What kind of Great Being allows himself to be "fixed" by Karzahni?
The descriptions of Velika in the Saga of Ignition are clear: he was an odd, broken, clumsily-rebuilt Po-Matoran, as were all the Matoran of Voya Nui. If Velika had not been like those around him, the great surprise of his unveiling after the reformation of Spherus Magna might not have been so surprising, but a surprise it was. So a broken Matoran rebuilt by Karzahni he must have been--but why?
He was not always this way, we have learned. In all the records salvaged from the Great Spirit Robot there were still traces, for those who went looking, of the original Po-Matoran Velika. There was no longer anyone who remembered him, or any record of his assigned duties in the village where he had lived in the Northern Continent: only a single copper scrap that had survived the destruction of Karzahni's realm: the tag with which he had been sent there, only partially legible:
Velika - Po-Mato--
broken arm, uppe--
return to: East Po-Koro, Inner Po-Wahi, Nor--
Signed: Roc-
A broken arm was a minor repair, compared with most of those sent to Karzahni--at least in the later years. Once Turaga across the isles began to wonder why their Matoran never returned from their repairs, they went to greater efforts to repair their broken Matoran, sending only the most irreparably damaged to Karzahni, the realm of no return. In those later years, a broken arm alone would never have been enough. Were there more damages, unable to be read on what remains of the tag? Or was he sent there so early in Karzahni's history that no one had yet become suspicious that none had returned?
The script used on the tag argues for the possibility of the latter option. The square-printed letters include a ligature that was lost in the great time-skip, an early Artakhan script that fell out of fashion everywhere but the Western Arm. While is possible that Velika was not quite the first Matoran sent to Karzahni, it seems he was an early one.
The discovery that, in early years, Karzahni had, in fact, competently fixed and returned Matoran sent a historiographic shockwave through the Bionicle community. Their Agori neighbours understood well enough that it was a surprising unveiling of mysteries when the earliest records of the Order of Mata Nui were unsealed, but they did not understand the smaller therein that, in the first few hundred years or so, every Matoran sent to Karzahni had returned, in perfect functioning order.
What kind of Great Being would allow himself to be fixed by Karzahni?
Why did Karzahni cease to competently perform the role for which he was made?
The fools, they would never know, Velika thought, nor understand, but just has he had given them thought, so too was he able to break it. His own broken arm had been a trivial wound, but he had become bored with East Po-Koro and had relished the opportunity to travel "by chance" to realm of repair. The Matoran Universe was no longer new, exactly, but the remnants of Spherus Magna were now far enough behind that he was willing to venture about and see what his changes to the Matoran had wrought--and where better to meet Matoran from all over the universe than where they were all repaired?
Karzahni had had him prepped genially, the bound-up arm unwound and laid beside him on the sterile surface, and the gentle titan started to knit him together carefully. Velika had smirked to himself, delighted at the fullness of his deception, when something--some tiny, trivial, unknowable, unpredictable instinct had made the titan pause.
"You're a strange one, aren't you?" he mused. Sedated, Velika didn't think he should answer, and maybe the sedation had even worked on him, a little, and he did not think to stop Karzahni as the titan tapped at his head, and the casing that should have housed a melding of silicate tissues and fine circuitry opened to reveal a wrinkled, grey lump of pulsating matter.
Even if he were a half-second slow under the sedation, that half-second had now passed, and Velika was indignant at being discovered. Even as Karzahni stepped back, baffled and a bit horrified at the un-Matoran brain he had discovered, Velika's eyes lit as he "woke" fully, and his good hand clutched at Karzahni's massive hand, and the titan could not break the grip.
"I look the same, don't I?" asked the apparent Po-Matoran, "but I am not--let me show you." And, with a wrench, his grip on Karzahni linked the titan's nervous system to his own, and Velika's thoughts coursed from his brain, through the apparently-Matoran body he inhabited, and into the Karzahni's nerves, leaping to his brain in less than an instant.
The visions Velika showed him awed the titan: visions of raw elemental power, of a knowledge of energised protodermis behind that of Artakha himself, of all that had come before, and of much that had happened since, and even as Karzahni struggled to comprehend the enormity of what he had just learned, Velika reached in and erased the memory of it--and then some.
Karzahni, now and forever more thereafter the Mad Titan, stumbled about, his eyes blinking furiously, and when he had calmed himself, though the world seemed to stop spinning, he saw the half-assembled Matoran on the operating table.
"You were just about to improve me," said Velika. "To restore me."
And Karzahni did: alone of all the Matoran that had come to him yet, he sent Velika away changed from what he had been, and alone of all the Matoran that would come thereafter, he sent Velika away with no defect, though to the eyes of one accustomed to a standard Matoran, he was no longer that. All the Matoran that Karzahni fixed thereafter would resemble him in some form, but covering defects he could no longer repair. Only, in Velika, there was no defect: this was his chosen form.
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