Growing Pains

The pain would ebb at times, at others it would overwhelm. However for the next few years it was the one constant in his life, well that and his training.

The training was good for one thing, distraction. The pain seemed to become secondary when he had something else to focus upon, so Armin began to delve deeply into his training. It did not matter if it was physical or mental training in nature. What began to matter is how he could distract or distance his mind from the pain.

If he was busy running then he would focus upon the fatigue, when he was weight training he would focus on the exertion, and if it was his studies he would do his best to think about the answers or the problem at hand. It was not long and he found that he could begin to ignore the daily pain, only the surges every month or so would be able to really get to him.

The training soon became the primary focus of his life, and he took to it well. Trained in military tactics, espionage and wilderness survival skills (much of which seemed to come naturally to him any ways) with extra curricular training in martial combat and heavy physical emphasis.

When he was only fourteen he had overheard one of the people who were studying him speaking with one of his trainers -he was pretending to be asleep at that moment but had often learned to use that form of deception to acquire little bits of information- that his training would suit him being dropped off for military rigors in dangerous warzones as a ‘shock trooper’.

He had heard the terminology before, but it was meant to be used to describe a deadly and intimidating force on the front lines. Designed to create panic and demoralize enemy troops, then it came to him. Was I designed to be this thing of fear, to create dread and spread panic. The targets he has trained to destroy in his combat training had all looked like these little inarticulate and poorly made stand ins for humans.

He wept inside as he realized that he was being designed as a weapon, one that would destroy bodies and break down minds. He was created as a living engine of fear and destruction, one that these people here had created for the purpose of aiming at people they wanted annihilated. When it came time would he follow those orders, or would he act with his own free will….

The results were electrifying

Have you ever had the feeling of static as you brush a balloon over your sweater and then touched it to the hair on your head or your arm, it feels as though invisible pins drag themselves across your skin. For Armin that feeling was all over his body and intense enough to wrack him with pain. It came in waves that radiated from his lower back all the way to his fingers and toes.

There was three days of pain, the first two were easily manageable, but on the fifth hour of the third day the pain got out of control, and it lasted for a grueling fifteen more hours. They tried giving him oral tranquilizers in his food, he couldn’t eat. They had to resort finally to elephant tranquilizers delivered by rifle, and with the amplified healing and metabolism they needed a lot. They couldn’t track the total dosage delivered, he began to bat them away after the first dozen landed, all in all they know they shot forty-nine darts at him. How many landed and delivered their doses they could not say.

He fell asleep under the influence of the powerful chemical agents, but the pain did not subside even in sleep. It still wracked him in the twilight between wake and rest, giving him dreams of pain and agony. Those who were awake had nightmares of their own, his body began to discharge blasts of electricity. The cage around him became somewhat of a Faraday cage, protecting those outside of it from the powerful bolts of lightning arcing from his body.

An IV was impossible since to go into the cage would be a death sentence, so they continued to shoot darts at him. He only roused twice over the next twelve hours, there was enough sedative to kill eight African bull elephants. His resistance to toxins and poisons burned through the drugs at an amazing pace.

This was the first time he would go through this ordeal, he was eleven at the time. As his hormones would continue to fluctuate over the next three years this would begin to happen one to two times per month.

The Longer the energy builds…

Like all things lightning must mature, in it’s infancy it is just a light static charge. It will not grow to something bigger or stronger until it has had the time to grow in strength and intensity.

Armin without mother or father was raised as an experiment, no love or nurturing did he find in the arms of the S.T.E.M. facility, or any of its scientists. He was given materials to stimulate his mental faculties, as well tests for his physical capacities, but his room other than those ‘training materials’ was relatively spartan in nature. No cot for him to sleep upon even only a steel ledge that he could lay upon uncomfortably, for the first couple of years at least…

Raised without care he began to focus on the things that brought him the attention he desired, answering questions correctly on assessments and achieving exceptional feats of strength were the things that rewarded him the most. So that was what he began to strive to accomplish with aplomb, and that he did, his strength grew immensely and they began to reward him with even more of the S.T.E.M serum and treatments. This in turn continued to amplify his strength.

The STEM treatments began to be boosted by Myostatin Amplification, which caused Armin’s body to begin dedicating itself to the creation of muscle mass in extreme quantities. The need for fats and proteins in his diet, made him hungry at almost all hours of the day. The muscle growth was immense, and by the age of nine he had successfully torn the bars off of his cage twice to get at the food stores. They began to leave the food and his cage open.

A problem arose in his treatments, the STEM, HGH and Myostatin therapies would not level out, his strength and appetite would only continue to climb, any time they reduced his food or the serums he would start to regress and weaken.

They needed to find a way of halting the regression, it took them five months to find the right concoction of genetic STEM treatments to prevent the regression. A spinal tap of the STEM serum derived from Electrophorus electricus and Mellivora capensis. The process was intense, painful and lasted for over eight hours, the eight lower vertebrae of his back all had to be infused with the serum.

