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Warning: This fictional work contains descriptions of violent acts. If you are really sensitive to this, its advised not to read this.

Prologue.
It’s a quiet night in the underground world of Cen-Traju. Besides from some travelers that are still looking for a place to sleep, the broad streets remain empty as it is. Through the holes in the ceiling, the ambience of the jungle above sounds calmly through the city. A small lizard climbs up a root of an old tree that has grown through the thick ceiling of the capital city of Staro Masko. Its eyes reflect the lights coming from the houses that still have some lively things going on inside. The reflections on his eyes disappear, revealing bigger lights behind the glass surfaces that have just been retracted. With its tongue it licks its eyeballs, then the glass moves back in place and reflects once again the city scenery. What the lizard does not know, is that through that reflection, a suspicious being can be seen. A hunched figure in black, with enormous hands but the body of an oversized matoran. The small replitilian being couldn’t care less however. It licks its eyeballs once again, and then disappears through one of the holes that lead to the tropical surface.

Inside a small house that lies on top of a farriery, a young po-matoran child wakes up. She can’t sleep because of a strange sound she’s hearing. Slowly she gets out of bed and stretches her arms, and yawns. While she walks to the door, she talks to herself.

“Dad probably left the gas on. How many times have I told him to always close the gas suppply after he’s done”.. As she walks down the stairs, the sound gets louder. She makes up from that, that it can’t be the gas supply that has been left open, because it is more of a knocking sound. She arrives in the workplace of her father. An improvised Vahki is lying in a corner, next to a replica bohrok. On the ceiling there are hanging several artificial limbs. She looks to her left, to the closed counter. She can now clearly hear the sound, and it’s coming from the front door. “Thump thump.. thump thump”. It sounds like a giant bear that is trying to ram in the door.

“M’azzal?”. The po-matoran’s older brother appears behind her. She can see that he is still tired, he is having trouble with keeping his eyes open.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Kevlin! Stop sneaking up on me, it’s getting annoying!”. She gives her older brother an angry look.

“Anyways, someone is knocking on the door, I was just going to open it”.

“Why don’t you just wake up dad?”

“Dad’s tired from the hard work he did in the last couple of days. He needs to rest”. She pauses for a moment.

“You also need to rest. Tomorrow is going to be your toa exam”.

“I guess you’re right sissy. Well then, say hello from me if it’s turaga Kongu”.

M’azzal only nods. Kevlin goes back to his room. She walks to the door and opens it. In front of her, there stands a hunched figure in black, with giant hands that don’t seem to fit to the rest of his proportions. Blue wires and lights run through his right side, red ones on his left side. His face is covered with a black kraana, hanging from his face as burned flesh. She wants to scream, opens her mouth but the figure’s right hand grabs her head, and doesn’t allow any sound to get through. With one eye she can see through two giant fingers how the lights start to blink and the wires light up. She can see that the left arm is holding a suspicious green stone, and the red glowing energy in the wires seems to originate from that source. The blue wires begin to light up and the energy comes straight for her. As she tries to struggle herself free, she feels how a fluid is pumped through every hole in her Komau mask and her head under that, with an enormous pressure that makes her feel as if her head is going to explode at any given time. The hand lets go of her, but M’azzal’s head hurts too much to notice that. She screams out all the pain, grabs to her head and lies on the ground. The poor child feels how her limbs are being stretched, her flesh torn apart and growing extra substance to elongate her limbs. She feels how her bones are growing through her flesh at some places, growing over the skin and dissolving where it just grew through. Her ribcage seperates from the rest of her skeleton, rearranging her ribs and growing extra bones to support the new formation, then reattaches to the rest of her skeleton. Her eyes are squeezed and stretched out, pulled back and forth until they settle in the right location in her reformed skull. She feels how her bones in her feet are growing through her flesh and hardening into additional armor. She twists and turns, the pain is too much for her. Then the pain suddeny stops, leaving her weakened.

“Must.. hold on to something”. M’azzal crawls with her last strength to a pole that is part of a nearby fence, that belongs to a farm. She tries to climb up using it as her support, but the pole also transforms, and takes the shape of a scythe.

“I hate my life”, she says with one last bit of cynicism. Then she falls to the ground. She can hear footsteps and doors opening. A familiar voice cries her name.

“M’azzal!”

The sounds fade away.

“Dad”

Chapter one: A special delivery

Yurakka walked through the buildings of the capital city of Staro Masko. Under his arm he held a bag, which was filled with scrolls. The matoran looked at his fingers, intrigued by the recent new form they had taken. Kaine had done a good job at giving him a toa body, that was for sure. He would have prefered a green body of the air element, just as his original element was, but the black armor was necessary to blend in, and Kaine said that the element of earth would suit him better. He went over his transformed kanohi Mahiki with his hand, the once smooth surface now feeling more like sandpaper. Yurakka looked back over his shoulder. Behind him he could see the empty alleys between the giant house complexes, only filled with garbage bins and rodents that were desperately trying to survive. A grin appeared on his face. His life as just a miserable being would be over soon enough. He’d only have to deliver the scroll files to the meetingplace with the Great Leader’s messenger, and he would get the rank of toa scout commander. He continued walking. As he proceeded, he heard the sound of rain drops. He looked up, and saw rain pouring from a hole in the surface. It was right above the meetingplace.

“Just my kind of luck”, he said to himself. He started sprinting to the meetingplace. The messenger should already be there, so the faster he got there, the faster he could leave the rainy place. Even though he came from that same jungle it was currently pouring from, he never liked rain in the first place. Just like every matoran of air, he disliked water. But he had grown such a hatred for it that he hated any form of water that wasn’t used in nutriance or for hygiene. He was now running through the rain, water splashed up to his knees with every step. “Splash splash splash”. He was getting tired. But he couldn’t stop, not now. “Splash splash”. Water now spat up to his waist, the pools were getting deeper and deeper.

“Damn!”. He gave up on running. The pools had become too deep to see what was below the surface and too deep to run through without getting tired within five minutes. He decided to rest for a while under an overhang of a tall building. Tired he walked up to the boxes that were stacked under the overhang, and took place on one of them. There he sat. He listened to the raindrops that were touching the water and stared blankly at the body water in front of him. It took him a few minutes to realise that something much bigger than raindrops was also splashing in the water. He looked up. How long had those splashes been going on? What was it? Where is it? He looked around him, but the thick curtain of raindrops prevented him from looking much farther than the edge of the overhang. But he saw something. A silhouet, toa-sized, quickly running away from his field of view. He jumped up. What he had just seen was the biggest nemesis of Kaine Noir’s gang: the reaper toa. As soon as Yurakka had recognised the shape of a scythe, he had started running to the meetingpoint for his life. If he could just get there, he and the messenger could take on their nemesis for sure. He ran as hard as he could in the direction of the meetingplace. Right next to him sounded a big splash. He looked over his shoulder while he kept running, and saw that what had almost hit him was a tile that had fallen of the roof. The toa was pursuing him? On the roof?! That guy must be really set on killing me, he thought by himself. He looked up, and saw the figure running along the edge of the roof above him. Then he tripped. Before he could recover his balance he had already fallen into the muddy water. He knew it was too late for him. He quickly stood up. He checked the bag with scrolls. Those were still intact. He praised the great spirit. Then the pursuing toa jumped from the roof and landed in front of him. Before he even knew what had happened, Yurakka was pressed against the wall and the reaper toa’s scythe was pressing against his throat. With wide open eyes he followed the shape of the scythe until his eyes registered the toa’s body. He was surprised by what he saw. The pursuer, the nemesis of Kaine’s gang, was smaller than him, and most of his armor was colored tan. Not HIS armor, Yurakka realised. Her armor. It was a small female toa of stone that now made the difference between whether he’d live, and whether he’d die. Her expression was hard and unsettling, and it sent chills down his spine.

