Amidst the darkened skyline of Chicago was one particularly looming building other than the Sears Tower.  Most of the city had managed to rebuild itself after the apocalypse back to its generally similar state, as well as remembering the names of most places from all-too-documented history.  But there were new buildings and new designs in the coming prospect, including the singular straight-sided skyscraper that loomed over all despite not being the tallest building in the city.  Standing like a sword raised towards the heavens with a sharply sloping top, two men walked along the corridors of the higher classified floors following the raptor tied down on a gurney.  He was unconscious still his brown pebble-smooth scales dull underneath the lights marking out his most distinguishing features, the striped purple markings that discoloured his skin, having two on the face and the rest all down his back to the tail.

        "You sure the experiment'll work, doc?"

        "Uhhh absolutely sir, there's no reason it shouldn't work with our subject.  You um...read the reports after all."

        "Indeed, my kind of reading, dreams that can be achieved.  I can see it now, the first REAL supersoldiers we'll have in centuries, able to take out entire nations without needing to reload, like walking armouries.  These nanothings are gonna change the world, and you my friend will be standing shoulder to shoulder...with me."

A hefty pat on the back was given as the two walked behind their subject towards the operating theatre.  Within there laid the main table, under piercing lights, as well as two computers.  One was authoritarian grey as a classic serious computer, the other of red and yellow colours in an almost childish design with various buttons and joysticks, like that of an arcade machine.

They soon began their operation on the subject, who slept unaware of the massive reconstruction of his own blood vessels, to be aligned with similarly shaped synthetic cables.  Some were the size of main arteries whilst others were as microscopic as capillaries.

When the cables had been laid down, there came the work on the neurological and cardiological systems.  The brain was wired minutely with all sorts of technical matter such as rerouters and microchips that lined the inside of his skull against the brain, just to deal with the massive amounts of information that the creature would have to cope with.  Then came the central processing unit that would sit perfectly balanced between his left and right medulla, essentially making it closer to a computer that matched its power to a sentient brain.  The heart was refitted with automatic adjusters to deal with the new flow of nanobots, and allow them better passage while keeping the blood pressure the same.

The experiment was figuratively a success.  An amazing success after years of work, an achievement that would change forever the battlefield with not firepower, but intelligence and adaptability.  If not for one slight flaw.

That flaw was named Dr. Derek Anseed, the top scientist of the city, and the only one trustworthy enough to even conceive of attempting such a radical experiment.  He was also a fanatic of videogames.

Videogames were electronic entertainment systems that consisted of controlling a character represented as a group of pixellated bits on a television screen and navigating them through places made also of pixels, created 1900 years ago as a staple of entertainment.  They had advanced through the years into levels of realism ever closer to reality itself, but Anseed was quite the fanatic of the "classical" games of the late 20th/early 21st Century, and was fascinated by both their unique age and the marvel of such originality from polygons or even pixels of all things.  Had it not been for his fanaticism, the world would have become a much more dangerous place, and the raptor would have lived a possibly worse existence as but a slave to this company.

Derek Anseed had managed to obtain his own personal computer in the military labs where he ate, rested, researched and played games upon the colourful machine in the background.  His computer held every single emulator he needed, programs that allowed one to play console-based videogames on a computer.  In turn, they held countless thousands of games of many various systems and ages.

Whether he actually had every single game in existence or not was uncertain, but it was certainly a most prized possession that he made part of his working contract, agreeing to do experiments for the military only if he were given such a computer, for his entire time in military research.  The military kept their word, so long as he concentrated on the Nanosoldier project and other similar experiments.  Which he did, vehemently balancing time between the project and his games.

But of course, nothing stays perfect for long.  And this project was no exception.  It all began when Dr. Anseed, after a gruelling session with some irrepressible nanobots centred in the left cerebellum, to which he had just finished installing the last microchip in the vicinity of, he attempted to finish a devastatingly furious level of a videogame called Ninja Gaiden.  Sleeplessness did not help matters.  Birds haunted him forever in his frustrated half-consciousness.

Being only human, his concentration was severely diminished, and the general had come in at that time as soon as he heard that the last microchip was finally installed, desperate to see his new nanosoldier arise.

Perhaps he wanted to feel like Dr. Frankenstein, despite never having robbed a grave, owned a castle or even participated by hand in the experiment.  He just wanted to pull the switch, or at least do the whole "It's alive" maniacal speech renowned and continuously revived by mad scientists and others everywhere.

Dr. Anseed asked to take a rest due to severe exhaustion, but the general reminded his deal, and could easily take away his obligations with but one click of his fingers.  With that motivation in mind, the doctor began to connect the proper cables to the data computer in the same room.

And here was the point where things went wrong.