Six days of recuperation that felt like forever, a constant tingling in his spine and his lower back, combined with pain that would flow over him in soft waves, then surge into massive surges that caused spasms in his muscles. Smashing hard enough to cause fractures in the concrete of his cage. The side effects didn’t start for a week….

We start with Turbulence.

In the beginning of the brief flash that is a bolt of lightning, we start with a tumult of atmospheric disturbance, this story is no different.
Cold and dense air comes into contact with warm and moist air, the two mix and form clouds and begin to create a storm, the sky roils and begins to threaten with wrath and ruin.

Armins father Demitri was an intelligent man, well blessed with the gifts of education and genetics that allowed him to flourish in the field of molecular biology. His mother Damara was a caring philanthropist who would always give of herself and bless others with anything they needed, never once complaining about the cost.

When they found out that they were pregnant the two were overjoyed and there was much elation, their families planning grand celebrations. Damara and her family began preparations at home to welcome the new edition. While Dimitri began his new job at a recently opened genetics laboratory, S.T.E.M labs (Stem-cell Therapy for Embryonic Manipulation) a subsidiary of the N.O.V.A corporation.

In the fourth month of the pregnancy the family received devastating news. Damara was suffering from a gestational form of Osteoporosis combined with Muscular degeneration, the case was so aggressive that they were afraid she would not survive the pregnancy to term. The family devastated by the news began to look for treatments or information related to the condition, with no luck since this was the only known case to ever exist.

Terrified about the possible loss of his wife and his unborn child, Dimitri asked his new employer for a leave of absence. His plea did not fall upon deaf ears, as his supervisor replied with a radical new idea, one they hoped would bring exciting advances in the field. Bring his wife in for treatments, there, they would devote an entire new department of research to her condition, one that he would be able to devote all of his time to. An arrangement Dimitri could not have even dreamed of, nearly unlimited research budget and any equipment they would need at his fingertips.

The research began slowly but even through the use of HGH and stem cell therapy, the group could not help Damara recover the strength and bone mass that she lost over the preceding months. Dimitri found that it was a welcome distraction to bury himself in the study and treatment of the disease, as it was for his family. He worked tirelessly to develop treatments and plans to deal with the symptoms and situations, he found it therapeutic to act as if it was not his family he was dealing with at all sometimes, then it became an emotional anesthetic numbing him to the reality of the facts before him.

Finally a breakthrough emerged, one that brought back a ray hope to a pair of souls covered in crushing darkness. The combination Stem cells from silver-back gorillas and simian growth hormone and a proprietary formula from N.O.V.A labs, had astounding effects. Damara’s bone mass and musculature began to recover. It was all the more reassuring that the infant seemed to be growing without absorbing from his mother.

By the eighth month of the pregnancy Damara’s health had almost recovered to normal, but Armins growth patterns had skyrocketed he had grown faster than anticipated in both length and in mass. He was growing far too much, as he had nearly doubled in weight in the past three weeks. His musculoskeletal structure had also changed as well, he was becoming more and more simian. His accelerated growth could lead to her death and soon.

Dimitri had decided that something had to be done to save his wife, the child was not his or Damara’s any more. This was not a child but an experiment, something atrocious to be destroyed. Although it devastated him that not only was he a party to this experimentation, but also its instigator. His wife lay in a bed soon to die herself and his company that was so willing to help, was now witholding her from him.

Now a conscientious objector to further treatment, and a danger to the project, Dimitri was relieved of his position, then he was relieved of the burden of guilt for the part he played when they took his life. Damara was placed into a medical coma, never to wake up even when they bombarded her with one hundred rads of gamma radiation. It wracked her body which protected Armin the initial blast, only to act like a radiation damper slowly releasing the toxic energy into his system over the next month.

They kept Damara alive until she had nothing left to give to Armin, her form withered in the last month unable to survive exclusively on IV. The radiation accelerated the rate that he grew as he began to become even more gorilla like, somehow there began to be electrical interference preventing them from monitoring vital signs. Forcing them to induce his birth, with his separation from his mother he began to feed and draw nourishment on his own with an appetite they could never have imagined.

His mother did not survive his birth, he would never know his her or his father, he would only know the Military Applications Division of N.O.V.A labs. Armin would never know the name his parents had given him, or that it meant ‘strong warrior’, he would instead be raised with the belief that he was a natural born gorilla that had been mutated from birth. Trained under M.A.D’s instruction learning about combat, military tactics and how to harness his natural aptitudes and powers.

The turbulence that batters us about, rattles us, and shakes us it is a part of the forces that forge us to be stronger than what we are. It is the friction that builds up the energy stored within us, to focus and direct at the target that we choose. That is where the lightning starts, like the air movement battering one molecule against another charging up energy little by little, until it gets so intense that it cannot be contained any longer, exploding forth like a un-containable force that cannot be reckoned with.

That is where lightning is born, and creates in us who we will become….