Fremel Fri Fric was born no more than a handful or two years ago in Free City. He was one of those types that are that runts of the litter that had it been harsher times and place would have been killed and cannibalized or left to die alone weak and defenseless from the rest of the world. By the time he was 2 years old however he was showing that he had an asset of much greater value than his height or muscles. His mind. The Nith`phane were known for being one of the most intelligent of all the species on Debris, but more importantly they were all just so damn infuriatingly curious about everything. Sometimes it led to good, but a great many events that ended in tragedy were started or made worse by their mischief. This was no different for Fremel, but unlike his brothers and sisters his curiosity led him down a path of reading and trying to replicate the things that he had read about. The people of Debris hadn’t heard of nuclear bombs, but had they known of them and fremel’s little tendency to attempt to create what he read about them, they’d all be in fear for their lives every day that he was left alone to his own devices. And that was largely how his life was. He was left to do as he wanted as his educators and the rest of the mischievous society went on about their days in the underworld of so many of Debris’ settlements.

It was during that birthday, his second, that he showed off his experiments. Most of them were just toys that could change form from one object to another, the process of doing such being like a puzzle. The adults were amazed and recognizing a brilliant idea they began making their own, especially the educators, using them in lessons. From that point on, they saw Fremel as a genius with potential that came along only once in a great while. His future was secured. He was the first among his siblings to leave the nest, being paid to come up with new transforming toys and if he were the average type among his kind he could have lived out his life doing nothing but creating these rudimentary toys. A year on though, he grew bored and unfulfilled. Yes he was able to live a life fairly easily, but it was still just any job that you did repeatedly day in and day out. It became repetitive and boring. Requests for new types weren’t being made and there were only so many things in the world that would be interesting and useful to make and they had long been exhausted. Thankfully, one of his toys made its way to the world above and to the hands of a Human. It reminded them of a toy from long ago back on Earth and tried to find out who made it. They failed, but word made it back to Fremel who took inspiration from the Human’s reminiscing and created a whole new line of toys based on the idea of various items and animals transforming into humanoids. He was quickly rewarded as the toys spread. His business grew from serving only the educators of the Nith`phane to being a sensation among quite a number of Humans.

Despite having a booming business, Fremel was still just a pup and hadn’t even taken on his apprenticeship yet. When time came for him to be taken under the tutelage of a master the greatest of all his kind competed to have him in their employ. In the end, the master of all master craftsmen won out, taking Fremel under wing. It was a great honor, but Fremel paid no mind to such status considerations. He knew that the master was talented and thought that perhaps he could teach him something, but if he was like the other adults the master would only hold Fremel back from his passion. That idea was pushed aside soon after he arrived. The Grand Master neither ordered him around nor held him back from any action he took. He was just left alone in a room with a tool bench and other needed resources to build or fix thing.. His food was provided for every day, but other than that he saw no other living being. Fremel spent his days crafting random things. Sometimes it was a new toy. Other times it was a sculpture. Still other times he’d invent something new to him, but among the technology that was available to the Free Nation they were nothing more than crude attempts at technology that was out of date by several under years when compared to modern earth. Time passed. Fremel continued to work until one day he ran out of ideas and stopped. He tried to force himself to create something, anything, but nothing came. When something did, he found that the finished product was not up to his standards. Months passed. Fremel spent more time destroying work than creating new things and then, he just stopped. In a full year he had not been out of the work room and a bedroom and bathroom that was directly connected to it nor had he seen any person save the one that brought his food and took it away.

