A young girl sits homeless on the street, thinking about how someone like herself, someone so young, ended up in this situation. It all started with the Ghost Dance War where her father had died. After which her mother used what little she had to move to Chicago. Her family was never exactly well off to begin with, and now despite her mother doing her best in a new job and location she could hardly afford to buy basic things like bread. Natalie didn't even notice how little her mother was eating, always giving her food and eating off whatever scraps she had left behind. Eventually her mother became too malnourished and too sick to continue on. Natalie was left alone, living off of bread that was either stale or moldy and whatever she could find that was edible out of the dumpsters in Chicago.
Natalie was near death constantly, not even a decade old and it seemed her life would be over. She’d starve to death or capture an illness just like her mother. Things were looking dire for poor Natalie, with no one going out of their way to help her. They would divert their eyes and avoid her, not wanting to think about or engage with the homeless orphaned street urchin. Everything was going poorly for Natalie for almost a year when the World Fair came to Chicago. With all the fairground food being left unattended or unfinished it was the perfect opportunity to be well fed for once.
Natalie decided to scope out and scout the fairgrounds while it was being set up when while spying on people setting up a string of lights a man came up behind her. “Are you lost, child? Where are your parents?” He spoke in a soft, sophisticated, and gentlemanly manner. Natalie turned to see the man. He was tall, slender, and handsome. The young man had his black hair slicked to the sides and a sophisticated looking mustache. He was dressed in a formal suit signaling his importance or status. He had in his hand a crumpled brown paper bag with a loaf of bread with chunks torn out of it.
Natalie looked at the floor while she rocked back and forth on her feet, holding and rubbing her own dirty hands together. “I uhh… don't have any. I've no family to speak of, it's just me.” The man blinked a few times. “Then who feeds you and educates you?” Natalie looked up at the stranger. “I feed me, and the streets teach me.” The man looked at his bread. “I was using this to feed pigeons, but maybe it would be better off in your hands.” He handed her the loaf before walking over to the men at work and instructing them. Natalie knew this man was the one in charge. The one arranging the fair.
Natalie continued to follow him around from the shadows, sneaking around while munching on the loaf of bread he gave her, leaving crumbs all over herself and the floor. She nearly jumped out of her skin when there was a load pop from a box hooked up to the electronic decorations. The gentleman walked over and checked the box before scolding the helpers for their mistake. He put on a set of leather gloves before rearranging some of the plugins. He then opens the box and fiddles with some wires before closing it and flipping a switch to turn the lights back on. Then, some time later, a second box blew.
Natalie sneaked over to the box and tore the ragged sleeves from her dirty jacket and wrapped it around her hands. She then mimicked the actions of the gentleman with some difficulty since her fingers were bound together before flipping the switch and turning it back on. Proud of herself, she brushed off her hands before removing the wrapping and taking a bite out of the loaf. She then hears footsteps approaching before hearing a familiar voice. “Did you… fix that yourself? I was literally following your trail of breadcrumbs when this got overloaded.”
Natalie hesitated before slowly nodding. “I wrapped my hands in cloth because I don't have gloves. It was hard to twist the wires with my fingers bound.” The gentleman rubs his chin and gums. “Follow me.” The man finds a female security and hands her some money. “I'd like you to clean this girl up and buy her some clothes. I gave you more than you'll probably need so feel free to keep the change. Once that's finished, return the child to me.” The woman did a bow giving a simple “yes sir” before taking Natalie by the hand. She gets a simple dress, undergarments, leggings, socks, shoes, and a hat. Natalie points out a set of gloves and the secretary gets those as well.
Once that is done she gets some soap and a bucket before removing and throwing away Natalie’s old clothes and scrubbing her down till she is clean, having to cut the knotted up hair short before brushing what's left and putting a small and simple bow in it. Once Natalie was cleaned the woman helped her into the clean outfit and escorted her back to the gentleman. “You look like a human being now. Come with me then, let's see how easily you pick things up.”
Natalie followed the man who gathered up small gears, wires, magnets, switches, and batteries on a table. He then put her on one side of the table and slowly built a small electromagnetic engine that he turned on. The thing started spinning and shaking lightly. “Alright, from observation alone, can you recreate that?” Natalie sat down and looked at the scraps before slowly mimicking the process and her device working just as well. The man nodded with his hand on his chin with clear approval. “You seem to have a natural talent for visual learning. With some proper education you could be quite good at this kind of work. It's not normally the kind of work a lady would do but…”
The man trailed off in thought for a moment. “I, I just realized I never introduced myself. How improper of me. I'm Tesla. Nikola Tesla.” Natalie nodded. “S-Stone. Natalie Stone. And I'm eight years old. Nice to meet you, Mister Tesla.” Tesla smiled. “The pleasure is all mine Mis Stone. How would you like to come with me? I never considered taking on an apprentice but I can't let such a natural talent be wasted. It would be a shame to ignore such potential.” Natalie hesitated before nodding.
Natalie was given a home, food, and education. Although a lot of things were handled by a female assistant or secretary, the man quickly became like a father to her. Unofficially adopted, Tesla taught her everything he knew on top of traditional education such as literacy, manners, and etiquette. Natalie quickly became adept at electrical engineering and even arithmetic and sciences with a specialty around electromagnetics. Over the years the two formed a bond both familial and professional with Natalie being Tesla's go too for bouncing ideas off of and testing inventions with.
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The two not only shared interests, but also a disdain for Tesla's biggest rival, Edison. Natalie could not help but loath the man just as much as her adoptive father did. “Inventer my foot, he's a glorified patent pusher. His only accomplishment is the mass production of the products of others and taking the credit.” As Tesla looked to the future and arrived for better and newer inventions to make the world better the world kept changing. Things were never easy for the fledgling inventor, and as Natalie developed into a woman capable of caring for herself she did what she could to help her adoptive father through his hard times.
