I swear that shipping company I worked for, Syldran Spaceways, was in cahoots with the H'Nzha pirates. Too many new contracts like myself and the old paws didn't seem to even care about the shockingly bad condition of our ship.

I was an engineer third class aboard the Pandarian freighter, Gurotney Pillak. We had the worst jobs on the ship: scrubbing plasma injectors, climbing in and out of bulkheads repairing broken conduits, getting our fur caked in grease and grime, doing all the dangerous but neccessary EVAs to keep our particle deflector shields operational, patching up leaky power cells, getting our tails frazzled by loose power lines... all the unglamorous, dangerous and essential tasks that keep an old rustbucket spaceworthy long enough for us to get paid.

We had to deliver a geostationary space tether assembly from Vostellion Prime to Hyperion VII. It was too large to fit through any of the gateways accessing their world and had to be delivered pre-assembled so we got the delivery job. Anyway, we were on the final approach to Hyperion VII when we were boarded by H'Nzha pirates. Knowing that they'd kill or enslave the crew of our ship, I jumped into an escape pod and bailed out.

A week later my pod landed way out in the backwoods of Hyperion VII. Survival wasn't a problem; there was plenty of prey to catch. But the only company I had were the huge bloodsucking ticks that burrowed under my fur. No. Fun. At. All. On top of that they tasted disgusting. Eventually I stumbled across a village where there was an off-worlder. A Shallen, no less. You didn't see many of them in this arm of the galaxy.

So the Shallen tells me about it's ship. And would I like to see it? Well, of course I would! That would be my ticket off this backwater of a planet back to my home world. Except the Shallen had forgotten to tell me that her ship was buried 50 Kelyks underground and was more of a mausoleum than a ship. It was never going to go anywhere in its present condition.

Still, I wasn't in that great a hurry to get back to Pandaria. The company policy was to resist and fight off any attempted attacks and space piracy even if it was a suicidal lost cause. The moment I set foot on Pandaria I'd be charged with abandoning ship and breach of contract. I didn't have any evidence to prove any collusion between Syldran Spaceways and the H'Nzha pirates so the best I could hope for would be a couple of years in the labour camps on one of our outer planets and then I'd be back on my way. Not excessively harsh but not much to look forward to either.

Meanwhile I was out in this tiny little Twillityn village on Hyperion VII with Alazarin, a Shallen suffering from some sort of post-traumatic shock and taking refuge in her fantasies and a local Twillityn, DeForest, for company while I cleaned myself up and worked out what I'd do next.

As it happened, I ended up joining the village orchestra with DeForest, Alazarin and the other villagers. Well they called it an orchestra although it wasn't like any orchestra I'd ever known. The music was fairly crude and simplistic and you'd never know who'd be playing from one day to the next. Some days it felt as if half the village turned out to play while other days it was little more than myself, DeForest, Alazarin and a few random stragglers. The best part was that not only were we welcomed wherever we went to perform but we were paid! That solved my immediate survival problems. My life had taken an unexpected turn at Hyperion VII and for the first time in a long time I was really enjoying myself. Things were looking up!