Fade: Out With a Bang

The show must go on.

Ferrik sat backstage in his private room, leaning over a table and peering owlishly into a lighted mirror, pulling strands of colored hair out of his face, long, jagged spikes of florescent blue and green. The permanent dye he'd used a year ago seemed to be doing its job, not looking faded or washed out at all. HE had to admit, it was a pretty impressive product, even with the unfortunate side-effect of stopping his hair from growing at all. 'Which is probably for the best, anyway' he thought to himself, 'if it got any longer, I'd start tripping over it'.

The impressive waterfall of color, blues and greens with the occasional reds, violets, and two other colors that have no non-Timonese equivalent, reached nearly to his knees. Spiking up, out, and back off his head in a huge shock that seemed at least 5 times more massive than he was, it was reminiscent of the tail of a comet, and drew attention away from the rest of his body, which was fine by him, for he was, in all other respects, abnormally small. That wouldn't matter tonight, though. Tonight, he planned to make full use of the new equipment he'd been designing, to the largest audience he'd had. It would be a memorable experience.

Perhaps a bit too memorable.

When Ferrik's parents realized there was something different about their child, they were at first, naturally, concerned. He was always small for his age, even 'delicate', and didn't seem to have the drive for easy socialization that most Timonae display early in life. Consulted professionals of various fields determined that Ferrik had an extremely rare genetic condition in which the process of physical maturity and growth is slow, stunted, and finally stops somewhere in the equivalent of the mid-teens. However, the psychological aspects of the condition, apart from the difficulty with socialization (due in no small part to the resulting abnormal appearance) also tended to occasionally produce an 'idiot savant', a genius in some subject or another, so Ferrik's parents started giving him all kinds of lessons in things, hoping to discover their freakishly small child was, in fact, some kind of prodigy.

They were, happily, not disappointed. Attempting subject after subject, Ferrik picked up an eclectic variety of skills, interests, and activities, though not really seeming to overly excel at any of them... until they got to music.

And suddenly, to his parents' delight, Ferrik began to shine like a star. Keyboards were mastered in a little under a year. The guitar and other similar instruments took even less. And when they finally (in spite of his natural shyness and social-phobia) brought him to singing, well, Ferrik had a voice that could sing so purely as to bring tears to the eyes, and so piercingly as to shatter glass. This was definitely something, his parents agreed, and began seriously pushing their son toward a career as a musician.

Ferrik took a while to get over his inhibition, his natural reticence to being the center of any kind of attention, due to the fact that the only attention he'd had previously from outside his family had been ridicule, laughter, and the constant assumption that he was a child, a girl, or both. Insults, cruelty, and derision had been all he had known. Until he got up on a stage, and started singing.

Suddenly, the insults started to dry out. The pointed whispers shifted from 'look at the midget!' to 'Holy Lin, that boy can SING!'. And when Ferrik dressed up, the more flamboyantly the better, strutting around the stage with confidence, using his small size and agility to leap, flip, and dance through his songs, the whispering died altogether. Jaws dropped. This boy had -talent-. The people who had made fun of him were eating their words, and Ferrik enjoyed the hell out of every moment.

Unlike most other 'child-stars', Ferrik's popularity didn't peak and then fall. If anything, it just got bigger. He began using more and more theatrical techniques in his shows, collecting other musicians in his band with like-minded ideals and utilizing increasingly bizarre sets and costumes. The audiences ate it up. Nobody had ever played music like this before, mixing it with such strange visuals and theatrics. Ferrik's concerts began to attract larger and larger crowds.

At this point, any other 'rockstar' (for lack of a better term) would have gleefully lost themselves in the heady glow of fandom and unlimited popularity. Ferrik, however, was loathe to let himself be seen offstage, still rather sensitive about his height, and seldom made any kind of public appearances. Instead, he spent his time and attention into furthering his music, trying to push it even farther, melding the channels of sight, sound, and emotion into a single, multisensory entity.

It was then, looking for more material to channel into his music, that he began to study metaphysics and philosophy. HERE was something he could use. Not only make the audience listen and see, but also make them -think-. He began working such themes into his performances, sincerely studying the various ideas to present them in a coherent, deeply profound form. Now attracting intellectuals and scientists into his audience, he began to experiment with technology to augment and amplify the Timonae psychic potentials, designing equipment that would create an actual psionic link between the listener and the music. The technology worked, almost frighteningly well. Ferrik was now playing stadiums and huge arenas, to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands.

Any true student of metaphysics, however, will tell you that nothing lasts forever, that everything changes. In Ferrik's case, this principle became drastically, horribly apparent, ending his musical career suddenly amidst a horrific scene of tragedy.

Ferrik's most popular song, at that point, was a 45-minute masterpiece in several stages, "Approaching the Light". The song began in dissonance, following the development of individual awareness out of chaos, and built up through several themes and modal changes, the lyrics becoming more and more metaphysical, until the climax of the song simulated a direct experience of a spiritual peak. With the psionic resonance, the audience often left feeling like they'd had an actual deeply religious experience. Until the one night that something went horribly wrong.

