Time for Hell

Enjoying his bath!

The voyage was deafening and breathless- your landing flatly broken on the soft, enveloping jade grass of an unfamiliar world and its alien coldness. Your body felt empty- your nerves alight with a dancing blaze of numbing pins and needles throughout. Your thoughts were not coming easy, but your contact was light, and you manage, somehow, to pick yourself up to your knees as a small trickle of blood and dirt falls from your face onto the grass below. Your eyes battle to focus- to finally process the alien environment around you. Mountains. Jagged, impossible mountains.

The horizon of impossible peaks seems to stretch on forever, like a great, serrated, unbroken plane beyond which a rippling sky of lilac and turquoise dwelled. Their summits reach defiantly to the heavens, and their barbed, curving faces pierced violently into the crimson clouds of the troposphere. The clouds break but do not dissipate. As if alive, the light shines through their red vapor like a bleeding wound. The sight commands awe, and you are afraid.

Your first thoughts upon landing on the soft, enveloping grass of the plains are drowned heartily in fear- fear of the unknown. The awareness that you are alone. That you were not only alone, but that you were further, more obscure, more isolated, and more inaccessible than any before you, living or dead, had ever been- and that there was no soul- no life on or from Earth that could possibly help you or even offer you the small, comforting familiarity that you were born on the same rock in space. The endless wilderness, the open grass, the sharp wind, and the cool, unyielding world beyond the mountains howled in unison with the understanding that you should not be here- and that you were not their own. As you looked down at the unnatural contrast of your bright blood on the planet’s soil, you agreed.

Cordis Jocure

At 13 sweeps old, indigo, and the Jocure name already loaded with the achievements of his ancestor, Cordis should have had the world given to him on a silver platter - and he knows it. Or, well, he knew it.

At some point in the last few sweeps, Cordis vanished from his hive. Ransacked and filled with dead trolls, it left no clue on where the heir to the Jocure line went. His arrogant and anti-social personality meant he had no friends or quadrants to look for him and as far as the fleet was concerned, he was dead.

Nowadays, no one takes a second look at the two-bit surgeon working for a known hemoanonymous smuggler. His white hair and vitiligo may jog a few trolls’ memories, but his boss is quick to slip a sharp threat into their ears to never breathe a soul of who her doctor is to anyone. 

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