I blinked my eyes, bright sunlight blaring in my face. I squinted through the glare until an image of my location started to form from the blur. I was in a giant, circular room, like an old fashioned library or office. Stone walls lined with mismatched bookcases, shelves lined with knick-knacks and figurines and old leather bound books, from floor to ceiling. Work tables covered in strange clockwork contraptions, half disassembled, scattered across their leather clad tabletops. Strange devices and tools arranged beside these works in progress with magnifying glasses and tubes and unlit burners on some, arranged like chemistry experiments. 

 A part of the wall was torn away opposite me, across the vast room, revealing a nighttime view of forested mountain peaks outside with ice capped points. The room was absolutely massive, everything in it on the scale of giants, the tables 30 or 40 feet high, the books in the shelves large enough to crush me.

 I was high up on one wall, propped up in some kind of metal and wood contraption, on one of the massive shelf's. Over my head was suspended a large glass lense, a line of different sized lenses leading up and away from it, angled in a line pointing up through a round window set high in the conical ceiling and focused on me. A view out into the dark night sky, magnified in parts through the lenses,twinkling with stars.

 I looked around in wonder, trying to take everything in. I was in a room for giants, a tiny interloper put away on a high shelf. My body was numb and unresponsive, my head moving sluggishly on my neck as I panned my eyes slowly about the room. I lifted my hands haltingly and looked down at them, then I froze.

 My hands were gone, my arms too. Instead I had raised a couple of wooden prosthetics, just a blob of wood for a hand, no fingers, attached to another longer block with a simple inset metal ball and socket hinge between the two. I leant back, the wood and leather of the sling contraption I was in creaking with the movement, and looked down at my body with horror. 

 I was wooden all over. A wood block for a chest. The usual two arms and two legs, also wood, with joints at the shoulder elbow and wrist, the hip knee and ankle. No fingers or toes, just flat blocks for hands and feet. Completely naked but with no wooden 'bits' to cover. I was in the body of a wooden toy, like the posable figures artists use.

 I noticed for the first time that I wasn't breathing. I raised my wooden hands to feel at my face. No opening at my mouth or in my ears, no eyeballs, just vague carvings.

 The blocks that served as my hands delivered sensation, if of a sort of numb, distant variety. More like I was being told what I was feeling then actually feeling it. Likewise I could feel the pressure on my face as I searched it. I passed my hands over my eyes again but they just seemed to be vague impressions carved into the wood, like my mouth and ears and nose, though I was seeing clearly and in vivid colour, my hands covering my sight as I passed them over my eye carvings. I could also hear and smell. What the actual fuck is going on?!

 I lifted myself up in the harness contraption I was in, lifting my arms from their leather slings and falling forward clumsily, dropping free of my support and clattering down on my wooden hands and knees. I knelt there, shaking, and looked up and out across the giant sized room. Suddenly I understood what was going on, at least in part. The room wasn't giant, I was small.

 I was a small wooden puppet. An old toy set high up on the bookshelves by some forgotten resident. As I looked about the room I saw layers of dust on the surfaces and coating the clockwork mechanisms and experiments. The place had a damp, musty smell. The wind whistled through the hole in the wall and outside I could hear the distant calls of nightbirds. All of these sensations came together to give the place a feeling of long abandonment.

 I struggled unsteadily to my puppet feet, wobbling uncertainly as I stood to my full height. From my perspective I'd guess I was about a foot tall, a bit less maybe. Long limbed, spindly and brittle feeling. I felt terribly vulnerable.

 As I stood and tried to settle myself a window opened in the air in front of my face and text began typing itself out.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

You have unlocked the Homunculus skill tree.

A new image formed in the window, just a blank grey space with a rippling brown line along the bottom, then a brown shoot started growing from the line and stopped once it had grown a few centimetres. A box of text popped up over this new growth and filled with the words 'Carver'. I focused on this box and it widened to fill the screen, more text typing itself out.

Carver - Trunk ability - Gain the ability to shape your form through concentration and force of will.

I concentrated and the box of text disappeared, leaving my view of the room unobstructed. I lifted my hand in front of my face. I could feel this ability inside me, I knew how to use it instinctively. Concentrating I began to mold my hand, carving four rivets down the flat surface and then separating out the sections to make five crude fingers. I wiggled the hingeless sticks in glee. This I could work with.

I sat on the floor of my high shelf and worked on my body. First I fashioned working hands with opposable thumbs, knowing I'd need those to operate any kind of tool. The process was quick at first, I was a decent artist and this ability to just mentally carve my body made it easy to shape fingers and a palm. Usually when drawing I found I could never quite recreate the image I saw in my head, my hands and eyes proving insufficient tools to perfectly replicate my imaginings. But this ability removed the need for any tool, it worked my will directly. It was truly marvelous.

 Creating the mechanisms to bend and manipulate the fingers freely took much longer than the initial carving. I couldn't create proper hinges like in my knees and shoulders because my hands were solid wood, that material unsuitable for proper mechanism. I could've created some kind of socket joint out of just the wood maybe but then I would've had to completely separate the material. The joints were obviously the same, the metal connections in the joints were separate, they had to be to work. But I was wary of fully separating a piece of my body, thinking it might just fall off.

 Instead I stretched and tenderised the joints of the fingers so they could flex and clench. This wouldn't give me great dexterity and I'd have a terribly weak grip but it was the best I could manage.

 Next I worked on my feet. This too was a long process, carving different areas then standing to test my balance and agility. I ended up with wide flat feet with three large toes, comically big but with great balance and movement ability. I then spent a while shaping my arms and legs into a more man-like shape generally, shaping out my chest and back, just so I could feel slightly more normal. I left the metal hinges serving as my joints alone for the moment, I was already considering ways to shape the metal into something better but I wanted time to consider my options. Finally done with my self improvements I stood and dusted myself off, surveying the giant room and trying to plan a way down from my perch.

 As I scanned the bookshelves below me and the worktable closest to me, considering my options for a descent, I had a moment to consider how ridiculous this all was. I'd woken up in a strange room with a massive hole in it, in the body of a small, sloppily carved puppet. I'd somehow unlocked magical powers that seemed to be working like a game, skill trees and pop up windows. And I was just taking it all in stride, not questioning anything.

 I stopped, realising I wasn't precisely sure who I was. I knew I was human, or at least had been. I was a man and my name was… No, I couldn't remember my name. I was in my thirties, I thought, but couldn't remember that exactly either. I was British, from a country called England. I couldn't remember any other countries from my world when I tried to though. I couldn't remember the town I lived in or any towns from this England place at all actually. My favourite food was roast dinner, especially roast potatoes. I could remember lots of kinds of foods from my world, pizza and burgers and chocolate. But I couldn't remember anyone I'd ever met, couldn't picture a single person's face clearly.

 Admittedly, I started to freak out a little at my strange, broken mind, my fractured memories with no sense or structure. No seniority.

 A memory of rain falling on a street lit by orange streetlights. A woman reaching out to grab my hand as a child, her face a blur, pulling me along happily down a bush lined pathway, swinging me suddenly off my feet, a whoop of pure joy bursting from my mouth. Sitting in the driver's seat of a car at night, crying and bashing my hands into the steering wheel. A bar, flashing with lights and crazy with people and voices and music, a drink in my hand and a wild grin on my face.

 One after another, memories with no connection, no sense of feeling or remembrance, like someone else's thoughts were flashing through my mind, unbidden and uncontrolled.

 I clutched my newly formed hands to my face and screeched, the first sound I'd made since coming to this world, the sound emerging as a bassy tremor like someone whipping their wand across the strings of a violin. Then I collapsed boneless and fell unconscious.