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1
i invented you (i invented you) and i will destroy you.
She supposes she feels a little guilty about the puppet. She made it from her own hand, after all. Carved the wood, made the joints, made the little space where a human heart would be, shaped like the chess piece of her own gnosis.
It was just a prototype, after all, she couldn’t have expected it to be perfect. Even after hours of milling over the wooden body, there were still little imperfections in the carving, little indents from where her grip on the doll had slipped or she accidently carved a bit too much off of the limb. Some parts have burn marks, from when she accidently knocked a candle over.
Honestly, Beelzebul was no carpenter, nor a puppeteer, let alone a scientist capable of making a puppet that was more like a robot. But, she is an all-powerful deity, and there are ways other than nuts and bolts and screws to do the whole puppet-to-rule-over-your-nation thing.
In the end, the first prototype is flawed. No doubt about it. It has burns from when she knocked a candle over, it has weird notches in the limbs, there’s a dent in the wood from when she got angry and threw the arm piece against the wall. It’s not perfect. She didn’t expect it to be.
Maybe, perhaps it might work. For the time being, before she can get a better one. She can put her heart into that little chess piece shaped hole in its chest, she can put its long hair into a braid like hers, dress it up in the right clothes, give it the orders. It can work. She can make this work.
So, three days after making it, she sets it down on the table, the same one she’d spent weeks bending over with a shaking hand, some wood, and a knife. She takes her heart out of her chest, and puts it in the puppet.
It comes alive.
The same night, it cries. Puppets do not cry.
The puppet is too human, despite still being a puppet. She cannot keep it.
She spends a few hours debating on what to do. She could destroy it, use the leftovers for a new puppet, or she could find a way to turn it off—she hadn’t thought of adding one while making the prototype—and try and fix it, or she could raise it as a human and pretend it was never a puppet at all. None of those options seem very good however, either stopped by her own moral compass or her willingness to follow through.
The only solution she can think of is to simply abandon it.
And abandon it she does. She goes to the Shekkei Pavilion, and she takes the too-human-to-be-a-puppet-but-too-puppet-to-be-a-human with her. She drops it off in a clearing with soft grass and flowers blooming on the edges; with two flaming maple trees looming over it.
Then she leaves, hoping to never see the failed puppet ever again. For her own sake.
2
friction sparks from metal, make it look like bleeding.
Yae Miko had long since forgotten about the puppet. Of course she knew about it, her dearest Ei had told her about it—like she did most things. Told her about how it was too human to be used for her plans, but too inhuman to be, well, human. She tells Miko about how in the end, she decides to simply abandon it at the Shekkei Pavilion, putting it to sleep.
Well, forgotten isn’t the right word. More like she hasn’t thought about it. She has much more important things to think about than a proof of concept stuck in a limbo of personhood and nonbeing. She’s simply never had to think about it.
That is, until right now.
She had come down to meet the puppet, considering the thing had been asking for a presence with the shogun—who, in fact, was not in this plane of existence, at the moment mind you, and instead was a robot. The Shogun, who was not the Shogun at all. Simply a puppet fulfilling the real Shoguns orders. When she comes down to meet the failed puppet who cried in its sleep, she expects something reminiscent of what Ei herself looks like.
Instead, she gets what looks like a young man. It’s clear that its hair was cut shoddily, like it was done on a whim without a mirror. The clothes it wears are colorful, and it looks eccentric. It’s quite clear that it’s made of wood and magic.
She listens to what it has to say.
It talks of Tatarasuna, a story involving the Akame Clan and a Mechanic from Fontaine, who when working together streamlined the processing of Crystal Marrow. It talks of the malfunctions of the main furnace, of black gas and sick workers. It begged for help.
She doesn’t have time to listen to it for long, she has other things to do. But she sent people to help the residents of Tartarsuna, she was not about to abandon the people that the puppet so clearly cared about. Even if she did not care about it herself.
Apparently, the puppet had gone to shut down the furnace itself. Soon after that, she hears news of its disappearance from Tartarasuna as a whole.
The too-human puppet is truly an enigma.
3
and if a leopard doesn’t change its spots, you can’t change my perception just from dots to dots.
When the Doctor meets the puppet, he is nothing short of curious.
What genius could have made a puppet that felt so truly alive, after all? A puppet able to mimic human emotion so thoroughly, that if it wasn’t for the obvious wooden body, Dottore would have thought it was a real human. A genius, he concludes. A brilliant genius who he could learn from.
Which is why, when the puppet tells him its creator abandoned it, and its creator was the Electro Archon—who gave him life with the power of her heart, he can’t help but feel disappointed. The puppet was alive with magic and wood, there was no machinery behind it. No programming, nor nuts or bolts or a mechanical brain driving the things very action, very being.
The thing is brainless, literally. Its head is solid wood, and yet it still acts so human. It still acts like it has wants and desires.
Even if it was not made by a genius, and was made from magic instead of something practical, Dottore figures he can use this to his advantage. There has to be a reason why it works the way it does. He would like to find out exactly how.
It tells him its name. He could care less. It may act and look like a person, but the truth of the matter is that it is wood and magic. A person is not wood and magic.
So, he plays along. He calls it by the name it gave him, he treats it as if it were a proper human being—of which it is not. It’s quite easy to convince it to hand itself over for his own experiments, to figure out what exactly is making this thing run.
The experiment still runs even after the puppet thinks they are over.
+1
“beware” the sign on the door suggests, i’m better off with artificial intelligence.
When he meets the puppet, he’s not sure what to think.
He’s clearly not human, but acts so much like one that he might as well be. So much so, that he can care less about the wooden body or the ball-joints or the solid head. The body doesn’t make you a person, it's the way you act, isn’t it? It’s the way you feel, the way you process things. One sole thing like what your body is made of doesn’t suddenly make you inhuman.
He doesn’t know where he got that from, but he knows that it’s an important part of his worldview. He knows there's a reason why, a memory he’s long since forgotten, a person he can no longer put a face to.
When Bennett first meets the puppet, he’s terrified and he runs away.
The second time around, he avoids him.
The third time around, it's the puppet that comes to him. The third time is the one that proves this idea of your body not making you human, but your actions that do.
It’s a blizzard, that in itself isn’t the part that has him hugging his pillow and biting his lip. It’s the thunder that does. He’s not sure why he’s scared of it, or why every loud boom shoot’s unbelievable fear through him, but it does.
His door was open at the time, and the puppet was walking past. He saw him.
He remembers the puppet comforting him. He remembers crying. He remembers the puppet giving him his name. He remembers watching the lightning whilst leaning against the puppets shoulder.
To him, the puppet is not a puppet. To him, the puppet is Kunikuzushi. To him, the puppet is a friend, a brother, and above all: human.