[This short chapter is a bit of an experiment. A friend advised that I try to mix things up a little, so I'm going to try showing some of the story from viewpoints other than just Jason's on occasion. If there's something about this that doesn't work, please feel free to let me know.]

[I made a couple alterations in order to clarify some things that I don't think I put enough work into the first few times.]

Bigott Eizenburg quickly made his way through the well-appointed passages of Zalem's upper levels. A man of strong German descent, clothed in a suit with a militaristic cut, his athletic figure gave off an air of grave authority. It doesn't take long before he's standing before the door to his destination. Setting his features in a grim expression, he pauses before entering the door to the lab, steeling himself to face the man inside.

'If you can call him a man,' Bigott thinks to himself.

Combined with a variant of the Methusilisation longevity treatments, Desty Nova's advanced nano-technology allowed him to live for centuries, and Bigott had even witnessed Nova regenerate serious damage after a laboratory accident some years ago. Over the years, all of that, combined with Nova's rather sadistic genius led Bigott to wonder just how human was Zalem's despotic ruler?

Effectively immortal, able to regenerate extensive wounds within seconds, and unbelievably brilliant. Combined with an unparalleled ruthlessness and complete lack of morals and empathy, Nova had managed to make himself the ruler of Zalem centuries before Bigott had been born, circumventing the ruling council that was nominally in charge of the floating city.

Oh, the council could provide some amount of push-back on certain things, but in almost all aspects, Nova was the one in charge of life on Zalem as well as in the poverty-riddled city below. The lives of every citizen of Zalem and Iron City were his to do with as he wished, and he did exactly that, taking great pleasure in playing with those lives like some sadistic god.

'Or a devil', Bigott mused. While Eizenburg was no believer in gods, he was fairly certain that the Devil existed, and he had chosen the form of one Desty Nova.

With a quick wave of his hand, Bigott signals the embedded sensors to open the doors, and enters into the spacious laboratory. A brief scan around the room reveals only a single white-clad lab technician focused on a set of instruments off to the side, but no Nova.

Heading towards the right side of the chamber, Bigott makes his way towards a set of elegantly designed arching doors. Passing through them onto the expansive balcony, he finds Nova standing near the railing, looking out over the sprawling Iron City below. Crossing the short distance to stand exactly 1.5 meters from Nova's left side, Bigott waits with a stiff posture, almost at attention, knowing better than to interrupt the white-haired scientist.

After a couple minutes of perusing the information being displayed on the holographic display of the palm-sized data-pad in his hand, Nova glances over at him. "Ah, Mister Eizenburg," Nova almost purrs, "I take it repairs have finally been completed on the external surveillance grid?" While his tone is reminiscent of one talking to a companion, Bigott is quite familiar with the faint trace of malice that underlies it. Waiting like a hidden predator, to strike at the first sign of weakness.

"Yes, sir," he answers in a carefully modulated monotone. "All systems are back up to full capacity. It appears that it was indeed sabotage." Considering that Nova was almost certainly already aware of the answer, Bigott had no doubt that this was another of those strange little games Nova liked to play with the people around him.

Nova smiled only faintly, but his voice was filled with a casual, depraved humor, "Of course it was sabotage. Every generation has one or two rebels. And as always, these will be found, and dealt with."

Bigott feels himself blanch at the memory of the last 'rebel' who'd been caught messing with important systems. A young boy of seventeen, who'd imagined he was making some kind of profound statement, standing up to the 'system'. When he'd been brought in, he was defiant, almost fearless.

After Nova had finished with the boy, the twisted remains were shown to the immediate family, along with a warning, before being dumped onto the Scrapheap below. Bigott refused to remember the details. How the boy's mother had collapsed screaming, tears streaming down her face at the sight of her son. Or the sadistic pleasure Nova had taken at the families overall reaction, reveling in his power over them.

Such examples were always made of anyone standing up to the powers Nova had put in place. While they were never officially made public, neither were they suppressed. Nova let the stories and rumors circulate, allowing fear to do much of his work for him. Of course, there are plenty of surveillance and security systems in place to ensure that it stays that way, should fear fail to do it's job. It would require an upset of epic proportions to allow the system to be challenged in any meaningful way, and no one had that kind of power. At least, no one on Zalem.

