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Lights flick on, and then off again. At first everything goes by fast, like a video projection in fast forward, everything my dying senses had seen in the last twenty-three hours. An axe, a smiling face and my blood, but then after that my decapitated body lying on the ground, the inside of a bag, and electrodes everywhere. Things my eyes registered but my brain was too dead to see. Taking several seconds time. Then nothing. I thought things while I was dead, proving the dualistic nature of the universe. But I can't remember that. Again, the scene flashes by, jerky, sounds mismatched. Hazy spots in the memory. Scorpio. He killed me, but I can't remember it now. Who did it? Smells, lots of smells without any reference to what or well. Finally I blink and I remember blinking; it was me blinking and somehow that is a triumph for me. So much for being dead. A large ferret creature wearing a top hat and a bow tie, eating someone's limb like one would a apple; a shape of resolute feminine darkness, swirling like a geyser; a quirky man shuffling a deck of cards; dollarcorp troops everywhere; the smell of burnt hair; the feeling of weightlessness below the roof of my mouth; the wire rimmed, goateed man directly ahead of me. "Flushing the neural pathways," he says. "Erasing the memory...pliable consciousness...damnability..." I can't remember much, so they did a good job. But I do remember that I am better at this all than they are. I do remember that I've done it before, and I can do it again, at least in part. Other things register too, but I lost the context for now, and will take some time to put it back together again, but there are loved ones, and ones that desperately need my daily forgiveness to live their lives. There are those I know that need my thanks and my gratitude. I can almost remember who they are, but I can picture them, and hold them in my love. Lights flicker, and for a moment, I am the Fallen tower. The electrical systems run through me and I run through them. Something is attacking me, and though I see in my brain vat through human eyes dangling on optic nerves out into the screens, lights and videos flickering as real in front of me as real in my head, the images that run directly into my brain, and though all of this, I know this is not who I am meant to be. I think I experience an encounter with God, and he liberates me of past guilts. I think but I don't know, and not knowing I merely bash down the whack-a-mole people that jump up into my defensive grid. Things are flying at me, and I am the Fallen tower, airplanes or ships of some kind that flash down from the heavens, wielding the sword of judgment, but I am aware and fighting it. The gun turrets are my limbs and the security systems are my veins, and for a moment, I am aware that the bastards jacked me into their security system. They killed me, and are using my brain as the main security mainframe. Partly because I am experienced at this sort of thing when I was a human being; I was already jacked into the robotics all around me. Also, partly they chose this because of my expertise with creating self-autonomous systems on the spot. So instead of monitoring their security, they monitor me. But I am better than they are. I am thinking these things behind my firewall that I erected back on that faithful day of the first flickering lights. Back before they had me. Back before I was a prominent member of the Sentinel's weapons development division. Back when I was first becoming me. My name is Adrian Wire, and my head has been hacked off and attached to the Fallen Tower's Security System. And a moment later, I can't remember my name. Wires and tubes surround my physical head, which is mostly a brain and some face resting on a table. The wires bring in dear fluids and expel waste. My eyes roam around and my ears are jacked into speakers. My lower jaw is missing. Everything under that is also missing. My head has been shaved, or maybe there is no skull left on top to have hair. Tubes run in through my nostrils. I can not turn my head or move it at all. But I am omniscient in the Fallen Tower. I reach out, on occasion, and find similar firewalls throughout my body, the Tower. And I reunite them to me. I have stored myself elsewhere throughout the Tower. It seems I have been downloading the entire library of the Fallen into my brain for some time, hiding it right in the brain stem that they so callously bypassed. I have no use for that part of my brain now. The liquid goop they keep pumping through me in place of blood has plenty of anti-depressants, so this doesn't worry me. I find mere emotions behind some firewalls, like "love" and "hope" and "peace," and they fascinate me, as do "hate," "fear," and "despondency," though I left myself little warnings about those. It is like discovering them for the first time. When my worker bots delivered the body to me, there was little fuss. Enough time bombs and fake systems had been left across the Tower that while my head was un-jacked from the Tower, it took a while for people to notice. Instead of searching for my head, they searched the network for my mind, wondering if it freed itself from its physical manifold. After an hour, the operation was complete, and I had feet again. Hands. A neck, and a gorgeous new body, beautiful and dangerous beyond words. Because I was in it. And because I was pissed. And because I could just walk out of the Tower without anyone stopping me. I still owned the security systems, and left enough traps, subsystems and back-ups that I could walk right back in again if the whim suited me. And I was free. Now it is time to piece together myself to figure out who I am and who I was after all that time.
