He lifted what was left of his right arm, leaning back as he did so and exposing the patchwork mess of ancient plating and milky-white synthetic skin, thinly draped over the myriad of components that made up his body. It was in equal parts organic and synthetic, at this point repaired too many times for anyone to fully grasp how it all worked together.

The lizard-man's pupils expanded fully into gaping black circles, and he swore he could see the activation diode of a prospecting-grade deep scanner lens, blinking a staccato of faint blue in the bottomless pit of the xeno's left eye.

He reached up to his eye as though to adjust a monocle, despite there not being one.

“Well I'll be…”

The lizard-man froze mid sentence, staring at the stump of his arm, his gaze moving from it to the side of his torso, the exposed plating and the faint, anemic pink glow of his power conduits. A muffled beeping noise sounded from within the lizard's eye socket. It sounded like a warning, and the alarm evident in his expression only served to confirm it.

“...damned. Armless or not, there's no way you could've lasted long enough to walk all the way here just on batteries. I figured you must've had some way to extract energy from ambient heat or summin' since there ain't a recharge station anywhere nearby, but I didn't even fathom someone could be mad enough to use that as a power source.”

“Not unless you're... Show me your face.”

“He's smarter than he looks," a thought crossed his mind. He raised the stump of his right arm even higher.

“Right, armless. I uh… Doubt the mask would come off without your input, so I won't even try to pull it off. Most o' the stuff I've got 'round here runs on electric charge, save for…”

He turned his head to look at one of those hybrid display case/containment units on the wall behind the counter, spanning almost half the room. He dug up a small remote from an inner pocket of his jumpsuit, turning a dial. The shielding on the unit receded, exposing fully what was within.

A very, very large gun.

It was a tremendous thing, as long as a grown man is tall. The magazine-like power source unit on the back portion of it glowed with a baleful red light, crackling with red sparks every once in a while. There were small, crimson crystals growing on the inside of the unit around the tremendous weapon's power source. It was a mixture of white and purple, the long barrel crowned with a trinity of pointed, articulated grippers.

The lizard-man's eyes flicked between the gigantic weapon and the stump of his arm. A mixture of fear and excitement became quickly evident to his mannerisms, and the creature stared into Armless' eyes.

“...I need an arm. Not a gun.”

“Fine, fine. I'll give ya… That one o'er there. Just let me try an' hook up the big 'un, c'mon.”

The lizard hastily used the remote to gesture towards one of the smaller containment/display cases on his wall, this one with a large enough viewport to see into it without necessitating the shielding be retracted. It was a contraption of dark grey synthetic muscle and brass-like metal plates. The shoulder-plate in particular resembled a shielded pauldron, with a stylized lizard-head etched into it. The hand assembly was a solid exoskeleton, the whole assembly a collection of smaller pressure-sensor plates.

It looked like a modern recreation of an antique design, going by the fact it had proper synth-fiber muscles instead of archaic servomotors and hydraulics, but still made use of purely mechanical joints and had visible coolant and lubricant tubes, though skillfully enough concealed that a layman's eye wouldn't pick them out among the mass of metal and polymer.

The lizard noticed him looking at it a little longer than just a glance, and gazed in the same direction.

“Yeah, she's a beaut. But no-one's willin' to have a piece o' blacktech grafted to their hide. 'Cept, of course...”

At this point, the lizard's gaze fully shifted to Armless. He didn't look him in the eye this time, rather staring at the stump of his right arm.

Armless let out a breathless sigh, more a social gesture than anything. “Very well. If you wouldn't mind, what is your name?”

The lizard-man pointed with his remote in turn at both display cases. Each emitted a loud hiss, the bottom plate of either case sliding open. Both prosthetics descended out of their containment cases using some sort of rail system that enabled the display stand they were both held by to move up and down.

So that was how the xeno got those monstrosities in there.

“Vezkig. Just Vez is fine. C'mon then, all my tools are in the back.”

