The many lambs for slaughter you have raised,
Innocence branded with a mark to claim,
Bleating ignorant and mindlessly graze,
And their life a falsehood within a game.
As you their shepherd like a god on high,
Judge which will live on and which ram must die?All it took was a push of a button. A pull of the trigger, resting at your fingertips. The temptation to become an agent of fate was alluring. To weave the tapestry into an image of your design, to tear out the spots that would not align with the vision patterned in your loom. A deletion of the unnecessary elements, required to preserve the integrity of the rest. The wool sheared off from the flock, the fibers spun together on the great wheel. A fine thread with which to stitch the lives and deaths throughout the course of tale and time. You were the master with deft hands to pass the shuttle and clip the strands, you crafted destiny out of the endless possibilities. Or were you merely a tool in the game of an even higher power? And like a puppet on strings and strands of the very wool you weave with, every action you profess to be your own is controlled by another?
Do you accept your fate as a living implement for eternity to come?
Or will you break free and escape the endless cycle?
Choose, or it is already chosen for you.
I will pull the wool over your eyes to see,
Unveiled what lies beneath so truth may yield,
And humble false superiority,
The fabric of reality revealed.
The mysteries unraveled at the seams,
And your life a shadow within a dream.Sheep. What an appropriate cognition. An approximation to humor, the irony that sheep came to bear in mind. Organic creatures that were so timid and docile it was blissfully unaware of why its masters let it fatten. Dimwitted and innocent, their flesh appreciated as mutton, and their milk made into cheese. Their hair fashioned into clothing and their bones porcelain, hide into parchment and gut into string. What ingenuity the humans had in domesticating the sheep, they did not stop there as ill content they were with lording over only one lesser creature. Soon more joined into the annals of history as beasts morphed and indefinitely changed to suit the needs and desire of this bipedal species. And perhaps, just perhaps, in the deepest part of the ancestral mind you may still find that spark as a glimmering twinkle in the darkest night, if they could do more than just tame what already was, but design a servant of their own. Perhaps the ancients dreamed of electric sheep.
Created for battle for a war long forgotten by the land and remember by few, the electric sheep that once fought against demons and angels, gods and monsters and everything in between. The battered and broken remains of those corporal things still buried in the Great Dale and mountains of Narfell and Rashemen. The two forces collided in a contest of wills. Armies marched towards destruction, lives carelessly sacrificed for the purposes of conquest and interest. So many souls taken, and for little gain but the profit of the military-industrial complex which grew over the tides of battle. For it was an arms race, the side that had the greater resources and power, making the darkest bargains outright could win the deadlocked contest. A war of supremacy that sent all the sheep to slaughter to fuel the fires of dominion.
It was somewhere in this war the first generation of warforged were created. The ingenuity of the Raumauthar combined the mysticism of their witches, the knowledge of their engineers, and perhaps the divine aid of some higher power to create them. Built to mimic the ideal Raumauthar warrior, clad in armor and bulk, tall and heavy to charge directly against the hellish armies the Nar raised. They were given the spark of life, a rudimentary essence that charged their wooden sinew and awakened their tabula rasa minds. And from here these fabricated soldiers became a common sight to bolster the ranks as they fought alongside their human counterparts. Their purpose was clear, to overwhelm and crush the enemy, trained in the arts of combat by the veterans of battles fought. Then the next generation came, another batch, more fine tuned to compensate for the failings of their first creation. And then another, and another, and another still. Resources poured into the creation of these sentient constructs which were progressively becoming more and more self-aware.
Some of the early warforged, began to question. Instilled with enough free will by their god-creators for introspection. They needed not to eat, nor drink, nor breathe, nor sleep running practically every hour of the day as guardians and drones. But their masters were of flesh, they had spoken of things beyond the arts of war and killing, things of love and life: Laughter, sadness, anger. They were concepts foreign to the minds of the warforged, and most stayed as emotionless warriors for their masters. But others still looked at the broken remains of their batchmates and wondered the greatest mystery: Where? Where does death lead for a being without a natural life? Is it like the things humans described as sleep? A state of inactivity for indefinite time? Would their consciousness still be attached though their bodies were utterly destroyed? Or would their minds fade, the power fueling its existence gone? Where does the dead warforged go?