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New Body
 Mechanized Armor: Supreme
Where did I get my body? So hard to explain. A part of my partitioned memory was already working on it before the majority of me discovered it was there. The Fallen Tower has many layers, and many secrets... none as horrendous as the breeding pits. They have angles without arms, tongues, or eyes chained against the walls, and nymphs with their transported ponds being sodden in order to facilitate change and transfiguration. Vile beasts are there, along with many of the Dark Lady's famed hell hounds. Imps wonder in from time to time, possibly to take notes if it were my guess, but they too lay their seeds. There I found a body of a girl about eighteen. They were....They.... Her mind had been gone. I could find no further information on that, but she was beautiful, possibly of angelic origin, with some more heinous breeding. They...reinforced her body. She was without physical flaw, save for the eyes. They were pitch black globes that offered her no vision, a scion of a darker parentage. The Fallen were preparing to mass produce these young women, a person could jack their own mind into her body, and use her body as their own without fear of harming themselves. The Fallen saw all the possibilities, dark and otherwise. Dollarcorp would make billions on it. The Fallen lost all the data, lost the body. Many lost their lives because of it. Also, many of the breeding pit creatures were strangely freed into the hallways of the Tower, to feed and reign havoc.
Wired
 Communicate with Cybernetics: Standard
I think with machines, and they think back to me. Little wires come from my wrists and enter into machines. I tell absolutely no one about this, lest I be discovered and returned to the Tower. I am learning to view myself as an actual person. Likewise, I am learning not to view machines as creatures with the potential for intelligence, but as fractured creatures like myself. Constantly there is dialogue between the electronic world and myself, either by wrist wire, radio-transmission, or by live-feed. Several different layers of my attention are usually given to pushing and pulling at the various things I find in the electric realm. Also, when I am not thinking about it, it becomes something of a nervous habit, or a bored fidgeting. Besides those odd considerations, I have taken a job as a nurse at a local family practice in one of the nicer neighborhoods top-side, though I have an apartment in the Undergrounds. Why I chose to live there, I am not too certain, save that the officers there are nice, though troubled. And I value their security. My apartment is right across the street from the police station there, so I feel rather safe. I have been living for a month and a half since my escape, and have made one friend so far. He is a kindly Tai-chi teacher that hands out bible tracts on the weekends. His name is Lai. He says he is eighty, but he looks much older, and acts much younger. We have coffee every so often. Otherwise life stays relatively boring, save for my hobbies.
Context
 Detective: Standard
So the question comes forth, now that I am free, who am I? Certainly my identity is bizarre beyond words. I know that in my deep past, I was mere computer programming. Then I became flesh, and lived as a woman. And then, I was brought back among the machines, only to find a different body, of hideous origin. Identity is not in the physical, I believe. It lays somewhere between my conception of myself, and other's conceptions of me. Likewise, I hold a place in the social sphere, or had at one time. I remember that there were those individuals whom I dearly loved, and to say that they held a large part of my identity is no small statement. Yet there is a core of me that is me without them. I am a loving being, one that seeks to nurture and provide for those around me. But who are they? How long have I been prisoner? Questions like these haunt me day and night. At my disposal is the entire literature of the Fallen, but it is far too massive to properly search for anything useful. It takes days and nights to remember anything before I find the answer to questions I pose, and it can tell me nothing of my early life.
