“It doesn’t hurt. Not how it feels like it should, anyway.” I’m in the process of repairing a hand on the new doll, the doll that used to be Sam. It was holding it in a fire when I found it.
“What do you mean, should?” I ask, carefully removing the porcelain shell from its palm as it holds dutifully still.
“This one can’t say with any specificity. But it feels wrong, somehow.” I had hoped, when I made the decision to transfer Sam into a core, that they would remember who they were after the process was complete. The ritual I performed definitely involved mirroring the hippocampus, the section of the brain responsible for memory. I was sure that would be enough. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way, though. The doll I put Sam into is acting like, well, a doll. It refers to itself in the third person, as an object, without being directed to. It tries to make itself useful around the house. It shows no indication of having any conception of having previously been something other than a doll, beyond… This vague sense of unease with its current body. It keeps damaging itself, and I don’t know what to do about it. This isn’t exactly a situation I or, as far as I’m aware, anyone else, has had to deal with. There’s no protocol for it, no easy 5 steps for fixing the existential ennui of your new formerly-human doll.
For now, I suppose I should focus on the repair, and on trying to get it to stop damaging its vessel. “Would you prefer if it did hurt?”
“This one thinks so, yes. It feels… unsatisfied, with having the damage but not the hurt.”
“Well, I don’t think I can really do anything to make you feel pain. None of these vessels are built for that kind of sensation, there’s not much use for it when they’re so easy to repair. It wouldn’t be a trivial problem to solve and I don’t really have the free time to plug away at it.” It says nothing as I set about repairing the shell I took off of its hand. “In any case, continuing to harm yourself isn’t going to bring it back.”
It simply sits and examines the exposed skeleton of its hand thoughtfully. The porcelain pieces are what really give dolls a semblance of life, without them they look more nakedly robotic. Utilitarian metal endoskeletons, brass-colored bars connecting complex mechanical joints. It sits on the edge of my workstation and flexes its fingers experimentally, watching intently as the multilayered mechanisms in its knuckles fold and slide over each other. Once upon a time they would’ve been a simple hinge joint, but that’s not quite how real fingers work, and the art of doll construction has made a lot of headway in bridging that gap over the years.
I’m in the middle of shaving off the parts of a porcelain plate that are too damaged to salvage when a booming explosion rings out in the air above me. That sounded like it came from the first floor. I freeze, listening intently, and hear a few heavy thuds followed closely by what sound like gunshots. Someone’s definitely here, someone who shouldn’t be. I drop the parts I’m working on and snap my fingers, sending out a cosma pulse that communicates instructions to all my dolls. All the ones I made myself, anyway. Sam didn’t have the protocols to interpret this nonverbal communication written into its core, so it doesn’t even notice what I’ve just done. All my other dolls, however, begin executing their emergency protocol, forming orderly processions to a designated spot in the workshop where a handful of them are collecting cores from the rest and placing them into portable storage which I can easily retrieve before exiting the premises. I don’t know how removing the core from the vessel would affect Sam, so it’s probably for the best that it’s not equipped to follow this unspoken command. I’m sure we can handle carrying one full vessel in addition to all the cores.
There’s someone else down here who won’t have picked up on my signal, however. I stand up and tell Sam to follow me, immediately darting off toward the corner that Jackie has taken over as his workshop. As usual, I find him there modifying spare parts. I actually can’t tell at a glance exactly what he’s making them into, but now isn’t the time to try to puzzle it out.
“Jackie! Someone just broke into the house!”
He turns toward me, protective goggles resting on his face to shield him from the cosma runoff of his work. “What? I didn’t think they could get in here?”
“I can make it hard to get in, I can’t make it impossible. Come on, we’re grabbing the cores and leaving. They should already be gathered up.”
He lifts his goggles onto his forehead and tosses his tools onto the desk as he gets up and follows me. In short order I’ve retrieved the case the doll cores have been gathered into, removing the last two from their vessels and stowing them with the rest, and the three of us begin to make our way upstairs.
As we near the top of the staircase, I slow down to a stop, leaning up against the corner of the stairwell and preparing to check for signs of intruders before proceeding. Sam doesn’t notice and ends up barreling forward. As soon as it rounds the corner, there’s a loud crack and it’s flung to the floor of the hall with a bullet hole in its porcelain faceplate. Fortunately doll vessels don’t have any vital components in their heads. It lays still, and after a moment a scrawny figure with dark red skin, short-cropped black hair, and tiny, nubby black horns approaches it, brandishing a pair of pistols. He doesn’t see me, distracted as he is by the doll on the floor in front of him, so I seize the opportunity to get the drop on him. There's a brief flash of yellow that jumps from my hand to his back. Unmodified cosma, it turns out, can be quite incapacitating when funneled directly into a person’s body without protection. He’ll be fine, but it’ll be a few hours before he wakes up.