"All that aside," Nova went on, his tone light and airy, "this little incident has thrown off my schedule. This will need to be corrected, and I want you to see to the details. There are other matters I'll be tending to."

Bigott tamps down on a surge of anxiety, careful to keep any sign of it from his expression. Seeing to the details of Nova's little experiments was often it's own kind of hell. Fortunately, Nova also rewarded useful servants, often lavishly. But even without the rewards, this was a far better position to be in than being part of the experiments.

To Nova, there were ultimately only two kinds of people in the world; those who were experimented on, and those who did the experimenting. And he did love his experiments, often testing his subjects to destruction, though there were a number of exceptions. All of this was done in the service of what Nova called 'Karmatron Dynamics', studying higher dimensional patterns (such as resulted from information, energy, a person's actions) in order to predict a person's 'destiny', for lack of a better term.

By predicting a person's destiny, Nova sought to completely control human destiny overall. At least, that was Bigott Eizenburg's understanding of it. Testing such an unusual individual as Alita supplied Nova not only with a wealth of data towards his Karmatron Dynamics experiments, but also entertained him tremendously. He enjoyed watching her suffer, but in the end, the assistant knew that Nova would eventually destroy her. She is, after all, a threat to the established order of things.

His manner becoming friendly, almost casual, Nova turns to him fully, "But first thing's first. How is our little Alita?"

Feeling the skin on the back of his neck and scalp crawl at the sight of the friendly smile on Nova's face, Bigott sends specific mental commands to the highly advanced neural implants all high-level officials possess. Holding his hand out at chest height, palm up, subdermal implants project a holographic display of the current subject of Nova's interest into the air between the two men. "The current batch of Karmatron Dynamics projections around subject 99a have lately been… inconclusive." The breath catches in Bigotts throat, as he braces for the rage he expects from his overlord.

Instead of rage, however, a strange look of intense curiosity crosses Nova's face. "Indeed? How unexpected." Nova turns and paces a few steps away, calling up information on the little data-pad in his hands. He stops, one arm crossed over the small of his back, as he gazes into the holographic display of the pad. "Up until now, the Karmic forces around Alita have been bending probabilities in fascinating ways. She's been a veritable cyclone, throwing everything into near-uncertainty," Nova muses in a subdued voice. "But these last few weeks, Karmatron projections around her have plateaued in a way that's well outside expected parameters."

Nova's voice becomes soft and thoughtful, though still holding an almost frightening intensity as he peers deep into the data displayed, "The subject herself hasn't undergone a change radical enough to account for this, so what could be the cause? Has the environment changed in some way?" His eyes flicker over the display in an almost maniacal fashion, "No. I've spent centuries molding Iron City into the perfect laboratory for my work, and it remains so. Shortly after she was revived, the waves she put out were like a volcanic erruption! A tidal wave of chaos, changing things around her in unexpected ways. According to every indication, this should have continued. Instead..." His voice trails off.

Snapping off the display, Nova slowly looks up and turns back around, "According to the data, this seems to have started when she changed back to her Berserker body. For months, she kept to her Motorball body, unable to face the pain of her failure with that boy, Hugo. Unable to wear the body tied to the memories of his death." Raising a hand to his face, he taps his lips lightly with an index finger, "There's something I'm overlooking, but what…?"

In his years being the scientist's assistant, Bigott has become well aware that Nova possesses keen insights into human nature, and that the scientist is incredibly, almost supernaturally adept at reading people. Combined with what has been gleaned from his Karmatron Dynamics, Nova had predicted that Alita should have remained so traumatized by her boyfriend's death that she would remain in her Motorball body all the way up until she reached the Championships, distancing herself from the body she wore when she'd failed to save the young man.

"Once again, she proves more unpredictable than I had anticipated," the immortal scientist mutters quietly. "Unless it's not her, specifically. Something else…?" Nova's eyes flash with a shadowy gleam. Snapping his attention to Bigott, Nova sharply orders, "Show me the events that occurred just prior to her returning to the Berserker."

Obediently, Bigott calls up the information from the city's massive and heavily protected central computers, displaying it through his subdermal implants. Footage and data from weeks ago are displayed. The beginning of the evening's game, the battle that commenced over the motorball as the paladins raced around the winding track, everything going as expected. What wasn't quite expected (but was anticipated as a possibility), was Alita's Tuner, her adopted father Ido, being called away mid-game to deal with a patient.

