I've been writing Random-centric quite a lot, lately, haven't I? Well, he needs some more fics doing anyway... Just a lil fic circulating Random's "creation" at the hands of a young designer who wants originality, but has no real idea what it is.

Betaed (quickly) by Sarah Frost. (Thank you, Sarah )


Construction.

Scarab Dynasty.

'It's perfect.' He scans the paper a glance before giving his verdict. 'Good design, decent framework, not too hard to program either, Go with it.'

He had the tone of somebody who really just couldn't be bothered to go over it one more time, and even thought it got on Zeke's nerves, he could sort of understand why. But still, he looked at the figure on the paper, and he knew it wasn't right. It wasn't what he wanted.

And Rick must have noticed the look on his co-workers face. 'Oh for crying out… what don't you like about it NOW, Zeke?'

'…He's a Lightning Knight.'

Rick groaned, his fists clenching around a copy of the day's meeting schedule. 'Yes, that IS your design department, Zeke. Lightning Knight Main-Character Design, phase one construction and the rest.'

'But… but that's just it, isn't it? He's just a Lightning Knight.'

'I repeat: that's exactly the point. You think they're calling this game "Ace Lightning" just for the hell of it? The sketch is fine. We're using it.' He tried to snatch the paper, but didn't realise that Zeke still had his hand on the corner. Didn't realise, that is, until Zeke's grip tightened and the brief struggle for possession ended with the sound of ripping.

'Rick!'

'Oh… oh crap!' Rick tossed the torn drawing back on Zeke's desk.

'Looks like it's not going into production after all…'

Rick rubbed a hand across his eyes. He left behind a black mark from the still damp ink of the sketch, but Zeke opted not to tell him. 'great. Just great. This is not my day… Look kid, redraw that… that thing and get it to me in the next hour, okay?

'But… Look, I can't…'

He was going to lose it. Definitely. Zeke can tell. Anything he says now might just lose him his job so he keeps his mouth shut, no matter how much he wants to start ranting on about boring old military Lightning Knights and stuck up production teams. 'Listen, we've got three days to get these final sketches and 3D figures done so we can start running prototypes through the simulator. If we don't have anything to show the head of department by this evening then the agency is slashing our funding.What are you trying to do, kid? Bankrupt us?'

Zeke still didn't answer. It was best not to start talking to Rick about money. He always got so uptight when it came to the budget.

'Listen, Zeke… if you WANT to be a part of this game, you're going to have to stop going all lone-ranger and start acting like a part of the team. That means obeying me and only me, twenty four seven, all the time. Capiché?'

'Um… absolutely?'

'Good,' Rick's expression calmed a little. 'That's good. At least we're starting to understand each other. Now, I'll be waiting in the production room. Get your drawing sorted and get in there. Stat. We want a Lightning Knight, okay? Nothing fancy just… just make him a little different to the other two and it'll be fine. I just need a last character, I mean is a tiny fraction of your concentration all that much to ask? We lose our new sponsorship and it's your ass going out that door.'

The door to the communal office slams shut as Rick leaves, still unaware that he's leaving black ink smudges on stuff as he touches it. He really didn't need to slam it like that, since the office had those automatic door-closing... things installed, but he does it anyway. Zeke reaches out to grab a prototype model of a Lightning Lance before it falls off his desk.

Crap…

New sponsorship…to hell with the sponsors.

He went back to staring at his paper –now ripped, smudged and missing half a face– and thinking about how much he hated it. This guy was just like the others. The ideal personified. Another Knight, daring to "do right at all times" (and also acting as the guardian of a convenient energy restore and auto-save point for the playable-characters.)

Well, it didn't seem to matter anyway. This picture wasn't fit for any final drafting now. The ink had blurred over the picture, it was all creased up and the image was missing half an eye.

Damn.

Or maybe not…

The figure on the paper was incomplete now, but actually it was sort of an improvement… Rick had ripped up his features a little, made him look a little less like all those other hackneyed, military-type designs. He'd had enough of those with the last company he worked with.

What had been their project name again? Deathstryke 3? He'd barely bothered committing the name to memory, he's worked in about a dozen of those places and the story's always the same: just a bunch of so-called experts trying to turn out the goriest videogame possible in a space of six months. Sure, Zeke was all up for horror and special effects, but since when did "RPG strategy" games consist of eighty percent blowing stuff up, fifteen percent finding weapons and five percent waiting at dodgy loading screens? He pitied the poor guys who'd been doing the testing.

