. . .

Assimilation
One

The trip to Ōshū in coastal eastern Japan had been his master's goal from the very beginning.

The purpose, Noise knew—as it always was with every one of his previous owners—was admittance into the infamous WRB in North America. Ōshū was the final stop before he was to be shipped back to the Americas and into the ring of the elites; it was to be the place where he would fight his last battle of acclaim in one of the world's most widely recognized arenas—The Underworld Circuit of Iwate. If he won there, his ticket to the WRB was all but sealed.

But on that gloomy, foggy morning in São Paulo, Brazil, as Noise stood in the foyer of a large, seaside villa and watched his owner babble in quick, harsh tones on the phone, he felt an emotion akin to foreboding. Something in him was on edge the whole four hours he was mounted in place against the wall, his shipment crate on the ground beside him, ready to be sealed and mailed off to a cottage in Iwate as soon as his master finished with business at home.

The man—a wealthy entrepreneur by the name of Luiz Miguel—was shouting heatedly into the hologram pad, eyes narrowing darker at each biting word; the impatient tap-tap of his twenty-thousand dollar shoes bouncing off the marble walls of the mansion. Noise was surprised that he could understand every syllable the man was spewing out, even though he couldn't remember installing a language translator into his system. . . Nevertheless, he tuned his audios into the conversation with curious, almost intense scrutiny:

"What do you mean, he has to apply for the preliminaries to get into the actual fight?" Luiz was snarling. "I thought I arranged the deal with Mashido already!. . . When? Two fucking days ago, that's when. . . He was supposed to book me the second match with Shagojoyo in Ōshū tomorrow!. . .

"What? He said that he's no recollection of any of it? After we spent hours and hours discussing the details in fine, legible print in his office, inside his business building, right in front of dozens of witnesses? That lying, scum-sucking bastard!. . . No, I'm not. . . I'm not making any of this up!. . . I'm not losing my mind, either, I'm fine—I am; I'm just so fraggin' pissed—

". . . Yes, yes, I honest to God did all that legal shit. . . Stamped it and dated it and sealed it and everything. . . I'll show it to you if you want, but seriously, I— What? What did you just say? Care to repeat that to me? because I honestly thought you just told me to give up. . .

"—Hah, are you fucking serious? Really, give up? You expect me to give up now, after all of this? After I've already packed my bags, about to head out for the plane and everything, you tell me I should just give up all hope?. . . Don't fucking bullshit me, Ellis! I don't care what you have to do, I'm expecting a slot in the match tomorrow, no matter what!"

The words were eerily familiar, as though he'd heard them some time before; and as Luiz clicked his silver hologram off, whirling on him with murderous, blood-shot eyes, Noise experienced a flash of déjà vu for the first time in his existence.

"You pile of shit," the Brazilian man whispered, voice so low with fury that it seemed as if he blamed Noise for the entire misunderstanding between him and Mashido. His movements were haphazard and jerky—like the samurai bot knew it would be—as he stormed over to Noise, yanked the recharging cord from his back panel, and roughly pushed him down into the shipment crate. "Sometimes you're more trouble than you're worth." Luiz lifted the wooden cover of the crate over the robot's body, making to conceal his lower half, upper torso, and the whole of his ribbed facemask; soon, only the pointed helm and glowing blue optics would be visible. . .

Noise suddenly knew then; knew it all in a dizzying flash of prescience, as his owner reached forward to secure the cover in place. . .—what would happen to him in the next few weeks.

Once Luiz finished with his shipment in Brazil, he would be nicely wrapped up and conveniently placed on a plane flying to eastern Japan, crate covered with wild stickers and quirky postal stamps. Luiz would have, in his rage and unyielding haste, forgotten the code and verification tag for his identification scan; so when he reached Ōshū, Noise would be carted off to the mechanical lost-and-found lobby, waiting in vain as his owner passed not five feet from his imprisonment, realizing the folly only upon reaching his cottage and discovering nothing there.

And once the day was over and the lights began to dim in the lobby as nighttime ascended, a stranger would approach him from the shadows and retrieve his body from the lost-and found room. The stranger, a man cloaked in dark black with grim, merciless eyes, would take him back to his suite, paint him a deep, rich violet color, insert golden optics into his eye-sockets, and spray-paint expressive kanji characters all over his frame. He would install a brand new, enhanced voice recognition system within his processor, equip him with state-of-the-art armor and weapons, and give him over to the authority of his younger charge.

