An Icy Torture (Ayumu Ishimaru's Story)

On the 5th of December 1995 a baby girl was born to two loving parents in a small remote village in Japan, the nearest other village was about 10 miles away, this meant the village hardly had any visitors, it was a simple farming community which was very wary of outsiders.

Ayumu lived happily with her family, her mother Yuki, her father Shiroi and her brother Yuukan who was five years older than her, a while before Ayumu's fifth birthday a group of scientists set up a lab just on the inside of the village, Shiroi, a retired samurai gathered the villagers and rose up against the possible threat, the scientists using their advanced technology to easily take down the pitchforks and torches as well as a couple of swords.

After that the scientists started to collect their guinea-pigs, aka, the village children, many parents tried to fight against the scientists and protect their children but yet again, the scientists easily took them down and gathered the scared and frightened children for their dark experiments.

When they came to Ayumu's house, Yuukan tried to defend an protect his mother and sister the best he could, even coming up to the point of holding a blade against the scientist's neck but the scientist had quickly tossed him away and overpowered the ten year old, as a last resort Yuukan gave himself to the scientists as long as they promised that they wouldn't take Ayumu.

A few months passed and the snows of winter started to fall all around the village and surrounding area, Ayumu had her fifth birthday and soon after it was clear that the scientists had lied to Yuukan as they came to collect Ayumu for their experiments, her mother tried to fight them off as much as she could to protect her daughter but one of the scientists injected her mother with some-kind of failed serum that immediately made her weak and eventually ill then worse, it allowed the scientists to easily take Ayumu for their experiments.

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Half a year passed as the torturous experiments continued on Ayumu, it seems that the scientists had discovered these strange crystals that, while charged with intense power were able to give their powers to young children just from contact to the skin, this caused the children much pain as their very cell structure was changed through these strange crystals, they gave the children certain powers, but many of the children were unable to take the amount of pain they were subjected to...it seemed that only those children who had a high pain threshold were able to survive past a couple of months, unknown to Ayumu, her brother Yuukan had survived and managed to escape, a kind, elderly couple finding him collapsed and took care of him in their house as if he was their own child.

After a strange and unusual equipment failure, just before Ayumu was about to be given another test of the psychic crystal she managed to take the chance and escape, running as far as her legs would take her through the snow until she eventually collapsed, waking up in an orphanage in Kyoto, never knowing who or what had taken her there, she spent some of her time there and for some reason the other children avoided her but she had no idea why, none of them wanted to be her friends.

After a year at the orphanage the children were given a cat to take care of and look after, the children never let Ayumu near the cat for the same reasons that they wouldn't play or even talk to her, one day she woke up to a black cat laid next to her on her bed, since the children avoided Ayumu she was able to just have the cat to herself, she called it Shou and he soon became her best friend.

After another year Ayumu was adopted by a travelling ballet troupe, they were nasty people, they treated Ayumu like dirt and even when Ayumu agreed to help them in their performances they still treated her badly, putting her in specifically sad roles such as the poor Cinderella, then swapping her for one of the two twins of the family for the Princess Cinderella, the family was made up of the father being the agent, the mother being the coordinator and the twin sisters being the stars of the show, years passed of Ayumu's misery, until the family got to Jump City and merely abandoned Ayumu in the Jump City theater.

Since then Ayumu has lived on the streets where she met Annie and Nina Vulpes, she now lives in the SVR base (Society of Victorian Rogues) and is grateful to Steampunk for giving her food and shelter, having met Steampunk in a disastrous attempt at a diamond theft from the museum.