Dr. Anseed did connect the cable properly.  But it was the wrong cable.  He should've connected the one from the data computer, but instead connected the one from his gaming computer.  And so the FinalGamer was born.

As soon as the doctor clicked SEND, the data poured into the subject's head like water from a burst dam.  Until then, the raptor had been in a deep sleep under careful heavy sedation.  But now he would awaken into something strange, something half real, his senses had been shut for so long that he wondered if cobwebs were now on his body.  His deep green eyes opened first before his other senses, blinded when he saw nothing but darkness like a computer without its monitor.

Something was pushing into his brain, something large yet invisible.  First there came that feeling one gets when they suddenly learn something new and astonishing, or realise the punchline of a joke.  That sudden clarity when something just clicks in your mind.  What he felt were several thousand clicks of that sort happening in rapid succession, like machine gun fire in his head.

Data shooting back and forth, his mind suddenly becoming a war zone where information was the weapon.  It tried to cram the raptor's head full of data that at first looked like ones and zeros, and he feared briefly that his brain had been scooped out and linked to a computer.

His brain was intact, but his guess was half-right.  A violent blinding migraine so strong that he couldn't even see from the pain, was too much for him to see what with so much information drilling into his brain.  He just wanted to tear away from what he was seeing, hoping to awake from whatever nightmare he imagined.  But then the numbers shifted, slowly changing their shape and becoming something else entirely different.  The numbers began lining up into new shapes and into stick men.  Then the stick men slowly gained weight and had different alterations changing to them.  They were soon becoming people or strange beasts that he'd never seen before, all running past him with such speed.

A short man in red dungarees, strange blocks falling forever into the deep abyss, a boy in green clothes armed with sword and shield, the sun and moon shining as one across a field full of trees where candy grew as armoured space-faring mercenaries tore through the stars themselves.  It was all so eye-opening, too opening, paralysing even.  He felt his eyes would burn from this much, or even burst from the pressure.  He wanted to escape, trying to scream as his own voice roared back at him in horrid slow-motion, his ears trying to catch up with everything.

His senses returned to him soon enough, eyes still blinded but his ears heard voices all around him.  Delayed, trapped and wading arduously through a blindingly intense force of random static rushing in his head.

        "-ut it d---ow!"

        "Tryi-won---ess!"

        "-iot, your gam---uble!  You rui---eriment!"

The voices filtered in and out as he kept hearing distorted repetitive melodies churning away, like a barrel organ overcranked by its player.  He felt he was tied down as he tried to push his arms off from whatever surface he was on, only to find they were immobile.  He needed to think, something that would get him out, and yet he couldn't think with worlds upon worlds forcing its way in, carving through the landscape of his mind.

Just when he thought his head would explode, his brain starting to vibrate like a disturbed bomb, the information stopped.  And then he saw that one word.

        "LOADING..."

At first he thought he really had had his brain extracted from his mind and linked to a computer, but his body seemed to disagree.  He felt his arms and his hands at the end of them.  The feet seemed to support the arms' argument as well, so he accepted that.

His eyes soon returned to partial reality, the light above his head seeming to pierce into the skull.  It felt like it was trying to wedge a headache in him with all the other information, just one more extra ball into the almost bursting closet of junk, an odd tingling trembling throughout his body like a surge of electricity.  He gazed at the faces above him, the podgy general with blonde moustache and stubborn green eyes, his hair tufted like the crested head of a small bird.  He stood next to a doctor with squinted brown eyes and unkempt hair to match and fidgety hands.

They began speaking but their mouths only moved before his vision.  No sound came, making the raptor believe he had become deaf until the voices came delayed by four seconds.

        "He appears to be handling himself."

        "Yes...but...how?!  All my games...they-"

        "Enough about your goddamn ancient toys, Anseed!  Our project is alive at least from your foolish blunder."

        "I DID ask for sleep, sir, to focus better on the experiment."

        "Your games take too much priority and endangered this experiment."

        "Well, at least his first test should be quite a show.  I mean, first time nanos always exceed their limits before finding them..."

Caring little of what they were saying, the subject knew he had to find a way out of here as he looked down at himself, seeing his brown-scaled body intact but shackled.  For some reason, he could see a few slight arcs of blue crackly rainbows loom crazily over the scales briefly before disappearing.  The shackles looked too strong to break as he tried to think how to escape.  And then he saw a word.  It appeared in his mind powerfully, like the LOADING did as it now showed:

That was on his mind already but the word was now there itself.  Now...a way to escape.  He had to get out of these cuffs that binded him.

Ties that bind?  Why am I thinking of weird phrases?  It felt like someone else was doing the thinking as his mind began this automatic wordchecking.

The last two words were the ones that made him the most nervous.  Two words he did not want to see while tied down in a strange lab were "Monster" and "Transformation", though there were worse words he could think of.  But his mind at the moment did not let him.

