Chapter Text
Agrafina Fedele, the Clockwork Courier:
The clockwork courier breathed deeply in the lush air of the Verdant Paths, memories of her time as a flesh-and-blood human telling her this would be restorative. Some androids coated themselves in synthetic skin sourced from the Cyberware markets that were the lifeblood of the megacities forming in the newer central realms, but she felt pride in the simplicity and honesty of the burnished silver planes of her face, modelled after her own features through the lens of a particularly fine sculptor of Earth’s Renaissance period. She’d been alive at the time, but far too busy learning to be a good wife in hopes of tipping the balance of her family’s fortunes back into the prosperous to have gone about courting the cutting edge of the art world. She sat upon the park bench, watching the ducks paddle serenely in the pond while young treefolk threw frozen peas into the water, savouring her pie construct. A local baker had made fantastic strides in recreating the warm caress of a hot pie on a cold day in a purely conceptual fashion, allowing non-organics like herself to fully enjoy the once-lost human pleasures that their chosen form had taken from them.
She sat a while longer; her next deliveries were not urgent. There was no need to rush. She looked over the leafy, safe park, and relished the warm glow of her heartstone as it crept through her system and spun the tiny gears she used to smile. None of the riches of her aristocratic childhood on Earth could compare to the soul-deep fulfilment of a good lunch and some simple errands. Born in 1478 by the calendar of Earth’s Common Era, in the city of Florence, Agrafina Fedele was the second daughter of the Fedele family. Always scrapping for success in the city’s cutthroat banking world, Agrafina’s father made it clear to her that she absolutely needed to help him secure a good match for her to marry in another of the banking families, in the hopes that they might combine their resources to protect each other’s interests and consolidate power against those that would undermine them for their tenuously held riches. Her husband, Petruccio, was a pleasant enough man; he had been raised much the same way by his own father, and the both of them knew well that their union was closer to a business partnership than one of matrimony. To outsiders, they appeared to have a happy marriage, and in many ways they did. The secret to this was that they seldom interacted; she may have politely enquired about his business dealings in far-off cities, and he may have commended her on raising their two children into solemn, respectful small adults, but in truth she longed for the horizon and he for the time with his children he’d missed too keenly for either of them to genuinely wish to hear the replies. They understood each other’s predicament well, and a sad kinship formed between them.
Since coming to the afterlife, she had reconnected with Petruccio when she found him running an orphanage for spirits sent to the afterlife earlier than nature intended. The tired eyes and sagging cheeks that had represented his appearance in their mortal spans had blossomed into a twinkling, rosy visage. The young spirits quickly found a home with him, and many former residents who had grown up in the afterlife still returned regularly to help harvest the acres of produce he and his staff tended to feed the needy and take part in festival days. He was another reason for her to glow. They had become firm friends since finding each other in the forms that let their hearts sing, and took joy in seeing each other thrive. Whenever mail for the orphanage was assigned to her, she ensured it was the last stop on her list so that she could spend the night meeting the newest residents, reconnecting with familiar faces and sipping the heady brews of the monks of the nearby mountains with friends old and new as they reminisced about old memories and pledged to forge many more.