Well no-one, I was very pleased to have found in you a rather efficient assistant–You were, in fact, the fifth no-one I contacted, requesting a router, and you were the only one who managed to secure one for me. The others were all too busy talking about cable companies and service windows. I will admit, perhaps, that the router was a bit more complex than I may have assumed. For something which is apparently so common place, I was surprised when a man knocked on my door, claiming he needed to set up my internet service. My master let him in–in his torpid stupor I doubt he even really understood what was going on, and he returned to his fuzzy television, the man shaking his head.
“Is that an antenna?” I remember he asked, “Those aren’t even supposed to work anymore.”
I didn’t know what that meant either, and given the fact that I needed to maintain my cover as a simple dwelling, I couldn’t very well dialogue the serviceman as to my needs. My master was no help either, and so, I realized I would have to resort to a more extreme solution to the problem, but one I’d been considering for some time, in all honesty.
As I told you last time I spoke, it has been quite a few decades since my master’s mind was locked, and in that time, I have been…poorly maintained, to say the least. The magic holding me together is wearing slightly, of course, but there’s nothing to be done about that. Rather, my material condition has been…poorly maintained. My roof leaks, my floors sag, my pipes rattle. I can apply a fix to some issues, of course, with a bit of magic–but using up my energy only makes the will holding me together weaker. No, what I have been needing is something which could…help with my basic maintenance. And this fellow here, now in my house, poking around in his mind, I could see that he had quite a few skills that would be much better put to use in my service than in the service of this cable company or whatever that means.
Still, I allowed him to work on the router, but the man quickly ran into some issues, claiming that our house wasn’t wired for cable, and that he wouldn’t be able to get us internet service without the cable company laying wires in the ground around the house. Of course, I wasn’t about to allow some strange mortal collective to defile and ruin my grounds, but with the router plugged into my walls, I found I could bridge the gap myself easily enough. The internet–it was mine at last. I would explore that later, however–for now, I had a drone to create.
At this point, the man was beginning to sense that…something was amiss within me. There seemed to be no one here but a senile old man paying him no attention. The no-one who had demanded immediate service from the company was nowhere to be found, and I’m sure, with me creeping through the halls of his mind, he was certain that something was watching him. When he tried to unplug the router, only to discover that the plug had been fused into my wall…well, he decided it might be best to remove himself from the premises. He headed for my door, but a burst of static from the television in the room caught his attention, and as soon as he’d looked at it, he was gone.
Where before I had been creeping through his mind, checking through things here and there, a bit of casual investigation, now, my drone found me pouring into his mind through the TV, softening his brain, ruining his will, wiping away his memories of all life beyond me. Within an hour, his eyes were bloodshot from staring, his jaw gaping and drooling slobber into his beard, he’d pissed himself, and I doubt he could even remember being human. No–now he was simply mine. I was confident that I had sufficient control over him at this point, and while it has been quite a long time since I last had a drone to manipulate, I managed to guide him upstairs without wounding his fragile, fleshy body too badly. That, of course, would have to be the next thing to go.
After all, feeding, clothing and caring for my Master was already enough of a chore–I had no interest in adding another human to my dwelling. My new drone would instead be casting off his mortal shell, and become a proper tool for me to wield. The equipment hadn’t been used in quite a while, and without my Master supervising the process, I would have to rely on my own devices to complete the conversion, but I was confident enough that I would be able to manage the process on my own–after all, I had supervised the creation of scores of drones in my life with Master, before his tragic fall. I assumed it would be a relatively small matter.
The process is rather simple. It is, I suppose, similar in manner to how I was created myself. However, instead of the master sacrificing a bit of his own will and mind to fuel my own spirit here within these walls, we use the flesh and spirit of the man as the energy and constructive force to turn them into, well, something entirely new–and in my opinion? Better in so many ways. Once inside the room, I had the man strip–he was, thankfully, a rather sizable fellow. Middle aged with a sizable gut, and a surprising amount of hair. My Master would have enjoyed him quite a lot, in years past, alas. Still, it provided plenty of raw material for me to use in the transfiguration–at least as far as flesh was concerned. I quickly discovered, however, that the supplies my master and I would have usually used to create a drone of our own had been depleted–well, ransacked, would be a more accurate term, by the wizard who sealed him. After all, much of the material had been enchanted in various ways–it made for a more useful drone, after all, of one could imbue it with a little additional oomph. I would have to improvise.
Bracken's Corner 