to use it to unseal some ancient evil.

Sometime in there, it occurred to me that what I could do was use the thing we were sent after to maybe stand a chance on my own. So I freed our prisoner. I expected that would break ties with everyone but... Zolf and Rodimus at least decided they were more loyal to me than our patron. Maybe I should have confided more in them.

[he's nearly done now]

So there were five of us left. Zolf, Rodimus, me, and Lina and Gourry, who were the two who'd gotten the artifact first. And it was pretty obvious to everyone that Re- our former patron was going off the deep end in collateral damage. He got the artifact by threatening to blow up a town. It turned out what he told Lina that I wanted to do? Yeah, that was his motivation. Risk destroying the world by unsealing a being that literally embodied destruction because that was the cause of his blindness.

Selfish bastard. Given the seal was inside him, he pretty much got his body hijacked and transformed for his troubles.

Zolf and I threw out our most powerful spells, to no effect. Zolf was crushed like a bug. Rodimus just attacked without thinking and was killed as well. If Lina hadn't dragged me out, I probably would have done something similar. This was pretty much the end of the world and I expected to die stopping it. Or would have been if I didn't happen to run into two people who just happened to have an unheard of spell and a legendary magical artifact lying around.

I still am friends with Lina and Gourry. We cross paths occasionally, usually when there's more trouble. But everyone in my world who knew this face [a gesture to indicate his current human appearance] is dead.

So that's the story.

[It's a rough kind of thing to tell, let alone live through. Not to mention Zelgadis held his human self as his true self, and then no one was there to remember it. He would always wear the surface damage that his patron had done.]

[Yondu was used to the scars the Kree gave him, knew they immediately labeled him, and didn't particularly mind. But Zelgadis had always minded, or at least it seemed that way.]

What were those two fellas like? In their downtime, anyway?

Orchestra Day 14

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