“Yurakka”, she said. Unintentionally he let out a short cry. How did she know his name? How did she even recognise him?

“I used to buy books from your shop at the surface. You were always looking so greedy”. He still didn’t get it.

“Of course you don’t recognise me. I have matured since the last time we met, and as you can see, I’ve become a toa. However..” she increased the pressure on his throat.

“I would recognise your greedy yellow eyes from a mile away”.

“W-who are you?”. He had assumed that she would look amused, but her cold stare only intensified.

“The sad truth is that you’re going to die anyway, so I guess I can tell you”. For a second she looked to her left. He took that moment as an attempt to escape. He kicked the female toa in the stomach, succesfully freeing him from the cold metal of the scythe. However, she quickly recovered from the impact and hit him in his crotch with the back of her weapon. Yurakka fell to his knees, and she pressed once again on his throat.

“My name”, she started, while she grabbed the bag with scrolls out of the water. He must have let go of it when he tried to escape. However he did not remember to let go of it.

“Is M’azzal”. Before the matoran in toa armor could reply, she pressed the blade of her weapon against his throat with enough force to cut through the flesh. And it did...

The messenger was done waiting. He was just standing here in there rain for two hours, and Kaine’s emissary still hadn’t arrived. His thick cloak held him warm, but he was still getting wet. Frowns formed on his white Pehkui. He knew that Yurakka wouldn’t be at the meetingplace as soon as he would be, but after waiting for two hours he had grown suspicious. And so he decided to look for him. He walked back to the Zylek X-10 vehicle that he had parked right behind him, and took out his blade from the front of it.

“Well then, let’s find that guy”.

He found him not much farther away. After three minutes of walking he had already found the emissary. Or better said, his corpse. He kneeled down to inspect the dead body. He found the cut in the throat. The cut itself wasn’t deep enough to kill Yurakka instantly. He found that the bones in the victim’s neck were also broken.
“The assassin had him captured at first. If they would have killed him immediately, the cut of their scythe would have been deeper”. He knew the working method of the reaper-toa all too well.

“The blood is still flowing, it must have happened about an hour ago”. He looked at the black/ purple fluid that came out of Yurakka’s wound.

“I should stop talking to myself”. He looked around for clues. He found them in the form of some scrolls that were floating on the water. He gathered them all together. He found six in total. Four of them were damaged by the water to the point where they had become unreadable. That left only two scrolls. The first one contained something that made a rare grin appear on the messenger’s face.

“Poor reaper-toa. Without this, you could aswell have slept a few hours extra instead”. He took the scroll with him aswell as the other one, which contained a recipe for a meat stew. As he was walking back to his vehicle, he looked back at the corpse once more, and noticed that something was written on the wall. A name written with dark purple blood, done with the last bit of strength that was left in the now dead matoran. It read “M’azzal van Kruizden”. The messenger jumped backwards, as if the name would suddenly come to life and try to bite his head off.

“Van Kuizden? Impossible! We blackmailed them with everything we could!”. Then he realised who M’azzal again was.

“Well, if it’s really her, it wouldn’t surprise me then. I better tell this to the master as soon as possible”. He looked at the two scrolls under his arm.

“And I also have something very important to show him. Thanks, emissary, you did a fine job”. He turned away from the dead body and walked away. He didn’t say anything on the whole way back.

M’azzal climbed up through her window, tucked away her scythe and lay down on her bed. With her arms folded under her head, she stared at the ceiling, which she and her mother had once painted blue and covered with stars. Bits of charred wood and burned stars could still be seen, since it was originally part of their old house, which had been burned down, and killed her mother. She let out a frustrated sigh. How the hell did she end up becoming an assassin? She knew the answer all to well. She moved her head towards the still open window, in which she had placed the leather bag to dry in the morning sunlight. It was a new bag, made out of leather. She knew that because there weren’t any scratches on it and it was still pretty flexible. It was probably made for the specific purpose of delivering the scrolls to someone. She grabbed the bag and started inspecting it. It was locked with two protosteel locks, but she wouldn’t need to open that, because there was one big crucial flaw in the leather bag. A part that had probably been ripped open before, had been sewed thightly. But the thin string that was used to do the job didn’t last long in the rain and had probably snapped along the way. She cursed. She might’ve lost valuable scrolls. She took one out of the hole, and opened it. Nothing. It was just an empty scroll. She took out another one, with the same result as the previous one. And another, also blank. Out of frustration she turned the bag upside down and let all the remaining scrolls fall out on her bed. There was one that caught her attention immediately. It had a yellow shade over it, as if it was much older than the other scrolls. A few drops of stained blood had covered some of the letters, and the lower left corner had been ripped off. She unfolded the scroll, and started reading through it. The morning light that came through her window shone through the paper, and made it difficult too read. She stood from her bed with the scroll still in her hand, and made her way to the antique desk on the other side of her bedroom. There she layed down the scroll and turned on the gaslight. She started reading.

The messenger flew through the abandoned tunnels of Staro Masko, dodging stalactites that looked like ragged teeth of a giant monster. The grey and humid rock flashed by and the messenger’s traditional robe stood tense from the high speed his Zylek X-10 flew with. His vehicle left a trail of grey smoke coming from the orange flames, that were shooting from the rusty thrusters. Up ahead, he saw an entrance to another tunnel appear. With one firm move, he made a sharp turn to his left, and continued his race to the Great Master. Suddenly, blaster shots sounded from all directions. A scraping sound came from the engine in front of him. A cog had probably gotten loose and prevented the rest of the engine mechanism to work. Behind the messenger was a rattling sound, and when he looked over his shoulder he saw that the steel heat protectors around the thrusters had fallen off. The back frame was now slowly melting away. Meanwhile shots still sounded, and one beam went right through his right elbow, fracturing the bones connecting bones in his right arm and pretty much dissolving his elbow joint. With his left hand he still tried to maintain control over his vehicle, but it was clear to him that he would have to make a crash landing. He let go of his controls and reinforced his armor with a layer of ice that he created from the humid atmosphere around him. He grabbed his sword from under his seat and prepared to jump off. The ground closed in fast, and the rocky stone floor became more terrifying with the second. His muscles tensed, he thickened the ice around him a little bit more, then jumped off. As he was still falling through the air, he heard a great explosion, and felt the warmth of the fire that followed behind him. He landed on the rough surface, the cracking ice under his feet making a noise similar to that of shattering glass. As he stood up from his kneeling position, he saw skakdi appearing all around him. From the direction he had just come from, a group of five skakdi snipers appeared, two from the element of air, one black earth skakdi, and two from the element of fire. Each of them held their own custom sniper rifle, or at least, what they called a sniper rifle. Those rifles were basically just long, thick and heavy blasters so that skakdi had little chance to miss their target. The messenger despised those weapons. It didn’t require any skill to handle them. No, he preferred the more elegant rifle-and-sword hybrid. The one he held in his left hand. The crowd of skakdi moved aside, to let an even bigger one through, who was probbly the leader. The big skakdi had spikes similar to the stalactites of the tunnel on his back, and he was colored dark green. His eyes were squeezed to thin lines; he was almost blind. But the messenger knew what was up with this figure.

