Prologue
My name is Jen. I am around twelve years old and I have spent my entire life in a cage. I have never seen the light day, only the florescent gleam of neon strips. I live in a cage in a cold, dark storage room full of other. . . things.
You see, I am an experiment. I was created by twisted, evil scientists who seem to feel the need to mutate human DNA by grafting animal genes into it. Then they analyze the results and dump them into cages, only opening them again to run tests.
I am one of five "results" that were created with avian-human DNA, and I am also one of two who survived. Which means I have wings. But I can't fly. I don't know how, because I can't ever even try to learn. One of the things that comes with being stuck in a dog crate since day one.
There are tons of other cages holding mutants here at The Institute, which is the name of this hell hole. A.k.a. lab. It's top secret, I suppose, since I highly doubt any of the stuff that goes on in this place is legal. I've picked up, by listening in on the scientist's conversations, that The Institute is in New York City, and it is hidden underneath a sewer. Lovely.
Anyway, besides bird genes, the scientists here have grafted pretty much every animal DNA imaginable into human embryos. A lot of them die, but the ones who don't live in the same storage hall that I do, hidden from a lab behind a glass wall and a curtain.
Below me, there is a little black dog that looks completely normal, but he can jump about twenty feet in the air and he can talk. Incidently, he never shuts up. Next to my cage is a little dark-skinned boy with a sort of patchy scale covering where he should have had hair, and beside him is a baby girl who can solve the most complex math problems in seconds, with absolutely no mistakes. On my other side is a girl who looks like a big cat, except for her human eyes and the fingers underneath her retractable claws.
But these recombinants are not the only things the scientists here create. They also made these power-charged, super-strong wolf human hybrids called Erasers. And, ironically enough, they're made to erase. They are the guards, hunters and executioners. They dispose of the useless, failed experiments. When they are in full morph, Erasers are vicious, hairy, fanged monsters with claws and teeth that could easily shred a man to bits, in seconds. But then they can also take a human form; resembling male models with feral, gleaming eyes and thick dark hair.
It's disgusting. I'm human enough to know that these scientists are horrible, twisted, crazy; with no regard at all for human life. They do this only for themselves, and for the sake of science. But science can, and does, go dreadfully wrong. To them though, results, theories, hypothesizes and experiments are all that is important. It never, ever crosses their minds that they are killing and mutilating innocent children.
So. That all pretty much summarized my childhood and nightmare of a life. I live in a cage. I have wings. I have tests run on me every single day. You might not believe me, but it's all true, even if you can't except that. Because the time will come when you're going to have to.