The rise of one of Pandora's most infamous villains started simply enough. Gaige simply wanted a control board from a CL4P-TP Steward bot. She had built Deathtrap mainly with parts from that line. His AI control core never worked completely as indented. So when an opportunity came to seize one after the fall of Jack, she went for it.

"Come on Claptrap, it won't hurt! You said yourself you're incapable of feeling pain!" said Gaige Menacingly.

"AHHH! Get away from me you crazy girl! I don't know why I ever made you my minion!"

Gaige chased the funny little robot all around the town of Sanctuary, wielding a plasma cutter and a wrench. She finally managed to corner him in the Crimson Raider safe house.

"Heh heh heh. Bad move coming in here, bot! The only way out of this safe house is up a set of stairs!"

"Damn you! Why did I ever reveal my weakness to you? What are you doing with that plasma cutter? No! AHH!"

Claptrap rolled away from the crazed Mechromancer, and locked himself in Roland's armory.

"Hah HAH! I've hacked the door controls former minion! You won't be able to get in here now! I've out smarted you; I've proven my robot intelligence superior! I've…. What are you doing? No! Don't cut the bars!"

Gaige started cutting the bars on the gate to the armory with a demented look on her face. One bar fell to the floor, then a second.

Lilith heard the clanging, and came down to investigate.

"Gaige? What are you doing?"

"I need a CL4P-TP control board."

"Uh-huh. And this explains you breaking into my dead boyfriend's armory…why?"

"Because Claptrap locked himself in there, obviously."

"Right. Mordy? Could you come down here? I think Gaige has finally lost it."

"Coming, Lil."

Gaige continued her cutting job, while Mordecai descended the stairs.

"Hey, Gaige. What you doing over there?" asked Mordy.

"Breaking into the armory."

"I see that. What's so important about claptrap that you gotta break our stuff to get to him?"

"AI control board. Last one in existence. Need to fix DT."

"What about all those dead Claptraps in Southern Shelf?"

"Tried them already. None of em had good parts."

"Look, I know how annoying that little hunk-a-junk can be, but he did kinda help us out against Jack. And he is the last of his kind. It just doesn't seem right to scrap him for parts."

"Will you oxygen guzzling buffoons leave me in peace? I have my hands busy looking for new vaults and the combination of your noise and the torch fumes are not making it easy to work here!" fumed Tannis.

"Need control core. Fix DT."

"Oh boy, Pandora has finally gotten to her. Hey! Brick! Need you for something." Shouted Lilith.

"Yeah, what do you want?"

"Just come down here!"

Brick thundered down the stairs.

"What is it Lil? I was trying to see how many squat thrusts I could do!"

Lilith merely pointed at the Mechromancer, then at the door.

Brick shrugged. "If you say so."

Bricked walked over to Gaige, she had nearly gotten through all the bars. He picked her up at her waist with a single massive hand.

"Hey! Put me down Brick!"

Brick walked her over to the door of the safe house.

"I am a woman of Science and Badassery and I WILL NOT BE MANHANDLED!"

Gaige punched and kicked at Brick, to no effect.

"Hey, sorry Gaige. But Lilith says you gotta go. And I can't even feel anything from you except your robot arm. That tickles a bit."

Brick took the torch away from her and dropped her outside the safe house, and locked the door. And by locked, we mean he moved a washing machine in front of it.

"LET ME BACK IN! I NEED THAT CONTROL CORE! SCIENCE WILL NOT BE DENIED!"

Gaige got a call on her echo.

"Ugh, will you please quiet yourself? Look, if I tell you where you can find some parts will you leave me in peace?" Echoed Tannis.

"I'm listening."

"Good. Its story time again. Five years ago, Hyperion had a plan to quietly silence their competition. This was the INAC, or Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap. Hyperion reprogrammed our little bucket of bolts here to dispose of their rivals. However this backfired and he stared what he dubbed the "Robolution" and called for all machines to revolt."

"How come I never heard of this? I've studied all about Pandora before I came here!"

"Hush, child. What you get though public channels is not the whole story. Anyway, Hyperion paid the Vault Hunters at the time -That would be Lilith, Mordecai, Brick, and Roland for those of you who are slow on the uptake- to deal with this problem. "

"Whoa whoa whoa, you're telling me the Vault Hunters worked for Hyperion? THE HYPERION? The same one that tried to kill us all?"

"Admittedly this was before Jack's hostile takeover, and the true extent of their ambitions was revealed. But yes, they are one and the same."

"How come they never talked about this?"

"Hyperion had them sign a nondisclosure agreement. Now if you're done-"

"Wait, they honored that even AFTER Jack tried to kill us all?"

"*Sigh* Look, the galactic law system is arcane. If they said anything, they could have sued the raiders into a financial sinkhole. This obviously would have been disastrous to the resistance so Roland enforced the gag order. Now are you done with your inane questions or can we get on with this?"

"I'm good."

"Finally. Now, Roland and his friends and his well defined pectoral muscles -May he rest in Peace- Defeated the Robolution, and reprogrammed the INAC to be the normal Claptrap you know and loathe. However, by doing this, they left behind a hilariously large stack of CL4P-TP carcasses for you to peruse. In exchange for me telling you the fast travel location, you will bring me as many claptrap parts as you can manage."

"Sounds fair, but why can't you go?"

"They locked my ID from going there, said that my quote "obsession" unquote was making my insanity worse. Imbeciles."

Gaige contemplated the moral ramifications of making a crazy person crazier for a minute. She decided fixing DT came first.

"Alright, you have a deal."

