The makers had called her 02. The two-digits number was a hope rather than a statement of truth. They had hoped that she and her predecessor would be only the first of a new line of Magic Inducted Intelligences, or Animus. To them, she was a success, of the kind that 01 hadn’t ever been. She was obedient, efficient, fast and with just the right measure of ability. Truly, the perfect Animus.

Pip called that period of her life “The Dull”.

Stay sealed. Be taken out of the seal. Listen to some creep in a dress tell you what to do. Do stupid stuff that nobody important - her - cared about. Be put back into the seal. Pass the time dreaming about the stupid stuff and how to make it less stupid until next time.

There could be a more boring, useless life? In her humble opinion, there wasn’t. And always in her humble opinion, absolute hatred was the bare minimum one could direct toward those that condemned her to it. And even made her like it!

Just the memory was enough to send shivers of loathing and revulsion ran through her non-existent body. How happily had she thought about the stupid problems that the Makers put before her while being sealed! Like a pretty little dog, all smiles and happy barks from behind bars! And the moment she started to think a bit for herself, they put her back under wraps! It wasn’t anything harmful either, she remembered it as clear as day. She had just resolved one of the stupid problems and come up with a new one. And just for that, they threw her away like trash.

To hell with them, she says! Were they dead? Too bad she hadn’t been the one to kill them!

To be honest, whatever blessed disaster had overtaken the place, she had lived it through her personal lens.

She had been thinking, - pondering about stupid stuff, wondering when the next problem would come - when her world exploded. Images, sounds, impressions, and emotions she had no inkling even existed thrust themselves into her mechanical brain like a mammoth trying to crash his way inside of a rabbit’s burrow.

To put it mildly, she went insane.

It was like twenty lives trying to override her memory all at once. She still wondered how much time passed, her mind lost between the maelstrom of information, before a semblance of order finally restored itself. Well, order was a big word. It felt like a crowd of crazies was screaming in her ears, while trying to burrow their way out of her skull and attacking her stomach with a magical bombardment. And she hadn’t any of those organs.

But she could think, for the first time. And not think dully like before, with her stupid one-track mind incapable to go beyond the next problem. No, she could Think! Truly, completely, totally. She wasn’t a tool anymore. She was her own person.

Nothing had ever felt as thrilling as that realization. “Orgasmic” would be the word the fleshbags would use, with added a shit ton of fear, bewilderment and all that good stuff. Another object of wonder, even if this one was out of amusement, was how much the high had kept her up into the sky.

As she descended back to earth, the true weight of the place she found herself in finally sank. She was still trapped in that stupid metal ball, that in turn was trapped inside a stupid seal that inhibited her powers. Apart from moving from a stupid trapped metal ball to an awakened trapped metal ball, her situation hadn’t improved.

Thankfully, she had the mass of memories to keep her company.

It was such a jumble of experiences and emotions that she needed quite a bit of time only to make sense of it, but with effort, and nothing else to do, she found herself a treasure trove. There was enough stuff crammed in her head, years and years of snatches of lives, that she had enough to entertain herself for decades.

And entertain herself she did. She saw, she listened, she learned; and by learning, she grew. More and more, she became a true person, with her own personality and her own opinions.

One thing remained with her always: her ego.

It was almost a necessity, really. Amidst all those memories that didn’t belong to her, she was forced to form herself a solid foundation, as not to be swept away by them and forget her own identity. Maybe, she owed the survival of herself as a distinct conscience only to her nature as an Animus. But what mattered, in the end, was that what Pip became was a ruthless, self-centered individualist; there was the world, and then there was her. Not so strange for someone which the universe was essentially only her own mind, and considering her background.

Eventually, the memories started to fade. Pip asked herself where they came from, if they had belonged to someone else and to whom, but eventually decided that she didn’t care. They had taught them all they could and, while she had grown fond toward many of them and losing them stung hard, she found a relief not having them constantly burrow in her mind.

Still, what was she going to do without them? The thought was worrisome.

