Once upon a time there was an actual story that this pointless drabble explained. Said epic now resides in the Vault of Abandoned Ideas, but the drabble remained to torment me, so I figured, what the slag. Let's finish it off. And so, this was born.

DISCLAIMER: Do I look like Greg Farshtey or anyone from Lego to you? I don't think so. xD

Synthetic Seraphim

When I first envisioned her, I never realized how much effort her creation would take...nor could I have imagined how much she would come to mean to me by the time I was ready to let her open her eyes to the light.

My role in this universe is a simple one. I am an artist. I am an inventor. I am a scientist and a sculptor, a dreamer and a doer. Alongside my brothers, I build the creatures that are used by the inhabitants of this realm, and those who run wild where no being can tame them. My role in this universe is a simple one, and yet at the same time it is infinitely complex; my duty, my destiny, is to create. To take the barest components, dead machinery and dead tissue, and give them form, give them purpose--give them life. For that is what the Makuta were brought forth into existence to do...and it is an existence I would trade for no other.

I will freely admit that I am an oddity amongst my kind, and always have been. My brothers have always concerned themselves with functionality―building creatures for their abilities alone, with no thought to any other aspect of their being. The only exceptions to this are Chirox and Mutran, who seem to delight in creating the kinds of horrors that will live on for eternity in Matoran nightmare. But I had always wondered: Can a creature that is beautiful in function not also be beautiful in form? Our creatures did what they were built to do, and that was all. But they could be so much more than simple, terrifying beasts... I soon realized that I wanted more, far more from my creations than mere functional beauty.

And thus grew my dream. When a request would come to build another kind of creature, I would begin immediately, planning one that was perfect in every way. The structure would have to be imagined before anything, of course; if a creature does not have the proper framework to support its abilities in its environment, outside aesthetics are meaningless. But as the inner workings came together, I would begin to design, mapping out every possible way to make the creature as beautiful in reality as it was in my mind's eye.

Of course, there was never enough time. My brothers, ever and always competing with each other and themselves, would complete their creatures long before I was even finished planning. And in the interests of saving material, the "leftovers" had to be taken apart and reverted to their base components, leaving me right back where I started―with nothing but a vague plan for a seemingly unreachable dream. It was frustrating, to say the least; none of my brothers would help me. None of them understood my vision. They did not care a bit for the dumb beasts they fashioned with their crude minds and dim imaginations, and they laughed at my obsession with balancing the unique forms of beauty I had found. So I let them laugh, and turned my focus inward. If I wanted to create a true work of art, I would have to do it myself.

But what would I make? There were so many choices, and indecision has always been a weakness of mine. With no specifications, nothing particularly necessary in this creature I was building, I had the freedom to chose whatever I wanted...but with no guidelines to follow, I had not even the faintest idea where to begin. What sort of environment would it be made for? What abilities and powers would I give it to help it survive? Would it be large and slow, or small and fast? What creature or creatures should I base it on, and what elements of their design should I keep or expel?

Inspiration struck like lightning.

It began as nothing more than a whim. I had already seen many things in my life--but the most beautiful, the most perfect in form and function, were not any creations of my brothers, but creations of the Great Beings themselves. The creatures called Toa...ah, they were the paragon of the balance I strove for! Their combat and elemental abilities were perfectly contained and controlled, and their noble, armored figures were like something out of a dream. If there was anything in this universe more perfect in both function and form, I was certain I would never see it.

But that wasn't all...oh, no, that was far from all. There was something else about these beings that placed them high above the creatures my brothers and I fashioned, something that set them apart even from their Matoran kin and the other creations of the Great Beings. These Toa seemed to radiate nobility and beauty, an aura of goodness that touched everything around them. They were fast and strong, but they were also clever, and their powers of adaptability were greater than anything I had ever seen. And no one Toa was exactly the same as any other. Their abilities varied, of course, as did their appearances...but the truly stunning differences, the ones that caught my attention as nothing else did, lay in their minds and hearts. The way they thought and planned, the way they used their abilities, the way they acted upon a situation...all individual, based on personal experiences, choices, and reasoning―and yet when examined closely, all intrinsically the same.

The thought of building one of them, or something like them, sparked a desire in me like none other. What would it take to create something that was strong and beautiful in every part of its being? What would it take to give that creature free thought, the power to make decisions based on reason instead of instinct? What would it take to build a being that could think and feel, and could rule itself? Did one Makuta even have what it took to make such a creature, or was this all sheer insanity, an effort doomed to fail from the start?

I had to know.

I had to build.

From the very beginning, I knew I had to keep the project concealed from my brothers. As good a leader as he was, Miserix would never approve of it―and even assuming he would, the others would never leave me alone to work on it. All of them would want a piece of it so that they could claim credit if it succeeded...or so that they could begin work of their own (ripped from my designs, of course) if it failed. So I began my work in secret, fashioning the parts and pieces that would, if all went well, embody and become my greatest work...my masterpiece...my dream

At first, things did not go well at all. The prospect of being discovered frightened me, and I worked too fast, made far too many mistakes. In my haste, I formed many useless pieces that did not connect, or pieces that connected but did not work as they should. This only served to make me even more frantic, until I could barely think straight for all the clutter in my mind. And my brainchild, the creature that was supposed to be my masterpiece, reflected that clutter in a grotesque, twisted amalgam of malformed limbs. It was truly a horrifying sight...one that, in a fit of anger, I pulled apart altogether. There was no hope of fixing a frame that badly warped; the only thing I could do was to start over from scratch.

I forced myself to slow down, to think clearly about the steps I needed to take. I studied from a distance the Toa that my brothers had called to serve them; I made diagrams, took notes, and began to imitate the things that made them what they were. I fashioned the second frame with great care and attention to detail, taking as much time as I needed to make sure it was as well-made as it could be. This time, I vowed, I would do things the way they should have been done before. This time, I vowed, I would not fail.

