Author's Note: Second chappie! xD I really hope you like this, but even if you don't, it was worth a try.
I don't know what else to add. Just read on. Please? Please?
2. Centre
Loki didn't remember the forest. She didn't remember her mother, or the other werewolves. In fact, she was sure she was born at the Centre.
She had been two years old when she had been brought to the human laboratory. The Centre, as it was called, was one of the many labs working together in a network, united by a common goal – producing more werewolf slave-warriors. The first thing done to the wolf-children in order to free their minds from distress and pain of loss was erasing their memories. That also made sure that they had no place they'd want to go back to in the future. It was cruel, but it kept them under control. This was done to Loki as well; and when she was ready, her training began.
Thus the wolf-girl grew up in the laboratory. The love of her parents, the shelter of trees and the joy of a child learning to live were replaced by the cold indifference of her trainers and supervisors, the harsh gleam of metal walls and wires of her confinements, and the seriousness of a warrior learning to kill. It was not an easy life. But Loki was a werewolf, and she did what all werewolves did – adapted to it.
Loki was a… an unusual werewolf. The strangeness of her situation consisted of the fact that she was a female, and a Born. It was highly unnatural in the werewolves' world, because the werewolf gene could only be inherited by males, and the only way for females to become werewolves was through the Bite, not through birth. But Loki was born a werewolf and that made her an oddity. She was quite unique, actually; the only Born wolf-girl ever heard of, as far as humans had been informed. She didn't know that, but there was someone who did, and he was deeply interested in her because of the fact. He thought that such an unusual specimen would undoubtedly have the markings of a great warrior, or be better than the others in some ways at least. He had nothing to base that on, but he observed the girl from the very first day she arrived and supervised her training. Sometimes he'd talk to her, just to test her intelligence at first, but soon she became something more of a pet to him.
This man was the head of this particular laboratory branch. Loki was his favourite; but not in a way a human child would be a favourite. He didn't love her as such. She was his favourite in the way a weapon could be – like a machine, a lifeless object. It never occurred to the man to cut her some slack, and he never considered setting her free as an option. Quite the opposite, he made sure she was trained in much harsher conditions than the others: he was hoping that this would reveal her extraordinary abilities, if she had any.
Loki started out with relatively easy things, of course, for she was but a child; though as the training progressed, her tasks became progressively more and more difficult. She was forced to do things like climb steep, flat walls or cross chasms using nothing but her hands and a length of rope stretched across the gap – and those were some of the easiest things asked from her. Loki was being worked every day until her last ounce of strength was drained out of her. She got afraid and tired, but she had to go through with it. There were punishments, too. If she failed in her exercises or didn't move fast enough, she'd be left for days without food, or get locked in a room full of blinding white light where she'd lay for hours, exhausted and scared and unable to rest, until the supervisors would come and take her away.
The girl's developing sense of smell didn't help matters at all. It had grown so strong that her nose alone wasn't enough to register all the scents she felt. All the other organs had to get involved in the process as well – and scents became images, sounds, tastes. Some scents Loki felt as pain, and it was the most terrible kind of pain you could possibly imagine: it tore at her lungs, her insides, her head, and she felt like curling up and dying somewhere in a corner. When her sense of smell began interfering with the training, however, the Head, or the Chief, as he told her to call him, designed some nose-filters especially for her. It helped a lot, and though Loki's nose was still sharper than the humans', the scents didn't hurt her that much anymore.
But there were other tortures Loki had to face day after day. Tests and check-ups were always horrible. She hated the feel of metal wires attached to her head; those blinding, colourful rays of light that struck her body as she was being "scanned" and her stats recorded; but the most terrible was that scent, the painful, excruciating scent of cold, indifferent steel that not even her new nose-filters could block out.
And there was also the matter of her transformations. 'The full-moon cycle', as the Chief called it. Usually, Borns didn't begin changing until they were approaching puberty, but Loki's wolf gene was unlocked artificially when she turned six. To the humans it was just an experiment, yet another test of the girl's strength. Loki was too small to be feared by them in their protective armour and shields of silver. Even in her wolf-form, she didn't pose much of a threat back then; they didn't have to worry about locking her up in a special room or tranquilizing her quite yet. Small as she was, she could easily be chained up, and then tested and observed – given that nobody came too close to her with their delicious fingers during those times.
In other words, being the humans' lab rat, or, should it be said, lab wolf wasn't a stroll in the park. But although Loki realized that she was being treated like some sort of an animal or an object, she didn't much mind because she didn't know any different. That was the way it had always been – there were humans, her masters; and there was her, their weapon. She'd never seen a forest or been outside or ever cared about what it was like… or at least that was what she thought. Because for her, there had never existed an outside.
