Saturday, January 4, 2014

The Journal of Silvr (Entry 1)

I call myself Silvr, it isn't my birth name, I can't even remember what it was, it's been so long since anyone ever used it. Silvr is actually short for Quiksilvr, my alias in the Underground. The Underground is a group fighting for the rights of the so-called "Lesser-races." We fight against who we call the Uppers, mostly Dwarves and Gnomes who formed a ruling class that has done everything in it's power to make all of our lives in the Lower Levels a living nightmare. But that is just the most recent chapter in my story. Let me start over from the beginning...

I remember my fourth birthday. It was a happy day. There was even a cake. But the happy times didn't last... not even a week later, my family was travelling to visit some family of ours in one of the Lower Levels. While we were travelling, we were attacked by a group of thugs, mostly Orks and a couple Humans, and they were led by a pale blue Ork. I don't know his name, but I remember his face.

The pale Ork and his gang mugged us, and after one of his Human friends tried to hurt my mother, and dad stepped in to try to stop him. There was a struggle and both my parents ended up dead, and then, just for the fun of it, I guess, the pale Ork picked me up with one huge hand and gouged out my right eye. I don't really remember anything after the pain started, but they must have just dropped me and left me for dead.

Then things got worse. A strange little Gnome found us, and realizing that I was still alive rushed me to a local medical facility to stabilize me. Then he took my semi-conscious body and started doing experiments on me. First, he installed a bionic eye in the socket that the Ork gouged out, but it wasn't just an eye. The eye, which still is wired directly to my nervous system, also contained a behavior chip that regulated the chemicals in my brain to make me "more peaceful." Basically, I spent the next 13 years of my life as a zombie slave forced to do anything that damned Gnome commanded.

I still don't know what his name was... I was told to call him the Doctor whenever anyone was around, and most of the time he used me as a common slave, doing chores and errands, and anything else he wanted me to do. Eventually, the Doctor started to lose his sanity, maybe from the weird experiments he would do when no one else was around. I don't know. He was kind of a mad scientist in the first place, always tinkering with strange gadgets and chemicals. He even built the gauntlet I wear.

It wasn't all bad, living with the Doctor, I learned a lot about making electrical and mechanical equipment while the Doctor was asleep or away and had forgotten to give me a command for that timeframe. I also started reading his research on whatever project he happened to be working on at the time.

He started developing the Force Gauntlet after he manufactured a set of small crystals that each dimly glowed a different color. There were a couple blue, three red, one green, a white, and two yellows. According to his notes, the crystals were tiny hyper-condensed solid fragments of the forces of nature. The color of the fragment represented the force it was made of... Red being fire, blue being cold, green being acid, white being sound, and yellow being electricity.

I still know very little about how the Force Gauntlet actually works, but I do know it was made specifically to harness the power contained in the tiny crystals. It has five sockets arranged in a star pattern on the back of the hand, and a small diamond lens in the palm. The gauntlet only needs one of each crystal to use it's power, and each socket can only harness one type of crystal. The crystals themselves are incredibly unstable and shatter into nothingness if used too often. I found that out the hard way, and now I only have two reds, a yellow, and a blue left out of the original stock.

I was 16 when the Doctor started torturing me using the Gauntlet, commanding me to stand there helplessly, measuring my pain response through the output from my eye. I still don't know why he started it, but he did... assured me he needed to know. Then, after a few months, he began the "shock therapy." Unfortunately for him, he didn't install any form of short circuit mitigation in my eye, and in the middle of the second session, the electricity shorted out the behavior chip, causing me to fly into a bitter rage killing the poor bastard with my bare hands. After a few minutes of thrashing around in the medical chamber, the chip must have fried itself, because the rage stopped. Now that I say it, I don't really feel anything anymore. No fear, no happiness, no anger. Maybe I'm less Human and more machine than I think...

After I came to my senses, I took a datapad, downloaded all the Doctor's research, took the Gauntlet, the extra crystals and anything else I felt would be useful and quickly left before anyone came to investigate. Luckily for me, the locals were used to seeing and hearing odd things from the Doctor's office so nobody found him for almost two weeks, and by then I was long gone.

The first thing I did was to perma-dye my hair silver, and build a leadlined steel plated eyepatch to wear over my bionic eye. For the last six months, I've been roaming around doing work repairing anything anyone needed fixed, hacking Gnome bank accounts, and living off my wits. I even did some slight modifications to both my eye and the gauntlet to allow them to interface through heavy-duty cabling. This allows me to both choose which shard to use and activate the gauntlet with simple command thoughts. I take great pride in that feat.

I eventually caught the unwanted attention from the authorities due to my excessive banking "withdrawals" and had to flee into the Lower Levels where I meet the Underground. But I think this is more than enough for one journal entry...

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