ARC & METALHEAD

Arc was born Lucy Ramirez. She and her twin brother Cassius were the children of a abusive, drug addict mother living in the slums of the city. They never met their father

Their mother struggled with addiction during their early childhood and was zoned out on drugs most of the time. Their aunt helped to raise them when they were very young. She saw that their mother wasn’t taking care of them, and tried to take the kids away to raise them herself, but when their mother found out about it, she convinced an enforcer who worked for her dealer to make sure she couldn’t take them away. He beat her to death in an alleyway on her way home from work.

When Lucy and Cassisus found out about their aunts death, something in Lucy snapped. She found her mother’s drug stash and flushed it. When their Mother found out, she came unhinged and attacked Lucy. She had her arms around Lucy’s neck and was trying to strangle her to death when Cassius walked into the room. He smashed their Mothers head with his baseball bat, breaking her skull, then picked up Lucy and carried her out of the house, never to return again. Lucy remembers this vividly as the moment her brother saved her life. She swore she would never let anything happen to Cassius as long as she lived.

For the next few years the twins lived on the streets, moving from place to place trying to find food and shelter. Life was hard for them, but they had each other and managed to get by. They started doing work for a ripper doc (come up with our own term for this) named Stringer helping him dig for scraps and old cybernetics in the garbage. They were squatting in the basement of an old sever building, which unbeknownst to them, was being used to store off the books data for the Omnis Mega-corp to avoid public scrutiny.

The hacker group Null Legion, found out about this secret data center, and coordinated a cyberattack on it in the middle of the night. This attack caused the server cores to overheat and catch fire. This fire quickly spread to the whole building. Lucy woke up from a dream of the streets on fire, to find herself in the middle of a real fire choking on smoke. She ran to Cassius’ bed and found him unconscious from smoke inhalation and severely burned. Remembering her promise to protect him no matter what, she picked him up and with every ounce of strength she had, managed to drag him out of the burning building. Her arm and hands were severely burned and Cassius suffered massive burns all over his body, putting him into a coma.

Lucy managed to get herself and Cassius to Stringer’s office where she collapsed from exhaustion. When Stringer saw them, Lucy begged him with her last ounce of energy to save her brother.

In a rare moment of compassion, Stringer decided to try to save both of them. He put them under anesthesia and performed a grueling 14 hours of surgery to replace their burned body parts with cybernetics.

Days later, Lucy woke up to find her arm and the right side of her face replaced by cybernetics. Stringer told her what he had done and explained it was the only way he could save their lives.

Lucy immediately got out of bed and demanded to see Cassius. Stringer took her to see him and what she found was a version of her brother she didn’t recognize. His burns were so extensive that Stringer had been forced to replace most of his body with cybernetics, making him more machine than human. Even with all of the surgical replacements, Stringer warned her that he was still in a deep coma and wasn’t sure if he would ever wake up.

Lucy stayed by his side for three days until he miraculously woke from his coma. Their reunion was bittersweet. Both of them had been changed so much by the fire and the surgeries, that they barely felt like the same people anymore. This shared trauma left lasting scars physically and mentally, but it also deepened their bond to a new level.

Null Legion was reported on the news as having claimed responsibility for the cyberattack against Omnis that caused the fire. When Lucy heard this, she swore to get revenge on Null Legion for what they had done to her brother.

These events were a rebirth of sorts for Lucy and Cassius. In a way, it was as though Lucy and Cassius died in that fire, and Arc and Metalhead (name?) were born from the ashes. This moment shaped the people they would become and was ultimately responsible for them forming The Family.