Once Kevin walked into the parlour, Doc Zed quickly shut the door behind them and the living room disappeared from view. The parlour in which they stood was about the same size as the living room, but there was a large curtain-covered window on the back wall and the room overall seemed more... empty. There was no furniture on the walls save for a small buffet, and while there was a table in the centre, the thing was a small, simple rectangle of wood with four chairs around it. Kevin took a seat at the end closest to the living room door; Doc Zed walked around the table to sit across from him. There was a door behind him, the glow of a light clearly visible in the space above and below it.

"So," Doc Zed started in a tone slightly quieter than a normal speaking voice, "where did you go? What have you been doing?" He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Everyone thought you were dead, Kevin. Nopony said anything—nopony knew anything—but everypony I talked to who had known you suddenly seemed so sad..."

"It's a long story, Doc," Kevin attempted to counter, though he could already tell the effort was half-hearted at best. "I don't really have a lot of time and I really just came here to ask you a favour—"

"Aha!" Doc Zed raised a hoof as he exclaimed the exclamation. "A favour, eh? You come back after... how long has it been, now? Three or four years? And you won't even tell me what's going on, and now you want a favour?"

Kevin frowned. "Um... yes?"

Doc Zed let out another hearty laugh. "C'mon, kid, you're gonna have to offer me more than that. I loved your mum and pop to bits, bless their souls, but they'd want me to be lookin' out for you. And I can't rightly do that if you won't tell me anything."

Kevin sighed. "I'm really not going to get out of this, am I?"

Doc Zed's expression grew more serious. "No, Kevin, I'm concerned. Please... I just want to help you, I really do."

"Well, okay." Kevin looked down at the wood grain of the table, studying how it curved along the surface. "When Mom and Dad died... they were gonna send me to the orphanage or something. Maybe a foster family. You know that."

"Yes, but would that—"

"Please, let me finish," Kevin interrupted looking up.

Doc Zed nodded. "You're right. I'm sorry—go on."

"As I said, they were gonna send me somewhere. Right after they died, too—it was maybe a week after their funeral that they said I couldn't stay over at Flight's house for much longer. But I felt safe there. Mom and Dad were gone... but Flight and her moms were so nice to me. It hurt—it hurt so darn much—but I felt like it was someplace I could survive."

"And that's when you disappeared." It wasn't a question; just a statement of fact. Kevin nodded.

"Yeah, it was the night before Social Services were coming down to pick me up. I dunno where they would have taken me—Umberlight, maybe, or somewhere up north. There weren't any families in Dienna who were willing to take me in, and there was no way I was gonna go live somewhere else and pretend like nothing ever happened." Kevin stopped. Doc Zed, as ingenious and tough as he was, could always be read like an open book. At that moment, Kevin could tell from his expression that the stallion was fighting back tears.

"But how did you get away?"

"It wasn't that hard," Kevin replied, expression unmoving. Although he knew the emotions he had felt at the time—terror, grief, anger—it all seemed so distant. "I just climbed out the window in the middle of the night and then took the back paths until I reached the edge of the city. And then I ran through the forest, off the path, as fast as I could go. I went south, so I could get to the smuggling ports at the tip of the Continent. It took me two days, but I eventually got to Minutiae."

Doc Zed jumped back in his seat. "Two days?! What about food? Water?"

"I didn't eat much, but I was able to find some edible plants. There were also a few streams, but again, I didn't drink much. I was pretty focused on getting away as fast as I could—I pretended like somepony was right on my tail the whole time."

"Aeneus above, kid, you're insane. You know that? Completely bonkers."

It was at this that Kevin finally cracked a smile. "I am, aren't I?"

"So lemme guess—you boarded a ship in Minutiae?"

"Yep, I found a mare willing to take me to Esprit. And there, I worked to earn a place to sleep."

"You worked?"

"Mostly in the shipyards, working with a bunch of ponies my age to move cargo. It kinda sucked, but it wasn't that bad. At least I wasn't working in the mines or anything."

Doc Zed whistled. "Kid, I never would have guessed—"

"Me neither... I don't know why I did it, either. It probably woulda been better just to go with Social Services and grow up normally and finish school. I started to realise that, too, when I was working on the island, so just a month or two ago I snuck aboard a ship from the Revan planet that was going to harvest stuff from the Frade planet."

"Why them?"

"I dunno, I wanted to see the system. Something better than that awful little island and the rest of this planet. It doesn't matter, though—only a day or two after they left the planet, they caught me. They were gonna take me back but they were on a tight schedule, so they decided to bring me back here on their return trip."

Doc Zed raised an eyebrow. "So is that who Gloss is? Someone from this ship?"

"No, he's from Umberlight, remember? I just met him on the path. No, I got off their ship when they accidentally brought this other ship aboard. While its captain was busy talking to the ponies on that ship, I booked it onto her ship."

"Who was this other ship's captain?"

"That's just the thing—I don't really know, to be honest. She was this orange pegasus filly with a magenta mane—looked like any other pony from a Bureau planet. But something about her was weird, I swear."

"Weird? In what way?"

Kevin scratched his head with a hoof. "I don't even know... she didn't recognise the alphabet or some words, her ship was like nothing I'd ever seen, and she seemed generally confused about a lot of what I was talking about. At first I thought she was from the Vergla planet, but she didn't seem like she had ever heard of the Bureau."

"Hadn't heard of the Bureau? You serious?"

"Yeah, I had to explain it to her and everything. Didn't even get her name, but she was going in this direction so it seemed to work out fine. I was planning on having her drop me off on one of the planets past this, I guess, but then we decided to stop here and we ended up crashing the ship somewhere near Dienna and she was gone when I woke up."

"What do you want from me, then? You said something about a favour?"

"Yeah. I probably won't be able to find her, wherever she is, but I want you to help me repair the ship. With or without that filly, I still wanna get off this planet."

Doc Zed blinked. "I dunno, Kevin... you're asking a lot—"

"Could we at least go and look at it?" Kevin asked, cutting him off. "Like, tonight? Before anypony sees it?"

Doc Zed sighed. "This is all so crazy... and yet you have me curious about this 'mystery ship'. And it's not like I was doing anything else tonight..."

Kevin grinned. "Thank you so much, Doc. You're fantastic, you know that?"

"Don't I ever." Doc Zed looked over at the door to the living room. "Guess we should go out there and tell this to your friend, hm?"

There was a creak outside the door, and the doorknob rotated. The door swung inwards.

"Don't worry, you ponies won't need to do that. I heard every word," Gloss said.