Though now that he thought about it, he remembered them actually kind of enjoying it… and the public had loved Deathstryke 3. Loved it. The game had sold in its billions. Deathstryke 4 was in production right then, even has he sat there fretting about his latest character design.

"Fear them. Fight them. Destroy them first." He scribbles absentmindedly on the corner of the paper without really knowing why he's doing it.

"Fear them. Fight them. Destroy them first"The Deathstryke tagline. Kind of ironic, Zeke realised, now that he thought about the motto they were supposedly sticking in the cut scene for Ace Lightning. "Do Right and Fear Not."

"Nice and kid friendly," Damien had called it. Nice and goddamn simple, more like. They should've hired better writers. At least Deathstryke 3 had had a half decent "aliens make a giant circus out of earth" plotline going. Not that anyone had cared that much about the plot. Nobody ever watches the cut scenes. They just want to get onto the next level and back to blowing stuff up as quickly as possible. Until he landed a job in this business he had been exactly the same. It wasn't real, right? Why bother watching a story when it wasn't even real and wasted time that was better spent shooting the aliens?

It wasn't real. Yeah. Sometimes Zeke thought maybe that was the most frightening thing about these games. That they were fiction and reality was worse. At least in the videogames nobody ever got hurt. Not really.

He pulled himself out of the daydream and back to the not-so-soft reality of having forty-five minutes to turn out a character or lose his job.

He stared at the paper where the page was ripped away, and the figure who had lost half his face. He got to thinking about the first bad guy he ever designed for Deathstryke. He remembered a torn up face and steely claws and eyes that flashed like lights in a nightmare.

Zeke traced the lines where the paper had ripped, and realised that he really, really didn't want to change this guy back into another Lightning Knight. He was better than that.

He remembered what Rick said to him: "we want a Lightning Knight, okay? Nothing fancy just… just make him a little different."

He picked up the trusty Grade-3 and started to draw, scribbling away on top of the old, smudged drawing.


Whatever soft, gentle lines were left from the previously smiling (and now kind of mutilated) face, Zeke rubbed them out and started again. He needed to be older, he decides first of all. Not too old, just old enough so you could tell he was around before Ace was. He remembered the guy who used to sell him the paper on the street outside the office. How he'd had one of those faces that was all… all hard and angry when Zeke handed him a quarter. The kind of face you get when you're disillusioned with life and everything about it. That's the kind of face he wanted this new Knight to have.

And the smile – he gets rid of that too. That line was too soft. Too subtle. This guy wasn't supposed to look that way this time. If he didn't watch where he was drawing these lines, then his design would just end up looking like Ace Lightning. This character wasn't supposed to be like that. This one was supposed to be different. At the place where Rick tore through the paper, he reshapes the Lightning Knight's face. He rubs out the uniform and starts again with a trench coat and broken wrist cannons.

Wait a sec, he stopped himself, wasn't he trying to get AWAY from all the military stuff? If anything all this… metal was taking it closer.

The wheels are too much…

Maybe I should go with tank treads… No, wait that's worse…

But leave him on foot and he looks like some kind of mechanical solider… Yeah, that's worse still…'

Zeke switched pencil for ink, dragging a biro (unprofessional, but it worked) across the paper, marking out the shading of the metal, carving out the hard, angular shapes where his arm was supposed to be.

No, not like that. This guy's not like that. He's not that sure of himself. It's not all "Do Right and Fear Not" for him. He's more… random than that. Have him switch back and forth all the time. Like a traffic light. He stops himself suddenly, trying to decide whether or not that description sounds… dorky. He figures that it does, but what the hey, they need SOMETHING to tell them whether he's good or bad.

Green light go, red light stop.

…That'll work.


Zeke jumped when a fellow employee's hand touched his shoulder. He'd been so wrapped up in what he was doing he hadn't heard her come it. She told him he was expected in the production room, apparently on threat of death if he didn't arrive in the next two minutes.

Zeke finally paused and looked down at his "Lightning Knight"

He kept on looking at it for kind of a long time and was late getting into the production room.


'Zeke, what the hell is this?' Zeke would never forget the look on Rick Hummel's face when he held the paper (with the ink blow dried with the hand dryer in the lavatory, just to be safe) out towards him as said it was the final draft. It was priceless. Or maybe terrifying. He wasn't totally sure which. 'I asked for a Lightning Knight, we're already done with the freaks!'

'He is a Lightning Knight.'

