//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: The Spiral Saga: Operation Lazarus 
// by Kleptoshark 
//------------------------------//

Herex was deep in thought; contemplating recent events, and his losses at the hands of the Spiral Knights.


Warmaster Seerus was dead, and news of this brought mixed emotion to the small, bent creature reclining in a large, red throne. This hunched, pensive creature was known by his underlings as “Herex, the Whispering Venom”. Herex, like any Gremlin of the planet of Cradle, was covered in short, rust-red fur, with the exception for an area on the right side of his face where the flesh had been boiled in a chemical incident. His two long ears were permanently cropped behind his head, like all gremlins. He was wearing a pair of safety goggles, he also wore an iconic, voluminous, pitch-black scarf he always had wrapped around his shoulders, and the blood-red outfit identifying him as a member of the dreaded Crimson Order. The Crimson Order itself was the highest rank attainable for a member of the Gremlin Hierarchy, and was a name that struck fear, reverence, and respect into the name of any Gremlin worth their own spit. 


As a result, the death of one of these feared Crimson Order members was not taken lightly. Herex brooded  over the mixed reports of the battle, some saying that the accursed Spiral Knights just barged through Warmaster’s defences and cut Seerus down like a defenceless pup, others saying that the high ranking Gremlin fought tooth-and-claw, dying in a matter truly befitting someone of his station. Only eight of us left now... thought Herex. To think, there used to be twelve... Granted, Crimson Order members were, if nothing else, ambitious; the first three were killed from in-fighting and intrigues within the Order, before the Spiral Knights landed in their thrice-damned spaceship and started throwing a wrench into everyone’s plans. 


Herex himself had one of his more delicate projects sabotaged by the Spiral Knights’ strike teams, losing a considerable amount of personnel to their advances, and letting years of military research fall into their grip. On the other hand, he was relatively lucky, when compared to Warmaster Seerus’ ugly fate. Herex’s expression once again turned grim as his mind turned back to the reports. Supposedly the damned Spiral Knights had broken into Seerus’ Grand Arsenal- into his own seat of power, and locked him inside of his own armoury as the facility was brought down on his head. Herex shook his head at the memory. Whether Seerus’ had put up a fight or not, that was no way for a Gremlin to die.


After the unfortunate catastrophe regarding Seerus, Herex immediately seized his peer’s death as a chance to expand his realm of influence, quickly pulling strings and pouring resources into obtaining the remnants of Seerus’s domain, which included the hefty workforce of Gremlins that were originally under Seerus’s command, and in addition, all of Warmaster Seerus’s top-secret projects were transferred to Herex, the latter of which he was currently reviewing. At the moment, Herex was busily muttering under his breath as he leafed through the Warmaster’s old projects, opening them to glance at the contents of each folder for anything that could be of use before discarding them into a furnace resting near his throne.


Herex’s voice, like that of many other gremlins, had a slightly husky, gravelly sound to it; a by-product from a life spent inhaling chemical fumes and smog from the panoply of machinery that the gremlins were so infatuated with.
“’Synthetic Steel’” He muttered, “…hmm, too impractical… ‘Self-Repairing Robots’…. maybe, but… no, no… ‘Killer Paper Cuts’…”

Herex didn’t say anything upon reading the last file, although made sure he was very careful to not brush the edges of the brown envelope containing the ridiculous project as he deposited it into the furnace.

Herex felt his sense of disappointment increasing with each progressively hare-brained scheme he read. He realised with some dismay that Seerus, being the engineering genius he was, probably completed most of his actually useful projects weeks after their conception. Yet one file from the deceased Warmaster managed to grab Herex’s attention. It was marked with the bright red Wrench-and-Gear of the Crimson Order, which was the main thing that caught Herex’s goggled eyes. Most project folders were marked with the black and beige hourglass of the Gremlins, but obviously Seerus had considered this project to be much more… special, somehow.


Herex tipped the folder upside down, slowly, much like a child opening a box when he knew it wasn’t his birthday. His dexterous fingers grabbed the precious papers as they escaped the folder’s confines, eager to spill their secrets upon the world. Herex placed the sheets of paper into order, before reading the title of this apparently ‘Super-Secret’ project. In bright-red letters, the paper read:

Time Travel


Herex’s lips pulled back across his snout to reveal a neat row of sharp teeth, as well as his unusually long canines, giving him a serpentine look. Herex grinned like a child who just discovered he could burn ants with a magnifying glass.
“Oh,” he happily muttered to no one in particular, “now this has potential.”