Life's what you make it...

[Marmalade Boy]

((Pretty much of a closed thread here making some more story behind John and Rio! And due to my lessened time, I'll be posting it bit by bit! Enjoy!))

As soon as the alarm on the mobile phone began chirping high-pitched squeaks, it was grabbed and muffled by two chubby hands, before being quietly switched off. John groaned, checking the clock on the Mobile Phone which confirmed it to be five in the morning, his wake up call set the night before. He'd set his alarm for this early so he could get out of the door before Rio woke up so she didn't try to stop him from his goal of finding someone to reverse the effects of the CATS Serum. Of course, John's mind was telling him it was bedtime, and so he curled back in the bedding that made his bed on the sofa, trying to keep himself awake yet failing miserably. With another groan, John crawled out of bed, feeling terrible and wanting desperately to go back into his comfortable sofa-bed and sleep until late in the day.

Shrugging off these feelings he quietly got himself ready, getting dressed whilst making sure not to make the floorboards creek, grabbing a breakfast meal bar and making sure the packet wouldn't crackle before brushing his teeth, making sure the sound of the plastic bristles scrubbing against his teeth wouldn't make too much of a sound. Anything that would have made enough of a sound to wake Rio he saved till he was outside, such as loading his Mauser and buckling his binoculars to his belt. Not within long though, he was all dressed and ready, rubbing his eyes and stifling a yawn. He felt a sharp pang of remorse about leaving Rio alone, but shrugged it off and went for the roof, to start his self-set mission...

When he had gone through all of the hallways to get to the roof, as well as climbing up with the aid of a box to compensate his relatively small height, he found himself longing bed again. It was freezing up on the roof, well below zero at this time in the morning, and with the wind chill it was even colder. John pulled his hat down a little closer to his eyes and shivered, slowly making his way through the snow-filled rooftop towards the Museum opposite, across the bridge made of planks and then to the Necrotec "Angerstein" Building that was relatively nearby, where he had found the CATS gas, and where he hoped to find out some answers behind it, and hopefully a cure. Well, that was a hope...

It had been near enough two months since John had been CATSed, and he was getting used to it, the curious stares of others, the height problems and the fact that nobody treated you seriously, especially Rio. In fact, it was mostly Rio who had prompted him to find a CATS-Cure, it was her constant treatment of him that had made him increasingly angry about being CATSed. She treated him like the four-year-old he looked like, it was almost as if she had forgotten who he really was. Maybe Malton had finally got to her, John thought, as he passed over an Auto-Repair shop that was surrounded with a few zombies, all 'asleep' swaying lightly in the breeze. Maybe even zombies found comfort in sleep, John continued to think, his wanting to get down and fall asleep growing as he thought of this. He shook his head and continued, grabbing onto his Mauser with both hands, feeling a little safer around the zombies, and continued onwards, lazily watching some of the flares that screeched into the sky before exploding into a shower of color, the sound hitting him moments after the actual flare.

((And that's it for this part! I'll make another update tonight when my sister's party's done!))

[Marmalade Boy]

It was later in the morning when John finally arrived at the Angerstein Building; shivering, tired and a little cranky to boot. It was still dark outside, and those without any means of timing still took this as not the right time to wake up yet, explaining how nobody was there when John climbed down the custom-built skylight on the building's roof and into the shelter of the Necrotec building. There was the faint hum of a generator in the distance, and someone had gone to the trouble of installing lights around the hallways, that combined with the wind shelter made the building pretty warm, John giving a welcome sigh and undoing the scarf around his lower face a little.

Whilst many buildings in Malton had been looted or barricaded to unrecognizable during the zombie times, Necrotec buildings remained quite the same as they had been before, bar a few barricades here and there and the marks of wear. John put it down to the fact that Necrotec Scientists still researched here, that useful things had to be made rather than looted here and that most of Necrotec buildings were offices and labs that weren't in the best interests of the survivor population. Walking through one of such labs, filled with a few powered down computers, John found someone sat behind the only switched on computer working early, a middle-aged woman who was nursing a coffee and peeling over a spreadsheet displayed on the screen. He went up to her politely, pulling at her coat a little too attract her attention,

"Hello there little one!" Said the woman with a smile, turning to face John, "You're up early!"

"Hi" Said John plainly, in no mood for child-speak, "I'm looking for Doctor Kauffen, I'm under the information that he works here, may you direct me to his office?" The woman looked puzzled, probably at the fact that such a small child could make a sentence like that, or pronounce Kauffen's name right. John stopped himself from rolling his eyes and smiled, "Please? It's very important"

"Sure kid, just follow me"

The woman shook her head and got to her feet, taking her coffee and leading John through the computer lab, a hallway, down two flights of stairs and stopped outside a door marked 'New projects lab three'. She paused to take a brief sip of her coffee and opened the door,

"He should be in here soon, might be a little late. You'll have to wait here for him I'm afraid"

"Thank you!"

