Groove Etcetera was bored. He'd landed on this world more than three weeks ago, and had yet to find where the elusive 'treasure' was. He kicked at a stick on the damp ground before him, "stupid map."

He was definitely not one for farting around when there was something to be done: he was a mercenary - but more than that, he was a revolutionary and if anything this supposed treasure he was seeking would be of great use for his cause. He himself had plenty of money: he'd been the middle son of a rich merchant fleet owner. Not just a ship pilot, his father was one of the richest men in occupied space. That was why it was so easy for Groove (not his original name, by a long shot) to have one of the best, fastest ships available. His elder brother would be taking over the business, his younger sister immersing herself in politics.

It was through her that Groove learned of the many, many ways that men like his father ruined lives. It was easy when you lived at the top of the 140 floor business center. It was simple to ignore the plight of those whose work held starvation at bay or provided raw materials for everything.

First, because they were easily replaced. They were so ... plentiful! Those pitiful peasants - they bred like crazy on every world, and on any given planet you could safely harvest hundreds of thousands of them in the name of "progress" there - alleviating one world of its wasteful lowest classes, and building an empire on another with their slave labor. Second, their lives were at least more valuable than the breakable and too-expensive to maintain robotic fleets which had been used on other planets. Groove's great-grandfather had pioneered some of that technology, along with the stardrives which they used. But between then and now, almost 140 years, technology was at last surpassed by economics. It was true that robots could do the work of 3 men or even more. But they had to be maintained by experts, not just feeding themselves. They ran on more dangerous fuels than mere food. It was simple to feed, clothe, house and keep fit a thousand humanoid workers. It was far more complicated to do the same for one hundred robots on an assembly line.

So human trade was still the way to go.

It made Groove ill thinking about it. His sister relished it. She herself had a cadre of slaves of different species, and it had been one of them which told Groove - long ago - that there was a rebelion core brewing on his homeworld. Though the slave had said it at first in spite and anger, as though threatening the big businessman's son - it was Groove who then proved himself worthy of the secret.

He'd left a donation of food, weapons and materials for housing and building, medicine, and a contact number with the slave's village. He'd heard that there were other people willing to do so, and eventually hooked up with them. By the time he was twenty years old, Groove had changed his name while away from his homeworld (and certainly away from his family) and had become a RobinHood-like icon to many on the rim worlds.

Because his family was absolutely, filthy, reekingly rich, and because he himself was no slouch in the wits department, he'd long since started squirreling away money under assumed identities. He was on no fewer than five payrolls in sub-companies supposedly doing things as menial as janitorial work, on through a made-up manager of a far-off shipping supply warehouse. It wasn't hundreds of millions of creds he was syphoning off his family's business, but it was enough to supply him with ready cash in any number of systems.

He had lost his eye in a battle with authorities on a core world, where he worried that his father would see him on the vids and recognize him. But in reality by that time, not even his sister knew what he looked like. He'd grown his hair out long (what a freak!) and had even allowed his facial hair to grow! That was not quite taboo nowadays, but it was one thing that other very rich families paid their genetic engineers to take out of their genes! Imagine the horror of a hairy face! Well Groove's was bedecked with a gunslinger's mustache and beard, and etched with a constant frown of worry. His eye... unreplaceable at that point, and he reasoned, why bother? He could see just fine with the one, had nanosurgery to actually implant sensors over his eyebrow which (once he got used to it) provided him with perfectly good binocular vision.

Groove was actually an attractive man, with a strong jaw and a good hairline. He wasn't one of those fruity girly-boys that were in fashion just in the generation before him, he had mousy brown hair that frazzled at the drop of a hat, and skin which burnt when out in open sunlight - any sunlight, he liked the quiet dim twilight after sunset most. Even with his eye 'plugged' expertly - he still cut a nicely impressive figure at gatherings.

And Groove was one of the very few full-blooded Humans who regularly came and went - welcome - on Planet Twenty, the Kin world isolated first as a prison and later as a sovereign planet fit only for engineered creatures. Several times he'd rescued Kin on their way to another more harsh prison, and they would never forget that.

He visited the locales that he supposedly worked at, regularly, just to make sure that if anything required his signature he could provide it. Fifteen alternate identities later, he could keep track of almost everyone who worked around, over, with and for him on any of a dozen worlds.

And, eventually, he opened a warehouse on that one world - and hired those who he knew needed the money the most. And, hid runaway servants, ran smuggling operations, and generally made a mess of the galactic economy from there. He'd become known as Groove Etcetera because at least one of his fake names was 'Geroav' and he announced himself to friends often amending his names with 'etcetera etcetera'. The name stuck, after only a couple meetings.

This world where he operated a halfway legitimate business (the warehouse did house real goods, spacelaned with a licence, and had its own whole landing pad for mid-sized shipment carriers) wasn't near the core, and it wasn't quite a rim world. It had one large military presence of Humanspace, and one thing that really bothered Groove: it had slavers on it too.

