[center][img]http://baku-panda.org/images/absolute_robin.png[/img][/center][COLOR=steelblue][INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3]S. T. A. R.   L A B S[/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][/COLOR][INDENT][INDENT][sup][color=goldenrod]Gotham City | Present Day[/color][/sup][/INDENT][/INDENT]
They called it [b]cold storage[/b].

It looked like a morgue.

Felt like a morgue. Standing off to one side, Dick felt an involuntary shudder course through his body. An odd ache biting into the back of his shoulder as he tried to shrug off the chill that permeated the austere, stainless steel interior.

Security here was tighter than at the morgue. Doctor Charles worked a cipher lock on the cabinet door, before finally plugging in a biometric key. Dick could hear an audible click, followed by a series of mechanical sounds, before the cabinet door popped open. 

A long, metal slab came sliding out of the open cabinet. Atop which was the body of Pinocchio. If Dick didn’t know better, he’d have easily mistaken the Toyman’s craftsmanship for a real human corpse. The level of detail that had gone into creating this puppet without strings demonstrated a sincere devotion to the creation of the doll.  Dark hair framing pale skin, a bluish tone giving the boy an alabaster quality that only seemed to reinforce the idea that it was just an porcelain doll.

Sarah re-appeared, wheeling a computer cart over beside the table on which the simulacrum lay. Digging through a pile of cables, she fished out the end of a coaxial connector and then unfolded what looked like a schematic. “I’ll be honest,” she uttered, laying the schematic out atop the doll’s body as she tried to orient to the layout. “We weren’t sure that we still had any of the right hardware. We’re still not,” the woman remarked.

Pulling away the blueprint paper, the woman felt along the boy’s abdomen. “No one’s touched this thing in more than ten years.” Prying open the naval, she wrestled a moment with marrying the coaxial cable to the port concealed there. Then she picked up a second cable and search for a second port a the base of the cranium, concealed by the hair.  When she had finished, she flipped open a laptop and then set to work.  “Let’s hope that I can remember my MS DOS...” Sarah commented, opening a window and then starting to type away. “The operating system may not even pair with modern computers.”

Dick didn’t respond.  He had doubts of his own to contend with.  Capturing Toyboy had been a sixteen year endeavor for both Officer Grayson and Nightwing.  It hadn’t ended well, for any of them.

After another minute, Sarah sat back from the laptop “All right, the BIOS is loading now,” the woman noted, turning her head up to look over at the former boy wonder as she explained, “The diagnostic tools will take a few minutes to cache.” 

If Dick heard her, he didn’t do anything to indicate it. After another moment of silence, Sarah remarked aloud, “So, what’s this things deal, anyway? I don’t think you ever told me.”

[color=#9fc5e8]“I don’t think you ever asked,”[/color] Dick uttered softly.

So, he [i]was[/i] listening. “I think I was afraid to,” Sarah admitted candidly, turning her eyes down to the boy on the table. “I couldn’t put it into storage fast enough,” the woman added, as her gaze trailed over to where monitors on the wall were measuring the radioactivity levels. Even in storage, the power cells were still remarkably [b]hot[/b]. 

“Horton cells...” the woman breathed. It was difficult to say whether she was impressed or terrified.

The answer was probably both.

“Schott had to be a [b]right bastard[/b] to play God with something as powerful as that,” Sarah stated finally.

[color=#9fc5e8]“Yeah,[/color]” Dick said. Finally, he reached a hand out to touch the doll on the shoulder. The body was ice cold. 

[color=#9fc5e8]“I think he’d agree.”[/color]

[center][color=black]+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +[/color][/center][color=gold][b]Hinkely Creek[/b]
[i]June 8, 1996[/i][/color]

This was supposed to be great.

This was supposed to be everything that he was created for. There were children. There were toys. They could all just play and have fun.

It was a surprise for Anton’s tenth’s birthday. Toyboy had gathered up the boy and his friends from the school that he attended. They could laugh and run around and play all the Toyman’s games. 

[b][i]“Children who do not follow rules must be punished!”[/i][/b]

The Toyman was angry. No matter what Toyboy did, no matter how hard that he tried, the children didn’t want to play the Toyman’s games. 