'Oh, really? You wanna explain to me how? You've really done it this time, Zeke, I swear… I mean look at this!'

Zeke looked at his picture – even though he'd sat for fifteen minutes in his office earlier doing just that. For the umpteenth time he examines the claw and the metal and the cold, hardness of the face that started out looking like all the others.

He took a deep breath, and gave Rick the "how" he'd asked for. He didn't explain everything, of course. He left out some of it. Like he decided NOT to tell him about most of the backstory he'd got planned, and all the messy bits that would probably mean they had to up the game rating. And how he wanted to find some way to work him into a PC role. And that he thought his guy might actuallybe a better match in the current romance plot they'd got going. Because all that was just his crazy brain going into overdrive, and Rick looked on the brink of firing him as it was. As much as he wanted his place in this "team", he also wanted that pay check.

'So… Angry looking guy, isn't it?

'ANGRY?' Rick snorted. 'If you think he looks bad wait until I show this to the directors. I mean these expression files will be a NIGHTMARE to compress… And what is with that… that thing?' He jabbed at something in the picture. 'You expect us to animate that hunk of unnecessary data?'

'The claw is the best part!' Zeke argued. He really thought so too. Things just hadn't been gelling at all in his head at first, what with knowing what he wanted to do but not how to do it. And then the claw came out, and that really sort of set his drawing apart. It was that point when he realised what he wanted to draw and what he wanted his character to be.

Rick didn't seem to agree. 'Rick, seriously, it's not THAT bad… a couple of extra bytes, that's all he needs… and maybe a few little plot modifications, but the writers can work around that.'

Rick stayed silent for a moment. Zeke was almost tricked into thinking he was actually considering his point. 'Hoffman… I am seriously supposed to believe that this… thing is the best friend of our superhero, huh?'

'It'll work won't it? I mean there's good in him too. He's just mixed up.' He tapped the paper, drawing attention to the only part of the image that had been done in colour –some red ink dabbed across the Cyborg's right eye. 'See, he's got this new-fangled program thing going… it's not a bad thing, really, it… just makes him do bad things. You know, he doesn't know what's right or wrong. He's not totally sure what he should be doing and why he should be doing it from one minute to the next.'

'Kind of like YOU, I figure,' Rick snorted. The comment didn't really mean anything but Zeke couldn't help but take it personally.

'I'm not saying that… I'm saying that's what people are like. Real people. Humans.'

Rick grunted. 'What, prone to being nice as pie one minute and ripping each other apart with hulking bits of metal the next?'

'Yes.' Zeke felt so sure of himself at first, but when Rick gave him THAT you-are-this-close-to-pay-cut look, he feels a little less confident. 'Um… I mean…'

The thing was, Rick's expression kind of… changed when he said that. In a weird way, Zeke figured that Rick actually agreed with him for once. It wasn't something he was all that happy about, but he agreed with him nonetheless…

'Look, don't you think the plot needs more work? Some whacked out cyborg like Random Virus might be just what we need.'

'Kids don't care about the plot, Zeke. They care about the shooting and the swordplay and… and the blowing stuff up, not— wait a sec, Random Virus?'

'Yes.'

'I thought his name was…' Rick cuts himself off, slapping his own forehead, as if reminding himself that he doesn't really care. 'Okay… forget I said that. Fine. The programmers are going to go totally to hell about this…'

Rick was right. He was usually right, especially when he was being cynical. The programmers DID go to hell about it, but to be totally honest the writers were even worse. They had to rewrite seven drafts of cut scenes to accommodate this guy. They hadn't had any choice.


It was the first time in a long while that Zeke had actually stopped to watch a cut scene when he saw Random Virus in action for the first time.

'I thought we were going for the heroic trio approach?' he heard someone muttering at the back of the room, but nobody else said anything. Especially not while Random Virus was ripping holes in metal walls and wires. Ten minutes later he was being thumped on the back by a hero and the cut scene was coming to an end. And all the way through it there was the light –the flickering from red to green that Zeke had wanted. It actually worked kind of well, despite the reference to traffic lights.

Still… No wonder the programming department had complained about this scene.

The cut scene ended, the screen became dark and up went the lights. A few minutes later people were muttering their compliments and the next days schedule was being arranged. And then someone else started babbling on about merchandise. If anything, Zeke knows his Virus would make an interesting action figure.

He was the last to leave his seat. Rick was standing at the back of the room, staring at his watch and shaking his head, and Zeke opts to ignore him.


Reviews much appreciated. Concrit even more so.