• ▬▬ Sparks of blue and orange spat and hissed around the crude metal table Raiken was working at. Different blueprints for his newest subject lay frazzled about the room in every corner. On the, obviously improvised, shelf, were anatomicly correct diagrams of a human arm hidden under a multitude of heavily used tools. Almost everything around there wasn't even moderately organized, the entire workspace was the home of infinite amounts both new and used paper, pens, and clipboards. Of which most held scores of technological success and failure.
    ▬▬ Raiken sighed to himself looking around his pathetic, autoshop-like, work area. There was one semi-organized place in the entire twelve by twelve room; His "Finished" wall. Where his succesful builds were hung, numbering in seven exact replicas of the human body, just. . . Duller. They were like androids in a weird way; they indeed looked like a human body, but they were just metal shells. Shells waiting for what they needed to live.
    ▬▬ Names didn't come with the suspended animation creations either. No numbers were cruelly pierced into their earlobes. Maybe not yet, but someday, these would be people too, people just like Raiken, people fighting for the same cause. Raiken's eyebrows furrowed as he stared curiously at the seven dully shining silver bodies, unconcious, and completely helpless. They left a faint remnant of a larger version of a childs doll; and he himself had made them.
    ▬▬ Raiken had studied a type of neuroscience since he was nine years old and had mastered it in the last ten years. When he as a child, his mother had taught him everything she could- before she was brutally murdered. Even the basic plans for what Raiken's creations happened to be were stemmed off of his mother's original landscape. They were still cold, still lifeless, and still metal. This fact would remain until the creations were exposed to the correct requirments to let themselves grow. To let themselves become like everyone else. Skin, hair, tears, feelings and emotions. These mere scraps of metal would one day be living beings too. Though emotions would most likely be a hinderance to their true purpose of creation.
    ▬▬ A stray spark jumped frm the arm that Raiken was melding with a blowtorch. Slowly, it fell to Raiken's hand and scorched his skin. He dropped the blowtorch, its blue flame dying as it hit the table.
    ▬▬ "Ouch, hot." Raiken mumbled, rubbing his palm.

    ▬:▬

    ▬▬ Luin wandered quietly into the work room just a few hours later to find Raiken asleep at his workrench, golden hair faling over what seemed to be a finished metal arm. The rest of the steel figure, most of which was just a steel skeleton, was pushed aside, being kept on the table by Raiken's weight on the arm. To Luin it seemed his master was falling asleep in his work room more often lately. Seeing as Luin, short and young as he was, was the technical butler to Raiken's mansion in the woods, he didn't really mind the lack of mess that Raiken normally left about the house. What with being half covered in grease all the time. The only thing that Luin could see dreadful about the situation was the obvious affect that it was having on Raiken's health. And the lonely, eerie, quiet of the mansion when Raiken wasn't up and about.
    ▬▬ Luin eyed the Finished wall.
    ▬▬ "Why am i the only one of the shells to have woken up?" He asked himself, knowing no answer would come. His eyes fell back on the sleeping half-cat demon, the rainbow that circulated in his ears and tail was lifeless at the moment.
    ▬▬ Then they twitched, just once, and Raiken was awake and half way across the room before Luin could even comprehend it. Raiken caught him in a swift and fluent motion into an embrace. It didn't feel like a caring one though; it felt like a restraint.
    ▬▬ Then Raiken spoke.
    ▬▬ "It's because, Luin, you died first." And Luin went limp for a moment, his mind racing to understand just what the hell Raiken meant. He was perfectly well alive, and he knew it. Then, it clicked, just as suddenly as Raiken had moved across the room.
    ▬▬ "So i'm not-."
    ▬▬ Raiken shook his head.
    ▬▬ "So how did I-?"
    ▬▬ "I don't know Luin, and quite frankly, i don't think that's a subject someone would go prying about themselves. Seeing as it's probably not a happy idea." Raiken had let go of Luin, he wasn't going to run from the conversation at this point. "But you're here now, and you have a job to do."
    ▬▬ Luin nodded and stared blankly at the ground. "Because youn need us for a very important task." He mirrored, quoting what Raiken had told him a thousand times, whenever he inquired about this sort of thing.

    ▬:▬


    ▬▬ As the two blonde males discussed the causes and effects of Raiken's experiments, with only vague and few and far between answers on Raiken's part, the room began to violently shake. Papers and breakables crashed onto the floor in the work room along with nails and other sharp, pointy objects. Framed pictures broke as the ground rumbled and made the old mansion quiver. The dangerous debri continued to pile.
    ▬▬ "Luin," Raiken called to the small figure, the lights had gone out and for some strange reason the shaking wouldn't stop. He had to strain his voice over the sound of precious collections of knick knacks fell to their demise and caused and awful amount of noise. "I want you in your room! And do not leave until i say it's safe!" The sound of footsteps could vaguley be made out as Luin scurried around the mess on the floor in the dark to his room.
    ▬▬ In a desperate attempt to save his precious creations from the unusually long earthquake, Raiken moved them to the garden in the back of the mansion. With a lot of effort mind you. By the time he had finished moving the last one, a smaller, more petite male body that had actually began female but had gone terribly arai, the quake had stopped. Their nervous systems were fragile at this stage, so Raiken set them up in manners that looked like people sitting in a park, hoping the anatomicly stable positions would help in case of an aftershock.
    ▬▬ Not but five minutes after Raiken had managed to hike his way to the parlor in the dark of the night an aftershock hit. Then another. And another. Small trees outside could be heard giving way as their needles clinked near soundlessly against the windows. Tiles fell from the old roof, but it held intact. Raiken was blind in the tar black night, he used his hands and tail to find a wall to follow upstairs. When he found one, he grimaced. The walls were old, like the rest of the building, and felt as such. Dust and dirt covered Raiken's palms. He continued along the wall a little further, coming across a shelf hung low enough on the wall for him to accidentely hit. One of the vases on top had managed to survive the shock and stay put, but the shelf had different plans. It gave way, causing the large vase to fall and knock Raiken out. Right there on the stairs.


    End Chapter One