Chapter two is here. Have fun reading and remember, reviews are best way to make sure you get another chapter.


The first half mile of Chiro's trek into the outskirts was mostly just dirt and weeds, with grass and bushes quickly taking over in the next half. It was here that most people stopped, as evident by a couple of thrown away cans and candy wrappers.

It took an hour's hike to reach the edge of his usual boundary. About a mile inHe smiled. He usually didn't have time to go this far before he had to had back to the orphanage if he wanted to make it in time for roll call and stay out of trouble. Right about here was where all the plant life started growing in larger numbers and was where the most of the strange creatures that everyone worried about lived. The shrubbery and trees were thicker here, though hardly what one would call a forest or even woods. Small hills and large rocks were scattered around the area.

Chiro picked up his pace, feeling even more excited then before.

But the further Chiro walked, the more strange things started to look. New kinds of trees he hadn't ever seen before started appearing. They looked almost the same as the ones in the city, except these ones had large, red pieces of fruit growing from the branches. Some of the fruit was bigger then his head.

"That's weird." mumbled Chiro, walking up to one of the trees. He felt the bark and examined some fallen leaves. It really didn't look like any he had ever seen before. He half thought about plucking one the pieces of fruit off the tree and trying it, but decided against it. Who knew what it might taste like?

He continued walking, watching blue and green birds fly from one red fruit tree to another. The tree were growing so close together that it was impossible to get through them. Walking around them till he spotted a break in the trees up ahead, he sprinted towards. Still watching the birds in the trees though, he almost walked into a giant metal, moss covered wall.

"What the?" Said Chiro in shock.

As Chiro's eyes continued upwards, he realized that the wall was actually a part of a giant metal body. Chiro stepped backwards, still looking up at the metal giant. It was shaped like a human, one made of metal blocks and cylinders. It must have been taller then most of the buildings in the city, how could he have not seen it before? How come no one in the city had seen it? Something that big would have to be miles out into the desert to not be spotted from just the people on the ground in the city, not to mention the people in the sky scrappers. The giant was standing at full height, looking straight out at the city. It didn't even have a shadow. Suddenly, Chiro felt as though he was being watched. Chiro stepped back again. Suddenly he felt slightly nausea and his eye became unfocused. Shaking his head and closing his eyes for a moment, he felt better, only to feel freaked out again when he opened them. The metal giant was gone. Instead of the metal wall that had only been a yard away from him a moment before was a boulder partly way into the ground surrounded by more of the red fruit trees, only these one had even thicker trunks and were even more closely packed together. He stared at the boulder, wondering if he had really seen the foot of a metal giant there.

Stepping forward, he felt the wave of nausea come again, and when his eyes refocused, the metal giant was back. It seemed he had to be really close to see it.

Chiro didn't understand what he was seeing. What was this thing? And why was it even out . Curiosity overpowering his fear, Chiro moved closer to the wall. He put up his hand when he was only a foot from it. He hesitated, the foot alone was probably two or three yards taller than him after all, but it didn't look like it would be moving any time soon. Touching the foot, Chiro found that the metal was surprisingly warm. But Chiro didn't get the chance to notice anything else. There was a sudden clunking sound from inside. Jumping back, Chiro watched as a large panel opened at the top and began lowering to the ground. Chiro quickly turned and ran well more then a yard away from it, but the nausea didn't come back. Slowly the door lowered to the ground. Once it hit the ground, everything became still again. Chiro stood, back against some of the trees, watching. He half expected alien creatures to come marching out or for more doors to start opening, but everything was still. Chiro walked closer, trying to see inside. It certainly looked empty.

After a moment of fierce debating with himself inside his head, he crept inside, slowly looking around. But there wasn't much to see though. There wasn't a ceiling, the room just continued upwards into the dark. It was impossible to see how high it went. Next to the door was a panel with buttons and a picture of the robot riddled with tiny dots, mostly on it's torso. But there were six dots almost twice of the size of all the others on both the hands, feet, the head and in the middle of the torso.

"I wonder how this works?" Said Chiro, examining the panel and touching one of the dots near the bottom of the torso.

Suddenly lights in the wall turned on, lighting the room in a blue glow. The door began to close.

"What?"

Before Chiro could even move the door snapped shut and several little clicks sounded as it locked.

"Wait! Open up." Said Chiro pounding on the door. The floor jerked violently, causing Chiro to lose balance and fall backwards. The elevator began moving, quickly gaining speed as it traveled up the leg. The elevator rose so fast that Chiro felt sure it would crash against the top of the elevator shaft before it could ever stop. But as quickly as it had gained speed it began slowing down, coming to a somewhat rough stop. Feeling a bit shaky, Chiro breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. Behind him, a new door opened. Or at least it did somewhat. It jammed halfway open and after trying to unstick itself a few times, it seemed to give up. Obviously, there wasn't much power in this place, nor was it in good condition. Not wanting to remain in the elevator in case it suddenly dropped or something, Chiro pushed the doors open the rest of the way and in stepped out into a hallway. Lights on the ceiling light up, but just barely. The light was dim and some flickered as they attempted to stay on. Some didn't come on at all. Chiro was starting to wonder just how much power was left in this place. It was almost as if the robot itself was struggling to find power to work even those few functions.

Looking down the hall, curiosity started overcoming his sense of fear once again. There were doors all down the hall both ways. Many of them open. Heading towards the door closest to him, Chiro looked inside. It was empty. Just some cupboards and a table with no chairs. Searching the others, Chiro found most of them were bare. The only thing he did find was tons of dust. There was so much of it that he was leaving faint footprints as he walked.