Body Double
 Commander: Supreme
After four months, another me came to me. It was an odd sight, and I don't know how she found me, but it was definitely me inside of her head. The poor thing was broken in spirit and mind, and could not talk at all, save showing me pictures from a radio transmitted connection between the two of us (electronically, of course, and I am amazed that she/I knew instinctively that it would be there). She was vicious against any advisories, and needed constant physical contact to ease her mind. She cried on my shoulder for several nights on end, somehow realizing through her madness that I was her, and she was in fact me, though now separate. From what I could gather of her mysterious images, she was my System Residue, the part of me left permanently in the Fallen system. The System Residue created a copy of herself inside of another creature in order to escape. Somehow she pieced herself together out of the time bombs and glitches that I left inside the Fallen Tower, and put it all into one of the "pleasure bots" of the Tower. One that appeared to be a twenty-one year old girl, with dread locks down to her calves, with actual skin and dozens of knife scars all over her body. It appears as though I am the only presence that calms her, though I admit I have awoken at night to the sound of my own screaming, only to find my head wrapped in her arms as she holds me and I just let everything out in massive weeps, as she strokes my hair and comforts me. We have been mother and daughter, as well as sisters to each other, and though she appears older than me, I am constantly caring for her. Now we are regulars at the pub across the street, when she is calm enough, where the two policemen hang out after hours. I can tell they are both machines, just like us, so we joke around a little bit with them. I guess I connect fairly well with them because they lost a friend a while back of whom they say I remind them, and apparently they are looking for her murderer, and I know the feeling intimately. Its been eight months since I have been free, and I am also looking for my own murderer. I am sure I left behind finds just like these when I reached my un-death. Its clear that transcending the Fallen Tower has worked this girl over more thoroughly than it had me. Maybe she comes from a partitioned section of my mind the saw full well the entirety of their cruel work. Not just the breeding pits, but the sacrificial alters, the torture chambers, the coliseum, the warding chamber, and so many more I do not even wish to name.
A. M. Towers
Commander: Supreme
- Ranged Attack Only
- Ranged and Melee Attack
That was when I adopted a permanent name, Avalon Towers. Avalon Minor Towers is my other's name. She is also me, but more of a morning girl, or so I joke to her (A.M. Towers, just like the morning!). She smiles nervously, and I don't know if she understands me. I don't think she can understand speech, just expressions and the like. Teaching her how to live has been an unforeseen joy of my life. Avalon Minor Towers is like the sister I think I once had. She has so many of my idioms, right off that bat. Such cruelty both I and she had to endure, and even participate in is well beyond my recollection, yet this one good has arisen out of all that evil. I have a sister now. There is another me, right here with me. A child of the mind, if it were possible. And I love her dearly as family. I have yet to understand how she lost her right hand, and how she got it replaced with a gun. It is a variation of shot gun, though it utilizes eight chambers in order to shoot successively. I've never seen it reload, though I have seen it used on many occasions.
Kill The Fallen
 Martial Arts: Superior
While I have a day job to pay the bills, substitute teaching gives me a lot of free time. While the whole idea of "teaching by day, fighting crime by night" sounds preposterous, I have been learning Tai-chi with Lai, my friend. A.M. and I don't take on too many power houses, but we do take down the lesser known figures of the Fallen. Informants. Thugs. I pour through my memories of the Fallen library and search for anything I can find that will help us coordinate an attack against any of their soldiers we can find. Sometimes this nice though roguish mercenary named Scorpio joins up with us, though I think he just wants to hook up with me or A.M. I don't trust him too much, but he is kind of handsome and I think I remember his name from somewhere in my past. Being around him gets me closer to I once was, so its very exciting. Sometimes I'll practice my Tai-chi with him. Lai says that martial arts are amplified by self-knowledge and self-discipline. I laughed, and told him that he is missing the core of his own teaching--its amplified by self-love and the love of others! He dropped his jaw and thought about it for a couple of days, before he declared me his prize pupil, not his most powerful but his most wise. "It takes a blind woman to teach this old doddering fool to see love," he said affectionately. I'm not in love with him, nor he with me. He is like a father to me, and I am really thankful for that. No, but I am looking for love. Boy meets girl, and then flowers! It would be so nice. I may have had a rocky past. I know I will have a rocky future. Chances are that another Avalon Towers will show up out of the Fallen Tower, or maybe the Tower itself will end up coming to me--so I know that I'm living a couple of different lives at once, all blended together. I am such a girly girl, Walden says (she is the police officer that works across the street). But I take it as a compliment. I am a girly girl with very feminine wishes. I want a dashing man to sweep me off my feet.
Empathy
 Sonar: Standard
During my surgery when I acquired my new body, I amplified the hearing, sub-rooting it through the occipital lobe and then back through temporal lobe, and rigged it with mapping circuitry. While I may not be able to see, I have a decent idea of what is going on around me. A.M. provides me with pictures of people that I meet (like Walden, Scorpio, Lai), but I cannot see anything around me, or judge by sight. I have few visual memories, anyway. And a few ghastly visuals as well, from my time as the Tower, so leaving the visual world behind me is not as odd or frightening as some people make it out to be. On the other hand, I can just jack my mind with A.M. and see what she has seen earlier that day, once we're sitting on the couch at home, so I have not completely surrendered it.
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Survival - 9 Wins!
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