“Ah, a tunnel skakdi. Great choice for a leader, if I say so myself”. The other skakdi looked confused. They probably weren’t used to someone talking to them so calmly. That was even more beneficial for him then.

“Most average people view tunnel skakdi as mutated molerats, because of their way of living and their very limited sight”, he continued, as if he was lecturing a bunch of children. He turned 360 degrees around him, looking each of his enemies into their eyes. Then he turned back to the big tunnel skakdi. He looked thrown off. But the messenger kept a serious face, and continued.

“However, those who do, greatly underestimate their visual capability. They see better than we do”. He tightened his grip on his sword.

“Tunnel skakdi feel every movement on and in the ground, which makes them very sensitive and aware of their environment”. The big guy still didn’t get it, and the surrounding skakdi were too intrigued to notice that the messenger had a plan.

“So if you come face to face in a battle with them, you have two options”. He made a feint, making it look as if he was going to sprint forward with his blade towards their leader.

“You either be quick”, he said while he reclaimed his position. The tunnel skakdi had already been aggravated, and was now sprinting towards him, roaring as some kind of insane rahi.

“Or” the skakdi was only a few feet away.

“You disappear”, he said, as he jumped fifteen feet in the air, disappearing from the tunnel skakdi’s radar. The other skakdi quickly loaded their blasters, but a few smarter members warned them that they could hit their leader if they weren’t carefull with their aim. The tunnel skakdi ran under him, unaware of the messenger’s position, which was right above him. The messenger let out one bestial cry, then landed on the leader’s shoulders, and planted his blade his neck. The tunnel skakdi roared, and tried to get his enemy off his back. But the messenger reflected the grasping claws with his dagger that he held in his right hand, doing so by putting all his strength in his shoulder. Still, it was extrmely painfull, and under his mask the corrupt toa of ice started sweating. He kept pushing his blade deeper into the armor, until purple blood oozed through the cut. He pulled the trigger at the end of the blade’s handle, and shattered the neck armor of the skakdi, burned the flesh under it. He pushed his blade one last bit deeper, and then the tunnel skakdi stopped growling. The big and bulky body lost its balance, and fell to the ground. A cracking sound from the neck confirmed the leader’s death. The crowd of skakdi looked horrified at the messenger. If they could change their facial expressions, they would have been looking angry instead of grinning.

“So, who’s next?”. He pulled out his blade from the tunnel sakdi’s corpse, making a disgusting sucking sound. A green skakdi ran out of the crowd, towards him. The messenger quickly steadied his aim, and then headshotted his opponent.

“What’s so important for you to keep safe, that you’re still trying to get out of this alive?!”, a female skakdi of fire yelled. He turned around to face her.

“I don’t know. My life, maybe?”. She laughed.

“I like you boy. So if you just give us what you’ve got with you, we’ll let you live. How about that guys?”. The other skakdi nodded. He didn’t notice any sign that they were lying. And he usually wasn’t wrong.

“I can’t let you have it, sorry girl”. He lifted his arm, and shot her in the chest. All other skakdi immediately stormed at him, with blades held in the air and blasters pointed at him. The ground seemed to shake from all of the sudden movement. He managed to shoot the first few opponents down, but had then to go over to swordplay mode if he didn’t want to have any molten armor splat on his face. As he swung his sword and cut through armor and flesh, he slowly backed up towards his vehicle. They kept coming, and suddenly one of them shot a thick beam out of his blaster, going through rows of comrades, killing them, but also piercing the armor and flesh in the messenger’s abdomenal section. He smelled the scent of burned flesh, tasted the metallic taste of blood that he coughed up. He couldn’t fight anymore. A blade cut through his chest armor, and ripped his longue. But he didn’t feel anything anymore. The world in front of him started to fade away. He fell to the ground, and the skakdi all jumped on him. But then he saw it. The vehicle of the Great Master, a Zylek X-11, flew over the horde of skakdi. They didn’t seem to notice it, but he did. It flew out of his field of view, but he heard the metal scrape over the surface. The Great Master had come to save him! The skadi also heard the scraping sound, and they turned around, losing all their interest in him. He heard how screams were filling up his ears, and saw blood spatting over him. He couldn’t move his head, but he was sure that his master had come to save him. Thirty seconds later, he saw the familiar black Ruru of is master appear above his face.

“M-master.. I’ve failed you”. Their blue eyes met.

“You don’t, I have. I should’ve thought about those tunnel gangs when I sent you out on this mission”. The messenger shook his head.

“No, you will bring p-peace in this world. I was able to retrieve t-the m-most important scroll, but the others have been s-stolen”.

“Stolen? By who?”

“M’azzal... van Kruizden”. His eyes started closing, he felt how his heart began to give up on him.

“I.. I’ve hidden the scrolls i-in my chest armor”. His master looked concerned. The messenger knew that he wouldn’t be able to take off his chest armor while he was still in this critical state, without affirming his death.

“You’ve served me well”

“I thank you.. my.. lord”. The heartlight went out. He was dead. The Great Master revealed his small heatblades under his wrists, and started carefully cutting of his servant’s chest. When he was done cutting a circle, he ripped out the piece of armor and threw it away with a clattering sound. He pulled out the first scroll. It had been damaged by the blade that had cut through the messenger before, and slightly burned by the heat of the heartlight, but it was still readable. When the Great Master was done reading through it, he pulled out the other piece of paper. It had been sealed with a wax seal, which read “To Maurak, the Great Master”. He smiled. He put away both scrolls under his cape, then made his way back to his Zylek X-11 vehicle. Along the way he killed some remaining skakdi that tried to jump him, before he arrived at his vehicle and flew away. When he took a look under him, he saw a trail of purple blood and a lot of skakdi corpses, with one lonely toa corpse lying among them.

M’azzal couldn’t believe what she’d just read. She had been reading through the old scroll for the fourtieth time, and every single time she read it again, she understood less of it. She should warn Kevlin. But he was a toa, he would ask her where she got the scroll from. But him being a toa was also the exact reason why she should warn him. She held the old paper above her gas lamp, and burned it to ashes. As it burned away, she read some of the still visible text once again.