Anton didn’t want to play the games. He’d encouraged the other children to try and escape from this place, from this utopia that had been made for them. For him.

The Toyman was angry sometimes. Sometimes a lot lately. He’d been angry at Anton’s mother, that was the first time that Toyboy had seen the Toyman angry like this. The Toyman had made it so that  Anton’s mother would never be able to make him angry again.

When that happened, the Toyman had given Toyboy a new directive: [i]To keep Anton safe[/i].

“I gave you everything that you could ever want.”

Turning his head up, Toyboy could see where the Toyman had Anton backed into a corner. The man was holding up a knife. The light gleaming off the blade betrayed the slick, sticky red mess that covered the knife, the handle, and the Toyman’s arm.

In his arms, the Toyboy was cradling the body of a child. Blood smearing across the doll’s hands and clothes, as the automaton struggled to process what was happening. They had been been playing just a short while ago.

To play. To laugh. To be the greatest toy ever made. Those were all of the reasons that the Toyman had given him for why he had been created.

Today was supposed to be what he was created for, what he was created to do. Instead, the doll’s dead eyes looked out over a playground of broken dreams.

“What? You’re afraid? Of me?” the Toyman’s voice uttered hoarsely. Reaching out, the man grabbed his son by the arm, roughly pulling him close. “This was for you,” the man barked, his tone softening as he seemed deflated for a moment, “This was all for you...”

Grabbing Anton by his head, the Toyman forced the child to look out over the bloodied bodies of his classmates. From the edge of the boy’s vision, the man could be seen raising the knife, as he darkly declared, “And this is all [b][i]your[/i][/b] fault...”

Something sailed between them.

Ripped from his grasp, the knife went tumbling through the air. As Anton sank to his knees in shock, the Toyman reeled back in confusion.

Confusion that slowly coalesced as the moving blur came into focus. A momentary realization seeped into an otherwise diseased mind. “Toyboy..?” the man uttered.

A child-sized fist buried itself into the Creator’s solar plexus. As the man lurched forward, reflect doubling him over, the doll executed a windmill kick that caught the Toyman on the underside the chin. The result launching the man up into the air, before he came crashing down a few feet away.

He struggled to move for a moment, then the fight gave out. As he collapsed onto the ground, Winslow Schott looked over at the Pinocchio of his own making and ask, “Why?”

Crouching down, the simulacrum drew his arms around the trembling, weeping form of Anton Schott. The doll’s eyes seemed alight with hell’s fire as he glared defiantly over at the man who had created him, and declared, [color=#ffd700]“Toyboy keep Anton safe.”[/color]

[center][color=black]+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +[/color][/center][color=gold][b]S.T.A.R. Labs[/b]
[i]Present Day[/i][/color]

The body of the doll was shaking atop the metal slab, like a child in the throes of a grand seizure.

Lurching forward, Dick placed his hands on the doll’s shoulders, pinning it down. The violent  convulsions racking the automaton proved a struggle, as Dick found himself nearly tossed on his ass by the force of the body’s spasms. 

Turning his head, the former circus act threw a look over toward where Sarah was working the laptop. [color=#9fc5e8]“Can you shut it down?”[/color]

The shake of the woman’s head was the only answer he needed. “His Horton cells are fully energized,” Sarah remarked, her head down as she continued plugging away at the machine. “The reaction is self-sustaining.”

Great. Another Grayson good idea. Pull a thermonuclear-powered [b]teddy bear[/b] from out of cold storage and fire up the reactor. What could go wrong? Except maybe turning it into a [i]teddy bomb[/i]…

The convulsions were starting to intensify. Dick realized that he could feel [i]heat[/i] coming off the body. Steam was starting to rise off the doll’s form. “Readings are approaching critical,” Sarah warned, her voice sharp and her fingers paused. She seemed at a loss for what to do next, as she glanced at Dick with a harried expression and said, “I think he’s about to expl…”

The doll lurched, snapped up into a fetal position and turning on its side. Dick had to scramble to re-position himself so that the simulacrum didn’t spill out onto the floor. 

Then it retched. A milky-white liquid splashing onto the floor as the doll [b]threw up[/b]. And then began coughing and sputtering.

