His memories of recent events were still fuzzy like a broken record. All he remembered were the orders and blindly obeying them, the daily reprogramming, the ice-cold water filling his lungs, his knuckles numb. Shadow had done a brilliant job of building Norm-14 into a near-perfect replica of his greatest nemesis, Tornado. His battle tactics were strikingly similar, his fights like a mirror image, mimicking his movements with razor-sharp precision. Norm-14 had no identity. He was simply someone's mirage. Built on hatred and revulsion, and mostly envy. Norm-14 didn't think—he obeyed without question. If he stepped even an inch out of line, he was reprogrammed into an even more polished and refined version. Basic functions like speech were stripped from him, rendering him a puppet with no will of his own. His sole purpose was to fight Tornado and obey Shadow.

But in a fight, Norm-14 lost. He had died. Well, he should have been dead by now. A ball of energy hit his chest, and he staggered bleeding into a narrow, dark alley, and he passed out. He felt his body being dragged and imagined it was one of Shadow's henchmen, and if it wasn't, he no longer had the strength to fight back. After hours of being unconscious, his eyes twitched and finally opened. He was in some kind of loft, and when he looked down... A little girl, no more than eight years old, was staring at him with a deadly gaze that belied her appearance. Her hair was butter-blond, braided in two braids over her shoulder. She wore some kind of superhero costume, a size S, and at her waist was a... Gun? Who lets a child carry a gun?

— "Don't move," Prim said, one of her front baby teeth missing.

Even though he was three times Prim's height, he didn't move a muscle. His body throbbed with pain. — "Where..." Norm-14 managed to stammer. He didn't have a complex understanding of how to formulate words, being nearly nonverbal. Shadow thought it unnecessary for him to know how to speak. — "Place..."