Said John with a smile, walking through the door and into the laboratory, which was a rather decorative one, filled with three fume cupboards, a centrifuge machine, a chiller, some stools and numerous counters filled with lab equipment and some other nick-nacks. The door closed behind John, and so he hopped up onto a stool (which took three tries before he was able to finally climb onto one) and began to wait, and wait, and wait. Soon though, he found himself drifting to sleep, and hopped down from the stool, grabbed a labcoat from off the top of a counter and curled up in the corner of the room with it wrapped around him, falling into a quick sleep...

[Marmalade Boy]

A few minutes later Doctor Kauffen walked through the computer rooms, he was a tall and well built man in his late forties, with iron grey hair and a short well-trimmed beard, looking physically very hard. He wore the dress of a Necrotec Lab Scientist, with the addition of a pistol holstered to his side. He passed the woman working at the computer, who stopped him with a,

"Hey, Kauffen" Said the woman, grabbing Kauffen's attention, "There's some kid in your office who wanted to see you, asked for your name personally. He even pronounced it right Ka-Fan-En"

"Kid?" Asked Kauffen, "Do I know this child?"

"Nah, never seen him, unless it's your long lost son, doesn't really look like you though" She smiled, "Have you been doing something you're not telling us?"

"In my office you say? Fine, I'll see him" Said Kauffen, ignoring the last part of her sentence and turning to leave,

Replied the woman, as Kauffen disappeared around the corner, wondering what Nieve had meant by some kid. It was rare that Kauffen saw a real child, well, since the start of the quarantine. He never really understood where all of the children had gone: Necrotec had no explanation, but he figured that the military had evacuated the children first, then the women and men, however the zombies had stopped the evacuation plans before it could have been fully executed. Kauffen snapped out of his daydream, entering his 'office' and finding, as described, a kid sleeping under one of his better labcoats in a corner.

Kauffen was in no mood for babysitting, or any child-directed sympathy, and quickly tore the labcoat from the sleeping child, waking him up in an instant,

"Main hall's out there, sleep all you want there" Said Kauffen with the hint of authority,

"Doctor Kauffen!" John exclaimed, stifling a yawn and standing up with a little stretch, "I've got something to ask you! It's about the CATS Serum!"

Kauffen thought briefly about this, thinking about the project into a cure for death way back in the starting days of Necrotec, when they had two units of research teams. One for finding an actual cure for death and the other trying to make the day of death death further away. Kauffen was in the latter team, and had came up with the CATS Serum with the help of his team. It had been ultimately deemed as not something Necrotec was looking for, so was stored in various project dumps as 'to be used for research purposes only'. Goodness knows how the child knew he was behind it. He put the pieces together in his mind, this 'child' had probably used the CATS serum by some mishap and wanted to find a way out of it. There was a first time for everything he reasoned,

"Let me guess, you want to get back to your older form?"

"Erm, yes" Said John, surprised at how Kauffen had got this so quickly, "Can you help me please sir?"

"Yes... and no" Said Kauffen, "Reversing the effects of CATS is by no means as easy as being affected by CATS, it's possible, but not easy" John cocked a thin eyebrow "And by not easy I mean it's expensive and could end up with you being killed"

"Well, being killed now isn't much of an obstacle with the zombies, is it?"

Said John with a sweet little smile, Kauffen furrowed his brows and heading for the door,

"I can't believe I'm having this conversation"

He muttered, as John followed waving his arms,

"Wait!!"

[Marmalade Boy]

Kauffen kept walking down the corridor out of his Office, as John followed, trying in vain to stop him,

"Hey! I have things you know! Like, lab equipment, you can have all of mine if you want! I have like, stacks of the things!" John called,

"Nope" Said Kauffen, taking a cigarette to his mouth and lighting it with a lighter that held the Necrotec logo,

"Erm, how about a laptop! I have one! Great condition! Only ever been used once!" John replied,

"Uh-uh" Kauffen shook out the lighter and put it back in his pocket,

"Food?" John suggested,

"Forget it kid, they're nothing you have I want" Kauffen said decisively, turning to face him, absorbed in his cigarette, "You'll have to get used to growing up again"

John bowed his head, ultimately disappointed and began to walk away. It was then that Kauffen noticed the Mauser slung across John's back, and halted his escape by grabbing the straps that held the Mauser to John's back and tugging it away in his hand, taking the pistol and looking over it,

"Hey!" John called, grabbing at his now-empty back, to see Kauffen toying with his Mauser, "Erm, you like?"

