There Are Four Lights

Disclaimer: "Star Fox" characters all belong to Nintendo. If you're reading this, you'd better know which characters those are. I snuck a few supporting characters in here, too, but they're just to fill in the plot holes. Nobody important. That all said, please enjoy the show...!

"Happiness is just a word to me, and it might have meant a thing or two, if I'd have known the difference." Yoko Kanno, Gotta Knock a Little Harder

Chapter Zero: Slippy's Story

I was eleven years old.

Eleven, and making the family rich. I worked in my father's workshop, actually more of a factory floating in space, staffed by him, me, and a few mechanic assistants. He designed stuff and showed it to me. I designed better stuff and made the plans work. Then I built the prototypes, and he sold them across the galaxy. It was business as usual.

Eleven, and famous in the business and design circles. Fighters, carriers, weaponry, not to mention tons of civilian stuff, like aircars and a series of construction equipment. My framed designs hung, (signed by my dad, of course), in the offices of military dignitaries and manufacturing corporations across three solar systems.

Eleven, and living on maybe four hours of sleep a night, if I was lucky. I'd been working since I was five, when Dad finally finished imparting everything he knew about mechanical, nuclear, and thermodynamic engineering to me, handed me a pencil and a T-square, and set me down in front of the drafting table. "Draw a rocket ship, Slippy," he said, "but be sure that it works. Make a good rocket ship to show daddy."

I made a rocket ship, all right, the U44 Longwing. It was the first ship to use solid-crystal laser weaponry and take advantage of different atmospheric levels to save fuel. It was a huge success, and it made the Toad family famous.

Dad signed it and sold it to Corneria. Then he gave me some more pencils, a bigger drafting table, and told me to do it again. So I did.

For six years, all he wanted from me were my designs.

And over the course of those same six years, I discovered that I wanted to fly the things I built.

I wanted to be a pilot.

From my earliest memories, I was certain that pilots had the most fun in the whole universe. They got to fly in the pictures I drew. They could go from world to world whenever they wanted, I thought, riding the stuff of my imagination. I determined that I had to be a pilot someday, and became more and more sure of that as six years passed.

But when I finally ran away from dad's workshop, I realize now, the plan was really just to escape. I had to get the hell away from my broken family. Mom had been on the frontier for years, and I'd long ago figured out that she wasn't coming back. Dad worked all the time, and I was expected to work, too. If designs weren't ready, or if I wanted to change them after a deadline arrived, I was told off just like any of the other workers in the shop. I had a job to do, did I forget? This place was a studio, damnit, not a preschool.

I'd never gone to school, and I wasn't sure what he meant when he said that, but it made me cry. I cried when I was seven, when I was eight, when I was nine, and when I was ten.

Then I turned eleven, and decided to stop.

I ran away from home.

I curled up inside my favorite design, a carrier called the Sigil-51, the day it was to be flown to Corneria. I knew exactly where I could hide away, where it would be warm, and where the effects of the life-support systems would still reach me. I wondered if dad would stop the ship from leaving when he didn't find me at my drafting table. Maybe he'd stop everything and come looking for me. Maybe he'd have the Cornerian soldiers, here to fly the Sigil, take the ship apart to find me.

But no soldiers were ever sent to find me in my little nest of wiring, and the ship left right on time.

I cried then, too, safely on my way to be what I wanted to be. My plan had succeeded; I wasn't sure why I was crying. Now, I realize, it was because I succeeded so easily. No-one came looking. No-one must have cared.

I'm still not sure if running away was the stupidest or the bravest thing I'd ever done.

It was, however, the last stupid or brave thing I ever did alone.

next chapter: Break Down the Door