An aeon passed. For long centuries, far enough in the past that everyone who was still alive and had been present at the time had forgotten it had ever happened, their minds on more urgent matters, all was silent. The broken giant lay motionless on the sand, as seemingly lifeless as the driftwood brought in by waves that lapped incessantly against the shore of the Fallen Arm. Its inhabitants no more expected it to move than they expected the gigantic severed limb that was their home to stand up on its hand and start moving on its own. As far as they could tell, they were one and the same, and the machine had died the day the world-Titan it served had lost its limb. It was ignored as something that was neither a threat nor a resource. For some reason – maybe an oddity that kept the inhabitants from wanting to explore it too closely – the animals also gave it a wide berth. No Krabbles sheltered underneath it, no Pterixes made their nests on top of it, even the Bunnits hadn't tried to chew through its cables even once.
Then, in response to an unspoken signal from one of the few minds vaster and more patient than itself, a single light on the metal frame flickered red for a few seconds, then stabilised, then went green. A shrill beep followed. A cog began to whirr, shuddering and creaking at first, sputtering where it had been clogged up with sand and rust and congealed ether that had begun to crystallise again. It had been so long since these mechanisms had last moved, they had almost forgotten how, so that they only responded very slowly and after much thought, even when the signals from the other systems reached them, the news that they were to be reactivated, to live again. Soon, enough of the cogs and pistons began to move at once, their system lights green and the alert noises more animated, that the machine itself began to rise. It tested its limbs one at a time, trembling from the effort. Grabbing hold of a nearby jutting piece of metal for support, it managed to haul itself to its feet. It stood there, leaning on the wreckage around it, while it came to terms with its own existence and familiarised itself with its own vital systems and how they worked.
It was an efficient machine, it discovered, and it repaired quickly, once its self-maintenance systems had been brought back online. First it staggered towards the beach and reached out probes into the water and into the ground, searching for Ether it could use as fuel. Green light began to wash over it and its dents and tears were cleaned and sealed over, rust scoured away, loose cogs put back into place, frayed cables strengthened. Errors in its software also corrected themselves, corrupted files recovered, malicious code removed, its memory defragmented, and with every sector regained, small recollections returned to it. It once again knew who it was. It remembered why it had been created and what it was capable of doing.
His name was Daedala. He was a Mechon, one of the first ever manufactured. He had been the first fully working prototype, to be monitored as a test before mass production began. His duty was to defend the Mechonis and its people, particularly from a possible security threat identified by Miqol. The future of the Mechon series, its popularity or discontinuation, depended on his success or failure.
Unfortunately for Daedala, what he knew still didn't make any sense in context. When he looked around, he could see nothing that matched his station just above Agniratha, or even the Mechonis at all, and a lot of unfamiliar sights and sounds. Activating all his sensors revealed no epiphanies. While some of the shapes roughly matched some of the sectors of the area he patrolled before he was (unexpectedly and without the correct safety precautions - his motion sensors had recorded that he had experienced some kind of sudden, violent impact that fit the pattern of battle damage during a security incident) deactivated, they did not show signs of system activity, like that of a live, active machine such as himself. This did not make any sense. He knew he had received a signal to wake up from somewhere. It had to have been a powerful signal, as he knew he had been very severely damaged when he was forced to shut down, and a weak signal would not have reached his emergency communications channel that only transmitted on the highest security level, only for Miqol and Egil and maybe the core of the Mechonis itself, if it really wanted to contact him for some reason. Especially as, if his sensors were functioning correctly, the signal had to have been coming from somewhere far away. Apart from a few specks here and there, mostly completely unconnected nodes, many of which were direly in need of reconnection and repair, there were no others of his own kind around him.
When he returned to his manual overview and looked out over the sea, at the feet of the Colossus rising out of the waves, he realised that he was very far from home.
The sun began to rise. By the time he had finished his scans, Daedala was in complete working order. He stared up at the cliff face above him, spreading his metal wings and waiting for his gyro-motors to start up so that he could begin hovering. There was no use standing here and staring out at the ocean. If he wanted to know where he was, and how to get back to his post, he needed to begin exploring more thoroughly.
He whirled around at the sound of crackling static and scraping blades just as the red flashing crosses on his radar announced the presence of hostiles behind him. Neither his combat reflexes nor his tactical skill database had been corroded during his long sleep. The figures that burst out of the sand, although they outnumbered him ten to one, were much smaller, uncoordinated in their attack and motivated by malfunctions in their code that caused them to act erratically. Hoisting his laser cannon, he destroyed three of them with three shots before they could even move.
