There are moments that put a person in context. You learn something new about them and suddenly their quirks make perfect sense. An irrational fear's origin is revealed and you realize that it is harshly rational after all. An eccentric behavior turns out to be an old habit that will die hard. A chip on the shoulder turns out to be the remains of an outdated survival mechanism.

Under normal circumstances, these moments leave you with a sense of clarity. You may wonder why you didn't see it sooner. It's so obvious in retrospect.

But Jules has left normal circumstances far, far behind. We've found the roots of their strange behavior, and we have more questions than ever before, and no way of answering them.

Let me start at the beginning.

The stop at Redstart should have been uneventful. It's a backwater town on a backwater planet, human-dominated and far outside the interests of the Bloodied Hand, the Orange Sector, Alexander Morgan, and the universe in general. With no police force to speak of, it's smuggler territory through and through. I'm sure Jules has stopped at a thousand such places over the years with no trouble. Nobody had a clue it would be so different this time.

It all started with the dog. Jules and I were all sitting out on the porch when it went by. A flash of white tail trailing along beside a group of rough-looking folk. Everyone on Rekham was rough-looking--nothing notable there--but something caught Jules's eye.

They whistled a high twee-tweet. The dog froze and stared towards the sound. Several of the rough-looking folk noticed the whistle as well--not that Jules noticed. All of their attention was on the dog. They whistled again and moments later, the dog threw himself into their arms.

Jules laughed as the dog squirmed in their embrace. The poor mutt seemed desperate to occupy the exact same physical space as them. "Hello, my friend," Jules cooed. "It has been quite some time, no?"

"Uh, cap'n?" I cut in. "I know you have all kinds of connections, but how do you know a dog on Rekham, of all the planets in the universe?"

"I haven't the faintest idea how he came to be on Rekham, but this is Acer. He's my dog," Jules explained.

"So do you also know his dangerous-looking friends whose attention you've attracted?"

Jules looked up, seeming to notice the dog's human companions for the first time. They were approaching the porch at a pace that made me size them up for a fight. There were four of them and four of us, but they all looked like fighters and we had one pacifist and one Alec.

Taking point on their side was a big-haired woman with a distinctive scar across the bridge of her nose. She was staring at Jules with an expression that bordered on pain.

Jules glanced up at her, then back to the dog. "Yes, I know them," they said quietly. "I suppose it's time you met my old crew."

Before I could say a word in response, the lead woman called out "Julian?"

All I could do was stare at Jules and their dog. "Captain, with all due respect, what in the hell is happening?"

By now, the woman and her three friends had reached us. The woman leaned over the porch railing while the others hung back, all of them wearing matching expressions of utter confusion. I suppose I must've fit right in.

"I can explain," Jules said, "But not here."

Ten minutes of agonizing waiting later, the dog was left behind at the house while new and old crews alike met in the back room of the nearby bar. It was a space typically reserved for private parties, but a rather large sum of money convinced the barkeeper to rent it out on short notice.

"I suppose you all have questions," Jules said. They were only drinking water, but they threw it back like a shot and shook their head vigorously as they put the glass down. "I'll start with introductions. These are Marie, Alec, and Frances--the crew of the Adelaide. And these--" they said, gesturing to the rough strangers. "Are the crew of the Widowmaker. Former crew, I suppose. There wasn't much left of the old girl when I last saw her."

The woman in charge nodded. "We've got a new ship now." She turned to me, Frances, and Alec. "Ava Jackson, captain of the Hawkmoth. Previously first mate of the Widowmaker. These chucklefucks are Eden, Jay, and Jasper. Now, if we're done with the pleasantries--"

Her voice had taken on a hard edge, yet she stopped speaking instantly when Jules held up a hand.

"I'd also like to know what's going on," I snapped. That I wasn't silenced by a single gesture from my captain seemed to shock and offend Ava.

"I'll second that," Frances growled. "Wasn't Hawkmoth the ship that screwed up my deal with Morgan?"

"Indeed," Jules said. "And I intend to negotiate some form of compensation for that incident. The fuel cells are easily paid for, but several of the other items taken were irreplaceable, including the uranium glass."