After which, the spasms and convulsions stopped.

[color=#9fc5e8]“Not what I was expecting,”[/color] Dick deadpanned simply. What had he been expecting? What exactly did one expect when they pulled a lifelike automaton out of the closet and fired it up for the first time in more than a decade?

As Dick helped the doll to sit up, he heard Sarah comment, “His power output appears to be regulating itself.” 

Looking back over at the woman, Dick gave a tilt of his head to indicate the wet mess on the floor as he asked, [color=#9fc5e8]“How did he..?”[/color]

“Best guess? Negative pressure on a coolant tank valve,” Sarah answered, with a shrug. “Beyond that, no one provided us with a manual. We were hired for storage only.”

Dick couldn’t argue with that. Instead, turning back toward the lifelike boy, the man helped to steady the android into a seated position on the edge of the metal table top. [color=#9fc5e8]“Hey, Toyboy,”[/color] Dick offered. [color=#9fc5e8]“It’s been awhile.” [/color]

It was uncanny. Like a close encounter with the third kind. An involuntary shiver ran down Dick’s spine as the doll cocked it’s head toward him. Though human-like, the way in which the eyes looked out at Dick were clearly [b]inhuman[/b]. The pupils dilating and contracting in abnormal fashion, as the lens and camera focused on Dick. Toyboy was meticulously recording his features, looking up at his head and then panning down to his chin, before returning back up to his eyes.

Moving from his spot by the table, Dick retrieved a Target shopping back. An assortment of boy’s clothing was folded up inside, with the tags still on them. Breaking open a pack of underwear, Dick pulled out a pair and then helped guide the doll down from the table.[color=#9fc5e8] “Let’s get these on you,”[/color] he remarked, holding them out for Toyboy to step into.

Returning to the bag, Dick next produced a pair of mesh shorts. While he wrestled with pulling the tags off, the automaton was exploring the wires and cables that were feeding into it’s body. A coaxial cable ran into his naval. A second was married to the base of his skull. An electrical and an optical line were going into two different points on his left forearm. 

Holding out the shorts, Dick uttered, [color=#9fc5e8]“And these...”[/color]

Toyboy’s hand rested on Dick’s shoulder, as the doll stepped into the shorts. As Dick hiked them up to the automaton’s waist, the simulacrum finally spoke. [color=#ffd700]“Voice pattern analysis indicates, with eighty-seven-point-six-four percent probability, that you’re Nightwing.” [/color]

Ignoring the observation, Dick instead looked over at Sarah as he wiggled one of the cables running from her computer into Toyboy’s body. [color=#9fc5e8]“Are we good to disconnect now?”[/color]

Doctor Charles just shrugged in reply. “At this point, I’m just monitoring. Toyboy’s functioning completely autonomously.”

[color=#9fc5e8]“Well, then, let’s get you unplugged,”[/color] Dick remarked, turning back to the doll. Reaching his hands around to the back of the child-like being’s head, he worked to disengage the connector there. Pulling the coaxial cable from the base of the boy’s skull, Dick let the cable fall free. From his position, crouched down at the doll’s eye level, the man looked at the android and asked, [color=#9fc5e8]“You need help with the others?”[/color]

Bringing both hands to his naval, the automaton unfastened the umbilical cable. [color=#ffd700]“Your physical appearance has been altered since our previous interaction,” [/color]the doll noted, even as it used its right hand to pull the remaining cabling from the ports on its left arm.

Reaching into the bag, Dick drew out a t-shirt and then a hooded sweatshirt. [color=#9fc5e8]“That’s right,”[/color] he murmured, as he worked to pry the tags off. [color=#9fc5e8]“Arms up,”[/color] Dick said. As the doll raised its arms up over its head, Dick pulled the t-shirt and then the sweatshirt over the automaton’s head. 

With that done, Toyboy now both out of the freezer and dressed, said, [color=#9fc5e8]“I just go by Commissioner Grayson now.”[/color] Reaching over, Dick deposited the discarded tags and other trash back into the Target bag. Then, turning back toward Toyboy, offered, [color=#9fc5e8]“If you feel up for a drive, I can get you caught up in the car.”[/color]