Dr. Hawthorn always had a bit of an abnormal view of reality, which only got worse when his son was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Hawthorn became sickened by the possible loss and grief of losing his son and got into medical university to try and find a cure for his son's illness. But he noticed this was too slow of a path, and his son was only getting worse day by day. So, he decided to use the new growing art of technology to fix him faster than simple medical measures. He experimented on the boy using AI and robotic parts to find out how to keep him on the same plane as the rest of them. What was left of the boy, was presented to the wife by Hawthorn, proudly showing he had fixed their son. However, she was not at all happy about what he had done to this son, bewildered and disoriented. Hawthorn was promptly kicked out by his wife as she called the police on him for what he had done. Being out of the house and away from his things, the son was only succumbed by the new parts, as the life support hardware misfired and caused the robotic parts to fry, losing his life soon after due to them. Hawthorn was left flummoxed by what happened, and being in this unwell state, set his mind to finding out what exactly went wrong with the test. He surrounded himself back in the suddies, wondering what happened and if there was a way to keep them around longer. He set up an arcade as his place for gathering these subjects, as broken people are easier to manipulate, and who is more broken than teens left at an arcade?

The police eventually catch up with Hawthorn due to a secret investigation at the arcade. He was forced to hide in the back rooms of the arcade while the police searched the scene. His last resort of survival was to merge himself with the pre-built robot stored in the back rooms, Barely.