Thing (Solo)

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

7th Day of Summer, 512 AV Tock had a broken hand. Five days ago, she had also gotten beat up fairly badly. She'd spent the rest of the day bed bound. She'd been forced to pay for a magical healing on the hand, since she could NOT afford to have it broken. She needed her hand to work. It had been bad enough she'd been forced to spend the whole day in bed, unable to work. Her work was all she had. When she had broken her foot, they hadn't been able to keep her in bed. She'd decided that if she couldn't have use of her own two feet to get around, she'd come up with a magical alternative. So she had made a pair of magic crutches, and used them to get around for the next few weeks. So when she had been bed bound all day on the second day of summer, she had started researching how to make an artificial hand. She had already begun spending some time studying hands before, but she hadn't yet done anything with those designs. So since she now had the time, and the motivation, she decided to put them to use. It would be like a prototype, to work the kinks out before construction of a proper golem. Plus it would always be handy to have an extra hand around the shop.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

All day on the second of summer, in between naps to conserve her energy, Tock had been reading. She had spent her time in bed, with a book propped in her lap, studying human anatomy. She had studied diagrams of human hands, pictures of the skeletal structure, and everything she could learn about muscles and how they worked. She had spent some of the time studying her own hand. She had never given detailed thought to how a hand worked before. The shape of it, the multiple places it could flex and bend, the different ways she could move her fingers. She used her hands for everything, they were easily what she would consider her most defining feature. A working girl's hands. And yet she had never deeply studied them. She took notes as she worked, writing slowly and a bit sloppily left-handed, leaning on a wooden board in her lap. Even as she wrote she pondered the mysteries of her hand... Why was it so much easier to write right handed? There were plenty of things she did with her left hand. She held a chisel with her left hand, a mallet with her right. When smithing, she held tongs with her left hand, and a hammer with her right. When she got an itch on the back of her head, she reflexively rose her right hand to scratch it, before realizing what she was doing and using the left instead. Even that simple scratch felt mote awkward left handed. Why? When she napped, she dreamed of hands. Satevis's hands, roaming her body. Firm, yet gentle, sending quivers through her body. She whimpered in her sleep, imagining the things she'd like him to do with his hands. And then she woke in a mood, and discovered something else that she preferred to do right-handed.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Four days ago, on the third day of summer, Tock had ridden her magic crutches to class again. She had been too sore and aching, to want to walk, and her foot had still been throbbing in pain. She probably should have stayed home, but the class was an important one, and she hadn't been able to stand missing it. She had, however, gone straight back to the infirmary after class and spent the entire rest of the day in bed. In between naps, she had spent that day drawing hands. She had sketched her own hand from multiple angles, studying her intact left hand more than the bandaged right, since she couldn't risk hurting her hand more by unbandaging it. She had had some trouble sketching the very hand she was holding the quill with, so it had been slow going, and she had ended up with a lot of sketches of her hand in the grip she had used on the quill. For some of the time, she had alternated between putting the quill down and turning her hand this way and that, then picking the quill up to sketch what she had seen. When the nurse had come to check on her, she had engaged the woman in idle chatter to keep her around a bit longer, faking interest in the woman's family so she could study the hand motions she used while she talked. She had even faked an intent interest in the woman's wedding ring, so she could get her to hold up her hand for display. At one point the nurse had leaned over to peek at Tock's drawings, and asked in a confused tone why she was drawing hands. Her response had simply been, "Cause 'ands is fascinatin'." By the time the nurse left to return to her duties, Tock had a dozen sketches of her hands, and couldn't begin to remember the names of the two toddling ankle biters the woman had gone on and on about. After a long day of drawing hands, her left hand had had a case of writer's cramp. It didn't hurt as bad as the broken hand, though. And it was a more worthwhile pain, since it came with the knowledge that she had been doing something useful. Rather than pain that came from being unable to control her emotional outbursts.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Three days ago, on the fourth day of summer, Tock had ridden her crutches down to work. Her boss had immediately expressed concern for why she was once again showing up injured, after she had only just gotten back on her feet. "It weren't my fault 'is time," she had told him. "I done were catchin' a no good thief. An' I done gots beat up fer my trouble." Jacques had sighed and asked her, "Are you certain it wasn't another bar fight?" Normally she would have snapped at him and her temper would have been riled up. After the week she'd been having, however, she had simply been too exhausted to get mad. "Nah," she'd said simply, "it were a thief, done robbed some boat. Go ask the guards. 