"I don't mind if you ask, but the answer is not an easy one to hear." He regards Dave quietly, almost appraising. "You can tell me to stop whenever you like if it makes you uncomfortable. I won't blame you."
He settles himself into leaning against a nearby tree, folding his arms across his chest as he thinks of how to explain and of how strange it is to be speaking on it willingly. Once upon a time he didn't even want to acknowledge that it had happened and he'd skate over the subject whenever possible, but there's something in him now - maybe age, maybe the Capitol having gotten it wrong so many times whether on purpose or not - that has him wanting to set the record straight.
"Black Ghost was a shadow organization of war profiteers and black market scientists on the version of Earth where I am from. In the 1950's and 60's they began to kidnap people from around the world, mostly those who wouldn't be missed like gang members, soldiers in war zones, vagrants and the like. They used these people as experiments for a new sort of weapon - cyborgs. I was one of those they kidnapped and the fourth subject of the project to actually survive." He rarely things of how many others there were even before they'd been given zero zero designations. How many subjects in the D series before Jet, how many in A through C, none of which had survived.
He never knew any of their names, never met most of them. Only the ones he'd escaped with. All the rest were lost as barely footnotes to history.
"They wanted to turn us into the ultimate fighting machines and then auction us off to the highest bidders, forcing an arms race that would hopefully trigger World War III."
no subject
He settles himself into leaning against a nearby tree, folding his arms across his chest as he thinks of how to explain and of how strange it is to be speaking on it willingly. Once upon a time he didn't even want to acknowledge that it had happened and he'd skate over the subject whenever possible, but there's something in him now - maybe age, maybe the Capitol having gotten it wrong so many times whether on purpose or not - that has him wanting to set the record straight.
"Black Ghost was a shadow organization of war profiteers and black market scientists on the version of Earth where I am from. In the 1950's and 60's they began to kidnap people from around the world, mostly those who wouldn't be missed like gang members, soldiers in war zones, vagrants and the like. They used these people as experiments for a new sort of weapon - cyborgs. I was one of those they kidnapped and the fourth subject of the project to actually survive." He rarely things of how many others there were even before they'd been given zero zero designations. How many subjects in the D series before Jet, how many in A through C, none of which had survived.
He never knew any of their names, never met most of them. Only the ones he'd escaped with. All the rest were lost as barely footnotes to history.
"They wanted to turn us into the ultimate fighting machines and then auction us off to the highest bidders, forcing an arms race that would hopefully trigger World War III."