From their hiding place inside a section of pipeline that had long ago fallen from its mooring, the three Machina watched the battle that raged between the swarm of faulty scout Mechon and the lone giant. The party dared not move; they had already watched that laser rifle, as large as the tallest of the three Machina was tall, fire a searing arc of energy across the entire length of the beach, evaporating everything in its path that wasn't already dust. They had also seen the giant Mechon detect a Pterix on the top of the cliff, hiding inside a cave, and accurately shoot at it. It could easily locate the three of them, and if it decided they were a threat, they would probably be dead. They weren't sure what kind of movements the Mechon registered as hostile actions – it might fire at any fast-moving object within a certain range, for all they knew.
Their mission wasn't that urgent – they'd been sent out to find more Ether cylinders, but it wasn't like the stores had entirely run out. Besides, this new threat was a more urgent priority. It was up to any Machina who located a potential new danger to the Refuge to find out as much as they could about it without putting their lives at risk. This newly activated Mechon was almost certainly a threat – almost all Mechon would attack them on sight – but they needed to know in more detail what they were up against.
The Mechon was clearly more powerful than the regular lost, faulty rejects that roamed the Fallen Arm until their parts finally wore out. It had gone from complete immobility to moving so fast that its observers kept losing track of where it was, even with their own biomechanically augmented eyes and the surveillance scope that their leader carried around with him in case they discovered anything interesting. Every time it moved, another of its attackers exploded. Its fighting style reminded them more of one of the Face Mechon that commanded the armies of the Mechonis, except that they hadn't heard it talk in a human voice as the Faces did, and they had never heard of a Face simply lying there, discarded, for centuries. The Machina couldn't tell if its behaviour was purposeful or not, if it had any intelligence or if it just instinctively responded to any perceived attack against it. It was difficult to tell from only observing it in battle, and this stranger seemed to have alerted the presence of every hostile creature on the Arm. Stealth was not its strong point. The leader of the party wished that the thing would hurry up and finish destroying its enemies, so that they could see what it did next. They needed to know urgently if this thing was intelligent. If it was, then it would have been given orders to attack the Machina, and it would eventually find the Refuge. It might be able to resume command over the Mechon here, or signal to the rest of the Mechon to assist it in the attack. Even if it attacked on its own, it wasn't clear who would win, and they would definitely take some casualties. They would need to find somewhere to run and hide until all this boiled over, maybe fix up Junks so that it would move, then submerge it for a while. Mechon hated getting wet.
The last of the scout Mechon was cut in half by a laser claw as it tried to fly at the giant Mechon's face, a last ditch attack in the hope that its enemy wasn't as deadly in melee as they were at range. It exploded as its power core was sheared through. The giant went down into a crouch and looked around it as it swept the area with its sensors one last time. Then it hoisted its laser cannon onto its back, retracted its claw and stood up. Its jets whined into life and it sprang into the air, landing on the cliff face. Disciplined nerves barely held as the giant feet thumped close to their hiding place. They could hear its system alerts beep to themselves, the regular blips of the scanner as it methodically searched for something. Not a Machina, he presumed, or it would have found us by now. Had it been ordered to go on another mission, other than preventing the rebel Machina from leaving their exile? There was so much going on in the world beyond the Fallen Arm these days, so much to worry about, that it was easy to lose track of the situation.
Suddenly, the Mechon turned its head sharply around and stared directly at the leader. He froze in terror. Its ocular filters flashed red several times and it made a noise like an automatic door. It drew a laser rifle from nowhere and pointed it at the Machina. The barrel of the cannon wouldn't have fit inside the pipe. He could see the charge lights on the side of the rifle fill up in turn, the barrel glowing slightly. His muscles were tensed to begin running, even though it probably wouldn't have done him any good. The high probability of death held a macabre fascination and he felt he couldn't look away. Besides, something was wrong in the way the Mechon was reacting. Other Mechon generally shot straight away, and the giant hadn't shown any hesitation in killing its other enemies. Maybe it hadn't been ordered to. Maybe Egil was returning to his senses. The Machina doubted it.
The regular beeping and careful, quiet watching each other suddenly gave way to a long string of garbled static screeching and hissing that he knew to be Mechon yells of protest, usually voiced when they malfunctioned. It swung its rifle around and began to discharge laser bolts wildly at nothing, setting a tree on fire in the process. Still complaining at the top of its voice, it turned and ran full pelt across the junk wastes.
Or maybe, mused the Machina, it isn't in as good repair as I thought.
