How Tartaro the Enforcer, nee Pedagerous the Seventh, Great and Mighty Lion Tamer and Strongman, Faced the Floods.

Pay attention, cause I’m not the type that says this kinda thing moren once. I fell in love with him when I saw a special about him on the Plasma. In the show, he was fifteen. I would have been eight at the time, so there’s no chance I coulda known him them. He lived in the salon exclusive and my mother didn’t let me perform in salons.

By my standards he was a giant, but you couldn’t tell that seein him surrounded by his family. In front of them, he looked short and little in the shoulders, kinda dwarfy. I was smaller than their family dog when I was eight. I mighta been smaller than the family dog now that I’m twenty-eight. They keep big dogs at the Snow Dome Salon.

Magnificent salon. Run entirely by Strongmen. Their animals are so tame, they just let them wander free. So you might be sittin watchin a juggler waitin for dinner to be brought to you and have a giraffe kissin your head. And they have this room called the Winter Garden, which is actually this big stretch of land just behind the salon where frozen water floats down from the sky. In the special, they tell you all about it, somethin about it being the only area in the sector not protected by the environmental dome. Nice salon.

In my somewhat biased opinion, the most impressive thing in that special is him. Fifteen years old, standing in the middle of the front yard, with a whip curled in his hand, dressed in an elegant business suit with a bright red tie to match the red mask over his face.

He was surrounded –just absolutely surrounded- by the red light of the spot and the pride of lions and then the dark emptiness of the black grass of the yard. He had the darkest hair and the darkest eyes I’d ever seen and he stared at the biggest lion. The lion with the thickest mane roaring above all the others, the one who looked like it would tear him into pieces.

Then he raised his hand, the one holding the curled whip, and that lion bowed and sank to the ground crawling on its belly. Then the little man sat down on the lion’s back, his head held high, his mouth stern, and he didn’t do a thing to acknowledge the wild applause of the audience. Not a damned thing.

That was Pedagerous the Seventh and that is why I’m in love with him.