Vez jumped off the counter, scuttling into the back room. Armless intended to follow him, but stopped before he could even start walking when he heard a click and a continuous whirr. Immediately afterward, Vez 'wheeled' out a pretty small, flat grav-platform which hovered only about twenty centimeters off the ground. He struggled, and Armless had to help him get the tremendous arm-cannon to sit on the platform, but it had no trouble carrying the weight once the cannon was in place.

After a few minutes of maneuvering it around the workshop, changing elevation and orientation to get the arm-cannon's length to fit through the door, Armless at last followed Vez through that very same door into the back-room of his shop, the lizard's personal workshop.

It was… Bewildering.

The room was a textbook example of ordered chaos. Worktables, robotic arms and mechatendrils hanging from the ceiling, blueprints and diagrams plastered all over the walls to the point of serving as wallpaper. There was a very intentional lack of order to the placement of everything from the outlandish tools to the half-finished pieces of scrap. His eyes wandered across the walls, the diagrams, the dusty speaker in the upper corner of the room...

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

He was snapped out of the haze by Vez beckoning him towards a plain, metal bed in the corner of the workshop, immaculately clean. The floor below it had not been not so fortunate, the wood soaked with blue blood too deeply to clean off.

Armless sat on the bed and held out his right arm. Vez used the grav-platform to raise both the arm-cannon and himself to a matching height, the whirr now a distinct and very noticeable noise as the platform's graviton manipulator.

The diminutive tinkerer worked fast.

Very, very fast.

The arm-cannon had a surprisingly flexible connection port, capable of changing size and orientation to accommodate attachment at different points. As he lacked some necessary equipment, the arm-cannon had to be lifted to his stump and forced to connect via hardware override, then manually and painstakingly calibrated. Only once the calibration matched up with the end user would it activate and interface with his power grid.

Though he wasn't being completely fair to the lizard. He was doing in a few hours what would take many trained professionals half a day. It wasn't just that he was skilled - he was in a hurry. Armless was certain he heard the hiss of a venting heat-sink at least once while he wasn't looking, and saw the residual off-gassed steam rising from under Vez's jumpsuit.

It went on like this for over three hours. Armless sat there, trying to interface with the arm-cannon, giving Vez verbal feedback, and Vez did his best to not have a nervous breakdown while he worked. He felt the pieces falling into place, the engine of destruction becoming more and more in tune with its intended host. And then, an ear-scraping static blasted through the workshop.

“STAY IN YOUR HOMES AND HAVE A WEAPON HANDY. THE GUARDS HAVE SPOTTED A TRIO OF WARRIOR-CASTE TRUTHSEEKERS APPROACHING THE SOUTHERN GATE. TWO APPEAR TO BE ARMED WITH SLUG-THROWERS.”

...And Vez just started working even faster, now muttering to himself.

“Shit, not yet, they weren't supposed to be here until sundown…”

Armless had a feeling this lizard wasn't just a charitable soul.

Seven more minutes passed. Vez was moving faster than a lizard of his size had any right to be, at this point openly letting bursts of steam vent from within and soak his overalls as he pushed his rather well-hidden body modifications to their limits.

Armless felt the connection port tightening around his stump, he felt the slack of the plug-cables tightening and pulling the massive weapon even closer onto his arm. Vez pulled out some mutant abomination of technology from within his toolbox, it resembled a handheld motorized drill with a proprietary battery pack, a PDA jury-rigged onto the back, and a dataport plug on the front instead of a drill bit.

He opened the emergency access panel on the underside of the gun and jammed the abomination into the dataport, muttered a prayer to the archdrakes under his breath, and squeezed the trigger.

An ear-splitting whine sounded from weapon, its connection port locking around his arm like a vice. A baleful, red glow rose from the power source, illuminating seams in its structure, moving towards the connection ports. When the glow reached it and entered its new body, Armless' systems flooded with a level of power output they hadn't experienced in a long, long time.