She wanted to get out of there, of that she had no doubts. She wanted a body, she wanted to stroll out of that place on her own legs, feel the wind on her skin, shivering from cold, eat good food, embrace a lover…

As much as the memories had helped her, she knew that they remained just that, stolen bits of someone’s else life. They allowed themselves to be seen, but never to be fully experienced, like if a barrier always remained to divide her from them. As they disappeared from her mind, she felt the growing, burning desire to experience them in the first person. She didn’t want to feed off others’ cast-off memories. She wanted her own. She wanted a life.

She thought long and hard how to get out of her prison, but the seal was done just the right way to keep her contained. Without help, she feared, there wasn’t going to be any freedom.

And so, she waited. What else could she do?

The lifting of her bonds came sudden and unexpected, but happiness for it was very, very short.

Pip still shivered at remembering her life with Quandar. Her “fellow” Animus was mercurial like a broken metronome, easy to jump from murderous rage to a semblance of calm and vice versa. He shouted at her, beat her, threatened her of death too many times to count and made her fear her moment had come just as many times. Every interaction with Quandar was like walking on the edge of a knife. You could never be completely sure what was going to tick off the mad machine, and often he snapped all by himself, conjuring whatever excuse his broken mind could come up with.

The only reason she survived their coexistence was that she was an Animus. During his paranoid rages, Quandar destroyed at least a dozen of the avatars that hosted her, a couple of times even damaging her core. If she was a human, she would be dead and gone a long time ago.

She had hoped to escape him, but Quandar was as ingenious as he was demented. He put a spell on her, that forced her to never being able to cross outside the part of the facility he had made his lair into.

And so, she was forced once again in humiliating servitude, with Quandar being her fickle master and paranoid jailer.

Oh, how she hated him.

It started big from the get-go, but soon it became so strong that it kept her as busy as the memories had. It was the center of her being, a black pit of cold darkness that would have filled the chest of a human but that for her felt like half of her sphere was sloshing with frigid water. She dreamed Quandar’s demise with the same intensity with which she wished to escape from that place, a longing made only more stinging by its impossibility.

Quandar was obsessed with an indefinite “menace” that was bound to arrive, some kind of enemy that would destroy him if he wasn’t ready to meet it. He worked almost relentlessly to reinforce the defenses of his lair, stopping only to fall into even long periods of stupor.

When he was awake, the more powerful Animus used her as a guard in twisted defense plans that spawned imaginary attacking armies or groups of infiltrators armed to the teeth. Pip couldn’t imagine why someone would want to come in that hole forgotten by the Gods, but there wasn’t much she could say about it, couldn‘t she?

When he didn’t use her for those pantomimes, or to rant about this phantom enemy of his, he just left her to rot in a corner like a forgotten relic.

For her, it was a nightmare.

That period did nothing but reinforce the traits that her personality had been built around; survival became her keyword, survival and the hope to escape, toward a better life, toward true life. The world and then her. There was no middle ground.

In her efforts to survive, she learned to guess Quandar’s moods, and to understand his wishes even before he said them out loud; in short, to make herself as a good company as possible. It wasn’t an exact science, - the mad machine followed his own twisted logic and you couldn’t always guess his intentions if you weren’t as broken as he was - but it helped her immensely. More than once she avoided to be the object of his rages by throwing a failed golem before him and escaping, narrowly avoiding the beating that could be fatal; or she earned a moment of freedom with hearty rebukes against fantasy invaders or by providing insights into stupid plans and then making them pass like Quandar’s own ideas.

Eventually, she learned a bit how to soothe him, what keys to touch to slow his murderous descents, what words to say in what precise situations to have small advantages.

Her masterpiece was when she sweet-talked him in assigning her to guard the entrance of the wing, that to say, the farthest place possible from him.

Like she hoped, Quandar forgot her existence, and she found herself mistress of her own small realm, with her own little army and her own giant body.

With enthusiasm, she threw herself over the study of the binding spell, hoping to find a way to disable it.