“Toa Total Control Protocol”
“Corrupted energy in the toa stones”
“Going on for forty years”
“Will start after five weeks from now”
“The ambassador’s faked death will be set up to look like this was done by the bringer of the scrolls, Yurakka”. This was the most important one to her.
“Heil the upcoming order, heil Maurak”

She let it lie on her desk as it slowly turned into ash. She held on to her head and looked desperately at the fire. What should she do? She knew that the ambassador and Kaine had some links, but she never expected it to go this deep. She decided to write down all clues she’d gotten and all events that had happened to clear her mind. While she was going downstairs she already summed things up in her head.

Nine years ago, her parents ran a succesfull business of selling artificial limbs for low prizes, when the infamous arms dealer and gang leader Kaine Noir tried to blackmail them to have them create artificial soldiers and extremely dangerous weapons. But her parents refused, and at one fatefull night, Kaine and his gang lighted their house on fire. Kevlin and M’azzal could escape, but their parents both got burried under the flaming house. Her mother died, her father had lost most of his original body, but rebuilded the missing parts of his body. Eight years ago, on another fatefull night, she had been turned into a toa by an unknown figure. She was twelve back then. For the following years, M’azzal was accused for illegally becoming a toa. After the court had finally decided that she was found unguilty, due to her transformation into a toa being against her will, she started to investigate the history of Kaine Noir and his gang. While doing research, she found out thay both the current ambassador of Cen-Traju and Kaine Noir originated from the same birthplace, both moved in to the capital city at the same time, and that they became (in)famous around the same time. That, plus the fact that they were childhood friends according to old interviews, added ambassador Maurak to her target list. She’d been gathering clues and killing Kaine’s gang members, going out at night and hunting them down. Meanwhile her brother Kevlin had become an official toa, and so he technically also became her enemy without him knowing, because to the toa corps, the mysterious “reaper-toa” was just a cruel murderer. A few weeks ago she was listening to a conversation between two members, and she overheard that they would send a person to the messenger of Maurak, to give him a bag filled with scrolls that contained valuable information.

And now she was here, walking down the stairs towards the familiar workingplace. When she arrived downstairs, she saw that her father had already woken up, and was now cooking a meal. Without saying anything to let him notice her presence, she sat down behind the dinner table that was placed in the center of the room. She leaned forwards, and once again inspected the ingenious work that her father had done on his self-repair. With every move of his arm, she could see how gears turned and pipes were being stretched out or pushed in. With every little bit of movement in his fingers, she could see how five wires on each side all the way up in the shoulder were ever so slightly adjusted. When he stretched his back, the pistons in his back extended and revealed a lot of wiring, cogs and blinking lights. She woke up from her trance when she heard the hinges of the front door squeeking, and loud footsteps sounding from the corridor. She looked at the dooropening, and saw her brother Kevlin appear. His white and orange armor was covered with familiar scratches from his old assignments, but she also noticed that he got a few extra ones in the few days that he was at the toa headquarters. Her father turned down the gas of the furnace to welcome his son.

“Kevlin!”, the old man’s voice sounded.

“How was your stay at the HQ?”. Kevlin gave his father one of his beloved smiles. M’azzal pulled an annoyed face. Everyone loved Kevlin, he was the perfect face of the district, and every girl had a crush on him.

“Not that interesting. We’ve been mostly outside of the HQ’s terrain. Apparently important documents were stolen from the ancient archives. So in those days that I was away, the team was looking for the thief”. He sat down in front of his sister.

“M’azzal”, he said as a way to great her. She gave him an arrogant look. Sure, she loved him, but he was just not the type of person she’d like to live with in the same house. Unfortunately she did live with him in the same house.

“In the end, we found the thief”, he continued.

“And, who was it?”, her father asked.

“Old man Yurakka. He was given toa armor, so it took a while to identify his body”.

“Did he.. die?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Not that he would’ve lived that long anyways. Stealing from the ancient archives is punishable by death”.

“You know what I think about death sentences”, M’azzal threw at him.

“Hear who says that”, he said back. She gave him a surprised look. Did he know? But he was taking a sip from his cup of coffee and hadn’t looked up. It was just a stupid thing he said. He probably had already forgotten about it.

“Now, don’t start fighting, boys. I’ve made breakfast for you. You’re just mad at each other because you haven’t eaten yet”. As their father said that, he gave both her and Kevlin a plate with cooked meat and beans. He grabbed a plate for himself and then took a seat at the head of the table. But M’azzal wasn’t all that hungry, and so she just poked with her fork in the rubbery meat.

“Well, that isn’t exactly true. I have been walking back for hours and got myself some food on my way back home”, Kevlin said.

“Oh”, was the only thing her father said. Ever since the loss of her mother, his wife, he had been a sad man when he was alone with his family. When he was working and people visited the workplace, he always gave off a strong, wise and kind look. But at times like this, he wanted everyone to be happy and quickly felt upset if it seemed as if he had done something wrong. Nevertheless, he never gave up on trying his best. It was both a blessing and a curse. Kevlin noticed the impact of what he had just said.

“But yeah, food prepared by you is the best food around”. He started cutting his piece of meat. She and her brother quickly glanced at each other. She didn’t like him that much, but she sure appreciated all the things he did for the family, even small things like this mattered. She looked at the father, and she noticed that Kevlin did the same. Their father smiled, while still staring at his plate as he moved a fork with food to his mouth.

“You don’t have to act like you want to eat, son. I’d rather want you to be honest and I feel slightly bad afterwards, than that you lie to me and I feel good about it”.

“I’m sorry”.

“It’s okay”.

The family continued eating. Then Kevlin turned to M’azzal.

“So, sissy, has anything happened during the time that I was away?”. She looked up from her plate, from which she had barely eaten anything yet.

“No, not much. I helped dad trying to get his vahki back to working again, but without result ”. When Kevlin didn’t reply, she decided to ask him a question.

“Why were you actually called to the head quarters? Don’t toa only have to go there in extremely important cases?”. He looked at her with a look that said “yeah, so what do you think it was?”.

“Exactly. So why do you think I was called there? It was an extremely important case, M’azzal. A code black, even”, he said.

The sound of shattering glass sounded from her dad’s direction. When she looked at him, she saw that his eyes were wide open, and he had squeezed his glass so hard that it had bursted. M’azzal had never heard of code black before. But she could judge just by the look of her father’s face that it was a big deal.
“Go on, I want to hear what’s so important to call for a code black”, he then said to his son.

“Uh, yeah, that’s right. The uh, the code black”. He straightened himself on his seat. His face stood even more serious than before, at least as far as his orange kakama would allow him to.

“Our spies have confirmed that Kaine Noir’s gang is growing faster than ever before. It is now confirmed that he gets his weapons from secret contacts from within the government. Turaga Kongu had gathered us for inspection and interrogation. Two toa are currently held in quarantine because of suspicious behaviour. To be honest, the only reason I came back is to”. He turned to his sister.

