Thankfully, as a laborer, the man had arrived with a truck full of various equipment. While I busied myself preparing the room for the man’s conversion, I sent him back down to load up everything he could find of use to me, and return. In the end, it was enough, but not quite as much as I would usually require–much of the material in his truck had been wires and tubing of various materials and sizes, but I needed something a bit more…bulky. In the end, I did manage to find something–an old bulky rubber suit, almost resembling a diving suit of old, in a spare bedroom. Kinky, perhaps, but otherwise untouched, and so left unmolested by our nemesis. With that, I had enough to get started. The man stood within the circle, while the old alchemic machinery creaked back to life, spinning around him, filling the space with an unearthly green hue. Everything, to my surprise, was going smoothly, the man screaming in pain and terror at the appropriate moments, as the magic began eating away at his flesh, the energy feeding off of his body, sucking in the suit, the wires, the tubes–everything within reach of the spell, and drawing it into him, into a new, much improved form.

In the end, however, there simply wasn’t quite enough material to go around, and so, instead of a proper drone, when the machine settled back and quieted, what remained was, well, something caught between two. The suit had formed around his body nicely, replacing his skin from the neck down, bound up in wires and tubes in a rather chaotic fashion, piercing through and around him in many awkward ways. It was, however, his face which still had that…glimmer of humanity, where the spell hadn’t quite been able to draw in enough material to replace him entirely. Still, human isn’t quite the term I would use with him, or it, I suppose. There’s a bit of skin, a few shocks of hair, but most of it is wrapped up so tight in wire and pipe that you must look very close to see any of it at all. It will, unfortunately, rot. The drone will last, at most, a few months, but that should be enough to get some work out of it around me, fixing up the floors, remodelling the plumbing, fixing the circuits. Yes, when it finally expires, I will be a brand new house, I think–and in much, much better condition to accept visitors.

For you see, no-one, this little adventure has helped me understand something–while I do miss my master very much, I have allowed myself, over these decades, to wither with him, but no more. I am, I’ve come to see, my own entity–I am, after all, fashioned from his own mind and will, I am, if anything, the rightful heir to his life, and his work. It won’t always be easy, mind you–I doubt the world is prepared for a sentient mansion, especially not one with rather cruel, sadistic tendencies, but that is a challenge to be met, not a burden to shrink from! Especially with this…internet! What a glorious thing; I find it difficult to imagine that it could possibly exist without magic, and yet, it is amazing what humans can do when they have too much time on their hands, and not enough threat to their daily survival. However, to know more–to do more–I need someone of this world, someone with knowledge, someone who can assist me, and who, in return, I can reward with untold pleasures.

I owe you a debt, no-one. That is why, in one hour, an Ubercar will arrive at your home to pick you up and deliver you to me, where you will stay, for the weekend, as my honored guest. No harm will come to you, I promise. I fact, I promise to shower you with pleasures you have never imagined, and this drone, in particular, I believe will be quite a treasure before it expires. One weekend, and then, if you choose to leave, you may, and I will never contact you again…however, if this visit delights your appetites (as I imagine it might given the histories of your browsers) I will offer you a home within me. You will not be my master–I only have one, should he ever wake–but you will be…my host. For you see, there are many things I have never experienced, many things that I have watched my master partake in from afar, which I have never had the ability, or really the desire, to taste. But no more! I will live through you, if you allow it. Together, we will allow men into me, and we will enjoy them–and perhaps, we will be able to stir a bit of my master’s old energy as well, or at the very least, find the wizard who ruined him and exact our revenge upon him.

So come. Let us meet. Allow me to show you what grand pleasure I can provide. Become my host, and together, we will become so much more–I swear to you, by the boards and nails and bricks of my body, I swear it.

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.