An image flashed in his head, clear yet gritty.  A man with black hair and large sideburns, white vested muscular body, piercing dark eyes of distrust and orange jeans of a prisoner's clothes.  The image flicked to him holding a gun, a revolver.  Then it showed him with a full meter of something white and glowing.  He was looking at the man's back.

He was in some odd basement, probably the bottom level of a boiler room or some place where power was going to be circulated through.  Pipes glowed green around him and steam escaped from the floor below him which was a large series of gratings.  There were things all around him, strange human-shaped beasts wrapped in dirty bandages with blades for arms and legs.  They started attacking the human.  And then it happened.  The image showed the man transforming into a monster.

And at that same time, the raptor's arms twitched.

Shuddering with the strangest feeling, his arms began to convulse and bulge as if tapeworms suddenly fattened up in his veins, making the muscles stretch.  He started to groan in pain, his scaled body starting to discolour from its rich earthen brown into something darker.  He felt his head whine with a strange noise, wanting to hold it to try and squash the pain inside it.  The sound rose to a screaming pitch as he screeched furiously, his brain seeming to pulse insanely, confusing itself with his heart which also started to beat rapidly.  His scaled chest heaved and rose as it enlargened somewhat, the ribcage swelling up extraordinarily fast.

His wrists and ankles pushed painfully against the braces, the raptor screaming as his voice deepened into something dark and vicious.  When he felt the braces break, he shot up and felt much larger in height and girth.  He looked down at himself to see an unfamiliarly frightening muscled chest, a huge ribcage pushed out against it, his face feeling bony against huge arms.  Everything hurt.  So badly.

His left arm ended in massive claws that looked like wicked scythes, whereas the right one was replaced with a blood-festooned spear attached to the elbow.  In fear, he roared and swiped at the space in front of his eyes, slashing the table in three pieces.  The General backed out of the room, with the experiment following him in fury.

He fucking caused this, thought the raptor.  Whatever the fuck he did to me, he's gonna PAY.

With anger and intense anguish coursing through his muscles, he charged at him.

The general dodged out of the way but the raptor's mind was too seized by fury to care anymore, clawing the walls to leave massive scars scraping sparks against steel.  Running as fast as he could in a lumbering gait, heavy monstrous breaths echoed down the corridor as he found one of the military guards aiming a pistol at him.  He suddenly flickered in his eyes like a bad TV reception, flickering into the same beasts with blades for arms and legs that were attacking that man he saw in his mind.

With a fury borne from somewhere not of his thoughts, he tore at him or it with one swipe of his huge claws.  A human corpse sliced into three pieces laid before him, blood flew across the hallway and onto the walls, splashes of viscous paint thrown from his claws like tha of a brush.

He felt no sorrow or shock.  Only anger, and perhaps a hidden fear.  But he charged onwards nevertheless, eventually reaching a window.  It seemed big enough for him to jump through but he looked out of it first, taking a moment to calm down and see an elevated motorway.  It was not too far from the building, but quite a long ways down, too far to go without breaking his legs normally.  As he tried to think of some way to escape, he felt his body change again.

His mouth opened beyond what he thought was possible, screaming a bass roar that shattered the window before him along with several other glass items in nearby labs.  His arms shrinked agonisingly fast back to their normal selves, the giant claws shooting back to their smaller dagger-sized lengths, the huge bladed arm morphed back to its small thin scaled self rather painfully so.  It felt las if his arm was being crushed by a vice, the bones rubbing against the flesh with an intimate distance.

His body became shorter in turn, legs thinning out to turn ungainly from the sudden transformation as his mouth pulled back viciously before he was back to his very disoriented normal self.  The window blew a cold wind out before him.  He had no other way out as guards from all possible directions were coming, the multiple crunching of boots rushing closer and louder.  The raptor could only get out by this window, unless he could fight the guards.  And no one wants to fight the para-military.

The motorway was smooth tarmac, smooth enough to play curling on.  Different vehicles sped past in both directions, both wheeled and flying cars with their their motors shouting briefly at each other before fading off into the distance.  A high-set pair of grind rails acted as crash barriers.

It happened again.  A foreign thought flashing in his mind without even wanting to further consider it.

Skate?  His own thoughts interjected.  What the fuck am I thinking of skating, trying to escape from a fucking lab?!

And now the image came to him.  A vision, a kid in bright orange clothes, green-lensed goggles and black shorts.  Skating, jumping onto a rail in a sunny area, some sort of bus station in a Japanese city.  He was skating along a rail and spraying graffiti on the buses and billboards.

Jump?  What the fuck, am I insane now or something?  He hadn't even begun to argue against it when he heard footsteps stop behind him, accompanied by the clicks of a dozen weapons.