'Ey done knows the 'ole story..." It had taken some convincing to get her boss to believe that she was a hero, and that her injuries had been from sustained doing something good, instead of from losing her temper. It had been a tough sell, since deep down she knew that she hadn't really cared about doing a good deed. Really, she had just been looking for a fight, and a thief who decided to pull a knife on her had been exactly the kind of brawl she had wanted. Her boss had almost sent her home anyway, since between the crutches, and the useless, broken hand, she wasn't going to do much good that day. She had convinced him, however, that not only could she still do plenty of good, but she would go absolutely crazy if she had to spend another full day lying in bed, drawing hands. "Hands?" he'd asked. Then, looking at the magic crutches and Grippy on her belt, he had held up his hands and said, "You know what? I don't want to know. We'll have you assist someone else today, until your hand is better. Or until you cut it off and replace it with a new one, which knowing you, seems like a strong possibility..." "Nah," she had said, "I's jus' gonna use all three." Cutting off her hand would be a foolish idea when she could keep her two natural hands and use an artificial one. She had spent the rest of the work day doing light assistant work, mostly using Grippy so as to reduce the strain on her healing body. A lot of it had been using the reaching tool to hand tools, parts, and supplies to men working up on ladders. She'd also been able to assist with some left-handed hammering, and of course there was nothing wrong with her voice, so she had still been giving orders and organizing the men the way she always did. Though by the time she went home that day, she had been even more convinced that she needed to build a replacement hand. She felt utterly useless without it.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

When she'd gotten home on the fourth day of summer, Tock had climbed into bed with a pile of wood, and spent the rest of the day carving. It hadn't been easy. Working with only one hand was a major pain. Each step seemed to take twice as long. She pulled her table over next to the bed so she could work and still rest as much as possible. Clamping each piece of wood onto the edge of the table was an exercise in patience, and that was a trait Tock tended to lack. She ended up needing to hold the wood in the crook of her right elbow while she used her left hand to clamp it down, working very slowly to make sure everything was properly aligned. Then she measured and carefully cut each piece, using a hand saw instead of Cutty, since Cutty still wasn't feeling well. Awhile later, she had eighteen pieces of wood cut, most of them only an inch long or smaller. Three segments a piece for the fingers, two for the thumb, and four separate pieces to make the palm. With some great care and precision, she should be able to assemble them to make a hand that could flex and bend in all the right places. Luckily, with such small pieces, using a mallet for the defining wasn't really needed. She braced each piece in place one at a time, and used a chisel in her left hand, bracing it with her right forearm when she needed a little extra leverage. She worked to carefully scrape off the wood to round out the shapes, forming the rough outlines of each finger segment. The filing work was the most time consuming with such small and detailed pieces. The shapes of the fingers had to be so precise that each contour required careful and delicate shaping. It was impossible to finish this task in an afternoon, and she ended up working long into the night, then starting up again early the next morning. As each segment was shaped with fine scrapes of the files, she held her own fingers up to them, comparing every line of her calloused flesh to the shape of the wood. She found it fitting that her new hand would be made of wood. Wood could be rough, yet soft. It was durable, yet shape-able. It was plain and dull on the surface, but could be polished to a stunning shine. It was all a matter of how much care was put into developing it.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

On the fifth day of Summer, after classes and taking care of some bureaucratic baloney, Tock returned home to continue working on her new hand. She had a bigger project in the works now, but she couldn't get any work down when she was down one hand. Plus having an extra hand would make a huge difference in the work she was going to do on the statue she was envisioning. She needed some finer tools, though. Last semester she had done most of her detailed assembly work at the University. Now that she wasn't in a gadgeteering class, though, she needed her own tools. So she stopped at the general store and spent a good couple of hours picking out all the tools she would need. She picked out screwdrivers, tiny hammers, clasps, wrenches, fasteners, and everything else that she had always wanted but never been able to afford. It was the shopkeeper's best sale in quite some time, and put a pretty big dent in Tock's purse, but it was worth it. She then spent the rest of the day at home, filing wooden fingers. She carefully scraped picks across the edges of the wood to shape where the joints would be attached, lining each piece up next to the others to ensure they would have a good fit. She held the pieces and bent them back and forth along the joints to make sure there was leeway in the movement and there wouldn't be any jams or catches in the construction. As the day wore on, and she finished shaping the small pieces of wood, she began assembling them into the desired shape. Unable to use her right hand, she was forced to line up each two pieces to be attached with a pair of clasps that held them together. It made the assembly horribly slow, since every time she needed to make an adjustment, she had to put down her tools, use her left hand to unclasp the piece, shift the position, reclasp it, and take the tool back up in her left hand again. It turned what would have been a several hour job into a long, long day of assembly work. OOC-150 GM spent for a Gadgeteering Toolkit.