Chapter One: Dr Einstein's patient
Doctor V.F. Einstein, MD, sighed as he checked his patient's brainwave patterns and pulse rate. Everything was normal, as far as he could tell; the main problem was that his patient was still unconscious after a whole year.
Einstein sighed again, making a mark on the thick checklist he'd compiled specifically for this patient. It seemed an easy enough case: to replace a shattered vertebrae and fix a hole in the patient's heart. It didn't bother him in the least that the green-haired woman who'd brought him in refused to tell the doctor where and how the patient sustained all those injuries.
Then, after fixing the patient up again, there remained the problem of actually bringing him back to life. Defibrillators would definitely not work; the poor guy was well and truly dead even before Dr Einstein had started his surgery. He'd discussed the problem 'theoretically' with his colleagues, and one of them, a Dr Shelly, had suggested using lightning.
"Of course, there's the problem of how to channel the lightning and controlling it such that the body won't burn," she had said. "But since this talk is all theoretical, there's always this possibility."
Einstein had worked on the idea at once, modifying his ancestral home (his ancestors would have turned in their graves if they knew what he had been doing), widening the skylight and lengthening the lightning conductor. For weeks he'd tried fruitlessly to control the wild surges of electricity, but failed miserably.
A stroke of luck came in the form of an email sent by one of his distant nieces, Nina, and Einstein set to work right away. Being a careful man, he'd run thousands of computer simulations and done at least thirty dry runs before taking the body out of his basement's deep freezer.
Einstein would never forget the night of his success. Lightning struck the modified conductor and rushed down through the circuit. It was slowed by a million resistors (which all blew) and sent life surging through the body.
"He's alive!!!" Einstein had all but cackled. "He's ALIVE!!!!!!"
Alive, but certainly not awake. As it had been till this very day.
Shaking himself away from his recollections, Dr Einstein sighed a third time, and turned his back on his patient, making for the door. His niece would be arriving in the morning, and he intended to spend the whole day with her discussing the development of clean, energy-generating devices.
A sudden beep from the brainwave monitor made him stop. He turned around, almost certain that he had imagined the sound, but no: the brainwave monitor showed a spike in brain activity, followed by a rapid series of ups and downs, like a mountain peak.
"Beta wave activity... he's dreaming!" Einstein whispered to himself. Stepping closer to his machine, he took a closer look at both it and his patient. The latter's eyeballs were rolling, wild beneath his eyelids. His breathing was becoming shallower and faster, and sweat was breaking out all over his body. Einstein took it all in, he too breaking out in excited perspiration.
Then with a strangled cry, the patient awoke, sitting upright, taking in deep, gasping breaths. He looked around, disorientated, fear showing very clearly in those dark amethyst eyes. His raven black hair hung halfway across his eyes, longer than it had been when Einstein had first put him on the operating table.
"Can you hear me?" Einstein said, in a clear, controlled voice. "Do you know who you are? Can you hear me?"
The patient looked over at him slowly, trembling. Just as slowly, he nodded.
"Good," Einstein tried very hard to keep himself from smiling. "Do you know who you are? Do you remember your name?"
"Y-yes," Einstein's patient whispered. "I-My name is..."
...
Nina Einstein, former chief physicist at Britannia's Dallas Laboratories, sat easily in the carriage as she rode through her uncle's estate at the foot of White Mountain. This was the first time in months when she could actually relax and not worry about anyone attacking her.
Nina still felt a chill whenever she thought of how her FLEIA bomb had been used on Tokyo, only fourteen months ago. The pride that she'd felt during the test firing at Dallas Labs had evaporated with the actual usage of the bomb. Having seen the damage that one bomb could do, she'd almost had a breakdown when Lelouch had told her that Prince Schneizel had fired multiple FLEIA bombs during the Damocles coup d'etat.
Lelouch, she thought. I wonder where you are now... Heaven, or Hell? You liberated much of the world from the fear of Britannia, but you ruined Britannia in the process. Lelouch, 'The Enigma'
Her thoughts came to a pleasant halt when she caught sight of her uncle's mansion, high on a cliff, built partly into White Mountain. It was the same as she'd dimly remembered, from photographs in the family album and infrequent visits during her childhood, before going over to Ashford Academy. Coming here, so far in the mountains, was the right thing to do, even if it was against the wishes of her parents.
For some reason, Nina's father and uncle Victor never did manage to see eye-to-eye.
The carriage stopped before her uncle's front gate fifteen minutes later. Nina got out without waiting for the driver to open her door, stretched, and breathed in the fresh, bracing mountain air. She shivered slightly in the cold; understandable, for she had not changed clothes during the flight from Galveston, and still wore her by-now infamous 'Dress of Red Death', so named because she had been wearing it when the FLEIA bomb was test-fired.
Interestingly, uncle Victor's main doors opened just as Nina was about to knock, resulting in her holding up a fist in front of her uncle Victor, who was obviously on his way out.
"Nina!" he exclaimed, too joyfully. He stepped to the side, as though to conceal something from her. "How've you been?"
"Uncle Victor," she replied, smiling despite her suspicion that he was hiding something. "So good to see you again. What's that you're hiding behind your back?"
"Hm? Me? Hiding?" Uncle Victor faltered. "Nothing! Nothing of your interest, anyway..." Einstein was never a good liar; already cold sweat was breaking out across his forehead. Nina smiled; it was amusing to see him so agitated.
"Come on, Uncle Victor, you can show me," Nina said. "Are you going to deny your favourite niece a simple request, after she hasn't seen you for so long?"
Einstein sighed. "All right," he said, and moved aside, revealing to his niece the slender, slightly pale form of his patient.
Nina's eyes widened like one of her FLEIA bomb craters. "N-no..." she said. "It can't be. You-you're dead! I saw you die! The whole world saw you die!" Her voice rose to a shriek.
"You can't be alive! Lelouch Lamperouge!!"