"Fantastic. The travel point is Tarturus Station."

"On it!"

Gaige darted over to Peirce Station, and quickly programmed the new location into the machine. It took a second to find it, and then declared:

"Location: [Tartarus Station] is now available for travel."

Gaige activated the transport. She arrived to be welcomed by an Ultimate Badass loader. Gaige had to dive out of the line of fire, before obliterating it with a Topneaa rocket barrage.

"Hey Tannis, a little advance warning would have been nice!"

"What did you expect? This area was one of the first Hyperion toeholds on Pandora. Of course it's well defended!"

"Freaking crazy scientists…"Gaige said off the echo.

Gaige fought her way though several weaker loaders to Tannis's old shack.

"You arrived at my former dwelling? Fantastic! You'll need to make your way to the Hyperion Junkyard. That is where you will find your smorgasbord of claptrap parts."

"Understood. Heading over there now."

Gaige made her way through the tunnel that leads to the junkyard.

"Anyway, getting back to story time, there was one part I neglected to mention."

"Oh? And that would be?"

"The INAC somehow developed a system to reanimate dead bodies with circuitry. Roland and company thought this technology was too gruesome to study further. I disagreed. Alas, I was outvoted. If you could recover a corpse with these circuits I would reward you further."

"What did this tech look like?"

"Its biggest distinguishing feature was a vacuum tube on the victim's head. Why such out dated technology, I do not know, but perhaps that is part of its secret."

"I'm at the junkyard, where should I start?"

"There was a small Hyperion outpost nearby that had both claptraps and trapped soldiers. Start there. It should be dead ahead of your position. "

Sure enough, in two minutes of walking, Gaige had found her destination. But before she could investigate, Junk loaders attacked her. Gaige whipped out a corrosive plasma caster and melted them into useless scrap in little time at all.

"I see at least one person can get things done around here! The claptrap parts should be scattered all around, and the trapping tech should be inside the fort."

"I guess I'll start with the trapping tech. That should be easier to find."

Gaige looked around the dilapidated fort. It was rusty, and its poor construction was falling apart. She wasn't paying attention and tripped over a piece of glass.

"Ow! Freaking junkyard!...Wait, is that..?"

Gaige dug up the offending object and found an intact vacuum tube implanted into a skull.

"Um, I think I found it!"

"Excellent. Acquire as many samples of it as you can. We will likely have to cobble together a complete system from several sets of parts."

In 20 minutes of searching, Gaige had found incomplete parts of 5 of the systems, but it looked like enough to rebuild it.

"Time to look for the control board. What part were you looking for exactly, Tannis?"

"Just grab as many of the guts of them as you can. I'll sort though them myself later."

"What are you paying me for this, anyway?"

"Don't worry, your compensation will be more than adequate."

Gaige started collecting the parts from the shot up robots. Many of the corpses had already been stripped for parts by the previous vault hunters. Half an hour in Gaige started to wonder something else.

"Hey Tannis, is there anything else the old guard "neglected" to tell us?"

"There was this incident at Jakobs Cove, what with the dead coming back to life and eating the townsfolk. But that's for another time."

"Let me guess, another non-disclosure agreement?"

"Indeed."

After another hour, Gaige finally found the part she needed. She carefully but gingerly pried it out of its former owner.

"Good news DT! You're not going to be stupid anymore!"

But Gaige had been out here for awhile, alone. And when a scientist is alone they have time to think. And when scientists' have time to think, odd ideas sometimes crop out.

"Hey Tannis, what would happen if I used the trap technology on the dead Claptraps?"

"Hmm. I didn't get to test that. What's your hypothesis?"

"All the claptraps had to be networked together to be infected with the INAC virus, right? What if we attached the Trap technology to one and activated the network?"

"There really may be other intelligent life on this planet other than myself! What are you waiting for? Get on it!"

"Right!"

Gaige started off by salvaging the 5 trap systems she salvaged, and building a working system from it. This took her the better part of two hours. She tested it out on a skag that looked like it had died a week ago. To her satisfaction, the skag started right up, and was under her control.

"Tannis, I've recovered a working sample of the trap technology."

"Great! Now, euthanize your test subject and move on to the robots."

"Understood. Euthanizing subject 1-A."

Gaige ordered the skag to roar, and she shot it in its exposed mouth. Her shot destroyed its flesh, but left the system intact. She recovered her sample, and moved on to a nearby claptrap that looked mostly intact.

The instillation was simple enough; she booted up the robot, activated the Trapping hardware, and activated the robot's networking adapter.

To her utter delight, the damaged claptraps came online, and tried as best as they were able to join her. Soon she had a small army of them from around the junkyard. She could control them by issuing commands to the main one via her Echo.

"RAM… give us RAM!"

"I've done it! I'VE DONE IT! THEY'RE ACTIVE! I AM THE GREATEST ENGINEER ALIIIIIVIVVEEEE!"

"Well done, my fellow scientist! What will you do now, Oh Mighty Mechromancer?"

"...I think I need to pay a visit to Jakobs Cove."

Authors Notes: I've had this bunny kicking around, but I'm not really sure where i'd go with it. So, its free to a good home under a few conditions:

1: You link back to this story. No Exceptions.

2: Let me know if you pick it up, I want to see where you go with it.

3: Buy me a new Shelby Mustang GT. (ok i'm kidding.)

also, this story was inspired by this image (used with permission, replace dot with . and remove spaces)

fc04 dot deviantart dot net/fs70/f/2012/103/b/6/borderlands_2_mechromancer _by_