"I'm sure they loved you when they had you, and all the years after." Arc sat back down on the other side of her, hoping that turning her would let the cooking fire warm up the other side of her body. He didn't do things by accident very often. This was just another one of those times. "And from the way you treat others, I can tell they showed you how much they loved you." He smiled at Madison as he tried to imagine what her parents were like. His weren't bad, but no one saw all the little things that their parents did to make them feel loved. It took an objective point of view to catch all the subtle nuances between child and parent, to really see what life was like for others. He knew his own parents loved him, despite the challenges they all faced in the very beginning, but there really was such a thing as being too close to a situation to see all the details. She had already picked out many of his own. Now he would do the same for her.<br/><br/>Her question about his abnormal physiology was not an uncommon one. True Arc hadn't had to answer that question in many years, but he'd grown quite accustomed to it during his childhood before the Fall. Now it was just like explaining a foot or a finger. "During development inside my mother, the parts of my brain in charge of motor control were not developing as quickly as they were supposed to. There really wasn't a test for that back then, so no one really knew what was wrong until I was born and I could barely push air out of my lungs. My father was a pioneer for Xenotech, so while my muscles struggled just to keep me alive, my father spent every waking moment working on a solution. The tech was already there but putting it inside a person was still a ways away. But I guess they figured 'what the hell', cause about four months after I was born they were performing brain surgery on a newborn."<br/><br/>Arc reached up and parted his hair, revealing a long, stretched out scar across the top of his scalp from one side to the other. "They managed to link the premotor, supplementary, primary, and posterior cortices to a microcomputer and wired it in to relay signals to my skeletal muscles, thus generating movement." As if she needed a demonstration, he lifted his hand and wiggled his fingers. "The interesting part is that it had some unanticipated side-effects. Somehow this increased the working efficiency of my muscles, so I can keep absolutely still without shaking. This also took my brain out of the equation when it came to regulating the neural impulses that are sent to muscle cells when it wants them to contract. This means I am way stronger than a human should be." This he did not demonstrate.<br/><br/>"So yeah... nerds 1, jocks 0."