The first thing Ratchet felt was a rough tearing at his skin as he hit the ground, knees first, before the rest of his body followed. His head ricocheted off the dirt, his chest burning in relief and his neck suddenly quite thankful, although still in great pain.

His eyes were clenched shut, expecting the worst . . . but then he opened them, blinking awake, and trying to make sense of the discontinuity surrounding him. Didn't his DeadLock collar just go off? Wasn't his head, at minimum, supposed to not be attached to his body?

For that matter, why in the seven cores of Veldin did he feel like he had rope burns?

"Get that rodent off my damned grass!" A voice barked, and suddenly Ratchet noticed four scaly hands reaching for him, jerking him to his feet just fast enough for him to notice he was on a planet of some kind — a nice, serene part of it, with a fair grove of trees in one part of his view and a meadow in the other, but the grip he was quickly wrenched into was anything but serene. "I thought I said to hang that runner high! I want his ears flapping in the breeze so hard that the airport wants 'em for wind socks!"

Ratchet coughed, trying to croak out "Airports still exist?", but finding his windpipe crushed. He felt like he should've died right then. And all things considered, maybe he had . . . his last memory was of a detonating collar, after all, and Gleeman Vox had burned it well into him that you didn't survive a collar blowing up.

Ratchet's eyes went high in a hurry as he looked up, vaguely noting that the man in front of him looked an awful lot like Gleeman . . . on a superficial level, at least. The face was there, the body was right, but the look was wrong. He had a short, graying beard and loose, light-colored attire, like the stuff in those old 'pirate' films. Hell, he even had the right wig for it, too.

"Fess up while you still can! Who cut my runner down?" The apparent 'Vox' shouted, his eyes wide. "Fess up now or I'll eat the damn rodent where he stands!"

"Now come on, 'Master' Gabriel, don't be rash." Ratchet heard a voice come from behind him as a pair of the same scaly hands from before cameentirely too close to Ratchet's cheeks, before reeling back at noticing a snakehead of the same scales poking out with the hands as well. "That'd be an awful waste, and eating such trash might make you sick."

"Well then someone better show himself before I-!" The man shouted again, before noting a rather svelte figure leaping down from the trees, before adjusting her dress and petticoats. He blinked at her. "Anastasia! Don't tell me you did this . . ."

The proud lizard-girl smiled, crossing her arms. "Father."

"Not this shit again . . ." Ratchet mumbled, barely getting it out, but apparently being overheard enough that he noticed his ear receiving a bite from the snakehead he saw before. He winced at the pain, but this time was too freaked out to scream.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. "You want to explain why you decided to defy me?"

Anastasia smirked, patting her dress down again. "He's much more useful than he looks, Father. No need to kill a slave in order to make an expensive example."

Ratchet snarled, but kept his mouth shut this time; whoever the girl was, she 'did' just save his life. Assuming it was still his they were talking about. And besides that . . . something about the girl's speech hit him wrong. It'd been almost five centuries since the Lombax Liberation Act . . . no one in the galaxy was still supposed to keep any kind of Lombax slave . . .

. . . right?

"Well pursing him's too much trouble for a runner." Gabriel glared down at Ratchet, a look of disdain on his face. "You have a better idea, my little mako?"

"Indeed." She smiled. "I'll keep him."

"Are you insane?" The workman that was holding Ratchet back craned his head up just enough to be seen. "You want this madman for a pet? He'd just as soon kill you as ravage you!"

"He's a runner, for God's sake. Anything else and I might agree, but a runner's harmless. Once he's set up nice and comfortable-like away from the machinery, he won't want to run anymore, now will he?" Anastasia smirked, dropping to her haunches to look at Ratchet. "Besides, I bet once you clean the grease and the mats out of his fur, he'll be as handsome as any purebred bolts can buy."

"Fine . . . if keeping him for a new toy will stem your meddling in my affairs, so much the better." Gabriel rolled his eyes. "Antonio, take Kay-Twelve here back behind the house and clean him off. All of him."

Ratchet blinked as the gravity of the situation finally was clicking, and he looked down at his feet as Antonio the scaly workman took hold with all four arms. They were calling him 'K12'. The girl's speech. Even the rope burns . . .

He didn't know how the DeadLock collar had led to this, but it didn't matter. For whatever reason, he was here, he was apparently stuck back in time, and — at least for now — he was finding out the hard way why the history books always called it the 'slave ages' . . .