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Yesterday, on the sixth day of summer, Tock had gotten up early to finish assembly. Each finger segment was attached by the finely carved joints she'd carved into them, fit together with tiny screws holding each one together. As the assembly continued, she tested the flexing of the fingers by laying the constructed hand in her own left palm, bending her fingers to curl around the hand and push the wooden fingers through the same motion. The hand was limp without anything to power it yet, but all she needed it to do was be capable of the motions. There would be a few limitations to the design. The fingers were able to bend and grip something, but they wouldn't be able to spread horizontally, cross over each other, or perform extra fine movements like playing a musical instrument. Her skill with crafting joints was still too limited to make something with finer capabilities. When she was finished with the assembly on the hand itself, she had to think about how she would be utilizing it. She needed a way to attach the hand to her own body so that she could make use of it. She took another trip down to the market, poking around the general store until she found some supplies that would serve her purpose. She bought a bagful of glass pieces that were made for entertainers who needed faux gemstones, but which she could polish up and use for Automaton eyes. She also found a leather belt that gave her an idea about how to finalize the project. Back at home she set to work making the modifications she needed. The belt she cut down until it was half its normal length. She carefully poked new holes through it, so she could adjust the fit to a much smaller length. The extra leather from the end she saved; she could cut it into little strips of leather to use for Automaton ears. Then she carefully drilled a hole through the wrist of the new creation, and slid a thin copper rod through it to create a pivot point. Next she cut and carved another piece of wood that could be slid onto the belt like a buckle, with a piece jutting out on either end to attach the rod to. After the careful precision she'd needed carving the finger joints, this piece was simple, being little more than a basic wooden hinge. Last she carved out a set of small divets into the back of the hand, and affixed a pair of the glass pieces and a small circle of leather into them. She hooked another pair of glass pieces onto the hinge piece, so that the Automaton's 'sight' would be aligned in multiple directions instead of being limited to the back of the hand. Once all was done, she tested out the design, looping the leather belt around her right arm. Once it was strapped on firmly, she held her hand up, and the artificial hand was lined up right under it. When she held her arm down at her side, the wrist-mounted creation let the wooden hand hang right next to her own. The buckle/hinge allowed the wrist to flex inwards, until the fingers brushed against her forearm. While the finger joints would be more limited in their movement than her real hand, the wrist actually had more mobility, able to flex a full hundred and eighty degrees. The beauty of this design was that even once she didn't need the replacement hand for normal use anymore, she would be able to strap the belt anywhere she wanted and have the hand perform tasks for her. OOC-2 SM spent for a leather belt, -10 GM for a bag of glass pieces

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Once the assembly was complete, Tock took an early afternoon nap, to make sure she would be good and refreshed before she started the Animation. She had learned her lesson with Cutty, and wouldn't be doing any Animating on anything less than full energy and alertness. When she woke, she touched up the chalk outline of her Animation circles, which dominated a full half of her house. Then she got to work modifying them with Glyphs. She had Satevis to thank for that. She didn't know much about Glyphs yet, but she had taken thorough notes and sketches of the ones he'd shown her when they were making the puppets. She decided to use the same ones for now, until she learned more about the process in order to develop her own techniques with them. First she carefully traced two yaq runes a piece on each of the two circles at opposite ends. They helped channel the Djed flow around the circles, keeping the magical energies contained. By holding the energy in and preventing it from bleeding off and being wasted, the process was made more efficient and faster. She traced out the runes with utmost care, since she was so amateurish with this art and didn't want to make a mistake. Thankfully her drawing skills were quite good, and she had a very steady hand. With her sketches of Satevis's runes to work off of, she was able to take her time and trace out each line of the runes slowly and precisely. She finished the four runes on the circles, and checked her notes, starting next on the two korad runes on each end of the line that connected the circles. The runes tied together the two circles, accentuating the Djed flow between them. When combined with the yaq runes on the circles themselves, this maximized the energy flow, keeping it not only contained within the circles, but accelerating the transfer rate from one circle to another. It would cut down the total time needed for the Animation process a great deal. Finally she added in the two that she thought were, perhaps, the most important. Inside each circle she traced a daraq rune. These represented equality. Since she would be transferring her own soul and memories from herself into the Automaton, these runes were a key factor in maintaining balance. It was like water, so much so that the rune even meant 'pond'. Water had a natural tendency to flow from one equal point to another. It was why water would spread across a floor, even if it was perfectly smooth and level. It was a basic principle of fluid dynamics that she had studied in her Gadgeteering classes, when learning how to use hydraulics to create things like pumps and water wheels. The same principles that worked on the physical properties of liquid worked on the energy properties of Djed. It was just a matter of understanding how it worked. Once each rune was traced, she went over them a second and then third time, checking every line, every curve, and every serif of the script to make sure they were perfect. Once she was more skilled and confident in how to use Glyphs, she would likely be able to trace them without so much thought. But when she was so new at it, she had to go over each and every step again and again to be sure they were right. With the Glyphs applied, she set her new hand in the circle, then drew her dagger with her left hand. She poked it into her right forearm, sending a drop of blood into the circles, and the magic began.