Looking back, I suppose it was almost requisite that my creation be female. Her frame had been built for strength, of course, as sturdy as I could make it―but once complete, it still retained a lightness and sense of delicacy that seemed more fitting with the smaller, narrower shape of the female than the broader shape of the male. Of course, minor design changes would be necessary to support this new plan; most of the Toa I had studied had been male, and their thicker figures, though possessing an aesthetic appeal of their own, simply would not do.

Work progressed slowly; the reformatting was easy on paper, but the pieces took time to shape and build, and making sure every part worked together with every other was a mountainous task in and of itself. However, I was patient; I persevered in the face of every difficulty, bending my imagination around every obstacle, until I had overcome them all. I created a lithe, light structure that could endure the strain of life in any environment, combat under any conditions. I created a body that could both contain and control power, that power without which a Toa is nothing but a tall, armored Matoran. I did everything I possibly could to build her a form that was as close as it could be to the original, her Toa kin.

And that was when something occurred to me. I realized it when I noticed how her figure and armor had become almost identical to that of one of Teridax's Toa Hagah, a Toa of Water named Gaaki. Here, in this brightly-lit laboratory, I had created so many things...but right now, I was not creating. I was mimicking, copying the works of inventors far greater and more experienced than myself. My masterpiece was becoming, not a creation, but a clone...and that, I could never allow.

I stripped the armor from her frame and began to work it into a different shape―a smoother, more streamlined silhouette than that of any Toa I had yet seen. She would be smaller than most of her kin, but without the added weight of heavier armor, I could make her much faster than them. The design of the armor was my own, though it took many tries to create a series of patterns that blended and flowed naturally, yet still appeased my desire for subtle, complex beauty. With this, I could be certain that she was indeed my own creature, not a simple copy of something better.

But still, it was not enough. She was still too...plain? Unoriginal? I was not entirely sure why, but the compulsion to change her was still strong. I had to give her something else, something that no Toa could ever dream of having. Something that would forever mark her as different...something that would forever mark her as mine. I would give her something practical, something she could use to fight and to survive―and something I was certain that, once I completed her and brought her to life, she would come to love.

I gave her wings.

And not just any wings; I had been engineering these for a long time in preparation for some other idea, before my masterpiece had even been a thought dancing in the back of my mind. These wings were long and graceful, arcing high over her head and almost brushing the floor when furled. With their bladed edges, they were weapons in and of themselves. And they could slice through water just as easily as air, letting her swim almost as fast as she could fly. All she would have to do was learn how to use them.

There were many things she would need to learn...and therein, I soon came to realize, lay one of my greatest problems. I had never before built a structure this complex; it would need an equally complex mind to control all of its functions. There were the basic survival instincts to take care of, of course, but there also had to be room for her to create functions of her own. She would need to learn how to reason, to think over her base instinct. And that would take a brain more vast in power and processing than any I had made before.

Constructing the basic pathways on the instinctive level from blank chips was easy enough; I made plenty of backups, in case any of my experiments went awry. But how to increase the processing power enough to sustain the more advanced functions of her being, both individually and in concert with one another? This was the most daunting task of all, and the one that seemed the most impossible.

It was then that I lost my resolve completely. Here I was in possession of a fully-formed body that, visually and functionally, was a work of art...but it had no brain to control it. How could I, a mere Makuta, create and program a brain so vastly complex as to support this creature I had made? And even assuming I somehow found a way to give her that brain...how could I possibly hope to give her a mind? Programming one into her would defeat the entire purpose of giving her free thought in the first place...and it wouldn't be a mind, really, just another string of code among millions that would moderate her actions and thoughts to a certain behavioral pattern. If I were to bring her to life like that, she would be no better than a machine...she would exist, but she would never truly live.

Days passed, and then weeks, and months, and I grew no closer to finding the solution. Had any of my brothers been the ones working this project, they would not have bothered searching for an answer at all; no, they would have leaped at the chance to be in complete control of such a creature. But the last thing I wanted was to be in control. I did not want to rob her of her freedom...even if she was still nothing more than an empty, soulless shell.

What did I want? Not even I knew for sure. My mind kept changing on its own, making decisions without ever seeing fit to inform me. When had I gone from building a beautiful creature to grasping at the impossible? I knew that I would never be satisfied until I could instill in her the one thing I had no power to give...a soul. But why? And how?

My answer was a long time in coming. And that answer is why I write now, preserving the story of my failures and triumphs where it will never be lost...and perhaps, one day, may even be found.

I have made a discovery that changes everything―one I dare not speak of directly, not even in writing, not even here in the safe and guarded depths of Destral. It is a powerful artifact, possibly one of the most powerful in our entire universe or any other, and it is most certainly guarded by creatures more fierce and terrifying than any I can imagine. But if I can somehow reach it, I know it will help me. It is the very essence of life...it will understand, as I have finally come to understand.

There is something beautiful in seeing, when I have spent so long working in the dark, unaware of even my own desires. I realize now that this is no longer some vain attempt at perfection in my art; it ceased to be such a shallow endeavor long ago, from the very moment I decided to alter the designs of the Great Beings and make her mine. And now...now she is so much more than what I had at first sought her to be.

She is the child of my ambitions and dreams.

She is my child.

So long as it is within my power to do so, I will protect her from danger. And I will pay any price to give her the mind, the soul, the life she so richly deserves.

I take my beloved child now from this cold, unloving place of her creation to a land I barely know, one that I can only hope will become the place of her birth.

I do not expect I shall return.

But I know in my heart that someday, somehow, she will.