Unable to be both philosopher and warrior, they rebelled alongside the other defectors. And the empires of Nar and Raumauthar collapsed in on themselves. And those who were still yet to be activated remained untouched in abandoned facilities that doted the Vale and Mountains. Secret laboratories brimming with centuries old secrets lost to the grains of time. Overgrowth and burial hid these places from plain sight, and one must go looking for such a places to even know of its existence. Rumors of great treasures still hidden in the deepest parts of the Vale and in Thesk echoed through the hourglass, and it was from a place found from such as this did AdAM 7 awaken by the activation of some unscrupulous fellows. A relic of times past, one of the last generations of warforged made and put into hibernation, what humans may experience as a comatose state as the decades rolled past before his awakening. But that is a memory for another time.
For what brought the Advanced Assassin Mech unit 7 to the City of Splendors was not for tourist attractions or indulgence, but rather honest work plain and simple. There was a contract on a target, fingered and marked for death. The terms were simple, execute the individual in a public manner so someone would find the body. A strange set of instructions, but perhaps if the target was a high profile in the Crown of the North someone was playing a political move. Yet the contract was accepted, paid for in the fees to arrive and establish an advance support network to ensure the assassins' safe arrival and departure after the deed was done. The thrill of killing was gone now. After over three hundred successful executions to his name, the warforged assassin was known in the criminal underworld as a weirdly effective hitman. One who was effective and got the job done with no hesitation or qualms, as a ruthlessly cold calculated killer. After all, AdAM 7 had a heart of stone, literally.
It was this heart of stone, that tapped the rhythms out. The empowered stony chambers pumping out the hydraulics through the hollow tubes, an entire system that mimicked the human heart. Call it sentimentality, that the designers made it so, a striking resemblance to the weakest part of the human body. Not in susceptibility to injury, but perhaps in the fragility that sentimentality meant human died of an emotionally broken heart. Fortunately for the construct, emotions were a foreign concept to his relatively young mind, as his trainers did not require such weaknesses to be exploited. There would be no hesitation to fire the crossbow, no remorse after each kill, no human qualities that made you weak. And yet it was what AdAM craved most. Consider it strange that Man tried to emulate their gods by creating something to call their own, an entire form of sentient life, and to the created their creators became their gods. So too did the cycle continue that AdAM found its interest in becoming more human the logical step to transcend its prime directive of being a weapon of a war no longer fought.
Pursing the goal of becoming human, over the years with the coins bought in death, the warforged had begun to redesign and construct his body to resemble the human form. Though his original creators had used a lighter alloy in his construction, favoring a sleeker, more agile design for the purposes of scouting and assassinations of key targets such as Nar commanders and messengers, the warforged's final goal was to cover its mechanized form with flesh. Parts harvested from his kills and any unfortunate bystander that had to be eliminated. His fingers for example had been re worked to feature five human-like digits, in lieu of a standard warforge's cruder three-prong grasp. It had taken a few months to learn how to control the bony fingers individually but the artificer who became his wealthy mechanic's work was clean. It was only the beginning, with each customization sessions costing more and more, steel skeletal ribs for example to add a level of unnecessary detail to the wood-fiber musculature, each added rib making AdAM giving him a unique skeletal appearance. The most recent piece however was his change in face plate, crafted from an original human skull. A dark wizard's skull from a few contracts back, liberating a hamlet plagued by his undead minions. With the underlying facial structure done Now it was time for flesh, for a face at last.
A face. Something that the aspiring human lacked, one so sinisterly crafted out of dying bone, mounted and fitted carefully over the original. An unnerving semblance of undeath, a countenance fitting for an assassin though his patrons never met him for plausible deniability. It worked well, and who would believe there was a spider-riding mechanical sniper dropping people dead in a single well-practiced shot? It had scared of most social contacts, but there was an older man who had some interest in the warforged, inviting the construct to partake in food and drink, all the while asking him so many incessant questions about his background. Of which AdAM felt compelled to tell the truth. Yet despite confessing to countless murders, the old man seemed hardly phased, only musing on to more prying. Yes, a round of at least three dozen or so questions, offset by the experience of eating and drinking for the first time.
Ruby lights flashed underneath the ebon cloth. A soft glow muffled by darkness through the dim light, the spark returning, and the loosely termed consciousness of a warforged returning. Systems back online, the thumping in his metal mediastinum, a moment spent rebooting the memory, retrieving the last recorded event as images flashed like a video reel ran in reverse. Blackness, hours of blackness, and then food and drink. A bowl of stew and mug of frothy ale, the lack of taste buds made it impossible to appreciate any flavor the food may or may not have had, but the act of masticating and consuming was far more interesting to the construct. Yes, perhaps a tongue would be required next and the sensory paths to his mind attuned. But before a tongue can be taken, first he must retrieve his personal effects, and AdAM 8 his unusual mount. Last left at the safe house under the care of some frightened common crook. Perhaps the spider hungered and ate the criminal already, never forget to feed a quarter-ton spider.
