Another Time, Another Space. (Hollow leader backstory)

There once was a man.  That man chose one day to have a family.  That family chose to build a house.  The man lived in the basement while the family lived in the rest of the house.  The family grew very large and prospered.  But one day the man decided to leave the basement and the house as well.  He took most of the family away, leaving only a few of them left.  

Among the few people who lived there was a boy.  A long time later, a crooked man came to the house.  He wanted to know where the family came from.  The boy told him about the man.  The crooked man hurt the boy and burnt the house to the ground.  The crooked man left to look for the man, leaving the boy with the ruins.  Finding the family's horse safe and sound, the boy took it to chase after the crooked man.

There were two paths.  One was a dark path, fraught with danger and the other was an idyllic trail.  In another story, the boy took the dangerous path.  It was long and he grew older and stronger, and by the end, he had become a little crooked himself.  So it was he was a match for the crooked man, having become one in his own right.

But in this story, the boy took the idyllic trail.  The trail was calm and the boy had to rest.  But he had no way of knowing that the trail was peaceful because the air was poisonous.  The boy passed away, but his spirit wore his clothes and continued on the trail.  And it was still on it.

---

The hollow that will simply be referred to as Testament laid on the cold steel floor, looking up at the mural on the ceiling.  He, for lack of a better pronoun, didn't know why he did it... stared at the mural like this.  He'd drawn it..... Thinking about how long ago he'd drawn it gave him pause.  It hadn't changed a day since then, yet here he lay looking at it.  He no longer felt anything when looking at it, but it gave him a sense of calm when the quiet started to get to him.

It had been several million years since the ship had flown through a field of gamma radiation.  The cryo sleep chamber had given out somewhere in the middle of it.  The ship's shielding protected against the radiation somewhat, as did his flight suit, but the only true protection was the cryo sleep and Testament had grown sick from the radiation LONG before he'd gotten that fixed.  Soon, he passed.  

For a few years, he'd become what he would someday would discover was a plus.  And even though he never left his ship, his soul chain eventually eroded.  Finding it easier to operate the ship's mechanisms when wearing his flight suit, he was still wearing it when he finally became a hollow.  The suit, worn for so long, was such a piece of his identity that it became one with it.  

His new existence was different at first.  He could do things he couldn't before.  Being able to possess the ship's systems let him alter and fix things he never could before.  He altered the ship's life support until it recycled reiatsu from the space around him, keeping him well sated as a hollow.  He tweaked the food dispenser, no longer necessary for him, to spit out various colored pastes, which he used as paints.  He also eventually managed to get it to replicate, fibrous plates for him to draw on.  Space was essentially littered with Testament's drawings.

The ship's various alert systems were reconfigured for music.  Nearly eternal nights occupied by dancing with cleaning supplies.  He became familiar with his suit's weapon systems.  He became a self taught master of the sword and a crack shot with a pistol.  

If Testament had come to exist in any other faction, he might have gone mad.  But the electronic systems of the flight suit had become one with his mind.  While he still had emotions, he found they could be deactivated.  He tried occasionally to stop inhibiting them, sometimes enjoying it, but always falling into despair from the loneliness before turning them back off.  Soon, the only time he turned them off was when he occasionally got the cryo sleep to function for a few hundred years, only dreaming with feelings un-suppressed.

Only once did he ever attempt to leave the ship.  He soon found himself separated from it and discovered for the first time in his life that his existence could in fact become worse.  He drifted aimlessly through space for... longer then he cared to think about... before a miracle happened.  The ship had entered a debris field and closed to a crawl.  Testament finally reunited with it.  He found himself un-suppressing his feelings.  He had never experienced joy and wished to.  After using his powers to eventually fix the ship, he chose to stay on it for what he was relatively sure would be the rest of his days.

It was one of these days, one out of the countless days, that he spent laying on the metal floor, that he heard something.  It wasn't quite something he had never heard before.  He'd heard all the noises the ship could make at some point or another when playing with its systems.  But he had, in all his years, never heard it used for its actual purpose.  Something was coming.  Something unnatural.  For the first time in his life, he moved quickly.

What.  What was it?  He found the screen.  It was... a shaking experience... Things that had remained still for untold millenia were changing.  It was... disturbing for him.  He had no time to become sentimental.  Something was, for the first time in millions of years, happening.  An energy reading was approaching.  A massive energy reading.  If he'd had a face he would have frowned.  This couldn't be right...  The power of it was... It wasn't on par with the Enemy, but... It wasn't exactly light years off.

He glanced over his shoulder and back up to the mural, eyeing the crooked man he'd drawn all that time ago.  It... It couldn't REALLY be HIM could it...  He looked at the controls, trying to remember what to do before raising a fist and jamming it down.  His hand disappeared in darkness where it hit the metal and moments later a readout appeared on the screen.  He had no spine for a chill to run down, but the sensation was comparable.  The energy was almost EXACTLY The Enemy's.   Something was... off though... It... No time.  

He scrambled from the control deck, looking around the small ship.  He'd spent more time then any being should exist in this room but he suddenly couldn't remember where anything was.  He was experiencing panic for the first time, after all.  The cryo-sleep chamber!  Maybe it could sense him.  Maybe if he was in stasis, whatEVER the hell it was, it might pass by?  He hurried for the chamber.  He even got his hands on it when it hit.  

He heard the windows shatter.  The room would have depressurized if it hadn't been void of oxygen already.  Not that he had much time to think about it.  The energy hit him.  Charged into him.  It was like having a sun lit inside of him.  Power.  More than he could ever have imagined.  More than he could even have CONCEIVED.  Suddenly erupting from him.  He slipped into unconsciousness.  When he came to, he understood.  It came in flashes during his sleep.  There had been another him... The other him had gone by a callsign he'd forgotten essentially forever ago... And the other him had died.

That could have been the end of it, but all of his power, his... reiryoku... sounded right... His Reiryoku would have been dispersed... if its owner didn't still exist.  Temporal paradoxes apparently interacted funnily with reiatsu.  When... Kepler?... had died.. His power, his energy... It had all tried to return to Kepler... to outer space... to him.

He had the power of a god... or demigod to be more specific... the demigod he'd become in another life.  From.. a place... A place?... He stumbled back to the panel.  A PLACE!  Off there in the reaches of space... with... LIFE... He slammed his fist into the panel.  It began calculating and mapping, tracking the path the energy had followed.  Finally it had confirmed one.  It was... thousands... hundreds of thousands of years away...

Or it would have been, just a short time ago.  He concentrated, his newfound power pulsing out of him.  Yes....  He walked slowly, calmly for the back of the ship, placing his hand on the wall between him and the engine.  And then he pressed himself into it, merging with the engine core of the ship.  His consciousness flooded the drives and engines, altering them, pumping them full of power.  Speed was unnecessary.  Even if he pumped the ship to speeds that nearly broke the laws of physics, it would still take years.  He had been patient for millions of years.  It was time... NOW, it was time...

And for the first time in his life, he'd had enough power to do what he did next.  He opened a garganta around the ship.  Ripping through the cracks between worlds, he entered that endless desert for only a few seconds before reemerging in the real world.  The being that would soon name itself Testament walked over to the broken glass, climbing to the console and pulling himself out of the ship, climbing atop it.  He stood there, gazing in wonder.  A planet... Not just a planet.  A planet FULL of life... of people...

"Wow."  It was the first word he'd said in a million years and it was all he could think to say.