They have not been always heroes. An outsider's POV on what might have been the Loonatics Team's first days.
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Raconteur -- \rack-on-TUR\, noun: One who excels in telling stories and anecdotes.
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Famous instructor Maxwell Sterling from the planet of Freling, that's who I was. For years, my name was said with reverence and envy, but that was to be expected with the thrilling and successful career I had lead to that point. There was little left to be added to my curriculum, and I had not doubt it would eventually come. And it did, before I expected and earlier than wiser minds would advise, but that I didn't knew until many years passed by.
As it was, I said yes to the High Council's offer and became mentor of the older descendant from the ruling family, our future leader, Optimatus.
I have excuses, plenty of them. My young age, the new council's lack of experience with planetary leadership and politics, the others advisors' influence … I can name many more, but the truth is one and only: the man that boy grew up to became, his mistakes and bad decisions, are nothing but our fault. True, it might be that Optimatus was a bad seed from the beginning, but our people counted with us to look after him.
And we failed.
What makes our faults even more visible and painful is our success with his younger sister, Zodavia. Why? Because at first we paid no attention to her, and she grew up under several women's watchful eyes, the only order to make sure her childhood occurred as normal as possible.
Her brother, on the other hand, was treated like a little king. Anything he wanted, every little thing, he had. We did this as compensation, seeing how he was being asked more than any child should. Planetary problems were dropped on his shoulders, leaving little time for him to learn who he really was or even the basic difference between right and wrong.
He was expected to be a leader, but no one ever thought on explaining him what a good leader was.
Then, almost five years after it started, I had no choice but to stop fooling myself. I cannot recall the moment when I took such decision, but that's probably due to the fact that weariness had been getting on me during most of said period. Yet my clearest memory is that of the conclusion I reached: he was lost. No matter what, there was no way we could undo all the damage done to the young man.
Once I acknowledged that fact, my goal became clear. To save the planet from collapsing under his ruling, we had to start all over again, this time with the girl. It turned out other members of the council shared my worries, so I didn't have to try hard to convince them. Soon enough a plan was formed, and her education was completely left under my supervision while a new group of tutors tried their best to solve the damage done.
When Zodavia started her training, she was older than her brother had been. Her personality was already developed, and the ambience she grew up did for her more than mansions and government buildings ever could. To balance my load of bad and good decisions, I would like to say she is the result of my tutoring, but I know better. I only played a little part in creating the woman she eventually became; one the planet, the council and especially I, were fond and proud of.
Until it became clear what she was not.
It must be admitted I never paid attention to the love she felt for her brother; but he was, after all, her only family, and her kind nature didn't let her accept that one day she would be asked to choose between Freling and Optimatus. We tried our best to make her stronger than him, and in a sense she succeeded; but his drive for power and glory she couldn't match, and that was a weakness Optimatus always exploited.
It took the first deaths for her to understand. Everything we insisted on, the danger he represented, she couldn't deny anymore. But when it sank that the High Council couldn't take him from his leader's position, and it had to be her the one to stop Optimatus … Let say that it changed her in a way I would have preferred never to witness.
The warm creature she had always been as a child disappeared and she turned into a stoic looking woman. Zodavia still cared for her people, but she barely let it be noticeable. Only those close to her understood how much she blamed herself for all the pain her brother was responsible of. But as days and months passed, we finally had to accept that a cold Zodavia was the price to pay in order to defeat Optimatus.
In the end, it wasn't enough.
To say it plainly: on her place, I would have recurred to assassination. But I'm not her, and she's not me, and maybe it was better that way. Because on the years that passed since she started her education, Optimatus' goals shifted somewhat. He still wanted to conquer, and to hear his name acclaimed by millions of voices in thousands of worlds. But there was one more thing that occupied his mind, heart and soul: he hated Zodavia.
Sometimes I wonder why he let her live; it would have to be so easy to dispose of her while she still was a little child, or a brilliant and too-powerful-for-her-age teenager. But then I remember how they used to spend their free time together on earlier days, and how he let her try to reach for him, as she was the only one that still looked for the man behind the leader.
Sometimes I look back and wonder why none of us noticed how much Optimatus loved her little sister. Maybe that was the clue we never found, the way to make him be what he was supposed to. Could it be that we had in our hands the choice to save him, yet we destroyed it by making Zodavia turn against her brother? As the past won't come back, I guess we'll never know. And it remains to be true that, because of our actions, in the end they were brothers only by name.
Yes, Zodavia could have tried to kill him; but he was sly, astute and on guard. There have been many attempts against his life, so it is highly unlikely she would have succeeded. Therefore, I must admit her approach was the best: to use her ascendance over the High Council in order to keep him on bay.
I could have said her it would not last long, but she probably already knew it. Thus, I am sure she was the least surprised when he had enough of it, finally kidnapping the council members and attacking her. That day, when the rumor came, I only prayed for her to survive. It was not behind Optimatus to kill his kin, so even long-life prison seemed a magnificent future for the one he had many times before called traitor.
The fact that she escaped was a welcomed surprise, but it was soon put aside when truth came in the form of a recorded message she left for those in her inner circle. There, in a few words, she made a prediction that turned to be accurate. A plan whose failure would lead to her death, but its success could give the rest of us another chance to recover Freling's freedom. A shot on democracy, she said.
On the message Zodavia showed a hidden card: on the last year, she had been cultivating Optimatus' hatred. Wise? Maybe not, seeing how close she had been from jail on those few months; but it the end, it allowed her to manipulate her brother into doing what she wanted him to.
Because almost a week after Zodavia left, Optimatus followed.
Many of us could have told him it was not a bright idea, but we were aware idiocy is not one of his traits. Even without our advice he understood that, under Freling's unstable political conditions, the planet could not be leaded from the distance. He left an interim regime and gave critical positions to his closest followers, but the de facto government tasks fell on the High Council's sphere.
Never doubting his right to rule our planet, he left.
It didn't took us long to recover the compromised positions, as some of Optimatus' men were, in fact, part of Zodavia's resistance. Another group of them, mostly amongst the strategists and military force, soon figured out what she had done. They still shared the older brother's dreams of conquest, but the younger sister's cunning and sense of sacrifice made them rethink their opinion of her.
Three months after being attacked, our side was de jure in charge of the planet, with the Head of the High Council unanimously selected Freling's first president. Two were the concessions agreed for this to happen: first, popular elections were to take place in no more than twelve months; and second, Zodavia and Optimatus were to remain Royalty, with their state and fortune equally divided yet without real political power.
That's how, in a little over three decades, I contributed to our planet's Royal regime to fall.
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TBC, or so I hope. This story has been on my hard drive for over ... dunno, eight months? Back when Season 2 was nothing but an idea. I still have not seen any new episodies, so my Loonatics' love is quietly sleeping, yet knowing this is more of a pre-Season 1 fic, I thought it might be a (good? bad?) idea to post. Hope you like what I have (which is, sadly, only chapters one and two -- and the idea of the final one).
waves hello to all the new authors around, while wonders where are the old ones hiding