"What's the deal with this orphanage?" After the hustle I had to go through to figure out what was inside the warehouse, there was no more rightful question to be asked. Staring at me with a calm expression, Dungeon Master 02 said, "what do you mean by that?"

"Exactly what I mean," I said, not planning on mincing my words any longer. I was dedicated to getting the answer here and now from him. He calmly crossed one leg over the other and said, "I heard that there's been some never-heard-before commotions around here since your arrival," he said, not even bothering to be subtle about the fact that they'd been closely monitoring us. "I take it these commotions were you investigating this place, weren't they?"

"They were," I confirmed with a nod. "Then wouldn't that mean that you've obtained the answers to that question of yours through your underway investigations? What could you possibly not understand about this place."

Remembering what I saw in the warehouse, I said, "This place looks like a normal orphanage—"

"It does because it is."

"But even so," I interjected, "I know this place isn't just that. It can't be just that." After all the trouble I had to go through to infiltrate the warehouse, all I was able to find were things that I suppose I should've expected but nonetheless were unexpected to me. What motivated me to investigate the warehouse in the first place was the belief that in there would be the things that would soon furnish the complex still in the process of being built, and that's indeed what I found. And it was exactly what I found that made me realize that I was wrong in my assumption of what the currently being structure were, for the furnitures were things that could furnish a dojo with wooden swords, shields, staffs, spears; a library with books, scrolls; a sanctum with wands, appraisal stones, identification tablets, enchanting tables, and plenty of other things that weren't exactly what I was expecting to find.

As to what exactly I was expecting to find, I suppose they were "suspects," "Theta-like" furnishings along the lines of the various flasks I found inside the warehouse, but it didn't take me long to realize that the flasks were part of a set of furnishings that will furnish a future alchemy lab. So yes, there was nothing of the "suspect," "Theta-like" things I was expecting to find. Sure, there were plenty of suspicious things in there, but nothing along the lines of what really made me wary of this place, which is why I really felt the need to ask Dungeon Master 02, who knew the truth of this place, 'what was the deal with this place.'

"If I give you the impression that I'm complaining about the normalcy of this place," I said, "Then you're right on that impression, I am. I am because I know Theta is involved in this, maybe not that directly, but directly enough for her to have her goons running this place."

"Sounds like you really distrust her."

"Distrust or otherwise, I know her well enough to understand that she's not the type to just open up an orphanage and have her goons run it for the simple sake of it. There has to be an underlying reason for it, and I have the feeling that the answer to that has something to do with that girl—Celestina—and the other children that this orphanage has been built for."

Dungeon Master 02 uncrossed his leg and said derisively, "When I left you and Dungeon Master 07 back then, I believed you might raise questions about this place. I was surprised to hear that you didn't. Why didn't you ask the question to Dungeon Master 07 back then but instead waited?"

The answer to that question was very simple: I back then didn't feel like I had the right to ask that question. As to why exactly did I believe that, I don't know; perhaps it was a way for me to put a punishment onto myself since what has been decided for me, in spite of everything that I've done, hardly felt like a punishment. But I wasn't going to simply admit that.

Most likely understanding that, Dungeon Master 02 continued, "Fine, I'll tell you. It's not like it has been intended to be kept hidden from you anyway."

"Just as you could have observed for yourself, this place might look like the perfect orphanage, but as you've also realized, this isn't just for the sake of it. This place has been built with one goal in mind: to be the hosting place for the second generation children of the TTLE program. Ever heard of it?" He asked, inquisitively.

"No," while the naming was highly familiar, having never heard of this program, I shook my head.

"I thought so. We too have never heard about it, up until very recently. Three years and eleven months to be precise. TTLE is short for Talent Transference Line Experiment. It was, as you've guessed it, a program run autonomously by Theta."

Upon hearing what the program was about, an almost complete mental image of everything regarding this program took shape in my mind.

"The objective of the program was to observe if the skills, abilities, and uniqueness passed down to the prototype of the homunculus project would be passed down to the next generation." Hearing that felt like receiving an answer to a question that I never realized I was asking myself. What happened to all the prototypes before me—because that's what I, who wield—no, used to wield—the subject HMC-P217's body was—a prototype, one that would become the blueprint for the HMC-0 series.

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"I see... I've never heard about this." Theta was, in spite of all that is missing in her head, a very perfectionist specimen, so I've always been intrigued as to where the other prototypes were as they weren't exposed where she would store all the results of her experiments. Her facilities had special exhibits for her failed attempts, be they alive ones or dead ones.

