Noy had been born to luxury, but not to comfort. His parents loved each other - but they also loved money, gambling, steed racing, and showing off their wealth in unusual ways. He was one of those ways, and by the time he was ten years old, Noy knew that for a fact.

They paraded him around the same way one would prance a highly-prized Steed, or a colorful Ferilon, at parties. They had been assured by the Peridian who spliced him together (as they were nominally fertile, but wealthy enough not to let that bother them) that he had unseen powers and abilities.

Their precious little Noy. Always slender, even as a child he hardly had any roundness to his long pointed face. His skin was a lovely mixture of his mother's creamy color and his father's darker green, and the fire red-orange hair of his grandfather on his mother's side.

Their precious Noy began showing his powers early: at eight, he went to grasp a door handle and it all but melted under his hand. Since then he was able to masterfully manipulate several different types of metals, but it was always clear that he'd want to become a Peridian. Genetics fascinated him, even as a child when he saw his first gene chart. (His own.)

This goal was aided greatly by his significant new power at the age of twelve, wherein he locked minds with one of his instructors and blurted out everything he could to show that he'd learned straight from her mind. This pleased his parents. This caused the instructor to quit her job.

One of the powers which Noy kept private though, knowing that he'd be overworked with it if his parents knew, was that of dreamwalking. It was neither the first nor last power he displayed, and even his Breeder didn't really understand where it came from or what genes it was located within on the vast chart.

But Noy understood.

He would slip from his own mind at night, in his snug bed in his wide room in the huge estate that his family Held out here in the middle of nowhere. At first it was merely to the next room, underneath his, where some of the Budak slept.

They had turbulent, somewhat sad dreams. When his wanderings let him in on his parents minds, he found them to be as self-absorbed in their own minds as they were in waking life. So much for them. As time went on, and he'd passed his first Status exam to become Pemilik like his father, he had also been forcing his mind ever farther away from his room and body.

At fifteen, he'd managed to listen in on a Renegade that slept miles and miles into the desert on the other side of the hills... And didn't turn him in. There was something about this middle-aged escaped Slave that compelled Noy to do... something.

At fifteen, too, Noy's parents were still showing him off. They were proud of him, certainly, and their friends complimented them nicely on his appearance and politeness... But why couldn't he be dressed a little more ... manly? They shrugged that off, but in their minds he needed to be a little more boy - so they insisted he appear so for any public appearances.

And since he was still a child in a world where children were everything, and meant everything to the world... He obliged.

He hated it, but he obliged.

The town where he had been brought into being lay on the north side of the mountain range that cut through the center of Wo'ad, it had a name but no one ever bothered to put it on a map. Slust sat north-east of there by perhaps two hundred miles, and this other mind he'd been watching for a while was just about that far south-west of him.

He always wondered what it was like to be such a person, so desperate to leave their comfortable home - but it wasn't comfortable for some people, it was horrible. The nightmares that the Renegade had proved that.

Nightmares of his own began to worry Noy. And it wasn't just that. He himself enjoyed being out in this 'middle of nowhere' township more because he'd started becoming something new, as well as not being able to cope with all the stinky awful smells in big towns.

Maybe it had started because he didn't like the smell, but once in a while his face would change. He woke up one morning without a nose entirely.

That suited him to a strange degree: he liked how he looked that way, and he didn't have to smell anything! But ... it completely boggled his mother, she wound up screaming and cowering from him. Even when he'd put it back, somehow, she still felt it necessary to glance at him with wide, cold eyes.

And then he'd grown feathers that one day. The next it turned out to be a tail. What was wrong with him? Well, whatever it was, he dealt with it. He realized that he could shapeshift, more than a little. And when he concentrated on doing that, he was exceptional at it. Whenever his concentration slipped, though, unconsciously he wound up with weird joints on his feet that helped him stand for hours, or another arm that sprang into being when he needed to hold a cup.

Even the Budak looked at him funny. So he plunged himself into studies, and - and - and then the aliens came.

He was only twenty when they did, it seemed so long ago. He knew immediately where his priorities should lay now, for the moment that he was in the presence of one of the magnificent Stone dragons, it responded to him well enough to almost tempt its owner to promote him to Dragon Master!

But that wasn't really what he wanted to do. After all, he had a great sense of genetics, and that didn't much help controlling dragons on the fly and he certainly didn't want to fight with the aliens!