"Who would abandon such a cool place?" Thought Chiro as he continued his search. Or maybe a better question was who could have built it. It wasn't anything else like on Shuggazoom, that was for sure.

Chiro wandered around for what felt like hours. Some of the rooms deeper in were much interesting the bare ones he had found first, including what he assumed was medical center, a lab, several bedrooms, a room with six giant pillars and the command center. It was by far the largest room with a huge TV screen as tall as a house and a control panel several meters long ran along the bottom in it. There was also with five large chairs in a circle surrounding a sixth one, each one a different color. Chiro thought that room was the coolest out of all of the rooms he had seen yet. Chiro had just sat down in one of the big chairs, the orange one in the middle, which turned out to be very comfy, when he noticed six large cylinders in a row against the back wall. They were all a different color too, just like the chairs. Walking up to them, Chiro quickly realized what they were. They were elevators, like the one he had came in, only they were all smaller verison. They were big enough for a single person, maybe even two.

Chiro stepped inside blue tube, but there wasn't a panel or anything to turn it on. After a moment of standing there, Chiro was about to get out when he was suddenly sucked up through the tude. Chiro barely had time to register going through the dark blue tunnel he landed back down, his legs buckling under from the sudden drop.

"Oww. That hurt." Mumbled Chiro, rubbing his leg to try and ease the pain.

Chiro pulled off his backpack and groaned, looking at dangle from his hand by only one strap. The other had snapped at the top where it had originally been stitched to the rest of the bag. "Great, a strap broke." He pulled it back on, letting his left should carry the wait. "This will be fun to explain when I get back." But it was at that moment that Chiro realized he wasn't in the same room anymore. He was now in a long, dark hallway. Two long, seemingly never ending fluorescent lights ran in the two corners of the hall, but they barely glowed. They casted just enough light for Chiro to tell that he was in a hallway, but at the same time gave Chiro an ominous feeling as though he had just stepped into some forbidden place. Walking out of the lift, Chiro noticed it was no longer blue, but now just the unpainted grey of the metal that it was made from. Non of the other tubes were there either.

"Now where am I?" Chiro asked out loud. He half expected some evil sounding laugh to respond to him, like in a horror movie, but everything was silent. Except for a soft humming sound. "This that...a machine?" It was coming from his right. Chiro started following the sound, though honestly he didn't have much of a choice. All of the hallway to the left of the grey tube was in complete darkness and Chiro had seen enough movie and read enough comics to know to not just wander into the darkness.

As Chiro walked, the soft humming slowly became louder until after ten minutes, he came upon a single door at the end of the hallway. In fact, it was the only door he had seen at all in this hallway. Slowly he opened the door and looked inside. At first, the room seemed really small. All Chiro could see in the dim light of the room was some more control stations, against the back walk and turned sharply to form an L shape. Walking into the room, Chiro noticed that was actually a metal walkway decking and right next to the doorway was a staircase leading down to a lower level. Because of the door, Chiro hadn't seen the stairway when he first looked inside. The lower level held five large glass chambers and multiple cables and cords running all over the floor to different places in the surrounding walls and to the bases of the glass chambers. But as Chiro stared at the glass chambers, full of strange colored liquids and bubbles gently floating up from the bases, he froze.

Each of the five chambers had a creature floating inside. All were a different color too: yellow, black, blue, green, and red. Just like the chairs and the tubes.

"What...is this?" Asked Chiro, dropping his backpack to the floor. Slowly he walked up to the closest chamber, which held the black colored creature. "Are you...alive in there?" Chiro asked, tapping the glass gently. There was no response from the creature inside as it continued to bob up and down. As Chiro continued observing the creatures, he noticed that they all had a long tail. "They're monkeys." Concluded Chiro. "Metal monkeys. But I'm pretty sure Shuggazoom never had animals like that." Chiro examined each chamber carefully, trying to figure what they were exactly and why they were in the chambers. But it was hard to tell if the monkeys were alive or not. They didn't move or seem aware of anything, yet at the same time, there was something about them that kept Chiro thinking that maybe they were alive somehow. "Maybe they're in suspended animation or something?" Thought Chiro. But it seemed highly unlikely that they were alive, no matter what signs of life Chiro thought he saw. After all, considering the condition of everything, nothing in this place had been touched for at least a decade, maybe even two.

After a while, Chiro stopped looking at the monkey and went back up to the controller stations.

"I wonder if anything still works."

Wiping away some the dust, Chiro read what labels he could make out. "Lets see, system reboot, system check, current chamber status, security monitors..."

Chiro wiped away the dust under a large lever, which was the only one like it on any of the stations. "Let's see...Begin...something...man, I can't make out the rest of it." Dust had gotten under the thin layer of glass covering the label. Besides the very first word, Begin, all Chiro could make out was the last letter of the last word: s. Curiosity getting the better of him, Chiro grasped the lever and pulled it back. There was a flash of green light so bright that that was all Chiro could see. For a few seconds, there was an intense feeling of pain and energy that filled Chiro's entire body. He collapsed, falling to the ground unconscious. The sudden surge of power short circuited the lights and the room went dark, the only light coming from the stasis chambers.

While Chiro laid on the floor unconscious, the five monkeys were slowly beginning to awaken.


Chapter two is finish, and man is it long. Even longer then the first! Though hopefully not too long. Chapter three should be coming out shortly.