ONC 2021 Ambassador's Pick
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Lav Sciarra's accomplishments are many: He is one of the Tower's best soldiers. He founded the Gemma Special Forces. He killed the terrorist who nearly destroyed the Tower. Lav Sciarra, they say, is a hero.
Lav knows oth...
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I suppose if this is to be an autobiography, I should start with my childhood. There are not many significant events that I can remember of my early life, but there are some details I can recall with stark clarity.
I grew up in the Gemma Research Lab. They don't raise children there anymore, but thirty years ago, there were far fewer Gemma and far less was known about us. There was no way to differentiate between Gemma and regular humans, so most families wouldn't know their child was Gemma until their powers showed. If the child was young enough, it wasn't unusual for parents to ... donate their Gemma children to the Lab. The Lab would give the Gemma child a new identity, effectively removing them from the family records.
I was named Lav Sciarra. Whether the name was computer generated or handpicked for me by one of the scientists, I do not know. I've been told that I displayed powers earlier than usual so at two years old, my parents gave me over to the Lab. Though I can't recall their faces, I have a faint recollection of walking hand-in-hand with them, their shadows engulfing my own, and a splash of green that could have been a tree. It is the only memory of them that I have.
There were two other Gemma living in the Lab besides me. One was a decade older than I, and she moved out once she was of age. The other was a boy a couple years older, but he was unfortunately very weak and he eventually passed. I rarely spoke with them, so the Lab scientists who visited me were my only companions. That is, until I met Kel.
Perhaps it was inevitable that we'd be drawn to each other. Gemma were rare, and to meet another of the same age was rarer still. I don't quite remember when we first met, but we went to the same school and saw each other frequently at the Lab. The teachers tended to ignore me as I was content with keeping to myself, completing the allotted classwork and reading in my spare time, but they had their hands full with Kel, who interrupted class with his incessant questions. More often than not, he was left with a question unfulfilled, and we would spend our time searching the Net for answers and creating more questions.
"So the crystal core isn't actually a crystal?" Kel asked, tilting his head.
We were sitting on my bed, discussing the latest Gemma discoveries and absently playing a game of catch with a rubber ball. It floated in the air between us, arcing back and forth without one of us ever touching it. My room was white-walled and had been bare for many years, but over time, I decorated them with posters, scientific diagrams and constellation maps. There were prints of fauna and flora from before the Fall, and illustrations of the Dunelands and the lindworms that lived there. Scattered among the drawings and photos were minutiae on geology and quotes by famous scientists.
I tapped the Cyband on my wrist and the device brought up a holographic drawing board. "Well, the most popular theory is that it is. They think that perhaps the crystal core stores magic energy that we can use." I drew the shape of a set of lungs, then drew a rough oval to represent a heart. Underneath the heart, I drew a diamond with rounded corners. "When the Lab first dissected the core, it was called a crystal because of its resemblance to a gemstone. Hence the naming of the people with this crystal core — Gemma."