“To recruit M’azzal to an official toa”

Description
Warning: This fictional work contains descriptions of violent acts. If you are really sensitive to this, its advised not to read this.

Prologue.
It’s a quiet night in the underground world of Cen-Traju. Besides from some travelers that are still looking for a place to sleep, the broad streets remain empty as it is. Through the holes in the ceiling, the ambience of the jungle above sounds calmly through the city. A small lizard climbs up a root of an old tree that has grown through the thick ceiling of the capital city of Staro Masko. Its eyes reflect the lights coming from the houses that still have some lively things going on inside. The reflections on his eyes disappear, revealing bigger lights behind the glass surfaces that have just been retracted. With its tongue it licks its eyeballs, then the glass moves back in place and reflects once again the city scenery. What the lizard does not know, is that through that reflection, a suspicious being can be seen. A hunched figure in black, with enormous hands but the body of an oversized matoran. The small replitilian being couldn’t care less however. It licks its eyeballs once again, and then disappears through one of the holes that lead to the tropical surface.

Inside a small house that lies on top of a farriery, a young po-matoran child wakes up. She can’t sleep because of a strange sound she’s hearing. Slowly she gets out of bed and stretches her arms, and yawns. While she walks to the door, she talks to herself.

“Dad probably left the gas on. How many times have I told him to always close the gas suppply after he’s done”.. As she walks down the stairs, the sound gets louder. She makes up from that, that it can’t be the gas supply that has been left open, because it is more of a knocking sound. She arrives in the workplace of her father. An improvised Vahki is lying in a corner, next to a replica bohrok. On the ceiling there are hanging several artificial limbs. She looks to her left, to the closed counter. She can now clearly hear the sound, and it’s coming from the front door. “Thump thump.. thump thump”. It sounds like a giant bear that is trying to ram in the door.

“M’azzal?”. The po-matoran’s older brother appears behind her. She can see that he is still tired, he is having trouble with keeping his eyes open.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Kevlin! Stop sneaking up on me, it’s getting annoying!”. She gives her older brother an angry look.

“Anyways, someone is knocking on the door, I was just going to open it”.

“Why don’t you just wake up dad?”

“Dad’s tired from the hard work he did in the last couple of days. He needs to rest”. She pauses for a moment.

“You also need to rest. Tomorrow is going to be your toa exam”.

“I guess you’re right sissy. Well then, say hello from me if it’s turaga Kongu”.

M’azzal only nods. Kevlin goes back to his room. She walks to the door and opens it. In front of her, there stands a hunched figure in black, with giant hands that don’t seem to fit to the rest of his proportions. Blue wires and lights run through his right side, red ones on his left side. His face is covered with a black kraana, hanging from his face as burned flesh. She wants to scream, opens her mouth but the figure’s right hand grabs her head, and doesn’t allow any sound to get through. With one eye she can see through two giant fingers how the lights start to blink and the wires light up. She can see that the left arm is holding a suspicious green stone, and the red glowing energy in the wires seems to originate from that source. The blue wires begin to light up and the energy comes straight for her. As she tries to struggle herself free, she feels how a fluid is pumped through every hole in her Komau mask and her head under that, with an enormous pressure that makes her feel as if her head is going to explode at any given time. The hand lets go of her, but M’azzal’s head hurts too much to notice that. She screams out all the pain, grabs to her head and lies on the ground. The poor child feels how her limbs are being stretched, her flesh torn apart and growing extra substance to elongate her limbs. She feels how her bones are growing through her flesh at some places, growing over the skin and dissolving where it just grew through. Her ribcage seperates from the rest of her skeleton, rearranging her ribs and growing extra bones to support the new formation, then reattaches to the rest of her skeleton. Her eyes are squeezed and stretched out, pulled back and forth until they settle in the right location in her reformed skull. She feels how her bones in her feet are growing through her flesh and hardening into additional armor. She twists and turns, the pain is too much for her. Then the pain suddeny stops, leaving her weakened.

“Must.. hold on to something”. M’azzal crawls with her last strength to a pole that is part of a nearby fence, that belongs to a farm. She tries to climb up using it as her support, but the pole also transforms, and takes the shape of a scythe.

“I hate my life”, she says with one last bit of cynicism. Then she falls to the ground. She can hear footsteps and doors opening. A familiar voice cries her name.

“M’azzal!”

The sounds fade away.

“Dad”

Chapter one: A special delivery

Yurakka walked through the buildings of the capital city of Staro Masko. Under his arm he held a bag, which was filled with scrolls. The matoran looked at his fingers, intrigued by the recent new form they had taken. Kaine had done a good job at giving him a toa body, that was for sure. He would have prefered a green body of the air element, just as his original element was, but the black armor was necessary to blend in, and Kaine said that the element of earth would suit him better. He went over his transformed kanohi Mahiki with his hand, the once smooth surface now feeling more like sandpaper. Yurakka looked back over his shoulder. Behind him he could see the empty alleys between the giant house complexes, only filled with garbage bins and rodents that were desperately trying to survive. A grin appeared on his face. His life as just a miserable being would be over soon enough. He’d only have to deliver the scroll files to the meetingplace with the Great Leader’s messenger, and he would get the rank of toa scout commander. He continued walking. As he proceeded, he heard the sound of rain drops. He looked up, and saw rain pouring from a hole in the surface. It was right above the meetingplace.

“Just my kind of luck”, he said to himself. He started sprinting to the meetingplace. The messenger should already be there, so the faster he got there, the faster he could leave the rainy place. Even though he came from that same jungle it was currently pouring from, he never liked rain in the first place. Just like every matoran of air, he disliked water. But he had grown such a hatred for it that he hated any form of water that wasn’t used in nutriance or for hygiene. He was now running through the rain, water splashed up to his knees with every step. “Splash splash splash”. He was getting tired. But he couldn’t stop, not now. “Splash splash”. Water now spat up to his waist, the pools were getting deeper and deeper.

“Damn!”. He gave up on running. The pools had become too deep to see what was below the surface and too deep to run through without getting tired within five minutes. He decided to rest for a while under an overhang of a tall building. Tired he walked up to the boxes that were stacked under the overhang, and took place on one of them. There he sat. He listened to the raindrops that were touching the water and stared blankly at the body water in front of him. It took him a few minutes to realise that something much bigger than raindrops was also splashing in the water. He looked up. How long had those splashes been going on? What was it? Where is it? He looked around him, but the thick curtain of raindrops prevented him from looking much farther than the edge of the overhang. But he saw something. A silhouet, toa-sized, quickly running away from his field of view. He jumped up. What he had just seen was the biggest nemesis of Kaine Noir’s gang: the reaper toa. As soon as Yurakka had recognised the shape of a scythe, he had started running to the meetingpoint for his life. If he could just get there, he and the messenger could take on their nemesis for sure. He ran as hard as he could in the direction of the meetingplace. Right next to him sounded a big splash. He looked over his shoulder while he kept running, and saw that what had almost hit him was a tile that had fallen of the roof. The toa was pursuing him? On the roof?! That guy must be really set on killing me, he thought by himself. He looked up, and saw the figure running along the edge of the roof above him. Then he tripped. Before he could recover his balance he had already fallen into the muddy water. He knew it was too late for him. He quickly stood up. He checked the bag with scrolls. Those were still intact. He praised the great spirit. Then the pursuing toa jumped from the roof and landed in front of him. Before he even knew what had happened, Yurakka was pressed against the wall and the reaper toa’s scythe was pressing against his throat. With wide open eyes he followed the shape of the scythe until his eyes registered the toa’s body. He was surprised by what he saw. The pursuer, the nemesis of Kaine’s gang, was smaller than him, and most of his armor was colored tan. Not HIS armor, Yurakka realised. Her armor. It was a small female toa of stone that now made the difference between whether he’d live, and whether he’d die. Her expression was hard and unsettling, and it sent chills down his spine.

