[CENTER]PLOT:
Cora, a runaway living at The Great Robot Circus, is scavenging for scrap below the dumpsite below Metro City, when she uncovers a boy robot with no memories and little clothing at that! Barely able to stand on its own feet, (let alone remember his own name) Cora befalls him the name Atom and convinces him into joining the circus. Machines are just mindless pieces of junk, but as Cora is soon to realise, not everything she's learnt is true.
Cora, a runaway living at The Great Robot Circus, is scavenging for scrap below the dumpsite below Metro City, when she uncovers a boy robot with no memories and little clothing at that! Barely able to stand on its own feet, (let alone remember his own name) Cora befalls him the name Atom and convinces him into joining the circus. Machines are just mindless pieces of junk, but as Cora is soon to realise, not everything she's learnt is true.
AUTHOR NOTES:
So this is a story I started back when I had just gotten into the series. A friend named Ty linked me to a song namedSpeeding Cars by Imogen Heap and when I heard the chorus:
There there baby
it's just text book stuff
it's in the ABC of growing up
Now, now darling
oh don't lose your head
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah
Those magicial little words struck me with a mental image of an amnesia Astro waking up on the scrapheap and scaring the daylights of a lone Cora. Crazy, but true. I must've listen to that song over and over, it was something in hearing the choruses and how the innocent melody played through them that carried me onto writing the story (so please if you've not heard it, have a listen to the song afterwards...unless you're into heavy metal more, then you're excused ^_^)
For the last couples months i've been busy on other projects and I recently came back this one deciding I wasn't happy with how it was going. I'd writen this being an early Astro Boy fan and knowing what I do now and having a better grasp of the characters I decided that before I could go forward I needed to go back and revise the story.
Now certain changes might be subtle while others will be acomplete change of scene. If you want to read all 3 of the original chapters you can here. Please bear in mind once I will be replacing them once all revision is complete.
Only 5 pages have been revised from chapter 1 thus far. Dependings on what I'm doing I might post some revised parts soon or later. Any comments are very much appreciated <3.
oxoxoxoxo[/CENTER]
Love You Yet
Chapter 1: The First Step
“Y-You’re…!”
Cora didn’t know what she was thinking when she left for the Wastelands that afternoon. It was the last day the Not-So-Great Robot Circus would be in town and preparations were already underway to hit the road. Yet instead of sticking behind to help, she’d dropped everything to come out here for some last minute scavenging.
The Wastelands below Metro City were rumoured to be the largest on record, and Cora couldn’t disagree with that. She and her friends had hit the jackpot many a times out here than they would’ve for any other dumpsites. But never, did she expect to encounter something like this.
Cora had spotted it by accident, when overlooking one of the Wasteland’s deep canyons of junk; something sticking out amongst the dull rusted metal, something black and pink…
It was too far away to make out exactly what it was, but a gut instinct told her she needed to check it out. So she did.
It’d been a long scramble down the canyon, though soon enough Cora reached the bottom. Carefully she’d clambered over derelict vehicles and old machinery equipment, stewed wires and circuitry crunching beneath her feet as she got forever nearer to the object that was pulling her in like a magnet.
Once she was close enough, it didn’t take long for Cora’s mind to process what her eyes had seen.
A body…
The whole scene had looked wrong; Cora only smelt the foul decay of junk, not a corpse. Either they’d not been dead long, or it was a drunk, but who took a nap face down buried by trash, and this far out? It was only on standing several feet away, did she realize with a stolen breath, that the body was too small to be an adult.
Some scumbag in the glamorous Metro City…had dumped a child down here, a boy.
“Oh no...” In that instance Cora abandoned all fear to have knotted in her stomach and broke into a run, tripping and stumbling over the unturned earth to the reach him. She hadn’t known if he was alive or not, there’d been no time to think of that, all she could do was act. But maybe if she’d stopped for just a moment, she might’ve noticed something wasn’t quite right.
"Hold on! I'll get you out!" A foot pressed firmly against the wall of compacted junk; Cora had hooked her arms under the armpits of the motionless child and pulled.
Like bricks to cement he was wedged in tight and it’d taken every ounce of her strength to free him. And when she had, toppling over in a miniature landslide of garbage, she could’ve sworn she saw a spark ignite from the boy as he fell along with her.
Speedo and boots was all he wore.
For a moment Cora had panicked, her hands reaching to shove the body off from her legs…only to stop upon feeling the rubbery touch of synthetic flesh on her fingertips. She seen them then, the grooves around each of the boy’s joints, the arms, legs and neck; the exposed gleaming metal to peer through every rip in the skin, the black helmet that it wasn’t a helmet, but was fused to his, it’s skull.
And all the dots had connected up, as it dawned on Cora of her mistake.
“A robot…?” She’d whispered in disbelief, prodding one of the two spikes to protrude from its scalp like a horn, “No way.”
Twitch
It moved.
Her scream had echoed off the slanting walls of the canyon, as she’d quickly pushed, shoved and kicked the robot away with her arms and legs and scrambled away like it were a disease. An electric whirl started up then, movement increasing in twitches all over the robot’s body as its every limb was put into motion. And Cora had watched with a pounding heart as the boy robot had come to life, clumsily sitting itself up.
The boy robot’s head rolled back, and a fluorescent blue shown from its large eyes, with a gaze so stone cold gaze it’d made Cora break out in a feverish sweat. Then as quick as it was to appear, the light vanished in the blink of an eye…and glassy brown irises, found her blue ocean ones.
“Y-You’re…how’d you-” She uttered at loss for words, all too aware her hand was squeezed on the stun gun in her sweater pocket. She kept her cool, the very best she could, “I thought you were broken.”
The boy robot remained immobile on the ground, its doll like feature blank and expressionless…then slowly, a look of pure innocence gradually flourished onto its face.
Ever so slightly, its head tilted to one side.
“You the new craze up there now or something…? Well?” Cora demanded bluntly, uncomfortable with all the staring. Malfunctioning robots were the worst kind a human could come across. If they didn’t run on the laws of robotics then there was no telling what they could do. She didn’t class this one as any exception.
The blood rushing in her ears, Cora cautiously took a step back; wrong move. Her heart jumped in her chest as the boy robot’s eyes darted down to the legs she stood on, transfixed by their movement. Curiously moving the artificial muscles on its face, the robot glanced down to its own set of legs. Slowly the knees were bent and ankles were wriggled, giving off electrical hums from parts that had not been used in a long time.
Like a puppet hung on strings, wobbly and unbalance, the boy robot begun to get to its feet.
“Stay where you are! I mean it!” Cora ordered, pulling out the stun gun and poising it forward to show she meant business. It’d recently been modified by a certain wiz kid to pack more a punch towards robots, but she didn’t know of it’s effectiveness since she hadn’t tested it out yet.
“Are you listening to me!? Hey!”
No matter what she said, robot didn’t respond. Its attention remained focused solely on itself as it hoisted its mechanical body from the ground. The robot’s legs never ceased to shake once it was up, its arms wavering out all over the place as if it were a bird that couldn’t understand why it had wings…so it didn’t come as a surprise to Cora when-
CLUNK!
It fell over.
“What…?” Her stun gun lowered, Cora stared dubiously at the machine now laid on its stomach with the expression only a surprised infant could bear. The robot soon moved again, and in doing so Cora raised her guard, but not for very long as it was to fall, as did the robot when it’d tumbled over again like a person on silts.
It tried many times, and every time it failed. The robot just couldn’t get back up.
She found it almost amusing…almost.
(More in just a minute, these word limits are murder! x_X)