One day, when Fremel had lost all his creative ferver, when he was lost and didn’t know what to do, the door to his work room opened. It was not time to eat, or have the food picked up. He wondered what was going on. No one came in. At first he didn’t make a move, but as the day went on thoughts of escaping this nightmare crossed his mind. Getting up slowly, not wanting to alert anyone that may be there of what his plans were, he made his way cautiously along the wall to the door. He paused at the threshold. Then, in one swift motion he stepped through. There was no one there either. It had been a while, but he wasn’t sure that the room he was in now was the same room that he had passed through when he entered the workshop, but that didn’t matter to him now. What was important was to find the exit and get back to his wonderful life that he’d been living up till he came to this place. Looking around for an exit , he found nothing, but there had to be one. How else could anyone get in if there wasn’t? Fremel knew that it must be hidden. He had no other choice but to look over every inch of this prison until he found whatever was need to free him from his cage so he got to work. He moved everything that he could spot that was moveable, pulled every book from its place on the massive bookshelves. Pretty soon he grew tired and hopeless, but as he went about his task the titles of the books caught his attention. Each one was named like “History of the such-and-such species” or “Principles of Physics known to the so-and-so species” and took to reading them. It wasn’t long before Fremel forgot all about escaping and fell asleep reading one of the many thousands of tombs in the library.

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When Fremel awoke, he opened his eyes, stretched, and slowly lifted himself up from where he had sat himself several hours ago. For a long time he had felt satisfied, but it was a different type of satisfaction than he had felt before. He’d read a history of the Nith`phane. There was much he hadn’t known and didn’t know that how much they had lost. The books made it clear that the Nith`phane were once part of a great civilization in an alliance with three other species on a planet they had J`nk. He wasn’t sure what a planet was but it seemed like that was an important thing that in the intervening millenia his people had just forgotten. How could they could ever do that seem strange to him, but there was no reason to question what he had read. The question that he had now was that why were these books and this information here but nowhere else. A flash of inspiration came to him. He needed to get his idea out into a physical object. He rushed for the door to the workshop.

“Inspiring book?” a voice came from behind Fremel. It was the Grand Master. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room that Fremel had overlooked when he’d woken up. The chair’s back had been to him, hiding the aged rat, but now that he’d cross the room, the light of a candle sitting on the table that the chair was sat at illuminated the one who had taken Fremel under his wing. The flame flickered and its harsh glow made the old man ancient, his wrinkles casting deep shadows over the rest of his face. “I was wondering when you’d be ready. I never expected that it would have taken this long for you to run out of steam,” the Grand Master chuckled.

Fremel was furious. He had nearly driven himself insane and this wrinkled fool was just seeing how long it would take him to burn himself out? “Is this how you’ve kept your position all these years? Make the most promising, threatening, of the next generation destroy themselves? Why? So you can keep your power for just a little longer?”

“No, my boy. Just the opposite. This library holds very important information and it requires that the person who maintains and uses it are of a special caliber. If one were to... burn out, as you say, they wouldn’t be fit to be granted access. And if given the abundant wealth of this archive they are not renewed almost instantly what hope would we have for our future if even our brightest were so dull as to not be inspired?”

With that, Fremel paused. He contemplated what the Grand Master said. What could be so important and in danger of being lost that it must be preserved like this? He sat at the table across from his tutor and began asking him questions. It took a while, but eventually Fremel calmed down and even eventually forgave the old man. He took his place as the Grand Master’s apprentice, a most coveted position, in earnest finally and as the years went by Fremel forgot how terrible he felt that experience had been, instead replacing the emotions associated with the happy feeling of a time when he was bursting with questions and ideas that he could ask and find the answers to or just explore the what others who had come before had to say about the topic.

Then the day when Jason returned from a battle he’d lost came. Fremel, along with several other apprentices joined in the crowd, heard his speech and were excited by the implications of what he’d said. Fremel knew it was time that he used the knowledge that his ancestors had hidden away and passed along for who knows how many ages. He just had to figure out how. He hadn’t read much into the histories of the Humans, but he had listened many times when stories were being told between them and the others. Remembering things that might be promising to explore he read fiercely through every archive about Humans that he could find. He finally found what he was looking for. It was something that he would never have imagined to be a real thing, but the effects of the machine was writ large on Human history and the archives had never lied about anything he could verify. The only problem was that now that he knew what to build he needed to convince the council of his idea and get some help in making it. He could build a model, but it was much too big of a machine for him to handle alone.