“Yurakka”, she said. Unintentionally he let out a short cry. How did she know his name? How did she even recognise him?

“I used to buy books from your shop at the surface. You were always looking so greedy”. He still didn’t get it.

“Of course you don’t recognise me. I have matured since the last time we met, and as you can see, I’ve become a toa. However..” she increased the pressure on his throat.

“I would recognise your greedy yellow eyes from a mile away”.

“W-who are you?”. He had assumed that she would look amused, but her cold stare only intensified.

“The sad truth is that you’re going to die anyway, so I guess I can tell you”. For a second she looked to her left. He took that moment as an attempt to escape. He kicked the female toa in the stomach, succesfully freeing him from the cold metal of the scythe. However, she quickly recovered from the impact and hit him in his crotch with the back of her weapon. Yurakka fell to his knees, and she pressed once again on his throat.

“My name”, she started, while she grabbed the bag with scrolls out of the water. He must have let go of it when he tried to escape. However he did not remember to let go of it.

“Is M’azzal”. Before the matoran in toa armor could reply, she pressed the blade of her weapon against his throat with enough force to cut through the flesh. And it did...

The messenger was done waiting. He was just standing here in there rain for two hours, and Kaine’s emissary still hadn’t arrived. His thick cloak held him warm, but he was still getting wet. Frowns formed on his white Pehkui. He knew that Yurakka wouldn’t be at the meetingplace as soon as he would be, but after waiting for two hours he had grown suspicious. And so he decided to look for him. He walked back to the Zylek X-10 vehicle that he had parked right behind him, and took out his blade from the front of it.

“Well then, let’s find that guy”.

He found him not much farther away. After three minutes of walking he had already found the emissary. Or better said, his corpse. He kneeled down to inspect the dead body. He found the cut in the throat. The cut itself wasn’t deep enough to kill Yurakka instantly. He found that the bones in the victim’s neck were also broken.
“The assassin had him captured at first. If they would have killed him immediately, the cut of their scythe would have been deeper”. He knew the working method of the reaper-toa all too well.

“The blood is still flowing, it must have happened about an hour ago”. He looked at the black/ purple fluid that came out of Yurakka’s wound.

“I should stop talking to myself”. He looked around for clues. He found them in the form of some scrolls that were floating on the water. He gathered them all together. He found six in total. Four of them were damaged by the water to the point where they had become unreadable. That left only two scrolls. The first one contained something that made a rare grin appear on the messenger’s face.

“Poor reaper-toa. Without this, you could aswell have slept a few hours extra instead”. He took the scroll with him aswell as the other one, which contained a recipe for a meat stew. As he was walking back to his vehicle, he looked back at the corpse once more, and noticed that something was written on the wall. A name written with dark purple blood, done with the last bit of strength that was left in the now dead matoran. It read “M’azzal van Kruizden”. The messenger jumped backwards, as if the name would suddenly come to life and try to bite his head off.

“Van Kuizden? Impossible! We blackmailed them with everything we could!”. Then he realised who M’azzal again was.

“Well, if it’s really her, it wouldn’t surprise me then. I better tell this to the master as soon as possible”. He looked at the two scrolls under his arm.

“And I also have something very important to show him. Thanks, emissary, you did a fine job”. He turned away from the dead body and walked away. He didn’t say anything on the whole way back.

M’azzal climbed up through her window, tucked away her scythe and lay down on her bed. With her arms folded under her head, she stared at the ceiling, which she and her mother had once painted blue and covered with stars. Bits of charred wood and burned stars could still be seen, since it was originally part of their old house, which had been burned down, and killed her mother. She let out a frustrated sigh. How the hell did she end up becoming an assassin? She knew the answer all to well. She moved her head towards the still open window, in which she had placed the leather bag to dry in the morning sunlight. It was a new bag, made out of leather. She knew that because there weren’t any scratches on it and it was still pretty flexible. It was probably made for the specific purpose of delivering the scrolls to someone. She grabbed the bag and started inspecting it. It was locked with two protosteel locks, but she wouldn’t need to open that, because there was one big crucial flaw in the leather bag. A part that had probably been ripped open before, had been sewed thightly. But the thin string that was used to do the job didn’t last long in the rain and had probably snapped along the way. She cursed. She might’ve lost valuable scrolls. She took one out of the hole, and opened it. Nothing. It was just an empty scroll. She took out another one, with the same result as the previous one. And another, also blank. Out of frustration she turned the bag upside down and let all the remaining scrolls fall out on her bed. There was one that caught her attention immediately. It had a yellow shade over it, as if it was much older than the other scrolls. A few drops of stained blood had covered some of the letters, and the lower left corner had been ripped off. She unfolded the scroll, and started reading through it. The morning light that came through her window shone through the paper, and made it difficult too read. She stood from her bed with the scroll still in her hand, and made her way to the antique desk on the other side of her bedroom. There she layed down the scroll and turned on the gaslight. She started reading.

The messenger flew through the abandoned tunnels of Staro Masko, dodging stalactites that looked like ragged teeth of a giant monster. The grey and humid rock flashed by and the messenger’s traditional robe stood tense from the high speed his Zylek X-10 flew with. His vehicle left a trail of grey smoke coming from the orange flames, that were shooting from the rusty thrusters. Up ahead, he saw an entrance to another tunnel appear. With one firm move, he made a sharp turn to his left, and continued his race to the Great Master. Suddenly, blaster shots sounded from all directions. A scraping sound came from the engine in front of him. A cog had probably gotten loose and prevented the rest of the engine mechanism to work. Behind the messenger was a rattling sound, and when he looked over his shoulder he saw that the steel heat protectors around the thrusters had fallen off. The back frame was now slowly melting away. Meanwhile shots still sounded, and one beam went right through his right elbow, fracturing the bones connecting bones in his right arm and pretty much dissolving his elbow joint. With his left hand he still tried to maintain control over his vehicle, but it was clear to him that he would have to make a crash landing. He let go of his controls and reinforced his armor with a layer of ice that he created from the humid atmosphere around him. He grabbed his sword from under his seat and prepared to jump off. The ground closed in fast, and the rocky stone floor became more terrifying with the second. His muscles tensed, he thickened the ice around him a little bit more, then jumped off. As he was still falling through the air, he heard a great explosion, and felt the warmth of the fire that followed behind him. He landed on the rough surface, the cracking ice under his feet making a noise similar to that of shattering glass. As he stood up from his kneeling position, he saw skakdi appearing all around him. From the direction he had just come from, a group of five skakdi snipers appeared, two from the element of air, one black earth skakdi, and two from the element of fire. Each of them held their own custom sniper rifle, or at least, what they called a sniper rifle. Those rifles were basically just long, thick and heavy blasters so that skakdi had little chance to miss their target. The messenger despised those weapons. It didn’t require any skill to handle them. No, he preferred the more elegant rifle-and-sword hybrid. The one he held in his left hand. The crowd of skakdi moved aside, to let an even bigger one through, who was probbly the leader. The big skakdi had spikes similar to the stalactites of the tunnel on his back, and he was colored dark green. His eyes were squeezed to thin lines; he was almost blind. But the messenger knew what was up with this figure.