"Mauser C96 Second Generation, shows first and second world war markings" Said Kauffen, pointing at the frame of the Mauser and examining it closer, "German guns are a hobby of mine" He patted his holster, which contained an old German Luger and looked at John from the Mauser, "I guess you do have something I want after all"

John hesitated, this was his gun, his most prized possession besides Rio and his other Mauser, and this man was attempting to make a trade between it and his age. He groaned, it was too hard a desicion to make, the Mauser had saved his life many times, and he had cared for it like a baby, cleaning it, repairing it, making sure it was loaded and in full working order, even though now it was getting close to being a whole Century in age,

"Erm, b-but sir! That's... That's... mine!"

Began John as Kauffen simply nodded and handed the gun back to John, patronizingly saying;

"Here you go kid, take real good care of it now"

John looked down at his gun, bowed his head and reluctantly held the gun back up again, an offering to Kauffen,

"It's yours, take it"

The man smiled, took the Mauser and slung it over his shoulder happily,

"Then we have ourselves a deal, if you'd like to follow me, then we'll see what we can do in terms of your age problem..."

[Marmalade Boy]

Kauffen had lead John around through the building, down some stairs and into a deserted part of the building, where he finally entered a room that had the usual lab-equipment and counters, but they were covered in a thick layer of dust, lighter patches in the dust showing that things had gone missing from here recently. As well as the lab things, there was a large blue-paper covered bed in the center of the room, like the sort of things that would be found in a hospital or a dentists. Kauffen removed the light blue paper covering and dusted down the bed, before taking a large brown cardboard box from underneath one of the counters and handing it to John,

"Change into these"

He said plainly, jerking his thumb at a closet here and John took the box and slowly made his way to the closet, which was quite large for a closet and strangely empty, before closing the door tight and getting changed into the items that were contained within the box Kauffen had given him. John left the room wearing hopelessly outfitting light blue scrub clothing, a hand clutched at the waistband of his pants to stop them from falling. By now John saw Kauffen setting up three drip bags on a stand next to the bed, containing orange liquids. John flinched,

"Are you sure this will work?" He asked, sounding both scared and dubious,

"Of course it will, like you said, what's there to worry about? Worst is that you could die, which we can fix. That or permanent disfiguration"

John turned to quickly leave, but Kauffen lifted him up and laid him down on the bed, taking the various needles connected to the drip bags and going to stick them into John's exposed arm. John flinched, as Kauffen rolled his eyes,

"Look, they're nothing to worry about, okay? I was joking, you'll be fine. Trust me..."

John groaned and relaxed on the bed a little, making a little pained noise everytime Kauffen stuck in one of the drip-needles. Once it was done, Kauffen checked each of the bags, then opened a little screw-gate on each, filling the tubes the drips were connected to and pushing some of the orange liquid into John's veins. John let out a squeak of discomfort, but then fell into a deep sleep...

By the time he was conscious, it was the morning of the next day...

[Marmalade Boy]

John awoke on the morning of the next day, feeling cold and uncomfortable, as well as slightly dizzy. He opened his eyes to find that he was in another lab-like room, albeit empty of lab equipment yet filled with some of the hard beds he had been on earlier, lightly covered with a thin and heavily starched white sheet. With a groan and a slight pain in that back of his head, he pushed himself up, and went up surprisingly high than he was used to, making him slightly giddy with excitement. Being tall mean only one thing; he was no longer stuck as a child! He quickly brought his hands to his face, finding them large and veiny, rather than small and chubby. Quickly he threw off the covers of the bed, jumping down and looking down at his legs, which even though were covered in loose-fitting scrubs, he was able to see that the treatment had worked and he wasn't aged four anymore.

It was when John had started off a few small victory whoops that he saw another figure in this room: Kauffen, sat on a high stool in the corner with a slight smile on his face directed at John. He was also holding a large board in his hands,

"Feeling better then?" Asked Kauffen smugly,

"Huh, better than ever!" Replied John, with a much deeper voice than he was used to, "Hey, my...!"

"Yes yes, the treatment was successful, let's not go into details" Kauffen interrupted, flipping around the board which revealed itself to be a mirror, "I'm no guesser for ages, but I'd say you were in your early twenties. Lucky bastard"

Looking down in the mirror, John saw his face again, which was neither chubby nor cute, but handsome with the natural good-looks of his newly found twenty-something youth added in there (or so John thought!) He smiled, and Kauffen flipped around the mirror to reveal it's plain reverse without showing emotion,

"Happy now?" He asked...