The next day, and the following few days afterwards, doctor Ido spent every waking moment dealing with unexpected emergencies that plagued Alita's team. His doing so had allowed Alita and her team to remain competitive enough to completely destroy an opposing team that had actually threatened to set them back. It had been an unexpectedly intense game, all thanks to minor upgrades that Nova had snuck into the opposing team's parts. Not enough to help them win, but enough to test Alita's capabilities and perserverence.

Even after the game was over, Ido had spent an entire day seeing to life-support problems that developed in the cores of two of Alita's teammates. The problems had been nothing serious enough that another cyber-physician couldn't have dealt with them, but Ido had seemed hellbent on making sure everything was in perfect order. When Alita had asked him, he had assured her that he was checking in with Gerhad and everything was fine in the clinic.

"Show me this patient that pulled the exile, Ido away from that night's game," Nova orders abruptly.

Bigott immediately calls up the information, showing the surveillance footage he had tracked down of how the patient got into Ido's clinic in the first place. The drug-crazed criminal enforcer who'd gone off the deep end and was on the verge of killing some homeless dreg. The crowd that had gathered to watch the show. And then, the man in the strange olive-drab jacket who had stepped in between the enforcer and the dreg.

The man looked to be in his mid to late forties, attractive in Bigott's estimation, though the scowl on his face marred that attractiveness.

'He looks like he's about to shit his pants,' Eizenberg thought to himself, 'and I can't say I blame him.' He'd seen what happened next.

"Freeze," Nova commands, causing Bigott to stop the image playing out. Nova then leans in closer to the projection, scrutinizing the tiny figure now standing almost calmly, defiantly between the dreg lying on the ground and the hulking enforcer. "He's terrified," Nova observes in a calm, detached manner. "He's also rather angry." Nova's eyes narrow just a bit, "Very angry in fact, but not at the enforcer. Not specifically, anyway." More scrutiny under that cold gaze. "Hm, he's angry at the crowd."

A slow, icy chuckle comes from Nova, "He's an idealist. I haven't seen another one of those in quite some time." To Bigott's ears, Nova's voice drips with derisive amusement. The scientist's eyes flicker over the displays of information, "Jason Deshane. Early fifties. Born in a small mining settlement to the south, no known family, precious few friends. A farmhand, how quaint." That reptilian gaze slides back to the image itself, "Continue."

The image flows into motion again. The man, Jason, attempts to talk the enforcer down. The enforcer, who was normally even-tempered, becomes enraged and backhands the man. The subject is thrown back a couple meters and tumbles onto the pavement, badly hurt. Then the enforcer is on him in a flash, moving with a speed that only someone with augmented reflexes could match.

The agonized screams that Jason emits are more like those of an animal being mutilated, than what would come from a human. The sounds of flesh and bone tearing, the horror show playing out in color, it all makes Bigott faintly nauseous. He is unsurprised, though still a little sickened, to see the look of genuine amusement on Nova's face. He keeps his own features carefully neutral.

Bigott finds himself feeling vaguely sorry for this Jason, but only vaguely. After all, what did he care about some filthy dirtsider who'd gotten himself crippled by sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. Only a complete fool would do such a thing. Based on what he'd seen, this Jason was one of the few idiot do-gooders that popped up now and then. They rarely ever lasted long.

'What was that old saying?' Bigott wonders to himself. 'Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.'

It only takes seconds. One arm is crushed and ripped off at the elbow, one leg torn off at the knee. Twisted and pulled apart, as if the enforcer were taking the legs off a small animal. The other leg quite literally stomped into the pavement, for the most part. Ruined and unrecoverable, certainly. Then it's over as suddenly as it started, the drug-crazed cyborg sprinting off into the crowd, bowling over those too slow to get out of his way. It's as if something is hot on his heels, likely some sort of hallucination, considering the cocktail of drugs that he'd binged on.