"Uranium glass?" Ava repeated. "You're shitting me. You mean that actually was you?"

"Indeed it was."

"Why didn't you just show yourself when we boarded, then?" Ava half-shouted. "You--not only would we have stopped robbing you, we--"

"I had no way of knowing it was truly you," Jules said calmly. "I assumed the Hawkmoth belonged to impostors, or admirers, or something of the sort."

"We already sold the glass," Ava said, sounding oddly defeated.

"We will work something out," Jules assured her.

"Is anyone gonna tell anyone what the fuck is going on?" Frances said.

Jules straightened in their chair and sighed. "Yes, yes, I'll tell the whole story." They addressed the Hawkmoth's crew first. "This first part, you already know. But we must all arrive on the same page before we may continue the script." Then they turned back to us and began. "Back in the day, I was something of a swashbuckler. A rather famous one, in fact. The captain of the Widowmaker."

"You're Julian Hellstrand" Frances said, her tone somehow both flat and incredulous.

I felt my hackles rise as it sank in that the strangers across the table were some of the most infamous pirates this side of the galaxy. And that the non-stranger right next to me had once been the same. I wondered what these people were even doing in such a small-time town.

"I was," Jules said. "Moving on, two years ago, the Widowmaker was badly damaged ina skirmish with some fleet ships in the Gyaneb system. I attempted an emergency landing on Akava, only to have it turn into a crash landing. I survived--clearly--but regained consciousness alone in an empty room. It was there that--well. Here's how it went."

And here, to the best of my recollection, is the story Jules told that night.

They awoke in an empty room with walls of gleaming silver--two way mirrors all around, they soon realized. They had a number of injuries from the crash--all of which had been cleaned and bandaged. They must have been given a painkiller as well. Nothing hurt. Their first thought was of their crew--had anyone else survived the crash? Were they being held somewhere nearby?

Jules paced the boundaries of the room, shooting glares through the glass--at their own reflection from their point of view--in an attempt to intimidate anyone who they might happen to lock eyes with. A vain attempt that showed just how little they knew about their captors at the time.

That would change.

Minutes later, having circled the room a dozen times without finding an escape, they started throwing their shoulder against the walls, looking for weak spots. The walls rattled, but did not give way, until finally a portico opened where previously there had only been blank, mirrored wall.

Through the opening stepped a creature beyond imagining. Jules was well-traveled, more so than most, but even they had never seen a thing like this. They seemed to be viewing it from multiple, shifting perspectives at once, body parts crossing over and through one another without any apparent pattern. The overall body plan didn't make sense, or rather it simply didn't exist. There was no symmetry, no branching, no fractals. The akavans spat in the face of basic biology and divorced form from function entirely. How it underwent any of the ordinary biological processes with a body like that was a complete mystery to Jules. Most life on inhabited planets evolves in sensible ways by Terran standards, but Akava was truly alien.

At that point, Jules was sedated by means unknown to them. When they awoke, they were shirtless, with a new bandage running from their clavicle to their navel. They ripped it off to find a newly closed incision that looked uncannily like an autopsy scar. The sight scared them half to death. They screamed, only to have their scream echoed by two others in the room with them.

Their new cellmates were a pair of fellow humans; a professor by the name of Dr. Malloy and a graduate student of his--Flora. They had come to study microbial life on Akava. Like most of the scientific community, they had dismissed rumors of intelligent life on the planet as utter nonsense. According to them, there was no way Akava should have been able to sustain any but the most basic of life forms. The akavans were clearly not ordinary life forms. As far as the professor could tell, they did not meet the definition for life as we know it. They were instead intelligent non-life. How they had come to be, he could not fathom.

Jules was not quite on their best behavior. They swore, spat, paced, and growled. They enumerated the acts of violence they planned to inflict upon their captors (with some creative interpretation of their anatomy). They acted every inch the pirate king and introduced themselves by their full name, the title of captain, and the name of their ship. Their cellmates were suitably terrified.