The boy would then change his designation from 'Noise' to 'Noisy Boy', enter him into the Underworld Circuit of Iwate under the name 'Hanzo Mashido', and ultimately claim title as one of the lead champions of robot boxing. . .

The memory was all there.

The touch and smell and sight of his every thought and action—the rough texture of his knuckles colliding into Shagojoyo's face mere seconds into the match, crushing the warm metal, fracturing it, until nothing was left but a bloody pulp of steel and sparks; the odor of fermenting oil as his opponent slumped forward and bled a thick, viscous pale purple, limbs haggardly ripped apart and flung across the entire arena, his internal wires strung over the stage like macabre Christmas lights on a cold, winter night; the still-life picture of the incredible, enormous crowd, all roaring in either delight or detached interest, their eyes as cruel and vicious and unfeeling as a robot's, yearning for violence, savagery, and bloodshed. . . so very evil. . . so very machine-like. . . so very inhuman. . .

No—

Noise stood perfectly still, encased in that indifferent, wooden box, wide-eyed with horror and disbelief. The flickers of icy, dreadful emotion inside of him were foreign; and yet, it seem to belong there as time froze in maddening, chaotic place. He could see Luiz's hand still leaning forward, the block of wood reaching to close him off from the world, to seal his fate away as easily as it would seal the box. He could see his master's lips lifting in a sneer, mouth opened to voice more snappy complaints. "Sometimes you're more trouble than you're worth," Luiz said, his words repeated slowly, coldly. . .

And then he was gone.

The darkness rushed in from everywhere—from the background, from the box, from the ground rising up—and consumed his small pockets of light with its Atramentarious ebony black. His optics widened, not yet the solid hue of gold-and-recessive-blue; and the glimmer of something far and near, deep and unsettling, shook his frame. It shot straight from the eyes, his previous yellow sight edged with dullness as Luiz's face and the mansion began to blur until they became a mesh of kaleidoscopic blobs and dotted lines. The sensation traveled down through his torso, to his legs and arms, and a deep, blooming pain seized hold of his chest and brought his limbs to a numbing state of immobility.

In one frenzied movement, the silence around him began to change shape, each pitch of sound blending into two instead of one. He saw words floating in the air, mixing and forming sentences, the chord of its line once Luiz's, but now flat and nondescript—one speaker monotone and cold, the other careless and airy. There was no sense to their back-and-forth gibberish, only the bleeding of voices into an idle drone; there was nothing there to feel but the sharp prick of an otherworldly presence, probing within him, tearing his insides to shreds, and reassembling it back again once the damage reached a point of no return.

He grunted, he writhed, he shuttered his optics to make the nightmare go away. Nothing made any sense anymore—how could he experience this, if he was a machine?; and if he could experience and feel, then why did it have to be so damnably real?

The pain was there in all its glory; the agony maddening in its vibrancy; trapping him in an eternal limbo, refusing to let him even move or scream and shout out his misery to the entire world. But he was a robot. . . he was Noisy Boy—Noise—and he had never thought himself capable of feeling a reaction, especially emotion, towards anything at all. He thought he had always been dead, immune to the organic world surrounding him, immune to human trivialities such as 'pain' and 'fear' and 'horror' and the antagonizing sensation of being—

"—ALIVE!"

The probing shuddered to a halt. Noise felt his frame still for a moment, shock numbing his senses until all he registered was that one word, uttered not by him, but by something else. . . something outside of his imprisonment.

The gibberish droning faded into steady cadences, growing louder and more distinct as the source of the noise hovered over his audios, like a bee buzzing around the origin of its excitement as it flits from flower to flower—or in his case, from limb to limb. Syllables clashed into tangible language, the words molded into sentences, into conversation and murmurs of dissection above his head. There was no explanation or understanding of it, no why or what or how, only the presence of something cool and clinical; and, at the same time, grasping and soothing in its brethren comfort. . .

". . .Actually did it!"

"Yeah humhm, what did I tell you? See that flash of light in his optics?
I think he's about to gain conscious now!"

"Sure it's not just charge from some residue energy?"

"Nah; it can't be. His frame's shaking, helm heating, armor smoking up and everything-"

"Always been wrong before, even with your reactivation."

