Marius et l'ogre

‍ ‍Remy was the only one of Marius Rocher's three children to follow him into music. Growing up in Marseille, he spent his childhood listening to his father's cello, which Marius played in the orchestra of the Grand Théâtre du Lacydon, one of the oldest opera houses in the country. Marius gave lessons to Remy and other eager students from the neighborhood, so it seemed things were never quiet for long in the Rocher home. Although he never took up the cello himself, Remy learned the piano and the viola and, at eight years old, was accepted into a classical music conservatory. He thrived there, much to the delight of his father.
Just a year after his admission, Remy's class was offered a special treat: to attend the générale of La Belle au bois dormant, with Marius playing in the orchestra. As the curtain fell on the first act, Remy slipped away from his classmates to catch a glimpse of his father in the orchestra pit, and turned down a corridor which led behind and beneath it. There in the dim light, he thought he saw something that brought his heart nearly to a stop: a hunched and towering figure stood before him, horns scraping against the ceiling. It turned its head to look at him, then sneered and crept away into the dark. Remy ran back toward the stage in a fright only to find that the fly loft had caught fire and the opera house was being evacuated. Still, he went looking for his father. Marius Rocher had no sooner made it safely out of the opera house that night than he realized his son was not in the crowd outside. Desperate to find his beloved Remy, he went back into the burning building but neither of them came back out. Several hours later, upon investigating the fire, authorities found Remy asleep under a pile of charred rubble without a single scrape or burn. When asked about the events from that night, he could only recount seeing the shadow of a creature and waking up when he’d been discovered after the fire and nothing in between.

The Rocher Session

Later in life Remy was still engaged in music but moved into its more technical pursuits, putting himself through university in Paris where he specialized in music and audio engineering. The fascinating Korean pop singer, who was still a rising star then, held a recording session in one of the university’s concert halls known for its pristine and honest acoustics; Remy was assigned to the project as an assistant sound engineer. During one particular session, Remy it seemed had lost his composure at listening in and interrupted the recording to insist that the musicians be rearranged in certain places around the room. While Park and the others were first confounded by this outburst, it did take the song to new heights that none of them had imagined. Thereafter, Remy was praised for his creativity and innovation and became one of Park’s most trusted collaborators. 

Karkinos

    Remy’s many years of world travels brought him joys that, in many ways, overshadowed the trauma of his past, but at thirty years old he began to feel slow and easily exhausted; the onset of these spells were subtle at first but became impossible to ignore.
    The last leg of Se-Yun Park’s latest tour ended, perhaps as a touch of destiny, in Paris and Remy used this opportunity to seek out Dr. Maël Genouville. The doctor had been a protégé of Remy’s father and had taken music lessons when Remy was a child, and often he was invited to stay for a perfectly modest meal. Now, years later, he had the regrettable duty of explaining the root of Remy’s symptoms: pancreatic cancer.