Over the next few days, or maybe hours or weeks or months--the passage of time was a tricky thing to keep track of in their windowless cell on an alien planet--the three of them were taken from and returned to the cell one by one. First Dr. Malloy, then Flora, then Jules. Each returned with a new incision at the nape of their neck, where any remaining hair (Dr. Malloy had already balded years ago) had been shaven away.

From there on out, things became difficult to describe. The three of them learned abruptly that the akavans communicated through telepathy. Whatever had happened to them in surgery allowed them to do the same, with each other and with the akavans. This type of communication had less to do with words and more to do with basal thoughts and feelings, the vague and nuanced impressions of the mind unsullied by language.

Reality began to slip. Jules felt as if their very mind were being pulled apart and rearranged, with things added and removed as the akavans saw fit. It was a kind of psychic surgery, a deep influence facilitated by the same device or process that allowed communication. Jules lost many of their more aggressive behaviors and violent urges during this time, much to the relief of their cellmates.

However, it was a deeply unpleasant process. Throughout, Jules had episodes of a horrible sort of clarity where they were all to aware of what it means to live in a human body; to be housed in a fragile collection of cells and their effluvia constantly undergoing processes over which the conscious mind has no awareness or control. To be a thinking being whose only way of interacting with the world is a shambling mass of meat which could, at any time, be destroyed. The psychological changes were underscored by physical ones as the stress made Jules's hair fade from brown to its present gray.

For a time they felt they had lost something of themselves, but soon they realized that for every loss, there was an even greater gain. The akavans had an intelligence perhaps not beyond, but certainly vastly different from that of humans, and their work gave Jules and their fellow captives a fragment of that intelligence. A certain wisdom, too, was gained.

The professor and his student underwent personality changes as well. Dr. Malloy's impatience, which made him somewhat infamous among his students, disappeared. Flora's nervousness and timid nature vanished as well--startling, since she'd had a rather severe anxiety disorder before being captured.

Eventually, the three of them were taken out of the cell and made to live among the akavans. As far as they could tell, this was not a natural population of these creatures, but a strictly controlled test environment populated by scientists or those who had volunteered to participate in some kind of study. There were a handful of other test subjects from other species, some of which Jules had never seen before. Even without translators or a shared verbal language, communication with them was no problem. All of them had the same telepathic capabilities.

They were all given jobs to do within the community, but it was all very strange. The only artificial structures on the planet had been built for the benefit of the non-akavan test subjects. The natives apparently had no use for houses or infrastructure of any kind. The jobs the test subjects performed also seemed to be only for their own benefit.

They lived and worked under strict yet benevolent observation at all hours of the day until quite suddenly, every test subject was loaded up into a shuttle and launched away, each to a different planet. None were ever sure why. Maybe the experiment had ended, or maybe this was part of it, or maybe there had been some emergency that forced them to evacuate the planet. They would never find out.

All in all, it had been around one standard Terran year since Jules's captivity began. They had never been quite the same--hence the change in name, personal pronouns, and career.

And ever since, all test subjects were able to keep in touch telepathically, even across solar systems.

Ava was the first to speak. "I can't believe the most feared pirate this side of Andromeda got the fucking Ludovico treatment from aliens." The Hawkmoth crew nodded agreements. "So what, you're some kind of zen-ass pacifist now?"

"I've lost the old thirst for blood, yes," Jules admitted. "But I haven't quite gone straight. My current enterprise is smuggling."

"Psh, big deal, you've been smuggling since you could walk. You don't even drink anymore!" Ava gave an exasperated gesture towards Jules's glass of water. "Julian, we thought you fucking died, and then you show up just to get your stupid-ass dog, and in the end it's like... like you're not even the same person! Like you did die! Do you have any idea how fucked up that is?"

"I'm well aware. And it's Jules now, if you don't mind. Actually, even if you do mind."

"Hey, did the akavans make you do that thing where you use fifty words instead of one?" Frances interjected. She had slumped over about a quarter of the way through the story, head in her hands, but she glanced up solely to make this comment.

"That's not new," Ava shot back. "It's just that less of the words are dirty now."

After a while, the lower-ranking crew members on either side drank themselves into a stupor and staggered off to their respective lodging facilities. At the end of the night, only Jules, Ava, and myself remained.

