Jean Baptist Emmanuel Zorc, a billionaire industrialist, media tycoon, an avid collector of antiquities and rarities stepped purposefully if a little uneasy out of the comfort of his stretch limo and onto the wet tarmac.

This secondary runaway of the John F. Kennedy International Spaceport was out of order now. But he didn’t care. It was pouring cats and dogs outside but he didn’t care about the rain either. He owned the limo. He owned the runway. And he owned the JFK International Spaceport in its entirety. He could put up with a bit of rain. It was just rain, after all. Just water. And he couldn’t care less he was going to get his coat wet. He could have had another one in a snap of his fingers. He could have a hundred designer coats if he wanted to, right this instance. Only it wasn’t what he wanted at all, not anymore.

He marched across the runway, making a straight line towards a cluster of warehouses down the road. He was quickly getting drenched but then again he didn’t care, he wouldn’t deign to bother himself with something as trivial as an umbrella. He didn’t want no stupid umbrellas. What he wanted was inside the warehouse.

Whatever he wanted, he got. Usually. No matter the cost. The problem for him, these days, was not in the cost though but in being able to find what he wanted. There were certain things you couldn’t get your hands on even if you had all the money in the world. And he found himself wanting those things, more often than not these days. And, consequently, he had to become an expert in the area of finding them.

A self-made man, he was proud of who he was and where he came from. He built his empire all by himself and he had nobody else to thank for that. He didn’t believe in luck. He believed in hard work. He believed that simply having money, for the sake of having money, wasn’t a good goal. Working hard for your money, on the other hand, making yourself better in the process, was. Work, he believed, was the very key to happiness. Work was the billionaire’s dream, not what the non-billionaires made of it. A) Work hard. B) Work on something important. C) Something that was going to touch people’s lives. Dream big! Change the world around you for the better. Change yourself for the better in the process. Bigger, stronger, happier!

Being successful, according to Zorc, meant having achieved things, tangible, countable things. And the very process of achieving those things gave his life purpose. It wasn’t what you wanted but how you’d gotten it that constituted the purpose. The journey you had to take to get there. The journey was more important than the point of destination, he believed. And if you invested in that, you’d ultimately get what you wanted. And he was very particular about his investments. His money, his time, and even the amount of space each thought occupied in his head. To control everything that was under his control was his motto. And everything that was not, had no room in his head.

He never cut corners too, never cheated at anything. If he was doing something, he was doing it thoroughly, committing to it a hundred percent. He believed cheating would only cut short your journey. And then there would be no point. Because he wanted the full experience. He played his games fair and thereupon became a great player. Someone to be reckoned with, someone worth hundreds of billions of dollars at this point. He guessed he was doing it right if he amassed so much money, he was onto something. Only the problem was, he was running out of games to play now. He was running out of corners not to cut, out of journeys to take, and challenges not to cheat at.

He’d done it all. It seemed. There were no more mountains left to climb, no more peaks to conquer. Nothing excited him anymore, nothing quenched his thirst for hard work and adventure. Everything was easy. Too easy. And he longed for something unobtainable. And the saddest thing is he was now running out of purpose, and therefore out of happiness. And it didn’t feel great. It sucked that after everything he’d been through it came down to this. He was about to witness his own downfall. Though he was not going to submit to it easily.

He was growing desperate now, desperate to find something worth his while. For the longest time, he was looking for it and he couldn’t find it, thinking he ran himself into a corner, a dead-end. And he couldn’t make peace with that, couldn’t figure out why. And what would be the next level in his game, because it seemed he owned everything. Zorc Industries was the single most affluent conglomerate in the world, and if it wasn’t for antimonopoly laws, it would have been the only conglomerate. His success was coming at a bitter price to him now. But he was never one to give up on something easily.

The answer to his prayers came suddenly to him, and out of nowhere. The realization that whatever power he thought he had, the money and all, wasn’t really power. He was one of the most influential men on the planet, sure. But he was still a man.

That was what was stopping him, he realized. Forestalling him from going to the next level. For a mere man, he achieved everything. But if he wanted more, he needed to become something else.

Not being cognizant of this, he must have been searching for it all his life. No matter how successful he’d become, there was always something missing. He just didn’t know what it was before, couldn’t put his finger on it. Well, he’d found it now! And he was putting his finger on it. Finally, all the pieces were beginning to fall into place. His eyes were opened suddenly to what was missing. He could see it clearly now. And it was very much worth it.

Inside the warehouse waiting for him were the mangollores, the beastly alien creatures that were commonly referred to as the dog-faced. Mercenaries from space. Galactic outcast. They were the soldiers of fortune, the unscrupulous kind. Their big black eyes were permanently peeled, always on the lookout for the opportunity to cash in on something. Not that they particularly needed money for anything. They just loved the idea of collecting it, cherishing it, worshiping it, as if money was a form of religion. And here they were now simply because Zorc had offered them a ton.