It was not long before the enemies of the Allagan Empire—most often resistance cells from within—learned ways of tampering with clockwork soldiers’ original programming, effectively turning the machina on their masters. To prevent this, imperial technologists worked with aetherochemists to create a more manlike soldier which would prove nigh impossible to corrupt. The result was the clockwork predator, which, in addition to having an impenetrable security protocol, was also a faster, more efficient killer.[1]