A man of about 28 years sits dozing in the cockpit of an Alliance long-range fighter, his arms crossed. His 6’3” broad shouldered and large-built frame pushes the capacity limit of the seat. His hair is longer than it has ever been, just starting to come down over his ears and brushing down on his shoulders in, seemingly, uncontrolled waves of dark ashen blonde. His eyes, however, will remain a mystery for the moment, as they are closed. The cold black of space fills the space the man is sitting in, reflecting on the mirrored surface of the cockpit’s polymer bubble. One of the myriad of lights on the console switches for green to a blinking red. A soft beeping pierces the oppressive silence. Nothing stirs. Or at least nothing noticed right away. The man’s eyes twitch in their sockets before slowly opening to reveal gunmetal grey eyes. He sighs and flips a switch beneath the blinking red light, turning it to amber and silencing the alarm. He takes the stick into his left hand and pitches it slightly to the left. Thrusters rotate his craft slightly, revealing the terminal divide of a small moon. He squints, wishing his shades hadn’t gotten busted on Whitefall when one of the local color decided he didn’t like no preacher man in his bar. He reached onto the dashboard of the craft and fished out a black insert for a notched preacher’s collar. Much like the grey one he was wearing at the moment. He keyed in a sequence of numbers on a pad to his right and let the computer send his landing request. His right hand hovered over the pad. Another green light, this time over the keypad lit up with a ding as the coordinates for his landing zone appeared. His clearance, it seems, was still good. For the moment at least. He pressed a sequence of buttons and flipped the toggle beside his thrust control. His engines began their slow warm up process and light began to fill his cockpit as his systems began to turn on. He popped his knuckles and pushed the throttle forward to its maximum in one swift motion and shot off toward the night side of the moon.

His craft touched down on the night side of the moon, Newhall. He stared up at the large bright red mass that dominated the night sky. Salisbury’s red gasses were the inspiration, however shallow, for the name of the city the man just arrived at. As his cockpit opened with a slow pneumatic hiss, a bright red holo-sign with white letters greeted him with a cheery ‘Welcome to Redcloud!’ Newhall shared a unique little feature with the moon of Earth-That-Was. It didn’t spin. However, it did one thing that the moon did not. Newhall was stuck in a stationary orbit. This meant that the daylight side was always in daylight. And the night time side was always dark. There were, of course, atmospheric interferences to this in the form of clouds, but day was day and night was night. For the most part, the daylight side was almost all agriculture. Massive greenhouses and field upon field of endless grains mad the landscape, only pierce by the occasional mountain or radio tower. The vast percentage of the population lived on the night side. Despite the perpetual night, or perhaps because of it, the dark side was much busier, much more “awake” than the daylight side. But Salisbury, or Big Red as it is sometimes referred to by locals wishing to sound more quaint than they perhaps might be, also had a strange orbit, angled so that it spent nearly all of its time above and below the orbital plane. Such a place was a den of highwaymen and fugitives. This is exactly why our man came here. What better place for a man on the run to hide than amongst an entire population of outlaws? True, it meant the town was a little rough. But the ridiculous size of the gun at his left hip meant that most people left him alone. And if that weren’t enough, the average man or woman got the feeling that there was something just not right about the man, and were inclined to leave him be rather than find out just what that not-rightness might be. He smiled to himself as a group of obvious gang members parted before him as he put his large grey officer’s overcoat around his shoulders. He called this air about him his ‘creepy bonus.’ He took a few corners until he found his way to one of the main thoroughfares and continued to walk for a long while. He came at last to the alleyway he was seeking and turned to the right. He walked all the way to the end of the alley, which opened up into a small lot hidden amongst the brick walls of the building surrounding it. A large yellow neon sign in the shape of a gun marked his destination. He walked into the door which rang a small bell. Antique design, but he liked it. He walked wordlessly up to the counter and unceremoniously pulled the dark grey hand-cannon out of it’s holster and slapped it on the counter with a heavy thud. A young woman in black cargo pants and a close fitting black sleeveless top looked up from the table and turned to see the man at the counter. She squinted and pulled her glasses down from the nest of black hair that held them and smiled as the man came into focus.

“Grey! I was wondering when you’d come back…”