Turning round, he saw a small army of soldiers aiming their rifles.  A field of hollow tunnels pointed at his face, ready to let bullets pass through them like trains.  Whether his next stop was either here or below was up to him.

        "Now now son...there's no need to try running."

The general practised his diplomacy from behind his armada.

        "We can help you get used to this."

        "What...have you done...to ME?!"

He had to ask them, demand them even.  What else could he even ask them other than "Please let me go", which he knew was not an option.

        "You should be proud to be enlisted in this experiment, young saurian.  You'll be representing a future for saving others from enemies."

        "Wait...a-am I some military experiment?"

        "Indeed you are.  How does that make you feel?"

        "Pissed off to fucking hell, THAT'S what I'm feeling!"

Unawares to the military, his feet began to tingle slightly, the thin scaled soles starting to shift and become more elevated.

        "Well, we made a mistake...we can help you with that.  Now if you'll just cooperate, because we used up a lot of precious time and money on you.  It would be a shame to waste that."

        "Your money, your fault.  Or is that the money of all us people who pay it for you?"

        "Don't make assumptions...they're the mother of all mistakes."

        "Well some mistakes turn out to be good ones, right?"

He felt his feet rise, not knowing what he was feeling but he kept thinking about the skates the kid wore.  He didn't look down but he felt a little slippery underneath, along with a strangely tight binding as if he were wearing shoes.  A type of shoe he was quite familiar with as a few gazes of surprise from the soldiers told their suspicions from what they saw.

        "Now son, why don't you just give yourself up and we can cure you?"

Nobody ever trusted this particular group in this city, least of all the fugitive, who looked out of the window and saw the rail.  He even had a phrase in his head that he knew would make a kick-ass exit line.  But he only had one chance of using it, an almost involuntary phrase that slid from his brain to his mouth with all the speed of a striking cobra.

        "You'll have to tag me first."

He swerved round swiftly upon wheeled feet and leapt out of the window, pushing his body through arms thrust at the window sides and fell into the night of Chicago.

He thought at first that he was actually going for suicide rather than being taken in by the paramilitary group, which actually would have been the lesser of two evils in this case.  But he actually got something better and even though he knew he had this sudden sense to trust himself, he still could not help but question it.

As the raptor fell out of the building, the cold air of the night sky rushed past him with a screeching sound like a gathering of banshees.  He looked down at his feet.  No more were the familiar three clawed toes on each foot, for now they were wrapped in tight-laced boots with two thin neon green wheels on the bottom.  Skating boots.  He knew precisely what he had to do, seeing the kid's example in his mind's eye as well as his own skating skills, perhaps luckily the only thing he could do well other than motorcycle racing.  His mind was still hazy, feeling as if it was on semi-automatic.

He aimed his feet at a rail, and prayed he would hit it.  It was a hell of a long way down, but somehow the escapee knew that if he hit the rail, this would work.  And after a long drop of what he felt was going to end with a giant crackling of bones accompanied by excruciating pain of shattered muscles before a slow death of bleeding strangled gasps, he felt his boots defy gravity.

They clamped onto the rail, one foot out front with the other behind it.  And with an almost automatic force, he was sliding along it sideways by an absurdly powerful magnetic force.  He was skating.  He couldn't believe he was skating, after an impossible drop.  He didn't even think to do any of this.

All he could do was laugh from fear and madness, and soon laugh again from the blissful release of fear and the sheer disbelief of the moment.  His cackle soon rang gleefully into the air, throwing his arms out as cars flew or drove by him back and forth.  His speed picked up as the wheels grinded against the rail with a screeching sound.

He knew the road would dip eventually to ground level, as it began to curve downwards causing him to pick up speed, making him feel a pulse of adrenaline.  The raptor hoped his balance would keep, and amazingly it did after a long while of grinding effortlessly, before he found a part close enough to the ground to jump off of.

He leapt from the rails and landed with a near-clumsy roll onto the littered pavement, his head somewhat cloudy from all that had happened to him.  A strange warm headache began to throb like a computer overloading slightly.  Staggering from disbelief that he had even managed such an escape, he felt his feet metamorphose from their booted form back into his original scaled toes, like some leathery slime was reshaping itself around them with a disconcertingly smooth pace.  No one was around as he ran, but then he had to ask himself, where COULD he run to?  He felt exhausted all of a sudden, needing to rest from the energy suddenly drained from him.  His body became stiff, strongly developing an urge to sleep.

He walked eastwards back to the only place he knew would keep him safe.  All he could do now was turn over this thoughts on what happened to him.  All that had just occurred over the past few hours felt like a disturbing acid trip, something he had never experienced in his life thankfully.  His head was also buzzing full of so many thoughts, of so many characters he never knew the existence of.  He needed someplace to rest.  That was all he needed right now.