F.EAR us; H'ATE us; K!NOW us

[<F>]

[the] T.RUTH

I don't have much time, I'm afraid. Writing an interesting beginning for all of you out there must, unfortunately, take second place to the running of an organisation. We'll be planning a raid soon; it's the least we could do to keep the humans on their toes... but of course, you don't know about that; that's why you're reading this.
I'll leave it to my historian to write the tale for you.

May you survive the night,
'Lucky'

[<F>]

[the] b.eginning

Like the rest of human history, it began with an idea.
In 1987, a small group of scientists believed they were well on their way to cloning humans. They dreamed of being able to save lives with this; they only wanted to make the world a better place.
Years of research went into that dream; planning, searching for donors, cutting, editing, reporting, and then going through everything again. They were a tight-knit group, who knew how to work together and how to get the most out of each other's skills.
But of course, their progress didn't go unnoticed.

A man from... well, wherever he was from, it's not really important, came to the laboratory. He'd been sent to do his own report on the biologists there, to get his own opinions of their work, and how far they were progressing.
Dutifully, the biologists showed him around, pointing out various aspects of their work. The man was very curious; always asking questions, always wanting to know, and jotting down the answers on his pad. There was little that didn't fascinate him about the biologists' work... but he began to notice little things.

This man... he wasn't very ambitious. But he was clever. He knew how to use people, to manipulate them to the point where they wouldn't recognise themselves in a mirror. And there was a young biologist there... Isabelle Hunt. She was so eager, so enthusiastic. Always ready and willing with an answer and a warm smile. But behind that, he saw hunger. A hunger for knowledge, and a hunger for power. She was an ambitious one, that young woman. She had joined little more than a year after the project had begun, and already she was heading some of its more... interesting sectors.
So he began to drop hints, here and there. This man was very interested, you see, in... well, mutants. And now that he was doing a survey on what might be called such, he found himself wanting to push the biologists' work into a different direction. Perhaps... Better humans.

Isabelle had no reason not to trust this man; after all, he was the head of a very influential organisation. He wrapped her around with words; made her curious about the same things as he. She was soon happy doing her job, and some work for him on the side.

First, she needed nuclei... and some ova. Those were easy to come by; human nuclei could be found easily; they were, after all, essential to the biologists' work.
The feline ova were slightly more challenging. She got many strange looks from the cat owners she asked. Asked what she wanted them for... Merely an unusual breeding program. But she got them in the end. Three Russian blues (with a proud pedigree), two tabbies, and fifteen mixed-breeds. They would hopefully keep long enough for her to find a way to get the eggs to develop without a mother.

You see, there was certainly no way she could get a human to agree to carry her experiments in the womb for nine months, especially when she wasn't sure how much of the child would be human, how much feline... and the likelihood of surrogate mother and child surviving the ordeal.
Isabelle experimented for a while, using hardier tabby ova for the first few tests, without success. She simply had no idea how to replicate a human womb. The man began to get impatient. They fought often, and seldom talked as often as they used to. But still Isabelle experimented... Until she decided that she would just have to out-right lie.

These biologists kept a close circle of 'friends'; people who supported their research, and had given time and again, to support their work. So she asked around if any of the women would consider taking an experimental foetus. At first, there was a general consensus of no. After all, (assuming the gentle reader is female) would you like to be asked to have someone else's child for you, someone you don't know? No, not really. But a few women began to come around to the idea... And as such, (after having signed a contract biding them to silence on the matter) two tabby-humans, two mixed breeds, and two Russian blues were implanted on the 19th of February, 1998.

There was little, in the first few months of research, to suggest exactly what this one idea was going to produce. The first Russian blue died within a few weeks; the mixed breeds faired little better. But the second Russian blue and the tabbies seemed to be doing well, comparing their progress with normal human births.
It must have been quite terrifying for the mothers when they discovered that their children weren't going to be completely human.

There was nothing attractive about the children. Furry, blind at birth... Two of them had paws where their hands should be; one had one paw and one hand. All of them had bony structures at the base of the spine... which were confirmed to be hairless tails. The skull structures varied. One was human; the other two had slight variations... More ugly human than cat.
Internally, things got worse. Cat bladders; human digestive tract. Most human brains, hampered by feline cerebellum. They didn't survive the hour.
But the little Russian blue child... He was lucky. Most of his internal organs were human, despite his disgusting physical appearance.
The youngest of the three, he received the benefit of the experience the biologist and her colleague had gleaned. She called him 'Lucky'.

The scientist was now completely fascinated. She completely ignored the laws; ignored the horror that her colleagues felt at what she had done. It all went to her head, that power. She was soon refining the DNA; mixing it up to suit her own purposes.
'Lucky' didn't really recieve the education he would have been expected to have, were he human. His surrogate mother wanted nothing to do with him, and neither did the biologist, except to check on his progress, once in a blue moon. So it was up to the biologists to care for them... And, over the next three years, all the children that followed after.

What Isabelle Hunt didn't count on, was one of her surrogate mothers breaking ranks. She went straight to the media.
Isabelle was clapped in irons almost immediately, and the other biologists with her. There was huge public outcry. Isabelle, even if she had that freedom, couldn't leave her holding cell without being spat on or yelled at, or swamped by the media. It was the biggest, most all-enveloping story since the industrial revolution, and everyone was expected to take a side.
But what of the experiments? There were six of them now; Lucky, Fluffy, Tiger, Rocky, Scout, and Loki. Everyone disagreed on what to do about them. Loki was by far the cutest; completely furry, with a cat-like face and adorable golden eyes. He became the undisputed face of the 'Save the Kiddens' campaign.