There was nothing he dared do about them: they were much stronger than the military itself, and frankly that military presence would eagerly defend them if need be, from any unwanted attacks. So Groove set up shop on the other side of the world from them, a less viable place for his business, but a more secluded one for hiding people.

It was there that an elderly woman had gasped out her last breaths telling him of a world which had an amazing treasure - she knew its coordinates, but not where on the world it was hidden, and didn't know quite what that treasure consisted of. So now, at the age of thirty four, with a sniper rifle in one hand and a compass unit in his other, he stomped through the murky woods on an uncharted planet looking for something he didn't even know he'd find.

***

Groove had walked, and walked. He went back to his ship, swore, glided it over the jungles and headed north. He thought about abandoning the planet entirely, but then something caught his eye. A massive mountain? Volcanic, certainly from the plume of steam or smoke coming from it. Well, at least if there was no real treasure here, he could take some video of this place and maybe even make a documentary about it... Without giving away its position in space of course.

Any uninhabited, but lush world like this one that the dying renegade servant had spoken of would surely attract the wrong attention. And ... was it uninhabited? Groove piloted around, seeking a good landing spot somewhere... anywhere... And saw something that made him do more than a double-take. It made him gawk, and he didn't do that easily.

It had to have been a ... a dragon? Only on Planet Twenty were there actually such things, and he was told repeatedly there that they were all "imported" somehow. Beyond hyperspace? Well... he had traveled pretty far, to this world. Without his instruments he couldn't even recognize the stars.

While he was pondering such things, three more dragons had appeared, and they all began to surround his ship. The ship itself was far from small - it might easily be able to house a couple of those things. But it wasn't huge - and the dragons... if Groove had been a different man, and began shooting at them with the onboard blasters? He felt sure that these dragons could have taken it down.

Groove had never been a religious man, after all what religions stood the tests of time and technology? But when he heard, or rather felt, the dragons voices in his mind, he very nearly fell to his knees to pray.

This way, human, spoke several at once.

So the place was inhabited, and by intelligent dragons... That almost blew Groove's mind right there. But he detected, somehow, a hint of humor in the command, a background conversation going on among the three as well as other dragons who now joined in finding him the best landing spot of all: that near the entrance to the volcano's heart.

Once he disembarked, he was stunned to be greeted not just by the dragons, who were of such amazing variety that he had no clue how to define some of them, but also humanoids. Whether they were from Core worlds, rim worlds or elsewhere entirely, he didn't even care. He was made welcome.

Made so welcome in fact, that they took him to see young dragonets. There were eggs on several floors, some layed recently, some that had yet to mature. The warmth of the volcanic level seemed to be reflected by the bright, almost comedic looking little hatchlings that watched him as intently as he gazed at them.

"So it turns out there is treasure on this world after all," Groove said with a smile, warming his heart as well as his hands by ruffling their fur or feathers (or was it fire?).

***

"So, do you think I can see your ship?" She asked, again, and once more Groove had to make that decision... Niloniy was growing quickly, but she was still young and still apt to accidentally explode things just by bumping into them. The last thing he needed was his ship in ruins just because she couldn't control that power yet. And, he wasn't too happy about telling her no. She had done everything else that he could have asked of her, learning of where he was from and why he was here, listening to him rant about his siblings and family, the Core and all. But ...

"Nil," he sighed, "I want nothing more than to have you sleeping in my quarters and watching my back..."

"But I'm not ready yet," she let her head droop, "I understand." Then she perked up, "But I learned something new!"

This surprised Groove. "And what is that?"

"Well you know how my clutch sibs can do things... I can do this!" Niloniy suddenly began moving her limbs around, but it was unsettling, it wasn't just crossing her legs or flickering her tail, it was...

"Nil, what - what are you doing?" Groove said, worried. But then her bright eyes gazed up at him from what appeared to be a dog's face.

"I can shapeshift!" She giggled.

That did put a whole new spin on their relationship. Niloniy was rather more graceful at walking or shifting or even imitating other creatures, than she would ever be at controling that other power. So Groove finally decided to move some of the equipment in his ship around - things like the food replicator and any records storage - into a spot where Nil wouldn't easily be able to fit in her draconic shape. While she wasn't as huge as the other dragons around this place, she did have to either squish down a bit to move through the ship, or simply change her size and shape to be more accommodating. So when she did accidentally manage to make a lamp vaporize itself in a flash of power, she wasn't going to get chastised too much about it.

Niloniy busied herself learning more and more about the state of affairs in the rest of the universe. She knew that she might be the only one of her kind around for many star systems, but now that Groove had the correct coordinates for her home world as well as numerous others that they visited while she was growing up, she would never want for draconic company if she really needed it.

DTF background

Groove's images courtesy of City of Heroes character generator

The Bower