"Now that we've got a bit more privacy," Ava said slowly, leaning in towards Jules. "Does Sarah know? About any of this?"

Jules inhaled through gritted teeth.

"Oh, god. Please tell me she at least knows you're alive.

"Ah, no," Jules said sheepishly. "She does not."

Ava sputtered for a moment. "Fucking typical! Everything about you changes, but you're still shit when it comes to your wife."

"Wh--You're married and you just ghosted your wife?" I said.

"Fuuuucking typical," Ava repeated. "Anyway, this is your big chance, cap'n. We're actually in town to see her right now. See, the crew's been making sure she's taken care of for you."

"Sarah lives here now? Why here of all places?" Jules asked.

"'Cause it's cheap and helps her lay low," Ava explained. "She doesn't have the benefit of your income anymore--though like I said, we've been helping her out for you--and running around with your surname attached isn't a great idea in most parts of the galaxy. Anyway, I figure you ending up here is the universe's way of yelling at you to go see your woman."

"I... I do intend to. Of course I will. I have to," Jules said. "The trouble is, as you said, I am a completely different person now. I can't even imagine how she'll react."

Ava shrugged. "Hell, she'll probably like it. She was definitely into the whole 'dangerous man' thing in theory, but you know... A milder temper, a safer job, weird alien powers apparently... She'll be way into all that."

Shortly after that, the bar was trying to close, so we said our farewells. Jules and I didn't talk much on our way back to the house, and once there, I was more interested in collapsing in bed than trying to get anything else out of them. I was out the second I hit the mattress.

In the morning, I awoke to a warm, wet sensation and found Jules's dog licking my face. It was deeply unpleasant.

Acer is actually the first dog I've seen in person. I've seen pictures and videos, but they're not common pets on Fakir. Some of the videos involved face-licking, but I'd never imagined it would be so gross. The people in the videos are usually laughing.

Dogs are supposed to be able to understand and follow human commands. "Don't do that," I told Acer. But the very next second, he was going for my face again. I had to physically hold him back. "Stop," I said, getting annoyed.

Frances appeared in the doorway. "Acer, off," she snapped. The dog immediately set his paws back on the floor. "Why don't you join us for breakfast? Jules went out. Wouldn't say where to." Her voice was a little hoarse, and I suspected that last night's drinking had taken its toll.

At the table, I found Alec huddled in his seat with his head in his hands, a glass of orange juice at the ready. "Everything makes so much sense," he said in an almost reverent half-whisper. His hangover was clearly hellacious, but his mind was preoccupied. "It all makes so much sense now."

"Quiet down," said Frances, who was equally hungover and far less distracted from the fact.

I joined them at the table. "But it really does explain everything," I protested. "Like how Jules and Flora can communicate telepathically across ridiculous distances."

"Why they're so against violence they won't even put weapons on the ship," Alec added.

"Why the Orange Sector was investigating them," I said, snapping my fingers as I thought of it. "I'd bet anything it has something to do with this."

"You may be right there," Frances said. "After shit went south for me on Demali, Flora told me a little about what Orange Sector might've been after. She said Jules was a victim of involuntary human experimentation and that's probably why they were a person of interest. I bet this is what she was talking about."

"That's why you were willing to come back!" I exclaimed.

"Don't shout," Frances groaned. "But yeah. Figured that was a good enough story. Figured Jules had a right to avoid being captive again. Came back."

"You guys ever notice how Jules doesn't have any mirrors in their quarters?" Alec asked. "I always thought it was, like, a gender thing, like body image or something, but it's totally 'cause of all the mirrors in their cell, right?"

Frances sighed. "Okay, but how do we even know any of this is true? I mean, the Widowmaker part obviously is , but the rest of it? What if there's no akavans and Jules is just regular crazy? I mean, we all know they're pretty out there."

"I'm sure Jules is some kinds of crazy," I agreed. "But there's so much about them that can't be explained except by this. Like the Orange Sector escape. You were there. Jules made long distance contact with Flora by some means we couldn't see. How would you explain that if not for the whole telepathic communication bit?"

