"He isn't here." Shotuku sat in his desk, arms folded across his chest as he stared down Sigma. The android had landed on the exterior of the academy, hacking into the security systems until he could gain access to the interior. After that the cyborg had hunted down Shotuku, seeking the whereabouts of his brother.

"Then where is he?"

"Not here." Shotuku never took his eyes off of Sigma's, holding on to the android's gaze.

"So he's on Earth then? Dispatched to fight the Jahari?"

"Your computational skills are as good as Ochenkov said. Why are you asking me if you can pull all of the data from this school in an instant?"

Sigma's eyes narrowed at the old man, his fingers clenching into fists. "I prefer more old-fashioned methods."

"You're far from old-fashioned Sigma." Shotuku stood up from his chair and stretched slowly, turning on the screen behind him. "But since you already know, I will not keep it from you." The screen displayed a satellite view of Remminstad, the frozen military base in the north. It began to search for the different members of the Crisis Rescue Unit, cycling through each Goliath until it found Porter. The youth was standing next to Ochenkov, the pair watching the horizon just outside of Remminstad. "There he is, safe and sound. Do you have a reason for seeing him?"

"Do I need a reason Mr. Shotuku?"

"So you've downloaded my name to your head hmm? I've seen a lot in my days robot, a lot more than you could ever put into your brain from the rest of the world. I have experiences, thoughts, feelings, that I can attach to my memories. Can you do that? Or can you only see data and facts and images? Do you process what you did to that boy or how you make him feel?"

"I didn't even know him!" Sigma shouted, the words bouncing around the otherwise empty room. "And he didn't know me. And it was better that way. I need to reset it to that."

"You choose to run away from problems? Things were better when I didn't know and now that I know I wish I did not?" Shotuku chuckled, shaking his head. "How interesting that a being created to know all information does not want to know information. You would think that maybe you would be smarter than that, more mature, but it seems that when you died, your maturity was locked away at that age."

"How do you know so much about the Enigma Soldiers?" Sigma's eyes narrowed, suspicious of the elderly man.

"Ochenkov," Shotuku quickly retorted, moving past the subject in an instant. "Now let me give you a lesson on being an adult and knowledge. With every little thing you learn, your responsibility grows. The more you learn, the more of a burden is placed on your mind and soul. And each year that passes you are to grow stronger, more resilient, so that you can carry more of a load. When you are a little child you want to learn and learn and ask questions and discover and you want to know everything. You know too much too fast and can't retain it all. You grow to being a teenager and you reject knowledge as it continues to overwhelm you. But as you grow you must continue to press forward with your growth, continue to find new information. As we grow older, we must learn tools to understand the knowledge we gather and apply it."

"You," Shotuku continued, "have no idea what kind of gift you have been given. For someone who was so alone, so lost, to have found himself a brother, one who was equally alone, is such a blessing. To have garnered all of the knowledge you have, to have access to everything you do, and to wish to squander it all away by blanking it is such a childish attitude. But, who am I? I am not a robot, I have not lost everything as you see it. What would I know about your life hmm?"

Sigma opened his mouth to speak but Shotuku waved him away, shutting him down. The old man was taking over the conversation and not even Sigma felt he had the willpower to stop his speech. "You may think you are completely alone in this world and that you are unique and a special case and that nobody else could ever understand you. Even with metal skin, you are still no different than a thousand other humans who go through the same problems every day. We may all deal with different forms of the dragon, but we all want to slay it." Shotuku stepped up to the android, his frail form pathetically tiny compared to the gleaming cyborg, but his spirit dwarfed Sigma. "Do as you please." He patted Sigma on the arm, his touch almost shocking the android's normally insensitive body.

Shotuku took leave from the room, wandering down the hallway slowly and saying hellos to faculty and students he passed. Sigma stood in the room, looking down at his arm where he had been touched. He had never felt anything before when someone had ever hit him; why had a little touch sent tingles through his body? Sigma clenched his fingers into a fist again then released them, watching his mechanical digits move. What was he trying to accomplish? What was he trying to do?

What was he?

* * * * *

Porter sighed in the cockpit of the White Storm, his body slowly adjusting to the cold climate. He did love looking at the mountain ranges in front of him. There was a different kind of beauty to them he was not used to. His father had always lived in the city and Porter had grown up there before being shipped off to the academy up in space. He had never had a chance to be out in the wilderness, to be one with nature like Ochenkov always mentioned. While his body wasn't fond of the cold, his mind was happy to take in the sights.

"Is beautiful yes?" Ochenkov joined Porter in staring at the panorama. "I run through these mountains, I live with the forests. Life was beautiful. Now, life like wastes."

Porter repeated the words over in his head until he could figure out what Ochenkov was trying to say. He finally gave up and assumed most of it, filling in the grammatical blanks and guessing the rest. "Do you want it back Ochenkov? That life?"

"No." The bluntness and speed of the answer caught Porter off-guard. "Past is past. Present is present. In past I am dead. Cannot go back to it. Only live today. Not live tomorrow. Only today."