Lucky was the least attractive, but probably one of the most intelligent. If you ever found someone wanting to get rid of the 'kiddens,' Lucky's name would be on their lips. 'He was the beginning of it all, anyway.'

Isabelle was locked away for a long, long time, though her colleagues were only guilty by association, and received shorter sentences. But then, there was Milly. She'd been the one who had taken maternity leave to take care of the experiments, and she swore she knew them better than anyone else. She was released on parole, two days into her sentence, and given custody of them. After all, what else could they do? Only Milly knew what to feed them, how to feed them... and it would have been inhumane to leave them like that.

[<F>]

[the] lives[/font]
[only read this if you need to know about the kiddens' childhood][/font]

Like everything else that is, at first, head-line news, the 'Kiddens' soon became a commonly acknowledged fact. Sure, they got into a few history books, and never went out of fashion in scientific circles. But for the most part, the human race at large... Had forgotten them.

For the children themselves, however, the struggle was only just beginning. Milly was up at all hours, taking care of six of the most demanding, challenging children in the world. She had to feed them all, clothe them, teach them manners... And because some of them had partially feline brains, she was forced to go against their natural grain, teaching them not to attack everything that moved.

They grew up.
When the youngest was about six years old, she decided to enrol them in primary school. She didn't know what to expect; what school would willingly take the six... interesting... children?
Not the first school she tried; that was for sure. Nor the second. With the six children in tow, Milly tried five different schools, and finally finally found a successful application in The St. Mary Primary School for Mentally Handicapped Children.

The children started their education there, growing and laughing with the children there. It was there that they developed their first 'people skills'. But Milly didn't think that was enough. As well as these children (among whom the Kiddens had had a warm, if puzzled, welcome), her children had to know how to relate to the majority.
There would be people in this world only too willing to hurt them. They had to know how to deal with that. So she enrolled them in Scouts.

Scouts was to be the first in a long series of life lessons in the children's education. Milly was there for every bruise, every bump, every wicked word that the normal children threw at her own. And by and by, the Kiddens came back into the news again.

"In this very school hall behind me," the reporter began. "The famous experimental children of Isabelle Hunt have been reported. These creatures go..."
Lucky cut off the reporter, mid-sentence. "Why do they know so much about us?" Milly sighed, and hugged all the children on the couch to her chest. "You're just not like other children," she said.

I won't bore you with a full account of my the Kiddens' childhood. Suffice to say that if they thought the discreet beatings and whispered jokes in Scouts were bad enough, secondary school was infinitely worse.
Outright beatings, teasing, name calling... the usual occurrences of school, but so much worse. They didn't stop; not even when the Kiddens had been there for two terms. The principal began to get edgy; the students were becoming outright rebellious, because most of the teachers didn't stop their cruelty. It was a common sight to see them running in late to class, just to avoid the shoving and catcalls in the corridors. Of course, then they were punished for being late.

It should not be said that all of the school were against the six ex-experiments. There were about ten, in the school of two hundred, who even went out of their way to befriend the Kiddens. But even so, you could tell by the questions some of them asked, and the way that they looked at the six, that the kids didn't really think of them as human.

Milly loved them, wanted them to make friends, just as she would've done if they were her own. So whenever they brought a friend over, naturally she was overjoyed. But it was a far more common occurence to see them jogging home, bruised, battered, and cut.
Such cruelty in others forges a strong bond between those you love and trust; the six were no exception.

[<F>]

[the] next stage[/font]

But no-one remembered the man, did they? The man who had started this, the man who the experiments had to thank for their survival.
His name was Blake, and he was not a stupid man.

Isabelle Hunt had been steadily giving him information, though she didn't know it, all through her work with the experiments. He had copies of every document, every tape she had stored on her computer, and it wasn't all that hard to work out how; he had been very friendly with her, until the hacker virus was implanted into her computer. After that, she didn't need him any more, and even without having to be nice to her, Blake still got what he wanted.
He set the army on their newest project, weeks after the 'Kiddens' were released into the custody of Milly. There were now over a hundred of them; all he had to do was wait for them to grow up.
Every year, he made a new 'batch'; sometimes with improvements, sometimes... failed. Either way, when the original experiments were going through high-school, others like them were being educated, too. Often, they escaped.

It was because of this that EX-15 arrived on Milly's doorstep, fifteen years old; a year younger than Rocky, Scout, and Loki.
He spun them a tale so much worse than the Kiddens'; every experiment was being educated for war, trained to fight, and to kill. The prospect horrified all of them. Every experiment there was sentient; as human as the next... OK, as human in mind as the next man. Capable of thought, of decisions, of knowing right and wrong.

She went to the media with his story, but no-one believed her; why should they? She was the batty lady who had taken on the six experiments in the first place; how could there be more?
More and more experiments began to find their house, some of them beaten bloody, others missing limbs...

At last, Blake came out with it. No-one knows why.
But either way, two-hundred and twenty experiments were released.

The citizens of Angeles, twenty four long years ago, had been anonymous. Now the who world knew their names, and the names of every experiment Kidden who had ever been.

Needless to say, life could never have been the same for us. We were just children, my sisters, my brothers and I, but we knew we had a job to do. And whether or not any of us wanted to do it, I knew for certain that we had to.
We're the Revolutionaries.

This is our world now, and nothing is going to take that from us. Ever.