A woman in a fancy dress decorated with pearls and seashells goes into the infirmary, and a few minutes later an older man in worn leather traveling clothes emerges. He doesn't pay much attention to who he sits next to at the bar, but asks for something new, and thanks her politely before taking a sip of the golden-brown concoction that appears.

Mordion finishes his drink in contemplative silence. He seems a little more relaxed than he was when he arrived, which mostly means that he no longer tenses every time the door opens or someone steps within five feet of him. 

A little girl a few tables over is staring at him. He meets her gaze for an instant, then splays out his hands, turning them over and looking at them as if bemused. With a snap of his fingers, there is a white flower in his palm. Glancing up at the girl again, he raises it to his lips and blows gently, making the petals flutter—except they are no longer petals, but the wings of a butterfly which flutters over to her.

She laughs, delighted, and he makes an expression like someone who used to know how to smile but is several decades out of practice. 

After that first magic trick, it's like a dam has been opened. More butterflies in every colour of the rainbow fly out of his sleeves to flap around the area before popping like soap bubbles. This attracts the attention of a couple more children; Mordion promptly pulls a handkerchief from behind the ear of a small boy and turns it into a white bird, which sits on the boy's head and sings. 

Raafi notices that something's going on when a butterfly flutters its way over to the bar, and turns to watch; it's always nice to see a magic show.

Raafi isn't the only one. Not every patron is so impressed, and there are still quite a few who don't even seem to have noticed there's a show happening in the corner, but the audience is growing all the time. 

Mordion borrows someone's drink, a full glass of clear bubbly liquid, and promptly turns it upside-down on the table without spilling a drop. Then he makes it vanish through the table and pulls it out from underneath to hand back to its owner. A few people start suggesting what he could do next, calling out tricks they've seen other magicians perform. 

Raafi takes this opportunity to get closer to the action, flickering to his chosen seat with a quiet word.

This little display of magic gets Mordion's attention for a moment, then he goes back to blowing a string of rainbow bubbles for a tiny girl with ginger pigtails. He's warming up to the crowd, starting to include a bit of patter along with the visual display. There are a couple of fumbles—he's slightly out of practice with this sort of thing—but he mostly manages to recover from them and make it look like he intended the result all along. 

"For my next trick," he says a few minutes later, "I need a volunteer to lend me a belt, or a scarf." No-one immediately rushes to produce such an item. 

Raafi produces a fluffy blue scarf from a pouch on his belt and tosses it over. (The pouch seems a little small to hold the scarf even if it was the only thing in it; it's a pretty squishy scarf, though, maybe it was just rolled up tight.)

"Many thanks, sir." 

He hands one end of the scarf to a child of indeterminate gender and has them pull it while he holds the other end. The scarf stretches and runs through his hands, and the fluff at his end starts coming out green, then yellow. By the time the child is most of the way across the room, they're holding the end of a fluffy rainbow about five times as long as the original.

Mordion collects it back in, bundles it up in his hands until it's completely hidden, and shakes out the original blue scarf, which he drops on the table. It comes to life and wiggles around so that one end can attempt to munch on his sleeve. Since it doesn't have any teeth, or indeed any visible body parts, this is ineffective. Instead, it coils its way up to wrap around his neck, then flows back down the other arm to roll itself up in his hand.

He bows, collects applause, waves off someone's offer to buy him a drink, and hands the neatly rolled bundle back to Raafi. 

"Thanks," he nods. "That was pretty good. Entertainer?"

"Thank you—for the compliment and the loan of your scarf. But, ah." His good mood abruptly vanishes. "This is merely a hobby." 

"Mm. Trouble at home?"

He laughs without humour. "You could call it that."

The crowd, having sensed that the show is over, have begun to disperse. 

Nod. "Looking for help?"

"Perhaps. Although giving it might be a little trickier than you imagine," he adds with a self-deprecating grin. 

"My current situation is...difficult to explain. I've explained it twice now, to different people, and I still don't entirely understand it myself." 

"I don't have anywhere I need to be." A private joke, maybe.

Mordion tips his head in something between a nod and a shrug. "Alright then." 

He folds himself into someone's vacated seat, back to the wall, before beginning to speak. 

"In my world, there are five incredibly powerful people known as the Reigners—so called because they rule the entire human race and hundreds of planets, although not all their subjects know it. Many years ago, I tried to overthrow them, so they exiled me to a distant corner of the galaxy, placed me under a ban that meant I could not directly oppose them, and put me in stasis." 

"Sounds unpleasant."

"That's far too generous a term for it." 

He stares unseeing into the distance, remembering. "In the past, the way to get around the Reigners' ban was to breed a race of men and women who were not under the ban and could go against the Reigners. This...failed, disastrously, twice. The first time, the Reigners eliminated the entire race. The second time, there were too many to kill, so they killed the best and put me in stass so that I was not there to guide the rest. Their descendants still survive, on a planet called Earth, which is where I found myself waking from stass a few months ago." 

"Doesn't sound like a hopeless starting point."

"If only that were the end of my troubles," Mordion replies, with a wry smile. 

"I awoke to find a girl—an Earth native, with Reigner blood like me—nearby. I convinced her to lend her blood along with mine to the creation of a person who would be able to defeat the Reigners on my behalf, which was possible because we were within a paratypical field of unusual strength."

He pauses. "The field...created a child. His name is Hume. I've been looking after him; I didn't intend to, but anything else...didn't feel right." 

"Ah."

"Hume can't leave the area of the paratypical field, which contains—or possibly is contained by—a forest. Without the field to sustain him, he'd die." At least, he's pretty sure that's what would happen. He hasn't tested it, for obvious reasons. 

"I can leave, but I've only done so once in the years I've been looking after Hume. I don't want to risk leaving him for very long. Even if I did, I have no way of getting off-planet, let alone doing so without alerting the Reigners. The Reigners themselves are presumably still back on Homeworld. They have no reason to leave, and less reason to come to Earth in particular." 

Well that's distressing.

"That sounds like something I should be able to help with. At least enough to give you some more options."

"Options," he repeats.

"I don't think I've had options in a very long time."