A/N all rights go to the amazing elder who watches his successors like a creepy stalker.

Prologue

1999

Five

"Albert!" I shake my cepan over and over. "Wake up!" it doesn't seem to be working. He may have been the frail old man who may have kidnapped me from my loving family and also culprit of other heinous crimes. Still. It's not what I'm concerned about at this moment. He is the only person I have known and loved (a little? I'm not sure anymore), and he has been dying for the past few months. Today, he won't wake up, he's probably dead but I can't accept that fact. I just can't.

"I won't be a slacker anymore. Just please wake up. Alberrrrrrrrtttttt!"

His eye cracks open. YES! Success is sweet. I notice the way my cepan is looking at me and I don't feel so euphoric anymore. Albert doesn't have his usual side-grin on him, instead he has this weird sad smile on his face like he's done something he's going to regret. A lot.

"Cody," he uses my favourite name. The only one that's actually mine. "I going to die…" What? "I don't want to die with a bunch of regrets. Cody," he uses that name again. "I…" His jaw slackens and his body crumples on to the linen sheets. A line of red trails off the corner of his mouth.

"Noooooooooooo! Noooooooooo!" I yell. I grab Albert by the shoulders and shake him. Harder and harder. I can hear the drone of a ship/airplane, I don't know which it is. "ALBERRRRTTTTTTTTTTTT!" I know he is dead now, there is a hollow silence where his heartbeat used to be, an emptiness in his eyes where merriment and laughter used to dance, an absence of warmth in his usually warm, wrinkled hands. An alabaster –skinned baldie walks over and grabs me by the shoulders. I can feel the cold of the handcuffs slapped over my hands, the click that locks it, the foam cube I'm clutching with my name. The baldie pulls me into a ship. I swear I could see a tuft of feather near Albert's neck.

This was the introduction to mogadorian life for me. I was five. In that the number and the age. In that Cody, Albert's foster son. It isn't over. Not yet.