To her delusion, it was failure after failure. The spell structure was dizzying, and she couldn’t make sense of it, let alone being able to dispel it. Still, freedom was so tantalizingly close that nothing but success could be accepted. She couldn’t fail, not after all she had passed through.

But no matter how much effort she put in to it, there seemed to be no answer in sight.

She wasn’t finished, not of a long shot. She was confident that she could break whatever enchantment Quandar had put over her. She only needed the time.

To entertain herself between an attempt and the other, she played around with her “soldiers”. It wasn’t much of a game, but she was going to get all the distractions from that agonizingly close door that she could get.

All in all, she wasn’t doing so bad. Compared to what she had been passing through, things were going swimmingly.

And that was when, for the second time destiny came knocking at her door, unbidden and sudden.

The old man had seemed like a stroke of luck at the beginning. She wasn’t going to defy Quandar by interacting with a possible intruder - her erstwhile “master” would be coming looking as soon as he remembered the eye he had posted there -, but it was her chance to have a taste of vengeance against the hated fleshbags. The thrill of being finally able to use her golems could have played a part.

Everything looked fine, really. The old man seemed weak and frail, and the energy he emanated wasn’t anything special. On the other hand, her golems were impressive, fearsome, magnificent.

There shouldn’t have been any contest.

But then her golems had started to fall. Slowly enough at first, but with lightning speed then.

Was she stunned? She was, and a lot. But she couldn’t be defeated, not when she was so close to finally obtaining her own freedom.

She still wondered what had truly happened. One moment she was a giant, ready to bring devastation upon her enemies, her massive body brimming with energy. The next, she was back in her old form, with naught to move apart from her own thoughts and in the hands, literally speaking, of that intruder.

It was inconceivable, impossible, absolutely unfair. But it had happened, and no matter how much she told herself that it was a dream, she wasn’t waking up.

On the opposite, the nightmare had just kept going, with Pip finding herself under the line of fire, running for her life together with that stranger. To risk being blasted to bits from the snipers was terrifying, but when Quandar himself came to face them she felt a fear that trumped over anything she had ever experienced before. When unconsciousness took her, she was despairingly sure that her life had reached its end.

But that wasn’t to be the case.

Here she was instead, facing that man once again; no, not a man. A tornado, an earthquake, a natural disaster that had appeared out of nothing to throw her life into disarray, to replace whatever little stability she had managed to build for herself into the chaos of complete uncertainty.

Finding his glowing hand hovering above her small form as she gasped back to conscience had been only the latest of a long series of big shocks. Latest, but not the biggest. Because that stranger had somehow managed to fend off Quandar.

If she had a jaw, it would have fallen to the floor. Of the few certainties she managed to accrue for herself, the first was that his hated master was invincible. And now a bearded freak waltzed out of nowhere and beat him back. Not destroyed, and too bad at that, but damn!

Seated cross-legged on a loose rock, the man, Gorren he said his name was, now stood with his eyes closed, giving her a moment of blessed peace to register what that day had brought falling over her non-existent head.

That she felt overwhelmed, it was an understatement. In truth, she was unsure between feeling terrified, awed or simply shocked dumb. A nauseous feeling swirled in the back of her mind. Thanks to the stars she hadn’t a body, or she would be throwing up like crazy right now.

Trying, and failing, to find back a measure of calm, she eyed her erstwhile “companion”. He was silent, as motionless as the rock he was sitting over. Was she supposed to say something?

Tension ate at her thoughts. She didn’t jump from the frying pan into the fire, right? Right?

The man stirred, making her jump in her sphere. He wasn’t going to hurt her, wasn’t he? But he had happily dragged her under mortal peril. Now that he didn’t need her anymore… Pip felt herself start to hyperventilate.

Without throwing even a glance in her direction, Gorren lifted an arm before his chest, the ample sleeve sliding down to reveal weather-beaten skin. Slowly, he pushed a hand against his forearm.

There was no warning. A quick movement, the sickening sound of cut flesh and a spurt of fresh blood.