Nobody knows exactly what happened, least of all Ferrik himself. Later investigations would point toward an act of direct mechanical sabotage, possibly a disgruntled fan, stalker, or a more sinister interest. But that night, just as Ferrik was reaching the peak of the song, just as the psionic resonators were at maximum and the most of the audience was weeping in joyous ecstasy, a crucial little relay in the equipment suddenly burned out with a hissing snap, and the emotional intensity of over forty thousand Timonae fed back through the circuit and directly into Ferrik's mind.

The psionic force almost killed him instantly. Collapsing on stage with a scream, trying to pull the equipment off his head, he didn't notice right away that his scream was being echoed by the entire stadium. As Ferrik writhed on the stage, pulling at the headpiece and feeling the psychic backlash burning through his mind, forty thousand people went into a state of violent psychosis.

Later camera footage of the event was truly horrifying. People screaming, biting, clawing their own (and others') eyes out, ripping each other open, the floor of the arena literally swimming in Timonese blood. Of the 40,000+ audience, less then then thousand remained alive past the first hour. And even fewer ever regained any semblance of sanity. The band members were found, dead on stage, bleeding from their eyes and ears amidst tangled masses of smashed equipment. Ferrik himself was nowhere to be found, and while initially assumed that he had died as well, perhaps at the hands of the raving audience, the fact that none of his remains were found led investigators to believe he had somehow fled or otherwise escaped. Cries for justice were raised, angry voices of the victims' friends and relatives demanded retribution, and a significant number of bounties were placed on Ferrik's head, making him, for a time, the most wanted 'criminal' in recent Timonese history. After several years, it was again assumed that he was probably dead, but the bounties still remained, just in case. Antimonae has not forgotten Ferrik.

What really happened that night, after the fateful performance, Ferrik himself could never clearly remember. In fact, he had a hard time remembering anything, after that. With so much of his mind in psychic shock, much of his personality fragmented. After an indeterminate amount of time, as his basic functions of cognition slowly returned, he became aware that he was floating inside a small starship, in deep space, away from any planets or interstellar traffic, and he didn't know who he was. There were stocks of basic rations and supplies stored away in the tiny cabin, but there was no sign of who had packed them, why they were there, or even why he was on the ship in the first place. Once he had the presence of mind to take more of an interest in his surroundings, he found two more things of interest- an almost alarmingly-large supply of various recreational drugs and medicines, and a large, fluffy, multicolored cat who seemed to have no trouble at all dealing with zero-gravity. He named the cat "Fade".

While he did have a goodly amount of supplies, no stash of rations will last forever, and he found himself reluctantly seeking out other ships, to trade for supplies. Never leaving the safety of his own airlock, and using a modified image of himself to communicate, he quickly found that in the depths of uncharted space, populated mainly by refugees, misfits, pirates and other criminals, recreational drugs were even better than money. Dimly remembering fragments of his past relating to drugs and their uses, he quickly found a market for both his supplies and knowledge, trading for needed items, safe passage, and of course, more drugs. He even managed to set up an impromptu chemistry lab in one corner of his cabin, to manufacture substances he didn't already have. It wasn't a glamorous life, it certainly wasn't a very social one, but it was quiet, away from people, and mostly safe, and gave him just what his psi-blasted mind needed to recover: Time.

He drifted aimlessly around the more obscure reaches of space for nearly a decade. Nearly all of the memory of his previous life had been buried, and somewhere along the line, he started to confuse his own identity with that of the cat, who was his only companion. When the cat finally died, several years after his hiatus began, Ferrik's mind couldn't cope with the loss, and he refused to accept the reality of it. He began to hallucinate the cat, out of a need for companionship, talking to it, holding conversations, even playing games with it. He was naturally delighted when the 'cat' started talking back. His confusion of identity continued, eventually shifting the personae of "Fade" to include himself.

This could have continued to go on indefinitely, if it hadn't been for a particular swarm of micrometeorites that punctured several key systems and forced him to seek out populated space. Barely managing to keep the ship moving in a mostly-straight line, he angled towards the nearest occupied planet, New Luna, and somewhere in all the stress and confusion of keeping his ship angled correctly to avoid burning up in the atmosphere, the 'cat' disappeared. In the nightmarish intensity of nearly crashing into the spaceport, the impact dooming his ship to never lift off again, he was nearly killed, saved only by emergency restraint systems he had forgotten the existence of.

Stumbling out of the remains of the ship in a daze, he had just enough presence of mind to deal with the furious docking officials, and by giving up every last bit of actual money he had, as well as selling the remains of his ship for scrap, he managed to appease the local authorities and pay for the damage he'd caused. Though he was able to gather the few valuables (and illegal goods) he had from his ship before he saw it towed away, he never found his 'cat'. He's still looking.