Frances shut her eyes tight against the sunlight filtering in through the window. "Maybe it's Flora who's doing all the work there. I dunno. It all just sounds crazy."

"The universe is a crazy place," I pointed out. "But I'll give you this: maybe there's no akavans. It's entirely possible that some other species grabbed Jules and did some wacky experiments and the trauma of it all scrambled their memories so they think that some bizarre, logic-defying, alive-but-not-alive thing got at them. But something definitely happened to them after that crash."

"Ask to see the scar," Frances suggested.

"Pardon?"

"Jules said they've got some bigass autopsy scar. See if it's real. If there's really a scar, something really happened. If not, then we know at least part of that story was a lie. You're closest to them. They'll show you if you ask."

I considered it a moment. "I'll ask," I decided. "But if they refuse, I'm not digging any deeper. I'm not about to spy on our captain in the shower or anything."

Frances nodded. "So. Is anybody else a little concerned by the fact that we're working with Julian fucking Hellstrand?" She asked. "'Cause whatever their little brush with the supernatural was about, the pirate king part was definitely real and Jules is an actual intergalactic outlaw. In real life, for real."

"They've obviously changed," Alec said. "I don't think we have anything to worry about. Unless they're a really, really good actor, and also pulling some weird gambit with their old crew."

"I'm not saying we're in danger directly from Jules or anything," Frances said. "Whatever they did in the past, I buy that they're a genuine do-no-harm hippie now. But they're still a wanted criminal, and now that we're aware of that, we could get into serious legal trouble for working with them. I mean, getting caught with the things we smuggle could already get us jail time, but this could make sure we never see the light of day again, you know?"

We were silent for a moment.

"I'm pretty ride or die for El Capitan at this point," Alec said. "And I mean, it's not like there's proof that we know who they are."

"Polygraphs are pretty reliable these days," Frances pointed out. "How good a liar are you, exactly?"

Alec's gaze dropped a bit, but his voice carried some determination as he said, "Ride or die, man. Ride or die."

"And I'm with the captain, consequences be damned," I said, perhaps a bit too forcefully.

"We know. Down, girl," Frances said. "Pretty sure we could find out Jules is--okay, I can't actually think of a scenario more extreme than finding out they were an infamous pirate who got kidnapped and brainfucked by aliens, but the point is, you'd follow Jules through hell and high water no matter what you found out about them. Not that it's good for you."

"And what about you?" I asked.

"Don't worry your pretty little first mate head off about it," Frances said. "I got nowhere better to be, and at least I finally know what the fuck is going on. Sort of. So I'm still here. I'll be keeping an eye on things and if a big enough shark comes after us, I'm gone. But that's nothing new."

We went our separate ways for the day--mostly back to bed. In the late afternoon, I was fixing myself something to eat when Jules came through the front door with their shirt balled up in one hand. On their bare torso was a long, pale, I-shaped scar from collarbone to navel. Just as advertised. One question answered, yet I had more questions than ever.

"What happened to your shirt?" I asked

"It's been ripped," Jules replied.

"I can see that," I said slowly. At moments like that, I'm never entirely sure whether Jules is being a smartass or just genuinely thought that was how they were supposed to answer. "What I'd like to know is what ripped it, cap'n."

"Sarah," they said. I waited in silence for them to continue. They didn't, and I decided not to probe. There were about two ways Jules could have torn their clothing while visiting their wife. Both were deeply personal, and I don't really want to know if my captain likes it rough.

"I'm here if you need to talk," I said with a shrug. I returned my attention to the kitchen.

Things have been peaceful since then, at least externally. Which is nice, because it gives us all space to freak the hell out about what we've just learned.

I mean, holy shit, Jules has killed people. Exactly how many ranges from less than a dozen to over a hundred depending on who you ask, and I'm not about to--

It's less than a dozen.

Oh my god. You've known this whole time.

Well, yeah. With the way Jules and I met, they pretty much had to tell me. It had just happened, and I wasn't about to work with them without knowing where they'd just come from.

I can't believe it never occurred to me that you would already know this.

Can we turn the recorder off for this conversation?

We're actually having a conversation? God, yeah, give me a second. Signing off.