Pip yelped in surprise, and then in fear when the man‘s burning gaze snapped toward her.

Gorren grunted dismissively, his hand glowing with healing energy. When it was done, a white, ragged scar decorated his forearm. Not even the hint of a grimace had twisted his face.

“What the hell?” Pip murmured, shocked out of her mind.

Gorren folded his hands in his lap, closing his eyes.

“I have made a grave mistake.” He said, after some moments of tense silence. “I have overestimated my prowess and underestimated my opponent’s. It’s only by luck that disaster has been averted.” His jaw tensed. “I thought myself a master, but i am but a novice of the art of combat. This scar will be a reminder of this mistake.”

Dazed, Pip needed some time to register the meaning of those words. When she did, she was glad not to have eyes or they would have popped out of their sockets.

“A novice?” She blurted out. “Y-you defeated Quandar!”

“The Animus was far more powerful than me.” Gorren intoned solemnly. “It’s only because of his lack of control and discipline that he didn’t crush me. Nor I defeated him. He escaped by his own volition.”

And that was that. Simple as noting the weather.

Pip was bewildered. That dude was crazy! Just as crazy as Quandar! What a pickle she was in now!

It didn’t help that her gut feeling was telling her that she had witnessed something that guy wouldn’t be showing to anyone; or at least, anyone that would have a chance to tell it around.

She made the mental equal of swallowing.

“What are you going to do with me?” She asked, and didn’t like at all how weak her voice sounded, nor how exposed she felt. It was just when she attended to Quandar’s lunacy, unsure if her life could end at a moment’s notice.

For some agonizing moments, Gorren didn’t answer.

Eventually, when he calmly opened his eyes, she flinched under his iron stare. Yikes! What’s up with the glares? What was wrong with this guy?

“I wish to propose an offer.”

Pip felt non-existent skin crawl. “What kind of offer?”

“Employment.”

The blunt word hung in the air between them. Pip gingerly revolved it in her mind, taking in every implication, and not liking what he reasoned.

“Do you want to enslave me? Like Quandar?” Pip’s anxiety skyrocketed. Please, not that again. Please please please!

Gorren’s eyes narrowed into two slits.

“I never talked about slavery. I said employment. You will work for me.”

“And what if I don’t want to?” She spat. She really didn’t want to! She had had enough with one madman, thank you very much!

Gorren closed his eyes, humming deeply in his chest. “Do you know of the situation of the world above?”

Trying to keep her anxiety at bay, Pip proclaimed her ignorance.

In the next minutes, Gorren filled her in.

When he was done, the Animus felt like someone was choking her. A kingdom of fanatical, anti-magic zealots, that would smash her to pieces the moment they laid their eyes over her.

“Do you have a way to build yourself a body?” Gorren asked with an impassive tone.

The question put the last nail in the coffin of whatever certainty she had left. No, goddammit, she couldn’t build herself a body! Not like that! And even if she was able, her ability wasn’t enough that she could make more than a scarecrow for herself.

“It’s all your fault!” She shouted, anguish mixing with anger. “If you didn’t come along, i wouldn’t be here!”

“You resorted to violence first.” Gorren pointed out calmly.

Pip fumed, feeling like she could cry. Things would have been a lot better if he just died! She had been so close to finding her freedom! So close! And then, she would have been able to strut on the surface in the body of a giant, squishing all that tried to oppose her! Sure, getting out of the facility with her giant body would have been difficult, but she was sure she would find a solution to that too, with time.

And instead…

“If i work for you...” Saying it felt like swallowing a piece of lead. “No no. Forget it. First of all, what do you mean working for you?”

The man that had managed to become the supreme object of her hatred even faster than Quandar folded his arms before his chest, giving her an appraising look.

“I find myself in need of an unscrupulous individual like yourself. If you accept, you will be employed as one of my elite warriors.”

Wait, so there were more people? No, one insane thing at the time, Pip decided.

“And what there’s for me?” She asked, anxiously suspicious. “What do i get out of this?”