“Ah, a tunnel skakdi. Great choice for a leader, if I say so myself”. The other skakdi looked confused. They probably weren’t used to someone talking to them so calmly. That was even more beneficial for him then.

“Most average people view tunnel skakdi as mutated molerats, because of their way of living and their very limited sight”, he continued, as if he was lecturing a bunch of children. He turned 360 degrees around him, looking each of his enemies into their eyes. Then he turned back to the big tunnel skakdi. He looked thrown off. But the messenger kept a serious face, and continued.

“However, those who do, greatly underestimate their visual capability. They see better than we do”. He tightened his grip on his sword.

“Tunnel skakdi feel every movement on and in the ground, which makes them very sensitive and aware of their environment”. The big guy still didn’t get it, and the surrounding skakdi were too intrigued to notice that the messenger had a plan.

“So if you come face to face in a battle with them, you have two options”. He made a feint, making it look as if he was going to sprint forward with his blade towards their leader.

“You either be quick”, he said while he reclaimed his position. The tunnel skakdi had already been aggravated, and was now sprinting towards him, roaring as some kind of insane rahi.

“Or” the skakdi was only a few feet away.

“You disappear”, he said, as he jumped fifteen feet in the air, disappearing from the tunnel skakdi’s radar. The other skakdi quickly loaded their blasters, but a few smarter members warned them that they could hit their leader if they weren’t carefull with their aim. The tunnel skakdi ran under him, unaware of the messenger’s position, which was right above him. The messenger let out one bestial cry, then landed on the leader’s shoulders, and planted his blade his neck. The tunnel skakdi roared, and tried to get his enemy off his back. But the messenger reflected the grasping claws with his dagger that he held in his right hand, doing so by putting all his strength in his shoulder. Still, it was extrmely painfull, and under his mask the corrupt toa of ice started sweating. He kept pushing his blade deeper into the armor, until purple blood oozed through the cut. He pulled the trigger at the end of the blade’s handle, and shattered the neck armor of the skakdi, burned the flesh under it. He pushed his blade one last bit deeper, and then the tunnel skakdi stopped growling. The big and bulky body lost its balance, and fell to the ground. A cracking sound from the neck confirmed the leader’s death. The crowd of skakdi looked horrified at the messenger. If they could change their facial expressions, they would have been looking angry instead of grinning.

“So, who’s next?”. He pulled out his blade from the tunnel sakdi’s corpse, making a disgusting sucking sound. A green skakdi ran out of the crowd, towards him. The messenger quickly steadied his aim, and then headshotted his opponent.

“What’s so important for you to keep safe, that you’re still trying to get out of this alive?!”, a female skakdi of fire yelled. He turned around to face her.

“I don’t know. My life, maybe?”. She laughed.

“I like you boy. So if you just give us what you’ve got with you, we’ll let you live. How about that guys?”. The other skakdi nodded. He didn’t notice any sign that they were lying. And he usually wasn’t wrong.

“I can’t let you have it, sorry girl”. He lifted his arm, and shot her in the chest. All other skakdi immediately stormed at him, with blades held in the air and blasters pointed at him. The ground seemed to shake from all of the sudden movement. He managed to shoot the first few opponents down, but had then to go over to swordplay mode if he didn’t want to have any molten armor splat on his face. As he swung his sword and cut through armor and flesh, he slowly backed up towards his vehicle. They kept coming, and suddenly one of them shot a thick beam out of his blaster, going through rows of comrades, killing them, but also piercing the armor and flesh in the messenger’s abdomenal section. He smelled the scent of burned flesh, tasted the metallic taste of blood that he coughed up. He couldn’t fight anymore. A blade cut through his chest armor, and ripped his longue. But he didn’t feel anything anymore. The world in front of him started to fade away. He fell to the ground, and the skakdi all jumped on him. But then he saw it. The vehicle of the Great Master, a Zylek X-11, flew over the horde of skakdi. They didn’t seem to notice it, but he did. It flew out of his field of view, but he heard the metal scrape over the surface. The Great Master had come to save him! The skadi also heard the scraping sound, and they turned around, losing all their interest in him. He heard how screams were filling up his ears, and saw blood spatting over him. He couldn’t move his head, but he was sure that his master had come to save him. Thirty seconds later, he saw the familiar black Ruru of is master appear above his face.

“M-master.. I’ve failed you”. Their blue eyes met.

“You don’t, I have. I should’ve thought about those tunnel gangs when I sent you out on this mission”. The messenger shook his head.

“No, you will bring p-peace in this world. I was able to retrieve t-the m-most important scroll, but the others have been s-stolen”.

“Stolen? By who?”

“M’azzal... van Kruizden”. His eyes started closing, he felt how his heart began to give up on him.

“I.. I’ve hidden the scrolls i-in my chest armor”. His master looked concerned. The messenger knew that he wouldn’t be able to take off his chest armor while he was still in this critical state, without affirming his death.

“You’ve served me well”

“I thank you.. my.. lord”. The heartlight went out. He was dead. The Great Master revealed his small heatblades under his wrists, and started carefully cutting of his servant’s chest. When he was done cutting a circle, he ripped out the piece of armor and threw it away with a clattering sound. He pulled out the first scroll. It had been damaged by the blade that had cut through the messenger before, and slightly burned by the heat of the heartlight, but it was still readable. When the Great Master was done reading through it, he pulled out the other piece of paper. It had been sealed with a wax seal, which read “To Maurak, the Great Master”. He smiled. He put away both scrolls under his cape, then made his way back to his Zylek X-11 vehicle. Along the way he killed some remaining skakdi that tried to jump him, before he arrived at his vehicle and flew away. When he took a look under him, he saw a trail of purple blood and a lot of skakdi corpses, with one lonely toa corpse lying among them.

M’azzal couldn’t believe what she’d just read. She had been reading through the old scroll for the fourtieth time, and every single time she read it again, she understood less of it. She should warn Kevlin. But he was a toa, he would ask her where she got the scroll from. But him being a toa was also the exact reason why she should warn him. She held the old paper above her gas lamp, and burned it to ashes. As it burned away, she read some of the still visible text once again.