The wreckage of what was just a moment ago a rather brave man is left in an expanding pool of blood, a ragged, quiet whimpering the only sound coming from him. The farmer's daughter, whom the man had come to the city with, rushes over to him, horrified and weeping at what had happened to her friend. Despite her distress, the young woman manages to provide rather expert first aid to the wounded man. She then manages to get him transported to the closest medical help, Ido's clinic, despite the fact that no one in the crowd moved to help her. With the amount of blood he left behind, Bigott is amazed that the man survived at all.

"Enough," Nova commands, and Bigott obediently switches off the holographic projector. "He's been there for weeks, in the home of the best cyber-surgeon in Iron City. Why is this man still in a wheelchair?"

"According to what I could find, he suffers from some sort of neural problem that's preventing him from utilizing cybernetics properly."

Nova's eyes scan the horizon as he slowly turns to look out over the balcony towards the sprawling city below. Bringing up his little data reader, Bigott can see that he calls up Karmatronic data, studying it for a few minutes. "I know of no condition that could cause this sort of problem. Even Ido's daughter was able to use cybernetics after a fashion, despite her degenerative condition, hence the full body replacement her father had planned. I want you to begin a file on this Jason Deshane."

"Shall I make preparations to have him added to 99a's tests?"

Nova waves one hand dismissively, "Not at this time, no. His Karmic readings are almost non-existent, hardly even registering. He's irrelevant, however after viewing Alita's interactions with him recently, he may prove useful in the future. She seems to have taken a liking to this weakling."

Before he can stop himself, Bigott's surprise gets the better of him. "She's attracted to him?"

Nova's snort of laughter is contemptuous not just of Bigott's assumption, but also the idea behind the question, "Hardly. She merely seems to find him likable. A rather surprising development, considering how she's distanced herself from anyone not already a part of her little circle. If she's forming any kind of bond with him, it could prove educational to see what happens when it's torn away." Turning back to face Bigott, Nova's face shows a mild amusement. "I had planned to see what sort of reaction could be elicited by cutting away the nurse, Gerhad. Now, I think adding this 'Jason' to the equation could make things a little more interesting. It's merely a matter of waiting for the right moment."

Nova changes the readout on the little datapad, focusing on Bigott again, "Speaking of Alita's little circle, what about that trip that she and her little family took out to the Badlands, recently?"

Pushing the words past a suddenly dry throat, Bigott responds, "Unfortunately the sabotage to our surveillance network caused us to lose the van after it reached the tree line. We were unable to ascertain the purpose of their trip."

Grunting absently, Nova says quietly, almost muttering, "Patterns that developed from that trip were hardly worth mentioning. We'll keep our attention focused on the city and the subjects themselves for the time being. Unless Alita happens to go along on another outing, of course."

"Certainly, sir."

His expression changing subtly but rapidly, Nova switches gears, "What about the team that Alita will be facing in her upcoming matches?"

Bigott switched the holo-display to bring up the paladins of the opposing team that Alita's would soon face. "Of the seven primary players, only this one shows any promise," he enlarges one image, while shrinking the others. "He goes by the name 'Fenrir'. He's volatile, stubborn, arrogant, has a small but useful number of addictions and appears to be bitter about a career that is now stagnating towards the top of Second League."

Nova focuses his gaze on the holographic image of the rather brutish looking cyborg, reading the face as well as the information displayed. "Yes, watching a promising career slowly die as a hard-fought future fades from his very grasp. And prideful, very nice. No doubt he'll take losing to a little girl like Alita very badly. I think I can use this one."

"Understood," Bigott answers promptly. "Anything else, sir?"

"Nothing further, no."

Bigott nods obediently and switches off his holo-projector.

"When she finally reaches First League," Nova continues, turning his gaze back out towards the distant horizon, a note of warning in his voice, "I want everything ready for her final challenge. Jashugan should provide for some interesting results when the two of them finally clash." Then Nova fully turns his back on Bigott, signaling that the assistant is dismissed.

Bigott was only too ready to be dismissed. Turning on his heel, he quickly makes his way through the balcony doors and heads for the laboratory exit. Alita's inevitable conflict with the reigning Motorball champion was still some ways off, but there was a great deal to get ready before then. The Karmatron information alone took enormous time and resources to properly study and put together.

Though Nova seemingly had all the time in the world to see his little projects through, he could still be frighteningly impatient about preparations being made ready in a timely manner.