Velveteen

Velveteen tasted the wheels — obviously — and got the blue one right before snapping it clean off the axle on an overenthusiastic crit, a fact nobody is going to let him forget. He spent the Cinderwalker fight getting shot at from across the room no matter where he stood, loudly cataloguing the injustice of it, before finishing the thing off with a vault over its back and a paperclip jammed into the right socket at exactly the right moment. When the talk turned to Heishi Q and dangerous people hunting Now, he sat down in the middle of the group and meditated, unbothered, more interested in where the information points next than in what it means for anyone's feelings.

Velveteen heard "we need to get to that door" and did the only thing that made sense to him: ran straight for it. He hit every tripwire in the room at once, got lit up by three machines in a single turn, and went down bleeding and unconscious before anyone else had finished their first real move. He came back up groggy, out a healing potion, and utterly unbothered by the lecture that followed. Doors and corners, Andy told him. Velveteen just goes where the universe pulls.

Velveteen told his blue story to the whole table, not realizing until Kael and Mistarion's book caught up to him that the vial of blue he swallowed the day he was arrested and Kael's stolen relic might be the same shimmering something. The revelation barely slowed him down before he was back to spreading the vibe — this time cornering a station guard with a deep-breathing exercise about what the universe wants from him, long enough for Kael to lift his badge clean. He declared, unprompted, that everyone present is made of the same stardust. Nobody agreed with him. He didn't need them to.

Velveteen rode the ceiling the entire meeting, changing color with his mood for an audience that mostly didn't notice, and made his one position very clear: no corporations, not after the last one put him on the Rock. He'd rather throw in with Narok Tarr's people than anyone wearing a company badge, and said as much plainly once they were back at the bar. Pressed on whether he'd actually act on that instead of just following Kael wherever Kael walked, he didn't have a good answer — but he knew which way he wanted the group to lean.

Velveteen wandered the bar cataloguing everyone's vibe long before anyone threw a punch, then spent the fight itself getting punched in the face repeatedly while failing to grapple, sidekick, or land a single hit on anyone. He refused, loudly and on principle, to eat the corpse when ND-E suggested it - an inanimate object is one thing, a dead person is gross, and he does not understand why nobody else sees the distinction. He ended the night hanging from the ceiling shaped like the exact case Narok wants smuggled, telling the man his whole crew was just where the universe happened to point them.

Gravity on Forge Home doesn't run one direction and Velveteen didn't fight that — he walked whichever wall or ceiling pulled hardest, sticking and peeling like something that was never meant to need a floor. He turned himself into a chair for Verum in Zabetta's office without being asked twice, and got called the first fucking time she'd seen that, which he'll take as a compliment. He pointed Whipkey's betrayal out the second he worked it out, gleeful about it rather than angry. Underneath the bit, he still wants to know what's actually inside the memory crystal riding in his gut, and nothing on this station so far has told him he'll ever get to taste it.

The crystal was purple and he had never tasted purple, so really that answered itself. It sits in him now, turning slowly, and it tastes like morning dew off an elderberry under a red sun, which he accepts is not an answer anyone was hoping for.

He caught Kael Vass by the scruff over the fire and told him not to dare. He shouted blink dog at eleven separate people and it worked on precisely none of them. He watched a man he had called a friend through the bars beat Oot to death on a loading floor, and he has not yet worked out where to put that. And then the universe gave him back a bathrobe.

He wakes first, because he was the least braced against any of it. He lifts the slab off Oot without much fuss and asks if the tortle is okay before he asks anything else. At the crossroads he puts his cheek to the floor and lets the station tell him which way — west — and he's right. He holds the hands of two dying men and tells them, meaning it, that the universe has them now. He keeps asking people to be his friend: the bird, the pirate, the tortle. When the day gets loud he has exactly one thing to offer. You need to center your gravity, dude.