This time Porter followed, the man's broken speaking resonating with the teenager, whose mind had wandered to thinking about his lost childhood. What if Sigma had always been his brother? If he had kept his father and his brother and they all worked together in the city today and he wasn't standing out in the mountains at this moment, cold and alone and waiting to possibly die at the hands of a twisted evil. "I wanted my past back Ochenkov. I always did, for as long as I was in the academy I wanted to go back and have a family and have a childhood and have friends and a life and instead I had none of it."

"Have friends, have family now. Have people love you. That is today."

"Indeed." Porter nodded in the cockpit. "I always forget it though, almost every day. It is strange to think back to a time when I was so alone, when nobody seemed to care if I showed up to class or got out of bed, and where I didn't have a future in the army. I didn't have a future at all. I don't know how I even got through a day."

"Past is past. Present is present," Ochenkov repeated. "I want to die one day, but I live. Past is past. Now is present."

Porter nearly fell out of his seat in shock at hearing that this brutish, burly man who had survived the harsh north had contemplated suicide at one point in his life. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Not sorry. Thing happen. Past is past." Porter began to suspect Ochenkov only knew a certain amount of phrases and couldn't come up with any new ones to explain his feelings.

"You two make a cute couple you know." The pair spun around to find Sigmeund behind them, sitting atop his Goliath, drinking tea from a thermos. He finished sipping his drink and sealed it, placing it on his battlesuit. "But you can't sit around moping like this all the time when lives are at stake."

"What you want Sigmeund?" Ochenkov spat, anger rising in his voice. The two hadn't seen each other since Ochenkov had lost his men and Goliath and been hospitalized.

"Calm down you big brute, I didn't come to finish you off." Sigmeund waved his hands in front of his face, trying to disarm the situation.

"Wait, how do you know who is inside the Goliath?" Porter looked between Ochenkov and Sigmeund, confused at how Sigmeund saw right through the disguise of an average Exo-class battlesuit.

"Well, I mean, if you ever hear him once, you know it the next time you hear it. Besides, I know he could never resist a chance to return to the north he loves so much."

"What you want?" Ochenkov repeated.

"Why, I just came to say hello to fellow comrades, that's all. Now that our nations are in allegiance I thought we could share a moment or two together."

"Lucky," Ochenkov snorted, turning his back on the general.

"I believe since you are the one stripped of your Goliath while mine is fully functioning, that you are the lucky one here." Sigmeund unscrewed his tea and took another sip as he paused. "Besides, I'm here for the boy, not for you."

"Me?" Porter said with confusion. He was bracing himself already though, considering his last encounter with Sigmeund had been a duel to the death over Sigma.

"Yes you. I want to see how you are doing." Sigmeund tilted his head sideways, eyeing the White Storm with a discerning view. "The last time we fought was interesting, very powerful, but not very technical. Whoever taught you decided to progress you past your basics in order to capitalize on your chi as quickly as possible."

"So?" Porter retorted, mostly puzzled by what Sigmeund had said but feeling like he had been insulted somehow.

"So I don't think it will hold up against a thousand Jahari. You can't sit in a trance forever. Right Ochenkov?" The last words were flung towards the barbarian, who winced upon hearing them, an undisclosed past brought to mention. "Anyways, I would like to spar once more, but without a trance this time. While you can use your chi in moderation, nothing so intense like last time."

"No." Porter walked past Sigmeund, with Ochenkov in tow. There were too many memories attached to the fight with Sigmeund, the battle for Sigma and Alpha, and near-death that had happened. Porter was not about to relive that, not after what Ochenkov had said. Past is past.

"I remember Porter," Sigmeund started a story as the youth walked away, "when I was first hired to the Enian Special Forces division. Of course this was far before my time as a pilot, or as an Artisan for that matter." Porter stopped in his tracks, swinging the White Storm's head around to stare at Sigmeund. The man had a cruel smile on his face, one that masked the dark knowledge hid beneath it. "One of my first tasks, not too long into it, was to kill a man deemed a traitor, a defector to the Enian Federation. See he had committed certain resourced to an Enian program but he was having second thoughts about the whole thing."

"What the hell are you mumbling about?" Porter had spun around entirely now, facing Sigmeund. He knew this story was going somewhere he didn't like, all in an attempt to goad him into a fight with Sigmeund.

"Well see, he had given us his child, his incarcerated son, for experimentation. We needed the boy for a project and the father just deciding he couldn't put his kid through that. Touching stuff really, but then, in the end, he just couldn't get through to him. His kid was our property, the government's property, and it was my job to keep it that way. So I was quickly dispatched to dispose of the old man before he started to go through with his threats of spreading word of our plan." Sigmeund slid down his Goliath as it opened, letting him fall into the chest cockpit in an acrobatic move. "Yes Porter," Sigmeund continued as the cockpit closed shut, "I remember the day that I killed your father."

A/N: Revelations and exposition abound! Finally a return to action as we prepare for the war in the north and chapter 100 draws closer!