She was about seven when The Operation was performed. Loki didn't remember much of it because she was given a powerful tranquilizer and slept through the whole thing. But it must've been very difficult and serious, because she awoke to a great deal of pain. She was floating in a giant capsule-tube full of some greenish, gooey liquid, and felt as though her whole body was one big, long, throbbing scar. There were steel wires attached to her head and limbs, two of them leading away from her nostrils and outside of the tube. No wonder she couldn't feel any scents! She twisted around a bit, and found that it was difficult to move. Her arms were also hard to lift, and not just because of the gooey liquid stuff slowing them down. She looked down at them, struggling to turn her head, and almost gasped. There were deep, raw-looking scars on both her forearms; but that wasn't what surprised and scared her. Protruding from both her hands, from the newly-made iron-rimmed holes between her knuckles were long metal claws, three on each hand. They gleamed dimly, reflecting the flickering lights that shone outside the tube, so cold and alien and strange to her. She had such claws on her feet, too.
Loki gasped this time, and instinctively clenched her hands into fists. The claws vanished with a sharp 'slinnnng' sound inside the holes between her knuckles, and under her skin. Her first impulse was to pluck them out; to bite and tear herself up until she ripped out those hateful things, because they didn't belong there, in her body. She wanted them out! But as the werewolf-girl stared at her hands and feet in horror, she realized that the metal was inside her, a part of her now; and there was nothing she could do about it. She had been mutilated, forever.
And so, Loki became a cyborg. With time, she learned to live with that; but she had to accept herself first, and it wasn't easy.
Or rather, it was easier than it had seemed at first. Once Loki's operation scars had completely healed (the green gooey liquid, as she found out later, was a special remedial solution that sped up the healing process), her training was taken onto a whole new level. Before, she was doing 'survival' exercises and things of the sort which trained her speed, strength and endurance in all categories possible. But now that she had a personal set of weapons at her disposition, she could proceed to the next step: the actual fighting. At first, she watched machines battle each other, which at the time was a fascinating sight for her to see; later, however, she had to fight them herself. It wasn't a very difficult skill to master – she was already strong and lithe enough to outfight some of the toughest robots; all she needed was experience. She needed experience in handling her new claws, too: those bits of metal had been very awkward to manage and hard to get used to in the beginning; but the more she used them and fought, the better she became. As time passed by, she developed her own sets of moves and strategies which she'd polished to perfection. Having no other goals or dreams in her life, she practiced long and hard every day – and soon she became a true expert in her job.
But there was another thing that came to her gradually along with her new skills: the hatred for robots and all other machines she had to face. Perhaps it was all a part of the Centre's purpose – to train their warriors to hate their enemy: but to Loki it became personal. It had a lot to do with their scent – it unnerved her to see something that looked like a living thing, but didn't feel living. Steel and concrete seemed to be everywhere – it was disturbing the wolf-girl, and getting on her nerves. Besides, it was so unfair! She had trained all her life and had always thought she was invincible; and here were some chunks of metal stuck together, with no brains or strategies of their own that were proving her wrong! (Yes, she often lost matches to some of the stronger robots.) That wasn't right. Loki could feel the Chief's disappointment, and she had to keep doing everything in her power to prove that she was unbeatable, and much better than some stupid, mindless, speechless metal things.
In reality, the Chief wasn't disappointed at all. In fact, he thought Loki was one of the most dedicated warriors he had ever seen during his entire career, but he wasn't going to reassure her. He knew all about psychology, and had calculated it all. As long as Loki was motivated, her strength would continue to grow. She was a very promising talent – and the Chief couldn't just let it all go down the drain by… encouraging the girl. For there were so many more glorious battles to be won, so many battles in store for her…
A lot more battles.
End Chapter! And yes, Loki is a cyborg-werewolf o.O (What am I on?) And yes, difficult lab-rat life and blah, but it's more here by the way of explanations, and not for angst. The only way I have for dealing with loopholes, sorry.
Is Loki the only female werewolf that ever existed? No. But it's a very rare occurence nonetheless, and the humans don't know about these a lot. (That was why Loki represented an object of interest and was cast aside from the rest of the batch.) It's a genetic mistake, kind of like mismatched eyes in humans, only on a... slightly bigger scale.
How could a child under seven have possibly handled all that abuse? Not believable. Loki is not a child. Not a human child, at least. Any werewolf cub would be able to hadle that. Werewolves' strength shouldn't be measured by human standards.
Does Loki have any "speshul" powers just because she's such an oddity? No. Does a red tomato taste differently from a yellow tomato? (yes, there is a yellow tomato!) Loki's just an ordinary werewolf, strength-wise, aside from the cyborg-y claws. But the Chief doesn't know that. That's why she gets all the 'special treatment' and the cyborg-y claws.
Although maybe... but no, no, I'm not saying that. One thing, folks, it's all there for a reason, ooooh...