Natalie aided in every project from the smallest invention to the failed Wardenclyffe tower.
Hard times only got harder as the now twenty nine year old Natalie watched the world turn into a battlefield. The great war, the war to end all wars, had started. With it a new demand for better weapons and telecommunications technology increased. This kept the inventor afloat but stressed as the workload increased and his desire to help in a war that led to the deaths of so many was practically non-existent as his project for free wireless energy was abandoned and the property foreclosed and demolished.
Tesla didn't want to work helping the military, but it was the only thing keeping him from bankruptcy as he spent money and time in lawsuits and personal inventions. With feedback from his female assistant slash adoptive daughter however, Tesla made strides in his personal endeavors that found use with the military with him issuing patents with both their names on it. The two knocked out the kinks of a bladeless turbine that saw use in a number of machines.
When Tesla later proposed a system for detecting submarines he nearly invented a radar or radar detection but since it would not have worked under water. The two then began work on and even patented a design for what could only be described as a VTOL biplane. The design, however, was not finished in time for the great war and deemed somewhat impractical. Just two years later Tesla felt distraught when a French inventor created radar and informed that Tesla had been so close to greatness. However, he trudged on with the money from war patents keeping him and his adoptive daughter who was now forty five and he seventy four.
Focused on her work, just like her adoptive father, Natalie never really found or made time for romance. Her adoptive father decided to hand her his unused notes including ones on devices they worked together but intentionally never finished once they relieved the potential of creating them on mass scales including an ocular and an invention that would one day become infamous as a “ray gun” however it functioned on electrostatic repulsion of tungsten making it closer to what modern day people would call a “rail gun”. Although he did talk about the inventions later in his life he eventually decided to officially retire on what little he had coming in from patents and entrusted his legacy to Natalie Stone, who had long ago legally changed her last name to Tesla.
Just a decade or so after his official retirement, while going to feed pigeons as he often did and turned to doing more regularly after retirement, Nikola Tesla was struck by a car. Refusing medical care stubbornly as he often did, Natalie took time out of her days to care for her adoptive father for years until one day he passed in his sleep due to heart complications. Natalie continued with her life and inventions, having aided lightly with the second world war but refusing to surrender the blueprint to the “death Ray” her adoptive father invented. Even after Nikola’s death, Natalie continued to be active in the fields of science and interacted with many famous people of the time including Einstein.
However, despite offering notes and help on a number of things and having her name on a number of patients, many people including other scientists didn't exactly take her seriously since she was a woman and often credited her inventions as things left unfinished by her adoptive father. However, one day, a man came to her looking to revive her father's tower idea for free energy. With notes from ideas from other inventors' works the tower included a faraday cage and Tesla coil technology.
Although the man gave her the general idea he was no inventor or engineer. He offered her a good amount of money for making his dream that was built on Nikola’s a reality. She built the tower in the place provided, at the meeting point of three cities. After that she entered a soft retirement. When her time eventually came, Natalie Tesla was little more than a footnote in history. Someone, who like her father, and also like many early female scientists, had to have her work rediscovered by later generations long after her death.
Perseus slowly woke from his slumber, gripping his head. He then looked at and clenched his fists a few times as tears streamed down his face. “Those… were memories. Just like with William. I only got tiny glimpses before without context but now… I remember all of it. All of her. Just like with William who lived before her, I now remember all of who I was as Natalie. This is at least my third time being alive and now I've gained the combined experiences of my past two lives. But why now? Why didn't I get Natalie first since she was the life before this one? I figured maybe I skipped to William because his experience as an Armatus holder was relevant and useful… but nothing triggered in the same way for Natalie.”
He paused to rub his eyes and remembered the last project Natalie did. “That was… the Olympic tower that I helped improve in this life. That man looked just like Mister Olympic. But that… can't be right. It would have to have been his father because he looked in his thirties and that was in the nineteen fifties.” Perseus got up and took a shower swapping to clean clothes, still rubbing his eyes. “At least I know where my talent for electrical engineering originates. I picked it up so fast because it was my job in my previous life.”
Perseus did some stretches before calling on Neptuna. Neptuna manifests. “Yes?” Perseus grumbled. “I thought you said that holders only get full memories if they had a previous connection to the god they pair with? So how is it that not only have I gotten the memories of William who was paired with Susano'o, but now a woman who was a normal person with no Armatus?” Neptuna shrugged. “I have no idea how or why you don't obey the normal rules as even demigods follow them. Maybe it has to do with whoever the godly parent was?”
Perseus groaned. “I haven't gone back that far yet. I remember you saying that people normally get three to five lifetimes. I remember three counting this one and have at least one I haven't remembered yet.” Neptuna made an attempt of putting her hand on Perseus' shoulder only to remember she can't. “It'll probably come to you eventually, so don't try to force it. These sort of soul memories usually take longer and come in chunks. You getting an entire lifetime in a single dream is abnormal and might be a sign you'll need the knowledge or skills of that lifetime soon. That or it might have been triggered from you putting stress on your soul by performing Unity.”
Perseus rubs his eyes again. “I just slept and I feel exhausted. I think I'm going to be lazy today. Want to watch a movie with me?” Neptuna hesitated for a moment. “You mean like you did with June while you were dating?” Perseus shrugged. “Kinda, but we aren't dating. So it's more like two friends seeing a movie. June unfortunately didn't work out as a girlfriend but that doesn't mean I'll stop trying to find the right woman for me.” Neptuna nods. “Right, I hope you find the right person someday.” The two move to the living room and turn on the TV. With popcorn and drink in hand the two have a casual day of rest.