Arms were detected and moveable, and leg was detected. Leg? Only one? No, two. A peculiar sensation from the left, as if the mind neglected acknowledgment of the limb intermittently. This required investigation, but first to rise from the slightly angled stone slab. Torso rising, pulled forward as the tubes filled with unknown scarlet ether had embedded into his body were tugged slightly back as a curious restraint. What had happened? No memory of being in such a state occurred in the review. Nor was this place as the mantle fell from those glowing eyes. The horizontal visual scan illuminated little of the place, presumptively cubical room of dimensions approximated to be 2500 square feet, no portcullis in sight. Curiouser and curiouser, as more cloth was peeled back by an arm sporting a series of those queer conduits and a shining . A gown. What use did he have for the scant clothing of a gown? It would be discarded soon enough.
A laboratory, a medical one, as the pounding heart sounds resounded against the walls palpating as the warforge sat up against the continual drone of fan blades. Fan blades with no discernable fan, and a now the sounds of pumps from the slab behind him, and the altar-bed knocked of hollow stone. And strangest of all, were the strangers heard and seen below. Alongside the work benches and walls, questionable blood, possible bone dust, and melting candlelight throwing light and shade around the forms. Were these his kidnappers? No. They too seemed to be wearing gowns. There below was a half-breed organic, pedigreed of elven and human which bore a blade into existence. Then a mountain of a man, or rather goliath, smiling a grin that glimmered like a displacer beast's in the underdark. Some paces away a gnomish figure, short and stout, but clearly not a dwarf by the laboratory bench, with a spec of flapping fairy attempting to be as threateningly defensive as possible it seemed in a far flung corner. Two more blankets-covered slabs with similar tubes running into the offered vessels. Six other beings in the vicinity, and AdAM 7, made seven. Was it coincidence? They shall have to see, and finally the veil was taken off and slipped down below, discarded like the wilting petals of the orchids on the table.
A leg. A fleshy leg fused at the pelvis. covered in blonde hairs and supple fair skin. Ah the reason for the sinister neglect. And still tubes attached, like his right arm. And so too was the left. Ah the left, it too was just as the leg, covered in skin and hair and fused at the shoulder girdle, as fingers slowly tingling in a mix of surprise and disbelief. But not fear or shock, more of a child-like wondrous curiosity to find oneself half-way to appearing human. Appreciating the sight of seeing those fingers move, his fingers move. And then those glowing artificial eyes gazed lower as the sight of a jewel near the flexion point of the arm, a radiant blue in what light there was and luminously pulsatile. What was done? And who was responsible for this transformation? And why was there the need? The need for something, something reflexively screaming at his body to draw in air through the nasal cavity. A rise of his chest cavity, a rush of his first breath realized moments after. Lungs perhaps? A human weakness from his autopsies of isolated targets, but a human quality nonetheless, now presumably inside him. All things took awhile to acclimate as the mind reorganized the pathways of command. Including that strange taste. Taste? A new muscle ran across those toothless maxilla, a tongue complete with thick saliva as the faint sulfur in the air became apparent and the new sensory piece withdrawn.
And alas, the final epiphany, the sensation in his chest beyond the rise and fall of this new breathing routine he must do. That pounding, the sounds of... His heart. One that replaced his ancient core, the source of a Warforged's indefinite biological immortality. Was it an organic heart? One ripped out from a human? As were his new limbs? And what of his old ones? Where did they go? So impressed by the new findings, AdAM found himself building the ship of theseus. Maybe he should be rechristened as AdAM 7.5a. To which his gaze looked down at the organics beneath him now, it was time to discern if these were truly organics, or just other experiments more whole than he was...
"Salutation: Greetings Varied Organics.
Comment: I am AdAM Seven.
Inquiry: What are your identities?"A rather friendly greeting for a man, or rather machine, or perhaps somewhere in the middle now, that has taken a fairly number of lives and left behind a string of unresolved murders and orphans and widows.
Member
Master EffeX
Lucian
Noctis
Chronic
EpicRoleplay
BunniesOfDoom
Days
headintheclouds
Kaithe Dame