4 Father Deprivation is Serious Business (I)

"-. 11 November, 1988 .-"

The sky was blue. The mountains were covered in snow even though the Tibetan Plateau was green despite November. The pirates' ship had shattered-but-not-really into some mirror dimension. And the man known to Earth as Jason Quill thought longingly to the years of his youth, when he hadn't gotten around to being banished on false charges and personal responsibility only meant catching flowers tossed by his adoring crowd.

It wasn't because some local galactic scum tried to abduct his flesh and blood. Or how the flesh and blood in question had been tripping balls in and out of implausible cosmic power in the time leading up to it. He wasn't even shocked with himself anymore for letting his daughter Last Wish him into letting his grandson join in on her last DMT trip. That actually came with the fewest misgivings, honestly, since his only real objection was that his grandson was too young. Not that there was anything resembling a prescription age when it came to doping your way into a cosmic psycho-trip.

But then Peter healed Meredith, which was a miracle on a primitive world so far behind even the most outdated medical technology in the wider universe. Unfortunately, the boy immediately followed up by going off to get himself kidnapped by a bunch of lowlifes that almost took or killed him. Along with everything else Jason Quill had on this world to call his own. That Peter turned things around in the end despite being knowingly cooperative up to then was, frankly, less of a shock than the way he did it. One didn't just hijack a hardcoded Yaka arrow from a Centaurian controller.

The post-battle clean-up and strip-searching the salvaged ship was a literal relief compared to everything leading up to it. Even when accounting for all the dead corpses he'd had to loot and haul by hand all over the place.

So of course something would upend even that.

Honestly, the only surprise at that point was that it wasn't Peter who did it.

No, it was a sorcerer. A very high-placed sorcerer. The Sorcerer in Chief of this dimension apparently. Allegedly. Or he used to be, prior to handing off the title to some contender/teacher/student of his some six centuries prior. All so he could dedicate his life to 'matters intrinsic to this reality that might reprise the events which undid countless times past if not better managed.' It was a mind twister if ever there was one. Which unfortunately proved the old man's alleged credentials almost as much as his ability to casually open portals across time and space.

Because of course the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme would be granted to some geriatric fossil that grew up in a pre-spaceflight civilization on a backwater dustball. Not that Jason Quill had even known of such a position before today. But he wasn't unaware of mystics and had even been acquainted with one before his banishment. The royal wizard, so to speak. Who was also the high priest of K'ythri and Sharra. But that man didn't precisely exhibit the ability to open portals across time and space big enough to drive whole spaceships through. Not without being completely wiped immediately afterwards.

But even the obvious power of the old man before him wasn't the first thing on J'son's mind.

No. What really mattered was history. Personal history. And not the wizard's personal history but theirs.

"You got Mer into psychedelics?" Jason Quill wasn't sure if he should be astounded or appalled.

"Yes."

… That simple answer had no business at all being spoken in such a kindly old man voice! "You. Personally. Went and got my daughter hooked on psychedelics."

"'Hooked' implies addiction," the old man of the mountain said from his cushion, puffing at his pipe. "Soul Wine is no more addictive than cannabis is."

Jason bristled. "Cannab – why you – you think she didn't listen to you on that too? Do you have any idea how many times she got in trouble with the police!? If not for you turning her into the stereotypical hippie-"

"She would have had no chance at all to discover the cure to her illness." Yao said mildly, interrupting him. "Not that it availed her ultimately, but without my intervention the odds would have been so low as to not matter all."

A bomb went off in his head. His thoughts scattered every which way, like shrapnel. "… What?"

"The Sacred Plant is the cure for cancer as well as any number of other illnesses mild and severe," Yao said, confirming that he hadn't hallucinated what he'd just heard. "And you give me too much credit. Soul Wine aside, even without my direct involvement Meredith Quill would have turned out exactly the same as she otherwise is."

The words felt like a slap over his face. Not just because of learning he'd been in possession of the cure for his daughter all this time, however illegally. But also because it completely destroyed his burgeoning hope that maybe he wasn't wholly responsible for what a disaster of a woman Mer had grown up into. The shame at even wishing for such an excuse, not to mention so quickly latching onto it, hit him even harder.

But of anger there was plenty as well. "And you couldn't have actually said so?" he finally bit out.

"I could have."

He did not hurl the tea table against the wall.

Yao the Ancient One beheld him calmly.

The man closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath to try and think of what may not have been said via that non-answer. When he didn't get anywhere, he reminded himself that he was here under the rules of hospitality. He also did his best to remind himself that the old man had been the one to inflict the least stress on him over the course of his life. Directly at least.

It took some time and some doing, but he succeeded in mastering himself.

The Sorcerer nodded sedately at the end of it, as if had been waiting for just that development.

Alright. Alright then. "What is your interest in my daughter?"

"Entirely incidental to my interest in her son."

He would not shoot the head off the only new acquaintance that had not done ill to him and his over the past 24 hours. "And what. Is your interest. In my grandson?"

"That life, the universe and everything has been undone. Shifted back two decades and six hundred years because Peter Jason Quill lived and died as the biggest waste of life in the universe."

