Name: Photon Herchal
Age: 46
Race: Cyborg
It was around day six hundred that he sobered up. He’d almost lost his mind more than once over the years but nothing had quite gotten Photon there. Not the first divorce, nor the second; nor the time his discount ship nearly burned up in orbit - would have been a good enough way to go. It was the last job he had that nearly snapped reality: building bombs in a factory on some forgotten moon. An old friend had hooked him up. Said it’d be easy takings. All Photon had to do was make sure the droids were oiled and do a few fixes here and there. He was right, too, it was pretty easy. Right up until his arm was shredded into mince meat and searing bits of metal melted through his guts. The safety protocols were lax, to say the least. An inspection droid’s hand had frozen up around an explosive. It turned out that the old ‘thump the machine’ method didn’t work out so great sometimes.
At least they’d given him a new arm. Well, a recycled arm. The one that the droid hadn’t lost. Sort of a fair trade but it did freeze up from time to time. His eye was too expensive to replace but his new guts felt great. His liver sure could take a beating and he could hold in his piss for a lot longer. But he felt colder. Boozing and gambling wasn’t as fun anymore. He still did both, maybe twice as much. His friends weren’t that fun anymore either. He wanted to punch in their smug faces. Photon had loved a good time but now he didn’t know what it was all for. How had he wasted so many years doing odd jobs and getting nowhere?
He drifted from scumhole planet to scumhole planet. Sometimes he didn’t even know he’d gotten on a transport ship until he woke up in some foreign cantina. Finally, after hundreds of days he settled on some dirt rock. He spent most days hunting for scrap metal to sell and most evenings shooting bottles off a boulder with his makeshift blaster. He could remember a time when he was younger and he used to compete in shoot-offs. Those moments when he felt his arm whipping up at incredible speed, turning targets into dust. It was hard to explain the feeling. It was like his hand, the blaster and all the space between them and the target were one thing, a string connected them all. The shots would happen before he even tried to make them happen. It’s how he earned the name Photon. Faster than anyone else. At least, in his podunk circles that is.
He never thought the feeling would come back. It did. Out there in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a junk blaster in one hand and a bottle of who-knows-what clutched in his rusty one, it came back for a second. Maybe two seconds. He turned all the bottles he’d lined up into particles. It was too fast for the blaster. It burst into flames and he had to toss it on the ground. Maybe he hadn’t screwed everything up. Maybe he’d had this one thing that’d never left him. Something unknown. Something he couldn’t explain that made him feel special. He needed to save his creds and get to someplace new. Someplace he could make a name for himself. He would really try this time.