The old man shifted his robe to better cover the tip of his tail. "Ro'lasi, of course I remember him. I'm old, not senile enough to forget my clutch mate." Looking over his glasses at the young Sluissi in front of him he continued, "Why come bother an old man about someone who's been dead for decades?"

The youth looked embarrassed as her words came out a bit rushed, "I was supposed to do a report on hero of mine, and I started to write one on your sister Ro'thasa. I love to watch skyboarding and she was the first Sluissi to compete on Corellia so she's always been an idol of mine. Only thing is, I couldn't find out who made the board she rode - until I saw an old holo interview and she said her clutch mate made it for her at 15. I couldn't believe someone so young could make a Galaxy class board, so I started digging. Only, there's really nothing about him other than a ship registry and some spacescape holos of his in the Great Library on Drall."

With a grunt, the old man shifted in the chair and gave a deprecating laugh, "You really know how to make an old man feel worthless. First my sister, then my brother, any chance you're going to want to write about an old priest like me?" With a good humored wave of his wrinkled hand he cut off her protests. "There's nothing worth writing about for me anyway. I studied and I grew old waiting to pass on what I learned, so at least let me do that."

"Where to start, hmm, I always thought of him as my idiot brother. He couldn't do sports worth a damn - I used to beat him up for fun ... a lot. School? I think he cut classes more often than I did. No, the only thing he was any good at was building things."

"We weren't rich growing up - not poor either, just not a lot of money for play things. For our 12th hatching day, Thasa wanted a hover board - they were all the rage back then. She got one of course - turns out Lasi gave most of his savings to the clutch master to get one for her. That lasted about two weeks before she pulled some stunt that overloaded the repulsor drive. Lasi picked it up and left without a word. Two weeks later he came home and gave it back to her. Never did find out where he went. After that, I watched her cut corners hard enough to spark the board against the wall. She'd compress the repulsor field down to nothing and make the damned thing scream like a thousand dying nerfs but it never overloaded again. That was Lasi, couldn't ride a board beyond the basics, but he could build them to take a beating."

"For a while we were the cool kids - do you still use cool? - Anyway, Lasi built us all boards - we called him the junkyard king for it. Hand him a couple weeks of allowance and he'd come back with a new board for you made from the finest junkyard scrap. Even I used to be pretty good at boarding, but Thasa was our queen. You think her skyboarding was good, you should have seen her on a hover board. I'm fairly certain she and physics weren't on speaking terms after some of the things she did."

"A couple of years later, some rich kids came down with their custom boards with micro-ion drives. Same crap different generation. They just needed to show that their expensive toys could make them better than us. And to be honest, they weren't bad, but with the drives, they could do maneuvers a repulsor board just couldn't keep up with. I think Lasi took it personally, I remember he walked away in the middle of the run looking like someone had run over his pet."

"We didn't see him for a month - guess the clutch master knew where he was, since nobody was panicked about him being gone. On our 15th hatching day, there comes Lasi, dropping out of the sky pulling a 5g landing on a 3m skyboard. Turns out he couldn't afford a micro-ion drive for a new hover board so he bought the drive off a wrecked speederbike and built a skyboard instead. I'd never even heard of one, I'm not sure he had either - he just knew what he had to use and what he wanted to achieve."

Reaching for his tea, the old Sluissi smiled, "That's it. He tweaked the board for her for about 6 months, but he built that board in a month out of junkyard parts as an overpowered hoverboard. No proper schooling on design, no engineering team telling him what could or couldn't be done - just backyard builder tricks picked up from making hover boards. Even after she went to Corellia and had major sponsors, that was the board she rode to clear her head. She once told me it was like flying on the back of a living creature not some hunk of tech."

The young Suissi looked puzzled, "If he was that good, what happened to him?"

A sad look crossed the old man's eyes, "I've asked myself that question a lot. One day he went to the junkyard and he came home changed. To quote him, 'the galaxy sang to me and promised to show me wonders.' We were still 15 and to be honest, I though he'd hit his head on something."

"That was it, my idiot brother who didn't care about anything but making his sister happy and building hover boards was gone and some stranger obsessed with rebuilding a junk ship to get into space had taken his place. In seven years, I don't think I heard him string more than a dozen words together at a time. He had his pilot's license and astrogator's certificate by 20 and by 22 he'd taken Destiny's Call from a rusted hulk to a fully certified ship. After that he was gone - he'd stop by from time to time, but he was only happy out there trying to see something nobody else had."

Using his tail to pull a holoprojector out from under the chair, the old man put reached down to put a holocube in. As he turned it on, the room faded away to be replaced by dawn rising through some un-named planet's icy rings. "They were beautiful weren't they?" The pair sat in silence as the scene changed several times - each a holo of breathtaking beauty whether of a planet, an accretion disk of a neutron star, or even flying through a red giant's massive solar flare.

"Why?", the young Sluissi struggled to find words.

"Why did he sell mediocre holos to the Library when he had these?", the old man shrugged before continuing, "I don't know. I believe that he sent these to Thasa because he wanted her to understand why he needed to leave. Money and recognition were never things that drove him but, somehow, he knew these were out there waiting to be seen."

As the holoprojector moved to another spacescape he continued, "After I became a priest, I came across a legend from Sullust that made me think of Lasi. In it, a young man stares at a meteor shower in a star covered night sky. One of the meteors is a foreign goddess who reaches down and steals his heart. He spends the rest of the story involved in fantastic adventures as he chases her through the sky trying to recover his heart."

The holoprojector showed a side lit nebula, scintillating oranges, yellows, and reds twisting together in a curtain hanging in space - until the exact moment of the birth of a star cuts through the haze. "How does it end?," the young Slussi's voice was barely a whisper in the dark.

"He finally catches her on the moon and demands his heart back. She laughs and shows him that she hadn't stolen his heart but rather given him hers. They spend the rest of time as twin comets dancing through the night sky." Turning off the projector, he looks at her conspiratorially, "between you and me, the Great Serpent hasn't struck me down yet for wanting to believe that these are Lasi's adventures and somewhere out there he caught his foreign goddess."