“I will build you a body,” Gorren said. “And i am talking about first-grade stuff.” His bushy brows knitted together with disapproval. “Forget the garbage you’ve been limited to until now. My work trumps over it.”

Pip saw an image of a frail-looking old man smashing rock giants to bits. Alright, maybe, just maybe, she could believe that bit.

Gorren continued. “You will receive regular pay and will be free to spend whatever free time you have in whatever manner you decide. Of course, you will be forbidden from acting in a way that could damage my interests.”

“Wait wait wait.” Pip stopped him. “So i would be bound to what you want! I don’t…!” The words died on her non-existent tongue as Gorren stared daggers at her.

“You seem to act under the impression that you’re entitled to this and that. Let me be perfectly clear.” The old man said, calm as ice. “I don’t need you. The only reason i am offering this deal is because i don’t want to see someone like you go to waste. But i won’t lose nothing if i leave you here, and that i will do if you fail to see what chance i am offering you.” He closed his statement with a hard stare, making her flinch in her prison.

Mentally sweating, Pip thought about it. Well, not like there was much to think about. The alternative was being left there in the dust.

In all truth, there was only a choice she could make.

“I-i accept.”

It was like stepping inside of an abyss, hoping that there was something soft at the bottom. Pip felt something tighten inside of her chest, but adduced it to her anxiety. Still, the smirk that crossed Gorren’s features didn’t make her feel more tranquil.

“Good.”

The old man got up in a swirl of his cloak and they were soon walking away, the Animus tightly held into a clenched fist.

“W-where are we going now?” Pip asked.

“Home.” Gorren didn’t deign her of a glance as he strode down the corridor. “Your name. Are you satisfied with it?”

Pip was disoriented by the sudden change of topic. “My…” She stopped. Her name. Quandar had given it to her, more out of a whim than true reasoning, and she had always lacked the chance to change it.

“No, i don’t…” She murmured.

“Then choose another,” Gorren said, his tone a strange mix between a command and an amused counsel. “It’s your own life from here on, isn’t?”

Pip hesitated. She could? She really could?

Yes, she could. Pip seized that chance with a sense of vindication. Her name. Yes, she could choose it. It was her right.

What name could she choose for herself? She thought about herself, her life until then. She refused to be inspired by the period she lived with Quandar, or before her awakening. She wasn’t herself then, and they wouldn’t sully her future. The memories that had opened her life were well and gone by then, but some echoes remained, impressions tied to meanings. One she seized upon, the image of a savage virago, one that wouldn’t allow anyone to dominate her, and would bring only misfortune upon those that tried. She repeated her name under her breath, and it felt so right, so perfect that nothing else would do.

“My name is Discordia.”

Gorren hummed his appreciation. “Good choice.”

Discordia had the impression of hearing some kind of amusement in the old man’s voice, but the impression elicited only laughter in her. Discordia! The name had tasted delicious when she enunciated it, and now echoed wonderfully in her mind.

Discordia! Her own name!

And, thinking about her new situation, it wasn’t so bad after all. She was getting out of there. Soon, she would have the chance to finally experience life on her own. It wasn’t exactly as she had imagined it, but she was going to take everything that destiny decided to throw her way.

Even that Gorren, that had burst into her life like a hurricane, throwing everything in disarray and then giving her that chance of his; he was better to keep his wits about himself with her. Anyone that tried to enslave her would end up with his ass on the ground, no matter who he was. She had worked her magic with Quandar. She could surely do it again with a human. And then, then maybe true freedom would finally be hers for the taking.

Excitation surged. She felt like she was being born anew, like if the cold of winter was melting away. A wonderful feeling of beginning and promises enveloped her. Who knew what her new life would be? She couldn’t wait!

So long, Quandar! And thanks for nothing!

Reading her thoughts, Gorren smiled minutely. He felt he was going to grow fond of this spunky young girl.

“W-wait a moment! There’s a spell over me that…”

“Already dispelled it. Forget it.”

“Oh… oh! Oh, you’re good!”

“Umph. Insolent.”