The Hatchling
]Restraint - 01
-The locker bay reeks of sweat and mold. Even though the rows see almost daily use, little attention is paid to the upkeep of the area. I catch a flicker of movement out of the eye, possibly a bug or a rat, regardless it draws my gaze to the shower. Amidst the stained yellow tile, I can make out several distinct rust colored stains. Probably just that, but most likely it's dried blood. A shudder goes up my spine, and for a moment I wonder what the hell I'm doing here. Surely there are better places for a teenage girl to be than a bloodied locker room, but then I remember: I am a Raven. Grime and gore go with the territory, along with a statistically shorter lifespan… but where are my manners? Allow me to introduce myself…
-My alias is Scarred. I am a Raven Registered with Global Cortex, the world's system of control. I pilot the bipedal A.C. Retribution, but for the first half of my life, I wanted nothing to do with these machines. As a youth, I witnessed my mother and father killed in an attack by a marauding A.C. pilot. In this era of subterranean society, corporations controlled every aspect of our existence, from the air we breathed to the places we lived. Lacking a centralized governing body to keep the corporate powers in check, they quickly grew into international monopolies that employed violent measures to obtain whatever they wanted. So if one corporation decides to attack a city run by another, there is no one around to protect the civilians or level punishment against the offenders…
-I digress however, for that's a topic of conversation for a politician, if such a thing still exists. The only thing going through my mind as I watched the housing project collapse around my friends and family, was hate: a searing rage that consumed my childhood and clouded my mind for many years. Aside from the momentary pain I endured at the loss of my loved ones, I felt nothing but contempt for the diabolical machine that took them from me. It was at that point that I made it my life goal to track down and crush as many Cores as I could, even if it meant having to learn to command one myself.
-It was slow at first, for they don't give to many licenses to minors, but eventually I came across the right corporate sponsor and got cracking. It was incredible at first, nothing gave me greater satisfaction or a larger sense of accomplishment than seeing an enemy A.C. crash and burn. I could care less about the people inside the machines I was ripping apart, as long as I could turn their mechs into unrecognizable piles of scrap…
-Then one day it hit me like a shotgun blast to the chest: the crushing realization that amidst the swath of burnt and broken metal I had left behind, I had failed to observe my enemy from the proper perspective. I had been blindly directing my rage towards a neutral, inanimate object, without observing the force driving it. A.C.'s are without thought or rational, incapable of distinguishing right from wrong… but their pilots were the furthest thing from blameless. Armored Cores are but a reflection of the character at its helm, so the only thing that makes them instruments of good or evil, are the pilots at the controls, whether they be human or A.I.
-From that point on, I did my best to atone for my wanton behavior. I now had a new purpose in my life: to levy punishment to the wicked and the indiscriminate of the Raven fold, and for that reason I was going to need all the allies I could muster. If there is one thing that is unanimous to anybody with even the slightest bit of power, it's that nobody likes it when you tell them what they can or can't do with it. For this reason, I expect and welcome any and all resistance that comes my way, because if there's one thing I want more than justice, it's for the disregarded masses of innocent civilians to live in relative peace without something coming along to endanger their way of life for a bit of profit. Without surrendering my rights as a human being or my means of defending myself, I will conquer those that stand in the way of that dream, human or otherwise…
* * *
-Took me a while, but I finally decided to get back into writing, if only on a recreational level. This is a weak attempt to try and reevaluate my objectives for Scarred's story. Should I choose to proceed, I will attempt to do away with any discrepancies in the previous story in relation to its basis in the Armored Core 3 timeline. Again, this is a big, "What if?" So please don't take judge me if I don't want to revamp 10+ chapters of a VERY old story. That would entail not only pouring over previous notes and chapters, but also replaying Armored Core 3 to completion again (100% Completion, thank you). On second thought, that might not be a bad idea, we'll see…