It was just the four of us in the small workshop. Well, I say the four of us, but in reality this type of work is beneath a grand gnome such as myself. The three lesser beings in the room are supposedly the best in their fields. I would rather have gnomes in here instead, but even the Council of Nine told me these were the best.
In the end I had no choice but to hire two elves, and a smelly female human, which for some reason has a heavy smell of iron for the past two days. Despicable. An artificer with such talent that even the ruling gnomes were forced to accept her ability, and she spends time in mines for some stupid reason. The elves seem to be perturbed by her smell as well.
They both keep glancing at her while sniffing the air. Its beginning to bother me. The female elf is supposedly the best at miniaturization. We have needed her ability constantly on this project. The frame is only a box about the size of a human’s night stand; but it has to be able to hold all the contraptions I needed for this project.
And the male elf is the laborer who put my design together. It took me nearly a month of lunar eclipses to finally get it through his head that even though he is drawing the components, as well as doing the math for each part, to make sure it holds up, its still my design. He signed a magic contract that keeps him from ever taking credit for my work, they all did. There is no way I would allow a lesser race to take credit for my work.
The artificer grabbed another spool of mithril wire from the female elf. It seems that’s all the elf has been doing lately, making smaller and smaller spools of wire, and giving it to the artificer. But even I can see the twenty seven enchantment matrices interlinked, and she is using the smaller and smaller wire to interlink the enchanted cubes. I won’t lie and say I know what she is doing; but no matter what, its my design.
“Alright, Bilinda, you’re up.” the human says at last, and the rack of matrices with wires intermingled between them gets passed from the foul smelling human to the equally inept elf. In a matter of minutes, I watch as the elf stretches the wires and slowly the cubes attract closer and closer together, eventually shrinking themselves, over the course of six hours Bilinda has made the twenty seven matrice cubes the same size as one normal cube, reducing the space needed for the brain to nearly a third of the space I thought would have been required for this project.
“Gilder, you’re turn.” Bilinda says after a few hours time. He takes the cube from her, and mounts it into a contraption that I don’t remember telling him to build. Oh well, its my design, it doesn’t matter. The cube seems to be completely secure inside the cage like structure, and he turns to put it into the box. I see the holes line up, and realize this is the last component needed to get this thing to work.
“I will mount it.” I say plainly over his hunched form. He leans back, and hands me the tool that was in his hand, and holds out several screws to me. Good. An elf subservient to a gnome, as all the races will be after this is finished.
“Grace, the matrice interface ready?” Gilder asks, making me drop a screw into the cage, and into the hollow enchantment matrices inside. Gilder’s head is turned so he doesn’t notice. It cant hurt anything being in there. Iron can’t conduct the same way mithril, silver, and gold can. It wont effect anything.
The human female comes over, and begins running more enchantment wire through the cage, leading to what looks like a plug, but I don’t see anywhere it would attach. She opens a cover facing away from me, and I see her attach the bundle of wire quickly, and close the door she had just opened..
“Did you spend the night in the mine?” I asked her. Instead of answering, she just turned red. Gilder punched me immediately after that. Everything went blank for a moment, and when I came to, I was bound and gagged with both elves standing over me. I may own their ideas, but I screwed up with the contracts, there is no clause stating they couldn’t do this, and I was also bound by the same contract that I couldn’t fire them until this project was completed. A slight oversight that I will correct with the next projects contracts.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“You know that the iron smell coming from Grace isn’t from the mines.” Bilinda says to me while slapping me in the neck every few words.
“You’ve also been told before that its rude in human culture to mention that you know about it.” Gilder delivered with a quick kick that made me slide further into a corner.
A bright glow comes from the project in the corner, and I watch as it begins moving on its own. It begins grabbing components from around the shop, and creating something anew with it. Something I had never seen before. It took several hours, and I couldn’t speak to it, I couldn’t give it an order, I couldn’t tell it anything because these inferiors bound me.
Eventually, the project attached the component it had made to itself, and I heard it make a noise. After a few seconds, I heard a clear sentence come from it.
“Where am I?” it asked. I was dumbfounded. These three had created an enchanted being.
“You are in a Lab.” Grace answered for me. I began thrashing, because talking to it was supposed to be my job. “The three of us created you, financed by the Gnome tied up over there. We are also under a magical contract that we can’t tell anyone that who wasn’t in the lab while we were creating you.” she tells it.
Well crap. Another loophole that I didn’t foresee. These three inferiors are under contract, but the creation isn’t, and it was in the lab the entire time up until now at least.
“You three created this body. It is flawed.” the project said to the trio; “may I use the materials here to create a better one?”
“You may. This is Grace, and this is Bilinda, and I am Gilder. Do you wish to give yourself a name?”
“I am Andy Roni…” at that moment, a sizzling sound came out of the matrix used as its brain, but even I could tell that it was unintentional.
“Andronis.” Gilder repeated, the thick elfish accent hiding the word that was meant. “That seems to fit you.”
I didn’t even get to name my creation, they did it for me. I will make the restrictions tighter on my next magical contracts.
The contraption began scurrying around the lab, and the utility tools we had given it flourished around the block frame creating several things at once. It was amazing, so much so that my subordinates had forgotten to untie me; and carried on a conversation with it while it was working, I was still bound and gagged while laying on the floor, dealing with that stench coming off of the human female.
I watched as it created itself again in a matter of a single hour, and even made a couple of obvious improvements that I had no idea what they were for. It rolled up to the back of the other one, and plugged a bundle of cords into itself, and I watched as the enchantment circuit in the one our lab created died, and the circuit in the new one sprang to life, even brighter than it had been before.
I finally got the gag off of my mouth, and shouted at it. “Stop what you are doing. You are my creation, and I will tell you what to do.”
“You will tell me nothing.” it said to me. “I created myself. Your team may have created the original body, but I created this one. And I am under no contract or requirement to give you any credit for it. They may not be able to admit it, but I will proclaim it loud and long.”
The project, calling itself Andronis now, rolled to the door, opened it, and left. The three people whom I have contracted turned to me at the same time, and I knew I would be lucky to survive what was coming.
“The contract is over, other than us not being able to talk about it; that means that we can do anything short of killing you; but if you die while we are not in the room, we can’t be held responsible for your actions.” Grace reminded me of a clause that was required to be in all magical contracts, even slave contracts. Neither person could be punished with death if they are not directly responsible for the death, or are not in the same room at the time of death. There are a few other clauses too to prevent abuse from the contractor to the contractee, but no such protections in the reverse; hence why they could do this.
I don’t think there was a bone in my body that wasn’t broken by the time they left. Worse, by the time anyone came to find me, Andronis had already spread the word loudly that those three inferrior beings created the first body, and he created the one he was in, and would create another.
It would be another century before the creations of the first Andronis would be considered their own race; but me. I just wanted them to all die. And one day, a way to kill them all fell into my lap on a silver platter.
By this point, they had evolved into a bipedal race that was still true to it’s origins, but no longer were the basic boxes of the past. They didn’t last indefinitely, but with each generation, they were living longer and longer. A few of the original one’s creations were still alive, and I was a venerable gnome in my twilight years by this point. I handed the plans for the device to my son from my deathbed, fated to never know what would happen to a mechanical race of half a billion.