Vlex excitedly places his palms on the table.

VLEX: “Can I tell the story?”

Garren reaches for his hat at the other end of the table and puts it back on. He smiles warmly.

GARREN: “Be my guest.”

As the night progressed, Garren couldn’t help but feel a profound sadness lingering inside of the joy he felt seeing his closest friends after so many years. He knew, truthfully, that this would likely be one of the very few times they would ever come in contact again. The risk was too great- old enemies may still remain. One does for certain, even if he may not be aware of precisely what they had done. President Velliar Shraw of the Alliance still holds the same office he had all those thirty years ago when his adopted brother had vanished at the same moment an interstellar terrorist cell lost its enigmatic leader. Garren was the man that fired the shot that killed The Reaper of Worlds- Combinia Shraw.

The truth is, the tales of the young mercenaries battling against a greed-driven monster wielding planetary superweapons are too broad to tell. They linger in the pasts of everyone at the table like a spirit haunting a condemned home. Each of them were changed into what they are now by those days. Some, ultimately, did not make it to this table. There is a time and a place for these stories, but today is not that day. Today they forget, at least for a moment.

But, of course, these feelings were drowned out by the genuine happiness they all felt. It was as though they had never left one another at all. Conversations were picked up right where they left off so many decades ago, stories were traded, and eventually they were kicked out of the dive once the closing time came.