“Toa Total Control Protocol”
“Corrupted energy in the toa stones”
“Going on for forty years”
“Will start after five weeks from now”
“The ambassador’s faked death will be set up to look like this was done by the bringer of the scrolls, Yurakka”. This was the most important one to her.
“Heil the upcoming order, heil Maurak”

She let it lie on her desk as it slowly turned into ash. She held on to her head and looked desperately at the fire. What should she do? She knew that the ambassador and Kaine had some links, but she never expected it to go this deep. She decided to write down all clues she’d gotten and all events that had happened to clear her mind. While she was going downstairs she already summed things up in her head.

Nine years ago, her parents ran a succesfull business of selling artificial limbs for low prizes, when the infamous arms dealer and gang leader Kaine Noir tried to blackmail them to have them create artificial soldiers and extremely dangerous weapons. But her parents refused, and at one fatefull night, Kaine and his gang lighted their house on fire. Kevlin and M’azzal could escape, but their parents both got burried under the flaming house. Her mother died, her father had lost most of his original body, but rebuilded the missing parts of his body. Eight years ago, on another fatefull night, she had been turned into a toa by an unknown figure. She was twelve back then. For the following years, M’azzal was accused for illegally becoming a toa. After the court had finally decided that she was found unguilty, due to her transformation into a toa being against her will, she started to investigate the history of Kaine Noir and his gang. While doing research, she found out thay both the current ambassador of Cen-Traju and Kaine Noir originated from the same birthplace, both moved in to the capital city at the same time, and that they became (in)famous around the same time. That, plus the fact that they were childhood friends according to old interviews, added ambassador Maurak to her target list. She’d been gathering clues and killing Kaine’s gang members, going out at night and hunting them down. Meanwhile her brother Kevlin had become an official toa, and so he technically also became her enemy without him knowing, because to the toa corps, the mysterious “reaper-toa” was just a cruel murderer. A few weeks ago she was listening to a conversation between two members, and she overheard that they would send a person to the messenger of Maurak, to give him a bag filled with scrolls that contained valuable information.

And now she was here, walking down the stairs towards the familiar workingplace. When she arrived downstairs, she saw that her father had already woken up, and was now cooking a meal. Without saying anything to let him notice her presence, she sat down behind the dinner table that was placed in the center of the room. She leaned forwards, and once again inspected the ingenious work that her father had done on his self-repair. With every move of his arm, she could see how gears turned and pipes were being stretched out or pushed in. With every little bit of movement in his fingers, she could see how five wires on each side all the way up in the shoulder were ever so slightly adjusted. When he stretched his back, the pistons in his back extended and revealed a lot of wiring, cogs and blinking lights. She woke up from her trance when she heard the hinges of the front door squeeking, and loud footsteps sounding from the corridor. She looked at the dooropening, and saw her brother Kevlin appear. His white and orange armor was covered with familiar scratches from his old assignments, but she also noticed that he got a few extra ones in the few days that he was at the toa headquarters. Her father turned down the gas of the furnace to welcome his son.

“Kevlin!”, the old man’s voice sounded.

“How was your stay at the HQ?”. Kevlin gave his father one of his beloved smiles. M’azzal pulled an annoyed face. Everyone loved Kevlin, he was the perfect face of the district, and every girl had a crush on him.

“Not that interesting. We’ve been mostly outside of the HQ’s terrain. Apparently important documents were stolen from the ancient archives. So in those days that I was away, the team was looking for the thief”. He sat down in front of his sister.

“M’azzal”, he said as a way to great her. She gave him an arrogant look. Sure, she loved him, but he was just not the type of person she’d like to live with in the same house. Unfortunately she did live with him in the same house.

“In the end, we found the thief”, he continued.

“And, who was it?”, her father asked.

“Old man Yurakka. He was given toa armor, so it took a while to identify his body”.

“Did he.. die?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Not that he would’ve lived that long anyways. Stealing from the ancient archives is punishable by death”.

“You know what I think about death sentences”, M’azzal threw at him.

“Hear who says that”, he said back. She gave him a surprised look. Did he know? But he was taking a sip from his cup of coffee and hadn’t looked up. It was just a stupid thing he said. He probably had already forgotten about it.

“Now, don’t start fighting, boys. I’ve made breakfast for you. You’re just mad at each other because you haven’t eaten yet”. As their father said that, he gave both her and Kevlin a plate with cooked meat and beans. He grabbed a plate for himself and then took a seat at the head of the table. But M’azzal wasn’t all that hungry, and so she just poked with her fork in the rubbery meat.

“Well, that isn’t exactly true. I have been walking back for hours and got myself some food on my way back home”, Kevlin said.

“Oh”, was the only thing her father said. Ever since the loss of her mother, his wife, he had been a sad man when he was alone with his family. When he was working and people visited the workplace, he always gave off a strong, wise and kind look. But at times like this, he wanted everyone to be happy and quickly felt upset if it seemed as if he had done something wrong. Nevertheless, he never gave up on trying his best. It was both a blessing and a curse. Kevlin noticed the impact of what he had just said.

“But yeah, food prepared by you is the best food around”. He started cutting his piece of meat. She and her brother quickly glanced at each other. She didn’t like him that much, but she sure appreciated all the things he did for the family, even small things like this mattered. She looked at the father, and she noticed that Kevlin did the same. Their father smiled, while still staring at his plate as he moved a fork with food to his mouth.

“You don’t have to act like you want to eat, son. I’d rather want you to be honest and I feel slightly bad afterwards, than that you lie to me and I feel good about it”.

“I’m sorry”.

“It’s okay”.

The family continued eating. Then Kevlin turned to M’azzal.

“So, sissy, has anything happened during the time that I was away?”. She looked up from her plate, from which she had barely eaten anything yet.

“No, not much. I helped dad trying to get his vahki back to working again, but without result ”. When Kevlin didn’t reply, she decided to ask him a question.

“Why were you actually called to the head quarters? Don’t toa only have to go there in extremely important cases?”. He looked at her with a look that said “yeah, so what do you think it was?”.

“Exactly. So why do you think I was called there? It was an extremely important case, M’azzal. A code black, even”, he said.

The sound of shattering glass sounded from her dad’s direction. When she looked at him, she saw that his eyes were wide open, and he had squeezed his glass so hard that it had bursted. M’azzal had never heard of code black before. But she could judge just by the look of her father’s face that it was a big deal.
“Go on, I want to hear what’s so important to call for a code black”, he then said to his son.

“Uh, yeah, that’s right. The uh, the code black”. He straightened himself on his seat. His face stood even more serious than before, at least as far as his orange kakama would allow him to.

“Our spies have confirmed that Kaine Noir’s gang is growing faster than ever before. It is now confirmed that he gets his weapons from secret contacts from within the government. Turaga Kongu had gathered us for inspection and interrogation. Two toa are currently held in quarantine because of suspicious behaviour. To be honest, the only reason I came back is to”. He turned to his sister.

“To recruit M’azzal to an official toa”