Chapter Text
A.S. 099, NOVEMBER 15TH.
PEGASUS GALAXY. BARA MAGNA.
Steam hissed into the air.
Pink eyes gazed upwards, framed by orange tinted protodermic skin.
Two moons hung overhead, a pair of moons, green and blue.
A sense of wrongness. Of Absence.
"By the Ancients, it's actually a stasis pod."
A voice was speaking. Words not understood, but said regardless.
"Who puts a kid like this inside of a stasis pod?"
Pink eyes turned, and saw a man towering above... him? Him, yes. He was a he. He was a warrior, clad in red armor atop orange chitinous skin. Face exposed. Wrong.
Shouldn't be unmasked...
...His own face was exposed. Why did that matter?
Weakness.
There was a strange weakness across his limbs. Like he'd been frozen by one of.... by someone, and thawed out again.
The pod around him suddenly felt constricting, constraining, wrong and right and yet-
"Woah woah hold on kid," the man was trying to help him sit up. "Let me help you."
The Words were Said, but he did not fully understand them. He understood the context and the tone but he did not understand the words themselves. He felt like he should know them but they were not coming quickly.
"Help" was the only word he understood.
He was being helped.
"You've been in the ice for... a really long time, judging by the overgrowth around the pod," the man was saying.
Pod? What was a pod?
He looked at the silver tube. Pod was the wrong word. Canister. That was the right word.
A silver tube whose lid was jettisoned, and the internal contents released. A bed on a tray...
'Looks like a coffin to me' an echo of another's voice brushed against his mind. Memories. Words. Connections. But still nothing. Absence. Aching and burning. Uncertainty. This was wrong.
Coffin. Whoever had said it was right. The Tray he was in was like a coffin. One that had taken his memories.
"Kid, hey." The man said.
Kid? He was no child! He was-!
He was.... What was he again? The word did not come.
He settled for looking around where he was further. It was a mountainous region, and vines and other plants had grown atop the canister that was half buried in the rock side. Some of it had been burnt away by the lid's jettisoning.
How had it been buried?
The ground around was.... depressed. Fractured.... Glassed.
Molten Impact- A Crash Site. He'd *Crashed* into the ground here... where-ever here was.
"Kid. Hey. Stop spacing out on me," the man said. "Can you understand me?"
More words by the second, understanding was coming. Slowly. He was asking if he understood.
He looked at the man, saw his blue eyes framed by orange skin, faded and wary by age.
He opened his mouth. He tried to speak. Couldn't. He just... he... what did he do?
"Okay, you're probably not in a state to talk uh... blink once for yes, two for no?" The man's words came too fast for understanding.
He frowned at the man.
"Uh..." The man reconsidered. He rapped on the pod's side once. "Can you do that?"
Tentatively, he did such, the man smiled.
"One for yes," he tapped once. "Two for no." he tapped twice. "Can you understand me?"
He tapped once. Twice.... thrice?
"Three...? Sort of?" The man asked.
Once for Yes.
"Okay. Um..." he pointed at himself. "My Name is Ackar. Do you understand?"
Name.... Name... Ackar. Okay.
Yes.
"Can you talk?" Ackar asked.
Could he? He tried again. Three knocks.
"Not sure, okay. Right. Do you know your name?" Ackar asked a question, concern in his voice.
He....
What was his name? Who even was he?
'Tahu,' a female voice echoed against his mind.
'Tahu!' an energetic male voice concurred.
'Tahu,' a frigid voice added.
Tahu. 'Tahu' felt right. Like a piece of a puzzle returning to the board. That was his name.
Tahu knocked once.
The man smiled. "Can you say it?"
Tahu opened his mouth, worked his jaw, worked his tongue... his throat responded hoarsely. But... He managed out those simple two syllables.
"Ta...hu..."
"Tahu? That's your name?" Yes. Ackar smiled. "Okay. Tahu, I'm going to lift you out of this container, alright?"
Tahu rapped once for yes. His legs felt weak and floppy. He was lifted up, and placed on the ground. Ackar was strong, even without a Mask.
Why was a Mask important? It was important. He didn't know why, but it WAS.
Tahu grabbed at Ackar's sleeve with one hand.
"What is it?" Ackar asked.
Tahu motioned at his face with the other hand. Whispered, "Mask."
Ackar frowned, searched around the canister's side pocket contents, and then fished out a mask.
His Mask.
Rounded on top, vents along the sides and forehead, two eyeholes. Red. Bright Red. Powerful.
"This what you want?" Ackar asked.
Tahu rapped the ground with his hand.
"Alright, if it'll make you feel better." Ackar gently handed him the mask, and helped Tahu guide it onto his face.
Immediately, energy surged through Tahu's body as he instinctively drew upon its reserves of energy to restore his weakened body. Tahu didn't know how he did it, but he did. He pulled on that energy within the Mask and he... He... He felt revitalized. He felt strength returning to his limbs and healing the damage the canister had done to him.