Audacity, stupefied outrage, shock and indignation exploded in him so violently that only the dust of dull upset was left.

"Among a number of other things," said the old man. "But those are a different matter."

"That was ten hundred steps too far, Sorcerer." Jason Quill did not jump across the tea table to strangle the other man for the insult. "Tell me why I shouldn't take me and mine and just leave right now."

"That is why we are here. Alone." Yao said, still entirely serene even then. "That I needn't immediately expend whatever mental and physical resources will otherwise be stressed. By parties lacking a certain regard for protocol, décor and hospitality that seldom comes outside of regal upbringing and poise."

The underhanded rebuke hit home like a gun stock to the face. The realisation that he was behaving completely lacking in any sort of regal grace hit him even harder.

Jason Quill clenched his fists over his knees and thinned his lips. He considered the Sorcerer's actions since he revealed himself to them that morning. How he opened the portal wide enough to pilot the ship through from the very start. Then proposed the solution of shunting it into an adjacent dimension to prevent finding or pursuit, however unlikely after the locator had been removed. But the Sorcerer did not take unilateral action. He instead waited to be given permission before he moved the ship to the mirror dimension. Even afterwards, for all that he immediately led them to individual lodgings on account of all but one of them being too tired, weak or out of sorts for a long discussion – and time differential between the USA and Tibet – the wizard held him to a different standard of respect and accommodation. The Ancient One even anticipated his desire to speak with him alone and subtly signalled his immediate availability without the others catching wind of it. Even seemed to want a private meeting with him before anything else. Or anyone else. Peter especially, for all that the kid was completely bewildered and crashed to sleep almost immediately after Jason put him to bed. Despite increasingly confused and nonsensical protests at being treated like a child and what have you.

Décor. Protocol. Hospitality. Despite decades' worth of lessons in the same, Jason hadn't bothered to reciprocate any but the barest minimum of it. Faux pas did not even begin to cover it for one who was ostensibly a galactic imperial prince.

It was times like this that still made him wish he hadn't crash-landed here.

He really had gone native hadn't he?

"Very well." But he would not apologise. Whatever grand designs the Sorcerer was about to share, they did and would not change the fact that at some point he interfered in his daughter's life and then used her. Used her for something to do with his grandson whom he'd just insulted to high hell. "Very well, then. Speak."

"We can speak and we can see." The Ancient One motioned for a tea set to float over to the table from an adjacent room. The steam from four cups carried with it a very familiar mix of scents.

J'son of Spartax grimaced at the maoi brew and dimethyltryptamine.

"I see you are no stranger to Soul Wine yourself. Familiarity breeds contempt?"

What, he didn't have some way to be omniscient about that like everything else? "The last five times it didn't do anything for me. Just made me dream about what my life would have been like if I'd been left with a fixable wreck after my crash-landing." Which was going back to Spartax and becoming an asshole.

The one didn't always cause the latter either. And Peter was always his son instead of grandson in those trips for some reason. There must have been dozens if not hundreds of versions he remembered, all of them going more or less the same way.

The one exception was the dream world where he didn't have a fixable wreck and life went more or less like this one, save for Mer's psychedelic sprees. Peter was successfully abducted and Jason Quill spent the next 20-some years watching the stars for his return at night. That one also involved barely driving away from being swallowed by a tidal wave of alien matter at some later point, only to spontaneously turn to dust some three or four years later.

Honesty, the only reason he kept using the DMT after the fourth time was because he'd promised Mer in the beginning to go on the full set of twelve trips. Which was supposedly the recommended number for the full benefits to your self-awareness and psychology according to some South American shamans or other. Or so Mer had pestered him into accepting. He was far too indulgent with her in those days. Ironically, if the DMT did anything good, it was that it showed him what he was doing wrong as a father.

He always did everything wrong as a father in those nightmares. He could safely say there were few in the universe that even came close to the kind of experience he had in bad parenting now.

"One of the most comforting and limiting things in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents," Yao told him, pulling him out of his melancholy. "Sometimes, through luck, folly or contemplation, one may piece together all this dissociated knowledge and open himself up the full vista of reality, and of his position in the Cosmic Day. Some become more of themselves. Some go mad from the revelation. Some rise above their state. Others flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age. But all achieve full accounting of themselves, for worse or better. What is unfortunate is that the overwhelming majority of those so enlightened choose not to follow through on The Path." The old man picked up one of the steaming cups and held it out, gaze intense. "And others do not follow up."

Up? Up where?

… Or did he mean up on?

"Now you begin to understand me." Yao picked up the other cup and brought it up to his lips, waiting and not wavering in his gaze on him even a moment. "This once, however, it will be another's path that we will be following up on. You will know well what questions will buy you my fullest answers then."

After a moment's hesitation, J'son of Spartax accepted and drank full the cup of maoi.

And after three quarters of an hour spent watching the Ancient One prepare the Soul Wine in wordless silence, they imbibed that brew also and went on a trip like and unlike all of those before.

A trip of bad living, worse dying, and one bad turn leading to another in a long chain of misadventures that he watched in full from two steps right behind the main actor.