before the sky split [ninjago next generation]

cybernetic perfection, part 1

"Are you sure you can just let the kid run around here?"

"That kid doesn't do any 'running around'," grunted The Mechanic. The henchmen's muttering was too quiet to echo around the empty part of the warehouse that had become their base of operations after Samurai X's frequent raids on his lair. His booming voice did. "Junko. Corner. Sit. Stay."

The girl crawled back to her corner between two empty shelves. Her three-legged crawling gait stumbled unnaturally and the henchmen chuckled unabashedly at her stump arm, the shortcoming of her human birth.

"Where was I?" The Mechanic huffed around the thick cigar between his lips. "We've got a quick job today. In and out. I could do it with my arm short-circuited, so don't fuck it up."

He pointed to each of the cronies with the lit end of his cigar.

"Easy day."

Junko watched as they piled into the getaway cars. She combed her lone hand through her hair and rolled a choppy strand between her fingers. One of the women who called her father "boss" had a long braid of hair. Junko had tried to imitate it, but her hand couldn't twist the strands over each other right to make her hair swing around like hers. If she had another hand, maybe. If she had been born right, maybe.

Her father's crew was an array of metals, gears, and wires affixed to arms and legs and eyes. His group of misfits— those unfortunate enough to be born wrong and those unfortunate enough to be allured by promises of mechanical perfection— bore the scars of the world. She rocked herself back and forth in the spot. It had worn a smoothened place in the ground where she had made herself a little retreat from the world. Junko closed her eyes and let her mind wander through a hall of doors to all her memories. Mechanical perfection. She floated to the door with the well-worn doorknob.

"Mechanical perfection," beamed the Mechanic. His arm blinded Junko as she caught the glare of the sun off its polished wrist. The audience beamed as he sold his prosthetics to them, his gang of thieves and pirates ready to be transformed into the right hands of a crime lord. "Stronger, faster, more durable than anyone with raw strength or elemental power."

He stepped around the workbench. The one to become Junko's, once she grew tall enough to reach it. His mechanical claw seized the rock it had taken two men to heave onto the table with difficulty, after which it trembled and groaned. The Mechanic hefted it with ease and crushed it in his claw. Junko flinched as the pieces fell like metallic hail.

"Vengestone, the hard-mined pride of Shintaro. New Ninjago City has been afraid for too long. They are afraid of technology. They are afraid," he said as he picked up a piece of the stone and crushed it again, "of progress. They hide behind the ninja and that Samurai X."

The gathered crowd raised a chorus of jeering boos.

"We don't fear technology," he whispered. The crowd fell silent to listen to his every word. "I remember when Ninjago City didn't either."

Junko strained to listen as his voice invited the crowd to take tentative steps towards him.

"Ninjago City was once the seat of technological innovation beyond your wildest dreams. Beyond expressways and Borg's line of personal computers. No," he said, "an age of cars that didn't need roads. There were no crowds of sheep huddling along the sidewalk being taught to say that they're in the most technologically perfect city in the world. Machines followed in our footsteps and kissed the ground behind our feet to clean it. That towering skyline,"

He gestured out the open bay door, towards the silhouette of the city.

"sprang to life overnight. And it did not stop there. The arts. The sciences. The medicine," he guided attention towards his arm, "it was a renaissance."

His metal pincer struck itself with a hundred tonnes of force.

"I could finally be perfect," he whispered, "and the ninja took it all away. They forced us to rely on them and their elemental powers rather than the things we could all do with our own hands. I became an abomination. I was, 'too far from human', and there was no place for me in their city. They forced me to find another avenue to greatness."

He grinned.

"Do you think I'm great?"

Junko closed the gate to that well-visited memory. There was another that she frequented. She floated towards the door.

The Mechanic grasped the hand of the red-haired woman as the driver of the truck backed the sealed shipping container towards the warehouse's open bay door with a continuous high-pitched beep.

"Pleasure doing business with you, Fujioka," she grinned.

"Pleasure's all mine, Miss Demeanour," he replied. The driver parked the truck and alighted the cab to join the pair. The Mechanic opened his arms and embraced the man in the dull green samurai attire. "Finally, the elusive thief attends his business."

"You've got no idea how hard it was to sneak out the old costume," he chuckled. He produced a lighter and a cigarette from his trousers' pocket. The samurai lit a cigarette for himself and Miss Demeanour, as well as the Mechanic's cigar.

"Everyone wants to know where you've been. Rumour has it, you've gone straight," the Mechanic teased. Two of his men emerged from the warehouse shelves to unlock the shipping container and move out the boxes of Vengestone. The samurai chuckled.

"Just a different business tactic, mate," he said. "Just attending so I can get paid in person. Wouldn't be too happy if someone ended up palming my cut. Need all I can get."

The samurai's metal elbow squeaked as he bent it.

"Need some maintenance. Been looking at some upgrades, too."

"Then you're in the right place, my friend," said the Mechanic warmly. He grasped the samurai's shoulder firmly and led him towards the belly of the warehouse. Miss Demeanour watched the truck lighten on its wheels.

Junko opened her eyes and looked around the warehouse. She knew the contents well. Scrap sheet metal, tools in piles, nuts and bolts and screws and nails and motors and defunct artefacts of her father's entry into the world that was New Ninjago City, and the components of his exile.

"Do you think I'm great?"

Do you think I can be great, too?

She'd have to be great from her corner of the warehouse. Junko reached from where she sat, though her arm was too short for her fingers to brush the shelves next to her. Her father's tools were too far away. She strained and tilted her shoulders to get to the scrap shelves, but her fingertips barely scraped the air. With a strain, she fell forward on her knees, keeping her feet where she had warmed the cold floor. She grasped the edge of the shelf with one foot connecting her to her place. It was some effort to get her freed foot beneath her to stand properly as she pulled herself up on the trembling shelf. Now she could get a better look at the wires and the jagged cuts of scrap metal. She brushed hair out of her face.

Junko placed her arm without a hand against the shelf to see how metal would fit against it. She shivered as the pieces passed a chill into her blood. Junko opened and closed her hand and imagined what kind of pieces would need to go together, how they would need to slide and glide against the body.

The door ground against its tracks as the Mechanic threw it upwards. Junko flinched and her foot fell from her seat. She replaced it quickly as her heart leapt and triumphant laughter echoed through the warehouse. Cheering boasts swelled as car engines died. Junko dared a glance over her shoulder and met her father's eye by chance. He stiffened as he saw her standing and scowled as his mood spoiled. Junko's own triumphant heart shrank and she slid her arm out from beneath the metal tubing and slinked back to her place.