A high enough power output to bring his true musculature to life, to re-activate subsystems that he'd forgotten his body even had. To awaken vital segments of data storage, restoring some fragmentary knowledge of who he was before all this.

Not enough to form an identity - it was all flashes and fragments of emotion. But it was something. It was enough to grant his shadow of a personality some semblance of substance. It was enough for him to know he was somebody, before all this. To know that he had a life before all this. Not one of grandeur and great wealth, but it was a past.

He still didn't know how he got here. Frankly, he still didn't care.

When he came to, he found himself in a dusty workshop filled with clutter, its walls covered in patchwork wallpaper of diagrams and blueprints.

He had an experimental-looking energy projector for an arm, and there was a small tinkerer looking up at him, grasping some mutant abomination of technology in his hands. Part drill, part PDA, part data-plug. Vez started to speak, just about to say that he didn't have the time to attach the other arm, that Armless had to help his town as he was. That he believed Armless' arrival to their town was a blessing from the archdrakes, that he must have been chosen by fate to be…

“...a hero. A-a stranger from out of town, come to drive off the bandits and save the townspeople.”

Armless wanted to laugh, but he couldn't. Not with this little man staring at - looking up to him. He didn't know exactly who he was, but he wasn't any sort of legendary hero. He was no Kuroha, no god-slayer, he wasn't a man with no name.

But then again… He couldn't remember his.

Armless stepped off the slate. His metal feet click-clacked against the wood floor, the synthetic skin not thick enough to hide the bulky endoskeleton. The Gun shifted in response to Armless' subconscious impulses, the connection port displaying its surprisingly impressive level of articulation, rotating around its axis and angling upward like an elbow.

He looked down at Vez. He willed his voicebox to activate, intentionally forcing it to cycle faster than it otherwise would to produce static.

He had nothing here, he was nobody. No ties. No relatives. No debts. No-one who remembered him.

He was free.

“Very well.”

Armless turned and walked out of the workshop. He heard the distinct growl-yelling of a warrior-caste lizard-man. It reminded him of the noises Rika made as he dodged her grabs.

He stood in front of the outer door. Though he didn't see him do it, Vez took his remote and pressed the button that opened the front door.

Armless stepped out into the street, the Gun at his side. There they were, the three towering Truthseekers, only some twenty meters down the street. Two of them wore loose shorts similar to the gate guards and bore large, crude firearms in their hands, looking like a replica of an old-world gun built by someone who didn't understand the reasoning behind certain design elements.

The one yelling was a solid half a head taller than his subordinates, and was clad in massive plates of armor. Or rather, he had massive plates of armor physically bolted and sown into his hide. On his head was a strange, wide-brimmed hat, and his left eye was a glowing golden orb. He was yelling at nobody in particular, making statements and promises of how the Truthseekers would bring about some sort of technological golden age and only needed enough workers to excavate a few hundred cubic metres of soil. That the townspeople could either walk into the new golden age as Truthseekers, or be dragged kicking and screaming into it as servants.

The lizard heard the door hiss as it opened, and saw Armless' masked, cloaked visage stepping out of it. A snarl formed on his face, and he turned his full size to face him down, ever so slowly walking towards him with thunderous step after thunderous step.

“What is this? A homunculus fresh out of the metal-womb, dressed up to look like one of the many-limbed ones? What are you, some sort of pretender hero?”

Armless meant to decouple the mask from his face so he could speak with the lizard face to face, but it was stuck. So, he did the next best thing. He opened his mouth. With a horrible noise the ceramic strained, cracked, and shattered, following his mouth in a jagged grin.

For the first time since he came here, his voice actually came out of his mouth, rather than the voicebox itself.

“A̸̡ ͘͟͜͝h̵̵͝҉̴ȩ̸̀͏r̸̢̀̕͜o̷͡ is just a man, who knows he is free.”