Hometown Memories (Darius)

Niko leaned back against the lamp post with his legs outwards, one hand in his jacket pocket while the other was at his side at his waist, spinning the pencil he had in his hand idly as he waited. He had followed the other guy, Dart, back here to his apartment. Everything seemed okay, nothing suspicious but he kept his ears and eyes open just in case even if he looked relaxed. Ready to run if things got too dangerous. He stretched his arms, loosening the joints and kinks. As he did, he winced slightly. The cut must have been deeper than he thought. Maybe he should've taken the offer of those bandages. Ah well. Now he'd have two scars to show instead of one. He realized he had been in this part of town before when had been a cub, scrounging for food from rubbish bins and dumpsters. The poachers and the time when he'd been hiding and running. The buildings looked better. Less bullet holes in them for one thing. The people he had seen on the way here looked a bit friendlier. Even some of the stores like the grocery store and the pharmacy had been refurnished or had disappeared completely, replaced by small eateries or new shopping stores. He stopped spinning for a moment, thinking back to the cold, rainy nights he'd spent hiding underneath cardboard boxes and in dumpsters. He hadn't even had any dreams of doing anything but making it to the next day. The day he'd found Arwen had been the best thing that'd happened to him because she'd given him a home and he'd been able to build his life back into something real. He'd been able to find a way to live. To live and enjoy life. And it'd led him to down roads that he had never traveled on before. Back to a place that was really home with others of his kind. Then back to the day it'd started. He dropped his arms back down to his sides, returning to spinning the pencil. He wondered what Blake's primal form was. And the Auxiliary. Wondered if he'd ever see them in their primal forms.

Closing the door behind him, Darius walked down the steps with the blue-prints in hand. The boy was still there, spinning the pencil. Darius took a mental note of his appearance. Height, general build, hair and eye colour. He looked easy-going. Innocent. Darius unfurled the blue-prints, stretching it out so that he could see them properly and flipped through them again. There were a lot of sketches in here with all the notes scrawled all over the place. Flame-thrower-arrow guns, grenades with toxic gas, components of weapons that were unlabeled but had scribbles that described it as weapons to explode blood vessels, rupture ear-drums and cause nausea, headaches and dizziness using sound waves, mechanical animals that could change sizes and go invisible, gadgets that could be thrown from afar and turn into spinning discs of spiked death, robot insects that were surveillance cameras, even some swords that spewed electricity and fire, components of a whip that injected poison into the skin each time it made contact, mechanical butterflies that could devour something within seconds. Nanobots. Not as innocent as he looked. But he was creative with his designs. Darius had kept him outside so that he didn't see his own toys. One run-down computer he'd bought and used for many years, scrap metal and pieces of technology he'd found on the streets. Circuit boards for more computers, computer chips, graphics cards and even bits and pieces of what he thought was a holographic display system. All he needed to see if it worked was a cable with the right points and a working remote. He even had some red plating for a motorbike, some rubber tyres and an engine to go with it. Someday he'd have the rest. Junk it was but he had immense pride in his junk. He didn't have any use for a motorbike but he liked seeing how things worked. He rolled up the blue-prints, looking at his new friend (so to speak) and said with a low chuckle, "You got some good stuff here. Fail safe flame-thrower huh? And a sound-wave weapon?"

He stopped spinning the pencil, gripping it in his hand with the tip facing the guy as he approached. Nothing up his sleeve, nothing in his pockets that Niko could see. Niko reached out for the blue-prints, taking them and rolling them up, pulling off his back-pack to put them inside and paused for a moment. No clip-boards. He had nothing in there to not make them creased. Ah well. Guess he’d carry them in his hand. It was getting late and he still had to work on some stuff. And some tinkering. Then he had to wake up early in the morning and go to work. Then he could go back home. His real home. Niko looked up at him as he spoke to him. He was asking questions. Questions about his designs. Who was this guy? He sounded like his old friend. He had even been a werewolf. Except, that guy had built robots for a living and he’d had a bunch of stuff lying around. Gadgets and tools. Wires and robot parts with steel frames and latex foam and silicone everywhere. Small-scale plaster models of the actual robots that he’d build and rotating wheels and gears lying in piles and clutters. He’d even had arrow guns. Some stuff could work. Other stuff couldn’t. But it would take a lot of time and a lot of effort. He didn’t think this guy would be able to figure it out anyway. And there were parts missing that he hadn’t included on purpose just to make it easier for the production team to make the stuff. And half of it would be recycled or was going to be blown up anyway so it wasn’t meant to last in the first place. Niko said with a chuckle,“I did this on the fly using my imagination Mr Dart. There’s nothing in here that I don’t have that I forgot because there’s nothing in here that’ll work in real life. Come on, a sound-wave weapon that bursts vessels and ear-drums? You have to have some serious money to make that and some good connections. It’s not just ordinary things you’re talking about.” He tipped his head to the guy and said,“Thanks for giving back my stuff. Guess I’ll see you around.”He turned and walked away back down the street. Time to head back and have a look at that wound.

Darius turned around walking back up the steps into the corridor, pulling out the copy of the folded up blue-print from inside the waist of his jeans and unfolded it. He'd made copies of each of the blue-prints and kept them in a safe place. Pushing open the door with one hand, he walked inside and leaned against the wall with his back to it beside the door studying the drawings more closely. He had skimmed the pictures, as much as he could have with his work at the studios and balancing his relationship with Ren. Most of the sketches were highly detailed down the last screw or tiny little component like hole which would connect to the nozzle (which was drawn separately) on the grenade that would inject the toxic gas inside. The width and height had even been penciled in next to the drawing of the nozzle down to the last decimal. Darius ran through a list of possibilities in his mind of what he could be. Animator? Drawing things on the fly using his imagination meant he had to think of ideas fast. These were all drawings of weapons and robots. If he was telling the truth and there was nothing that would work in real life the only reason he would put this much detail into the designs is if he was working for someone. Like he was one of the animators or illustrators for a project for a studio making movies or animated shows. Though he had never seen drawings that were so meticulous and precise, especially with measurements. The only other time when he had seen drawings like this was when he had been with Da Vinci. And he had been an inventor and an engineer among other things. Though at the time, he had been regarded as crazy by the general populace. A lunatic who babbled nonsense and rubbish about flying machines, armoured cars and parachutes. It wasn't until much later that society would pay attention to his sketches and find out that most of them had some merit. That some things could be taken and form a starting point to invent and form the groundwork for some stuff. An armoured car? Developed into a tank. Flying machines? A helicopter. Was the kid an inventor? An engineer? Darius flipped the blue-print over, seeing a scrawled number on the back. A mobile number. Maybe he'd find some use for that later. Maybe it'd be better to keep tabs on this guy. Hunt him down for some more information. He could imitate his voice or pretend to be his friend or someone who had mistaken the guy's ideas for his to get a name of where he worked or what he name was. For now, he'd fiddle with some things, work things out. Darius headed towards the stair-case, walking up. Time to go.