INVENTORS BREAKTHROUGH
A young lad scurries, dashing through a crowded and dark alleyway. He grabs onto a pipe and swings, falling into what seems to be a dumpster. "Ouch!" he shouts, then continues running, the same thought in his mind. I'm so dead if I'm late, he thinks, and continues until he reaches a platform, stepping onto a bronze-colored steam train.
The guard takes a glance and then says, "Aren't you too young to ride alone? Run off to your parents, runt."
The boy takes offense. Even though he looks young, he is 15, which is old enough for him to ride alone. The boy shouts, "I'm 15, jacka**!"
The guard looks pissed. He does not take this lightly and kicks him off the train.
The frantic boy starts running. Well, lucky me, he thinks. Now I'm definitely going to be late, forget dinner. Let's hope he doesn't kill me. He reaches the Blue District, ducking and hiding. He climbs a fence, allowing him to sneak past Enforcers. Enforcers were scum, privileged and entitled guards from the High World, enforcing a curfew. The boy stops in front of a bar. "Okay, it's time. I'm just going to look at the floor and slip past," he says, smiling.
Although the second he walks in, the sound of a young girl screaming, "Ken!... Ken's back!" greets him. The young boy, named Ken, lets out a nervous smile before looking up to see his uncle giving him a brutal stare down.
"Hey, Uncle Charles, how are you doing?" Ken says, nervously smiling.
An older man, Charles, attending to the bar, says, "Ken, you know better. It's damn near curfew. What if they caught you?"
"Yeah, but they didn't," Ken replies. He knows better, but he doesn't want to get scolded.
Charles's face relaxes as he lets out a sigh of relief. Ken slips past and enters a door that seems to lead to the basement of the bar.
Gadgets and other knick knacks litter a hard wooden floor. Ken props up the metal he found in the Grey, wiping the dust off his desk. He examines it, letting out a giant shout of joy. "Woohoo!" A giant smile spreads across his face. "It's Silverite, true and genuine Silverite from the High World! This is the metal from the meteor that fell years ago. It's what most of the High World buildings are made of. It's impossible for an Underworlder to obtain." Ken starts to drool, thinking of the price he could charge. Lunemire was exceptional in shady trades. Ken calmly remembers his plans for this: a weapon, not just any weapon.
Ken, although young, was an exceptional inventor and creator. When he was younger, he loved building things with his mother. No matter how poor they were, even if it blew up, they always laughed. Ken's mother was a gentle soul and popular. She was known all over for her charismatic and charming attitude for a place as scummy as the Underworld. Everybody seemed to love her.
A tear runs down his eye. Ten years ago, a riot between the Enforcers and Lunemirians broke out, ending with a bombing. This bombing killed Ken's mother, father, and brother. Switching gears back to the present, Ken rubs his eyes and grunts, "I can't get it to work." He had finished welding.
Sadly, his visions weren't coming true. He'd overestimated the amount of Silverite. Most would feel disheartened or give up. Ken saw this as a challenge to test his brain. He would need to dumb it down as the gears in his brain turned, a fire emitted in his eyes, a burning passion.
Ken's brain kicks into overtime as he plays with parts, everything mashing, equations flying. Ken's brain was in a flow state, and nothing was stopping it. Ken was reconfiguring his parts, and it felt like an engine was in his brain. Minutes felt like seconds, his brain thinking of everything before his body could finish the action. "Just a little longer," Ken says. His brain, finally reaching the limits of its speed thinking, Ken lets out a sigh of relief as he falls to the ground in a state of exhaustion. A bright Silverite gun lays on his desk with the engraving "A."
Getting up with pain, Ken can feel a headache; it's like his head is boiling. He picks up the gun. "I did it! Wow, I've recreated it," Ken says. His mind drifts to a distant memory, seven years ago, when he was eight. He had done the impossible: successfully sneaking into the High World. Although Ken's memory of this was lacking, he remembers what he did when he was up there. The eight-year-old Ken had ended up in the dorm area of the High World. This is where the scholars, entertainers, and warriors lived.
The young Ken breaks into a dorm. It was lackluster, but he was searching for anything of value. In this endeavor, he stumbled across a mini office in the students' room with notebooks studying the Rune and Silverite concepts that were very new to the young Ken. Abruptly, a door opens. The sound of the door startled Ken. He was playing with a mass contraption emitting energy. The young Ken, startled, trips, he acts what seems to be an unfinished reactor which explodes. This explosion left the young Ken gravely hurt and the young adult who had come into his room, his research destroyed and ransacked. Ken snaps back to the present. He's recreated a Rune amplifier, or more specifically, an ether cycle. The issue with Silverite is that for a metal so strong, it only has trace hints of ether, so by making a rune amplifier, it cancels out this issue. The practice of this is called a false artifact, which is taboo and punished by death, stated by the council. The act of studying and experimenting with the rune in secret is a grave crime.
Ken had done it. He made a false artifact from scratch. His mind had reached a new limit, but sadly, his stomach had not. Heading upstairs back into the main bar, a young girl, Uncle Charles' little girl, ran towards him. "Ken… Ken… Kenny," she exclaims. Ken picks her up. This young mistress was Alice, with hair so light blonde, you would think she's out of a fairytale.
Ken drops the girl. She pouts while staring at him. Ken props himself up on a bar stool in front of the counter. His uncle hands him a plate. "Hey, what's with that smile you're trying to hide?" Charles says.
Ken chokes on his food, slamming his fist into the counter as the young Alice laughs. "It's nothing, Uncle. Just had a fan day today," Ken says with a smile on his face. Uncle Charles can't seem to smile back. The boy's got my sister's charisma, Charles thinks. He's reminded of his sister.
"Hey, kiddo," Charles says, but before he could finish his sentence, Ken was out the door and into the world again.
"Alice, asking Daddy where Kenny goes all day,"
"That is a good question," Charles says with a chuckle.
Ken had one goal in mind with his false artifact: get back into the High World. His motives had no other meaning, plain and simple: crush the High World from the inside at all cost.
Ken throws on a hat and enters the Orange District, a place in Lunemire like no other, a place where he had plans and business. The fire in his soul wasn't out yet, and his brain was still burning with ideas and theories.
Most people set limitations and followed the rules, the guidelines sent by a higher order. Ken lived to exploit these flaws. Compared to everyone, Ken was unique, a genius in his own right.