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."

"Everyone should have options."

"How very egalitarian of you." Mordion doesn't sound like he disapproves. "That's not a sentiment one hears expressed very often around the Reigners."