Chapter Text
Lucas Miller was a terrible, awful human being. He had no regard for other beings' lives or autonomy, nor did he care for their feelings. He was a creature of science—and creature indeed, as he was only human in the eyes of those who did not know his true colors—and spent many year studying the bond between the humanoid races of Faerûn and their dæmons.
Humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, and goliaths all had dæmons. (Tieflings as well, though their dæmons functioned differently.) However, most 'monster' races did not have dæmons—goblins, abyssals, celestials, elementals, and so on—and this intrigued him. What caused a race to develop dæmons? What caused dæmons to settle? What were dæmons?
He wouldn't rest until he had answers.
He started with bugbears, as one does. They were large, goblin-esque creatures that were the size of a full-blooded orc only covered in fur and completely vicious murderers. Think a murderous mutated bear with rudimentary intelligence and speaking skills. They killed for sport—sometimes even their own kind—and were generally solitary but Lucas managed to get his hands on a small family unit. That's where things got a tad unethical.
Lucas at one point had...acquired a few dæmons who had survived the death of their counterparts. And he had also acquired a family of bugbears. Now he only had to make the two bond.
The process was painful for the bugbears—the dæmons didn't complain but they were generally listless anyway because of, you know, the death of their other damn half of themselves—but what is a little pain in the face of progress? The experimental bonding involved a lot of electrical stimulation, magical radiation, and isolation from any of the others, save the dæmon that they were going to be assigned to. One of the bugbears didn't make it but hey, that's science! You gotta break a few eggs to learn to reverse the flow of time and discover if the chicken really was once a raptor after all! And after many, many months of painful bonding experiments, one of the dæmons finally took.
The bugbear's name was Klaarg. He was the second-biggest, absolute strongest, and third oldest of the unit. The dæmon that bonded with him was a large wolf-mastiff crossbreed that Lucas had named Dæne—or DÆmon oNE—and had been chosen for Klaarg because it was the only one that could fight him off. When they bonded, Dæne began to develop more of a personality—still wildly different from Klaarg's own violent tendencies—and Klaarg began to calm down. Somehow, the introduction of a dæmon bond to a non-bonded monster caused it to behave more like a bonded race. Klaarg became more docile and easier to interact with and soon he and Dæne could be trusted with small interactions with some of Lucas' robot helpers.
After Klaarg—whom Lucas had renamed Daniel—came the eldest bugbear who bonded with a grumpy lynx that Lucas named Twæn. Then the youngest bonded with a marmoset named Thræse. Then the last—Klaarg's sire—bonded with the remaining dæmon, a slow loris named Quæd.
The implications of bonding a non-bonded with a severed dæmon was amazing but the mental changes in both the re-bonded dæmon and the bugbears was even more so. Daniel became placid and Dæne became more aggressive and lucid. The eldest bugbear became much more compliant whole Twæn began to act out and of her own accord. The youngest bugbear became more lively and playful while Thræse gained a serious nature. Daniel's sire started to read and became contemplative while Quæd became restless and active.
It seemed as though bonding with a dæmon smoothed out the rough, 'monster' parts of their personalities and allowed them to individualize but, unlike a normal bonded dæmon, their dæmons mirrored their new personality. He had made a breakthrough that only he could have achieved.
And one day he would be known for this breakthrough. One day people would call Lucas Miller the father of monster-dæmon bonding. One day he would outshine his family legacy.
(But Maureen dies and so does Dæne and Daniel goes missing and everything goes to shit. Marcus unsettles and it's raw and terrifying that his feelings and his dæmon are both so wild but when she looks like Maureen's lark dæmon, Michael, it fucking hurts. He hides away with the Philosophers's Stone and the planar viewing disks and tries so goddamn hard to forget but a Miller is obsession and he needs his mother. When the Reclaimers come and the Bureau is after him, he only puts up the pretense of helping because he knows that at the core of this all is Maureen—in a robotic chassis—and he needs her so badly. No one else matters. And Marcus settles into a lark.)