[Browbird] Otai

In a debris field millions of miles away from the next scrap of civilization, the wreckage of a long-sunken passenger vessel lies covered and rotting into the surface of an asteroid dotted with toppling monuments and shambled structures that had once housed a civilization whose name and faces have been lost to the passage of time.  It’s on this asteroid that a young Browbird named Otai was born and raised, the second generation of wreckage survivors struggling to make it to the next day in the recesses of deep space

But to Otai, this place was his home.  He knew every inch of that asteroid backwards and forwards, spending so many years of his life playing in its craters and delighting the few surviving families who persisted and thrived despite so many things in the world telling them not to.  He loved every day with them, he loved creating adventures and finding joy and color in the smallest of places, making everyone else see it too through his laughter and his smiles.  Despite the starvation and peril all around him, Otai grew up in a relatively happy and active home, with a community that cherished every life and every moment together.  They made it work, never knowing anything else and wanting nothing more than to see the next day amongst the distant sun that warmed their bodies

Until it warmed them too much.  Otai was young when their asteroid finally emerged from the icy chill of deep space and made its final journey around the nearest sun, with a warmth that reached into every crater and between every speck of fur on their bodies.  While he delighted in this newfound adventure he never understood why his elders seemed more desperate to fiddle with the old technology of his grandparents more than ever before, and why his mother‘s hugs got longer and deeper every night.  He finally discovered the reason when their journey around the sun reached its end, their end, and the lights of the sun’s rays warmed the frozen craters of the asteroid, thawing the ice and releasing toxic gas into their nonexistent atmosphere.  Thanks to the respirator he had found while exploring the asteroid’s depths and old crash sites Otai was saved from a horrifying, long demise

The rest of his community was not so lucky 

With his entire community gone Otai was forced to see himself into some semblance of adulthood with his sanity relatively intact.  He did so with the help of his beloved K2, his substitute family who he forged lovingly out of scraps and debris left over from those that came before, spending years creating his little robot companion with bits and pieces of those he once loved so much and would continue to love until the end of his days too.  K2 became the culmination of everything he had lost, and everything he still had to gain.  Together they finally salvaged enough scrap through the decades to create a one-way vessel that was more of a crude bullet shot directly into deep space, eventually finding its way to civilization.  To a new home, with a new life 

Otai had never realized just how much life existed out of his asteroid 

Overwhelmed, terrified, and too terrified to show either of these emotions, Otai spends his first few days in real civilization hiding and lashing out at anybody who dares to come close to him.  He’s forgotten how to talk to other people that aren’t his chirping robot, he’s forgotten how to touch, how to feel, how to speak.  Others often take his long stares and unblinking, unmoving masked face to mean trouble and quickly become unnerved by him.  The flashing lights of the neon city planet he crash landed into fries his senses, forcing him to hide out in its dark, grungy places with his mask a permanent fixture on his face just to keep himself sane.  For the first time ever, he misses his asteroid, he misses quiet, he misses his mother’s old bedroom that still smells like her sometimes 

This is until The Company finds him 

After Otai unknowingly stumbles into a deal gone wrong and comes out on top with nothing in his hands but his father’s old stave he used to ward off an entire mob of other beings, Otai is approached by a Browbird not unlike his own kind that offers him a job: travel the universe at your own pace, without the crowds or the deals or the voices, and get paid to do so - as long as you bring back what we ask you to.  Scared witless and more lonely than anyone has ever been, Otai accepts the deal 

If only they’d remembered to mention his contractually obligated partner, who happens to be the most annoying, ferocious little thing alive.  And they’re liable to swallow each other whole if one of them doesn’t do something about it.  Luckily, a mission gone wrong pushes them both to the brink of collapse, finally forcing them to talk to each other and letting Jac see the scared, terrified little kid behind the big scary mask