"Well, doesn't hurt to try, does it?
—Why don't you give him a test and see. . ."

There followed a sharp prod to his left, invisible fingers prying into burning, sensitive armor. The act was innocent, armed with only good intentions, but he felt pain; voiced it aloud in a low tremor, and almost at once, the touch ceased. Soft murmurs filled the silence again, the monotone levelness of the speaker putting enough energy in his recently limp appendages to spark them into action.

"Hear us, Noisy Boy? Feel us?"

"Just try to power up your optics and move something. . ."

Without thinking of the consequences—or even of the possibility of more pain—Noise did as he was told, flickering on his eyes in one swift, nervous movement.

There was a click and a whirl; and it was a second before he realized the sound was coming from inside of him, his internal cooling fan whirling to life as his processor lit up in keen awareness. Everything turned blindingly, glaringly red. Noise gasped, the sound coming out in one relieved sigh of air– 'Aeughhh'. Hands found him, pressing his body firmly down as he jerked up in a violent, pendulant motion. The initial blurriness of the room began to fade away, until his crimson-toned vision dimmed to a pale white, blue, and black.

It took him those first few minutes of shuttering his optics again and again, head twisting back and forth to take in snippets of the bland room—the chipped, crumbling ruin of the wall; the barricade of cracked, crystalline mirrors surrounding him in a circle; the multiple components of blood-stained metal stacked in piles on the ground; the tools and machinery that whirled through the encampment, showers of sparks flying from their sharp-edged weapons—before he brought his eyes heavenward and met the gaze of a blue-eyed, grinning robot. It took him another five minutes to realize that this was him—the bot with the strangely comforting, monotone voice.

Noise opened his mouth to speak, to express an acknowledgement, a greeting, anything, to the calm-looking machine in front of him; but the all too familiar sensation of his ribbed facemask stopped him dead. He brought his optics downward and caught the glint of deep purple armor reflecting back. Without having to look, he knew his optics must be a brilliant, lively gold; that his body must be framed in beautiful, unintelligible kanji.

"I—" the samurai bot murmured. The hands holding him down were gone, and the freedom to move was overwhelming. He finally noticed that he was no longer inside the crate. That he had never been in the crate from the beginning.

"I. . . I don't understand-" Noise tried again, his vocals breaking. The dizzying sense of reality was too strong to comprehend; his arms remained rigid beside his side as he laid there, unsure and confused. "Here. . . I'm here. . . But how?"

"How not?" the monotone robot answered him wryly, and he leaned down to pat Noise's arm. "Don't worry. Reality, not fantasy. Here now, not there." Surprising him, the robot reached down to grasp his hand, bringing it right up in front of Noise's face with only a wicked grin for an explanation. "See?" He slapped Noise's faceplates with the limp appendage. "Feel?" He opened his mouth and whistled a soft, low tune. "Hear?"

Slowly, the smile on his face faded, humor disappearing from his expression as he dropped Noise's hand back to its side. Metal met metal with a clank; bright blue optics stared at him levelly. They had never met before until this day, but there was an impression of companionship in the gaze that made him feel oddly safe. "Sense?" the robot named Atom asked quietly.

Noise didn't reply, his optics dimming. He nodded in silence, and it was enough.

"Welcome back from deactivation, Noisy Boy. . ."—Atom continued, and his expression flashed in mock admonishment as he shook his helm—"Seven hundred, ninety-one years sure is a long time to be sleeping, don't you think?"

Tbc.

A/N: And we get a look into Noisy Boy's past and how he came to be! (He's called 'Noise' in here, because I like it better than 'Noisy' or 'Noisy Boy' |8)
I made most of it up, so I'm not sure if it's accurate or not.

Hope this (especially the beginning part when Noise re-experiences his memory/dream) wasn't too confusing; it's supposed to be vague like that, but people tell me I'm way too unclear sometimes, so just give a shout if you didn't get something C: Also, I know the copious amount of detail is killing you guys (dw, it's killing me too XD), but that's just my writing style for the fic, this chapter especially, so forgive me! There shall be some action soon (if I'm able to continue. . .), but I'm just building up character right now so it's going a bit slow.

I apologize for the immense cursing and slight violence in this chapter-~- I might change the rating to M in the future, because it will eventually get more violent.
Also, can you guys guess what year it is now? :3