He gasped for breath, and coughed up nothing except to clear his throat.
"Woah there-" Ackar gasped as Tahu picked himself up to his feet. "What the hell kinda magic is inside that mask anyways?"
Language came forth completely, and Tahu grinned beneath the mask as he understood it completely.
Unfortunately, the rest of Tahu's memories were not forthcoming at all.
"I have no idea," Tahu said, "but I feel like I'm alive again."
"Hey there," Ackar smiled. "Well, that's as good of a start as any, I guess."
"I guess it is," Tahu said. And then, he asked an important question. "Do you know where I am, exactly? Because I don't remember anything solid before waking up just now."
"Let me know if any of this sounds familiar. You're up in the northern most mountain range of Bara Magna," Ackar paused for recognition. "It's a planet on the edge of the the Pegasus Galaxy." Another pause. "Ever heard of the Ancients? The Wraith? Atlantis?"
None of it drew any sort of important feelings from his void of memory, so Tahu said, "None of that sounds even remotely familiar at all."
"...Well, shit, kid," Ackar sighed. "Either being in that stasis pod completely wiped your memory, or you're a really long way from home. Maybe both."
"I'm not a kid," Tahu protested.
"Tahu, when you get to be as old as I am, everyone under fifty is a kid," Ackar smirked. And then he poked Tahu on the nose. "You just happen to be *very* kid shaped, even by that metric. And do you even know how old you are?"
Tahu went to speak... but found the word couldn't come.
He closed his mouth, and grunted, "Fine."
There was armor in the canister, and a large fire sword. None of it was sized to Tahu's scale. Tahu knew it was his, should fit like a glove, but something had clearly gone wrong.
He was too small and the everything else was too big. Functionally, did it even matter how old he was before he went into the pod when his memory was essentially erased to nothing?
Ackar told him of the Agori settlements, and how warriors like him- the "Glatorians" of his world- once upon a time settled disputed between the tribal villages in open combat. Of course, that role had faded into obscurity over the last 100 years, and so people like Ackar instead now did odd jobs.
Like how an uppity geological scholar from the Rock Tribe had requested that Ackar scout out a place in the mountains where a rock slide had happened to block a major road, and it needed surveying to see how much trouble it'd be to clear out.
After finishing that task, and on his way down the mountain again, Ackar had found Tahu's canister by sheer chance. Opened it, and found the boy sleeping inside.
The rest, as the saying went, was history. (But who even said that? Another confounding mystery in Tahy's memories.)
"I'd wager you're in your teenaged years, at least," Ackar supposed as they sat by a fire he'd started. "That means that we have a really interesting conundrum to sort out when we get to civilization again."
"What's that?" Tahu asked before biting into a cooked bird that Ackar had caught for them. The mask sustained him, but his stomach ached for real food. It tasted good, even slightly charred. No, *especially* with the extra char on it, it tasted almost... just the right amount of sear. Not too fleshy, but not too crisp. Just right.
'Needs seasonings though,' Tahu thought idly.
"See, one of the problems with Bara Magna is that even with the added boost of civilization saving things that the Atlantians give us, this world is too harsh. Many folks are leaving it, either by dying, or by choice. In the former case, they leave things behind. Family. Often times, kids. They either get shuffled around to surviving family, or get adopted through an orphanage. Sometimes that works out... sometimes it doesn't."
"And Bara Magna's laws mean that as long as I'm physically in my 'teens' in appearance," Tahu paused. "I'm considered someone in need of a guardian." That... hurt in ways Tahu couldn't put to words.
"Yep," Ackar nodded. "The amnesia thing adds a whole other dimension to it, too."
Tahu sighed. "So what are my options?"
"Well, when we get back to civilization, you've got two choices..." Ackar raised one finger. "If you're sick of me, you can go into the system and maybe luck out getting people who actually care, but they keep you locked down to one place and probably try to mold you into someone you're not." he raised a second finger. "Or two, you could let me claim you as mine and I deal with all the shitty guardian stuff and give you the room to breathe and figure yourself out that you're probably not going to get from anyone else. We travel a lot, and I can help you train and get used to that sword and armor of yours."
Tahu frowned. "...I feel like... that's not even really a choice at all?" He scowled. "What's stopping me from just taking my stuff and going off on my own?"
"Nothing," Ackar said. "But you're probably going to get a lot of odd looks wandering around on your own like a wild child, and also, I'd feel bad and trail you until you got in over your head and have to bail you out."
Tahu closed his eyes, and sighed, aggravated. "I'm stuck with you no matter what, aren't I?"
"I feel like I owe it to an old friend," Ackar said, glancing at the stars. "Even if I don't know who the hell that old friend even is. Maybe some other me out there in the multiverse knew your parents."
Tahu then asked what felt like a stupid question, "What's a multiverse?"
Ackar then told him about universes, and universal clusters, and really... basically, a whole lot of words that Tahu chose to blame on his amnesia for not understanding anything about it at all.