A Dragon out of Time, A Crash and Spyro Story

Chapter 4: They're Just Slaves to Evil Intentions

 The Sorceress was the immortal and the all-powerful tyrant of the Forgotten Realms. She had murdered millions that had risen to oppose her. Her mastery of magic has led to the extinction of numerous species scattered throughout Avalar, including the Dragonflies. Her hatred of Dragons, seething in her ever since her father was murdered by one, is what ignited her campaign against peace in the world. Her father, a Dinopotamus like the Sorceress herself, was a master of the same black magic his daughter now wields. He was to be the biggest threat to Dragons that they had ever encountered. He led his people to challenge the Dragon's claim to the entire world. After countless deaths and a decade long war, he was defeated solely because a rare purple Dragon, who was born a little more than a thousand years before Spyro, rose to defeat him. In the grueling battle, the Dragon barely escaped with his life, fulfilling the wishes of the Elder Dragons who taught him what he needed to defeat The Sorcerer of the Dinopotamuses, and in the process murdered the father of Dionaca.

"My only child, Dionaca," The Sorcerer whispered to his daughter, "avenge me. With my final breath, I bestow upon you all the power I have. Use it. Kill ever last damn Dragon. Make them... make them pay for what they did to our race."

The power surged into the Sorceress' young body as tears dripped from her eyes. Her father passed away, and she found her purpose.

Cortex was born to two poor parents as part of a traveling circus. His father was forever in debt to the Circus owner, who profited of his business while those under his control suffered. Cortex was born with a rare genetic defect, which up to this point in human history had never affected another person. A key in the human genome which blocks the ability of the human brain to function at peak capacity has been turned off in his mind. As a consequence, he has the mind of a one year old... with experience. His brain will always continue to grow; it will never stop making new neurons and form new connections. Instead of having a limited capacity like any normal human, with patterns forming during early in their development, his brain will always add new capacities and new patterns as needed. This defect makes him unquestionably the smartest human on the planet.

This great intellect comes at a great personal coast, however. The deathly side effect of his rare genetic defect is human growth. Cortex's head continues to grow, his skull never fully closed after birth like a normal human child's would. And Cortex's body also continues to grow. Unlike other humans whose growth locks down and stops at puberty, Cortex never stops growing. He never had puberty and doesn't have an adult height. There is only a height at the time of death, when his heart gives out or his spine collapses.

As a child, he was remarkably small. He understood English at 10 months, and could speak it at 1 year, 4 months. He had a photographic memory. He could think of more than one thing at once. It was this remarkable brilliance that allowed him to invent time travel, genetic manipulation, and gave his poor father hope for his family. Cortex's father borrowed, stole, and begged for any money and saved it to get his youngest son into Australia's finest private school, Madame Amberley's Academy. For his thievery, Cortex's father and his mother were killed by the owner of the circus they worked for, orphaning Cortex and his older brother. Although Cortex's brother had received instructions before his father died to use the money he had gathered to get Cortex into the Academy. The thing was Cortex knew his parents were going to be murdered. He deduced the fact before it was going to happen, and he didn't act on it. It was the last time fear ever impacted his decisions. He blamed everyone but himself for his parent's death; he grew cold and distant, and gradually hated everyone at the school he had been abandoned at, for the relatively retarded students that made fun of him and his head. He knew he was smarter than them, than his teachers, than the professors. His intelligence wasn't unnoticed, and he quickly distinguished as the smartest student at the Academy, earning even more resentment from his supposed intellectual childhood peers. One student whom Cortex pissed off enough sought to punish him physically for his arrogance. He cornered him into a bathroom with his gang, but Cortex goaded him to fight alone. Cortex killed him; his mentality, "end the battle with maximum force, to prevent the bully from ever fighting him again." Cortex would have been expelled, if one professor, Dr. Nefarious Tropy, hadn't kept him at the school. He knew who Cortex was. He knew what was different about him. Cortex's mother and Tropy's half-sister was the illegitimate child of his father, Anton Tropy. He was a world renowned geneticist until his adultery scandal ruined his career. But that old man was nefarious in more ways than one. He also conducted illegal experiments with human intelligence, and altered the unfertilized eggs of his unofficial daughter so that they contained a recessive gene, "Anton's Key," which would give all of her children a fifty percent chance of having hyper intelligence and an early death. Cortex's father had never assembled enough money to get Cortex into Madame Amberley's Academy. Nefarious Tropy took care of that. He was so intrigued by his father's work that he needed to see if he could save his nephew's life. He explained Cortex's condition to him, and moved him away from speculation of his murder to a remote archipelago off the coast of Australia and sought ways to keep Cortex alive. When science failed them, they turned to a rumor of Power Crystals that they can grant creatures immortality. So Cortex attempted to use his group of mutated upon animals, most of which were the test subjects of experiments attempting to see if "Anton's Key" could be reversed or stopped, to gather the Crystals scattered through the world and give himself a way to live, for he didn't have much time left. Of all the creature's Cortex rapidly evolved and bred, only Subject C3, (or as she identifies as: Coco Bandicoot) successfully kept "Anton's Key" while cutting off their growth acceleration after puberty. Both she and her brother would eventually stand in the way of Cortex's world domination, and preventing his untimely death.

Malefor was responsible for the Death of the Sorceress' father. He knew that the day he went to her castle and warned her of another Purple Dragon that was born. He was the Dragon the Sorceress should hate the most. She knew that Malefor was a purple Dragon that was born around the same time she was, but she never made the connection that the Dragon who killed her father was still alive. The thing was, Malefor felt somewhat ashamed of killing the Sorcerer. He was told to, by his elders that feared his power. They couldn't do it themselves, no Dragon could accept their purple prodigy that could master the convexity as well as the Sorcerer could. They made him do it; they filled his head with lies and raised him to defeat the Sorceress' father. But the Elder Dragons didn't tell him everything. They never mentioned what the Power Crystals could do, how they tried to keep me from using those ancient rocks. They feared I would become a Dark Dragon. Well they were right. I was a prodigy of magic, why couldn't I live forever. What was so "immorally wrong" about that. The Dragons tried their best to keep the Power Crystals away from the Dinopotamuses because they feared they would use the magic "immorally" like I eventually did. The Elders tried to control everything. They thought themselves morally superior to every creature and Dragons self-proclaimed themselves as benign guardians of the world. To rule with compassion and understanding. But would kill anyone species that rose to challenge them, or send me to do it because they couldn't defeat their "evil" enemies. Right and wrong, sentiments for the weak! There was only a survival of the fittest. And both he and the Sorceress were the most powerful beings in existence. It was why Malefor respected her, the only other creature he did respect. Not even the latest purple dragon, which he set in motion to have murdered by the Sorceress, so that maybe she could have closure for her father's death.