In the meantime he was looking out for good land to put money into. On that pretext he took a hovercraft out, alone without even a Budak to accompany him, down to where that Renegade slept. It was a long trip, but far from boring. He spent the night of his twenty-third birthday under the stars, chatting with this creature who had no legs, instead bore a long, slender and spine-tipped snake-body.

S'ska was his name, son of another Budak named Essence, both of whom had escaped their Breeder a dozen years before. S'ska knew that Noy meant no harm and wasn't being followed, and certainly wasn't going to turn them in here in their white-walled desert community. S'ska's mind was more open than most, he couldn't walk through dreams but after a while knew when Noy was watching him, and could even go so far as conducting conversations with him.

White Valley would not become Noy's home - that was the Renegade's township and Noy promised to keep it secret. Before leaving there, he helped shape up some metal goods for them - shovels, utencils, knives and barrels - and informed them that when he knew of an Alien attack, they would be told as quickly as he could fall to sleep.

Noy did eventually find other good land to settle, mostly in small townships and in rural areas distant from heavy industry or paved roads. Sometimes even without a nose, Noy could smell roads...

It was sort of odd, to him as well as several others, that one of the last powers that finally shown up was that of telepathy with human kind. It seemed almost a let down after all the other things he could do, but it did give him a new outlook when those Dragon Masters he hung out with told him privately they appreciated him way more than his family friends did.

But he did hang out with those Masters. So delicate, they often chided him or even showed off for him, but they also knew he had it in him to really create everything they needed to do their job. Somewhere along this line, was when he was befriended by Ojyr.

She was a bit of a mystery to him, she had the typical Pelatih appearance with a bit of cat here and a bit of something else there... She didn't open her mind to him completely but even so, she enjoyed his company and shortly after they met, helped provide him with dragons as well as her own genes for him to complete his Peridian training. Dragon Breeder, Peridian - he could make anything he needed.

He was hardly forty when Ojyr introduced him to S'bhu - and together they founded their Dream island.

Noy was inspired, S'bhu was such an easy shapeshifter. And gender shifter too! She could look far more manly than Noy ever did, and they laughed and drank and laughed some more about that. So this trio, almost inseperable now, set about creating not just dragons, but children.

Fascinating children at that. The things that Noy could do with a few samples was nothing short of amazing: it was in his blood, in his psionic powers, to do so. No one faulted him - and certainly, no one even asked him about it, if he requested another sample. Some of his Budak purchases went toward this goal, producing interesting, if not quite fully realized results. One or two of those results still lived and worked for them on the Isle, but a couple could be sold off to rich folks on the mainland.

And then came their children, the ones which among the trio, they would actually keep, treasure and love.

So unlike Noy's family, he thought. Their amazing hooves, each of them slightly different than the last. S'bhu mothered all three but fathered one as well. And Noy didn't dare show some of this work off to his peers in their Peridian offices.

They would snub him even more than they already did, for being a Dragon Breeder. Yes, even in this era of danger and invasion, there were still people who thought that the only "good" Zekiran child was a "plain old looking" one. Not a finger extra, no little furry ear tips. Certainly no shapeshifting, and definitely no extra legs!

Noy looked at S'bhu's offspring, and smiled serenly to himself. They were not monsters, in their tangle of legs and tails. They were lovely.

Eventually word would come to Noy that something strange was attempting to take up residence in a corner of "his" part of Dream Isle, chasing away anyone who tried to get near. No one would be able to say what it exactly was, however, for they would find themselves fleeing in inexplicable terror before they could get too close. But there would be nothing stopping Noy from reaching out into the dreams of a creature that was not malicious, but lonely and afraid, himself, and unwilling to let anything come too close lest they see him for what he was...

Noy had little difficulty locating the creature, all he had to do was go where everything else wasn't. Even animals would be found away from their normal dens and nests, this creature bothered them in ways that Noy couldn't even imagine.

Located by: Noy

Sex: Sterile Male

Size: Medium-Small (5-9' at shoulder)

Species: Graft-Chimaera

Abilities: Empathy. Fear Aura. Godshard. Plane-Shifting. Shapeshifting (Monstrous Human). Spirit Communion. Telepathy. Undeath. Vocal/Verbal Speech.

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