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock closed her eyes, sitting in the source circle, and worked to focus her mind. She had learned, the hard way, that distractions and stray thoughts were potentially dangerous to an Animation. She focused on her breathing, in and out, calming and centering herself. She had done the Animation process enough times that she could simply dive right into it, but she was beginning to realize there was more to it. Instead of diving right into the depths of her soul, she first sought calm and peace. She focused her mind into a meditative state until all the distractions were gone from her. Thankfully her home was quiet, so there wasn't much she needed to tune out. The only noise was the sound of her own breathing, and she focused on that until it became nothing more than part of the flow she sought. It was only then that she searched inside, and found that place within her where her soul resided. The balancing runes in the circles helped her touch her soul to the Automaton almost immediately, like a scale balancing itself out. A drop of Djed flowed from her, guided by the two runes on the connecting line between the circles. They gently helped the spiritual energy along, and it was like there was no place else for the piece of her soul to go but into the Automaton, where it belonged. The Soulcore formed, and she gave the creation but a single, simple Directive: obedience to her. She didn't waste her time with things like non-violence, she she might, some day, need to command this hand to stab someone for her. So long as it was programmed to obey her above all else, she would be able to get it to do anything she needed. What came next was the most complex. This would be the most advanced Automaton she had ever created to date. The aid of the runes helped her with transferring her thoughts and memories into the wooden hand, granting it a basic intelligence and knowledge. Her other Automatons had only been able to follow a fixed set of pre-programmed commands. This one would be able to think for itself, at least to a degree. It wouldn't be as intelligent as a real human, but it would be smarter than an animal. It could be thought of as a child's mind; able to understand language, understand basic information, and perform tasks on its own, but not advanced enough to tackle complex challenges or understand abstract ideas. It would be able to use tools, but not create its own designs. It would be able to write the words she told it to, but be unable to form complex enough thoughts to write its own stories. It would be able to draw a picture with a child's skill, but it wouldn't be able to truly understand art. She sat for hours, transferring her thoughts of such things, allowing her memories to be shared with it. With the balancing runes, it was like each thought she had was shared by the newly forming intelligence, mimicked as if her mind were being held up before a mirror.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Today, the seventh day of summer, Tock continued working on her creation. She got home from work and took another refreshing nap, so that her exhaustion from a day of construction work wouldn't affect her Animation. Once she was rested and refreshed, she returned to the Animation circles and continued, taking some time to once again seek peace and balance within herself. She focused and pushed everything else away, until it was just her and her Automaton. Of course, she couldn't tune out every single thing; she wasn't some monk in a temple who was able to detach themselves completely from the physical world. But she could at least clear her thoughts, and ignore any distractions around her. It helped that there wasn't much there for her to tune out. Had this been a crowded, noisy room, she would never have been able to clear her thoughts. Once she was calm, she began the transfer again. All afternoon and into the night, with a break in between to take another short nap and ensure her mind remained fresh and alert, she worked on programming the Automaton. She transferred her memories of tools, quills, chalk, and paper, making sure the creation would understand what each of these simple things were. She spent extra time focusing on teaching it about tools. These were the first things she had learned herself, as a child. She had known how to identify each size and type of chisel before she had known how to read. She drew on those memories, feeling a surge of warmth as she remembered her Granddad holding them out to her, and explaining what each one was, and what it was used for. The Automaton, while not intelligent enough to design a creation or carving of its own, would know the basics of tools. It would be able to pick out the right one for the job, as long as the job wasn't overly complex. It would know that a hammer was used on nails, a screwdriver on screws, and a chisel on wood. It just wouldn't be able to figure out the right place for a nail or screw on its own, but once she set the nail for it, it would be able to drive it in. It was the same way her Granddad had taught her. He would design the project, hold the wood in place, and set the nails, then let her swing the hammer. She had always felt so proud, as a child, knowing that she was helping. The hand would be a helper, lending a hand whenever needed, helping her to complete her tasks. Even with the aid of the runes, she spent all day teaching it everything it needed to know. She then paused in the process once more, knowing she would need another couple of days yet to finish.