By her own words, it was to remind of the steps she went through to finally arrive at what she considered a finished product. Meticulous as she was, all the prototypes displayed in her exhibits were arranged alphabetically and numerically according to the name code she gave them, so when Dungeon Master 02 made reference to the homunculi "prototypes" being used, I was more or less able to figure out which ones he was referring to.

"Are the prototypes used labelled between HMC-P140 to HMC-P162, aside from HMC-PMC-143, HMC-PMC-156, HMC-PMC-159 and HMC-PMC-161?" I asked to confirm.

"Oh... yes, it's exactly them. You sure are quick to the update."

"Having spent four decades by her side does that to pretty much anyone... Wait."

At that moment, a detail about the missing prototypes and the one precisely left behind hit me. Upon taking notice of that detail, a flood of other information came flooding into my mind that I could tell was a little limited considering the vessel I inhabited, giving me a light headache.

"You said this place was built to host the second generation of the TTLE program, right? Second, not first?"

Theta started The Homunculi Project with one goal in mind: to create a perfect vessel for us Dungeon Masters to incarnate into. One of the main reasons I, HMC-P217, was considered near-perfect was because I displayed high potential for the skill that we Dungeon Masters consider, aside from growth potential, of utmost importance when acquiring a new vessel: Longevity.

For us whose mission spanned for hundreds of years, acquiring a vessel that was of utmost importance, as without that skill, all the effort put into nurturing a vessel would be lost to the unstoppable march of time in less than a 100 years. The homunculi project was supposed to grant us Dungeon Masters the opportunity to acquire a vessel whose both strength and longevity potential was to rival with the vessel acquired by Dungeon Master 04, which was without a doubt one of the luckiest vessels any of us Dungeon Masters could have spawned into using our old incarnation method: Greed and Resurgence.

In the light of that, since HMC-P217 was the first homonculi to be artificially born with that longevity skill, it was logical to assume that the prototype before it didn't have that skill, and thus had no way to survive that long, as that skill is a rare skill; one does not simply awaken it. So I was really confused when I remembered that Dungeon Master 02 mentioned that this was the second generation. It didn't exactly not make sense per se; in fact, it was totally logical considering the fact that the subject she used for this program didn't have the longevity skill, it was what that implied that left me really confused about what that would imply.

Chuckling, Dungeon Master 02 said, "You heard me right, second generation."

"Then that means that..."

"You've guessed it, the first generation was born roughly twenty years ago, 22 to be exact."

"....right under our nose."

I was by no means Theta's confidant, but I was confident enough to say that I was, out of all Dungeon Masters and all the people close to her, namely her ascetics, the one most familiar with her and all her many weird experiments and "attempts," and yet I've never heard of this one program.

"And I'm pretty confident to say that the second generation of this program would've gone right under our nose too, had she been able to control one thing."

"What?" I asked, more or less guessing what it was about.

"The sex the program's first generation were born with."

I knew it.

While I had no way to tell what sex the prototype missing from her exhibits were, I knew for a fact that anything born a several sequences before me down to the P-170 sequence were females. This was because the new method she came up with to create homunculi made it so that anything born of it was female. She hadn't yet figured out a way to create males with that method, which is why I, Dungeon Master 18, originally a male, ended up in a female body. As for anything below the sequence HMC-162, I knew that, from the method they used back then, which was different from the one from which I was born, they could be either male or female. It was then, as I remembered the prototypes left behind between HMC-P140 to HMC-P162, it wasn't hard to notice a pattern: the prototypes left behind were either dead ones or females, which allowed me to come up with the immediate conjecture that the missing prototype could be males.

As to the question of why she picked up all the male prototypes for this program, it wasn't very hard to figure it out considering the objective of this program: to observe if the skill acquired by the prototype would be passed down to a descendant. Unless one were a deliberate freak of nature like I and those of the HMC-0 series, there were very limited ways to have descendants. The fact was that there was only one way—the one to procreate. Assuming Theta's subjects were male, all she would need to have her experiment quick-started were females, and that was not something she was lacking. After all, she had her Maiden Ascetics. If the assumptions I was coming with were right, I could see how Dungeon Master's experiments went under our nose without anyone noticing; all she would need was a facility to host her chosen ascetics and subjects, and that was something she was not short of.

Upon considering what Dungeon Master 02 just said that ruined the secrecy of the second running of this program, I could only come up with one theory, "Was she abducting people? Men, to be exact?"