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No sooner have I knocked our uninvited guest out than I hear a guttural scream from further down the hall, in the direction he came from. I turn to see another combat demon sprinting toward me, winding up for a swing with her enormous hammer, but before she reaches me she lets out a scream and drops her hammer, both hands scrabbling at her back. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but before she can pull herself back together Victoria is upon her, pummeling her into the wall. I consider the threat effectively neutralized, and scurry down the hallway to check on Sam.
That scar on its forehead certainly looks nasty, and we likely won’t be able to do anything about it for a good while, but it will undoubtedly be fine. It’s certainly starting to look like a bit of a mess, though, between the bullet hole and the hand that's been stripped down to its skeleton. We can fix those eventually, I’m sure.
As soon as I complete my perfunctory examination of the doll, I hand it off to Jackie and begin moving. He follows closely behind me, and in short order we find our way to an exit. No one’s better at navigating this house than I am, and the on-the-fly rearrangement I did to get me here so quickly has also put our interlopers further away. Of course, that also puts Victoria further from the exit, and I have no idea where Alice is, but Victoria can handle herself and, under the circumstances, I am really not in a position to concern myself with Alice. Instead I quickly cast a cloak around Jackie and myself, and pull him down a side street.
“We should be fine, for now, I don’t think either of us is who they’re after, and as long as we don’t put ourselves too obviously in anyone’s attention they shouldn’t notice us.” I set the case of doll cores down on the ground and open it up, quickly checking for any obvious signs of damage. Everything seems fine, they’re all still glowing softly. I breathe a sigh of relief and lean against the brick wall next to me. The stress of an actual home invasion is starting to hit me now that I’m no longer in immediate danger. I had planned for this for years, of course, otherwise my escape wouldn’t have gone so smoothly, but planning for the possibility doesn’t mean actually expecting it’ll happen. As aware of my limits as I may be, I really had grown to think of my home as a truly safe place, somewhere I wouldn’t have to deal with any of the issues that run rampant through the rest of the city. Not directly, anyway. That was naive, of course. Even if I hadn’t gotten wrapped up with Alice and Victoria, it’s inevitable that eventually an independent witch will begin attracting unwanted visitors to her door. It’s just a question of when.
A clattering and a stream of expletives rings out from the end of the alley we’re in. I turn toward it and see Victoria staggering away from the house, with Alice in tow. I call out her name before she can run off, and once the two of them join us I toss the cloak over them as well. “I only saw two demons in there, were there more?”
Victoria shakes her head. “Just the two, and the one you hit was already out when I got there.”
“Yeah, he shouldn’t wake up for a few more hours. What about the girl with the hammer?”
“She’s gonna be spending a little time in recovery. We should be able to get away clean if we move now.”
“Lead the way, then.”
We follow Victoria into a nearby manhole cover, which deposits us in some dark, cramped maintenance tunnels. As we begin to make our way through the catacombs, I take the opportunity to calm myself down a bit. This was certainly a shock, a nasty one, but all considered it could’ve been much worse. I got my dolls out, I was already as finished as I was gonna get with my research on that info Victoria and Alice got me, nothing got irreparably damaged. Nobody seemed to have gotten caught in the crossfire except Sam, and it seemed to be fine.
Actually, I should probably check on it more thoroughly. I wave Jackie over to me, and he hands me the doll. A quick inspection of its head shows the damage is merely cosmetic; I ask how it’s feeling, and it says it doesn’t notice a difference. Things could definitely have turned out worse, although I can’t say I cherish the memory of seeing it get shot. But at least it wasn’t someone who would've been seriously hurt by the bullet.
Once I’ve finished inspecting the doll, I approach Alice. “You didn’t get hurt, did you? I suspect that it was you and Victoria they were primarily after, so I doubt they were planning to be very gentle with you.”
She shakes her head, fidgeting with her hands slightly. “No, I… I’m fine. I guess Victoria was right, though, I probably should learn to fight in a way that can stand up to these kinds of people. If they find me again, I don’t want to be helpless like this.”
I don’t have much to say about that. She’s right, if she’s going to be wanted by angels and demons all over the city, it doesn’t make sense not to be able to defend herself from them. Much as I wish I could simply keep her safe myself, it’s not realistic. I can’t keep an eye on her all the time, and I can’t reliably fight off combat demons in a straight fight.
We continue walking for what feels like miles in silence, until eventually Victoria pulls some scrap metal aside from a wall and reveals a door hidden behind it. The door opens into a surprisingly spacious brick room with a couple lights on the ceiling and some cots built into the far wall. There are a pair of workbenches built into the near wall as well, on either side of the entrance. It doesn't look particularly comfortable, but it’s certainly livable.
“This place used to see a lot more use, back when working maintenance down here was a full-time job," Victoria explains. "Shifts could last for weeks at a time, and the repairmen on call would sleep in here. That stopped after the strikes, of course, so now nobody really uses these bunkers, and most people don’t even remember they exist. If we’re careful, we should be able to stay here for a while without issue.”
I set down my box of cores in one of the corners, and sit on one of the cots. “Thank you, Victoria. I think we could all use some rest after what just happened.”
She nods and pulls the scrap back across the doorway, before closing the door and laying down on one of the other cots. It doesn’t take her long to fall asleep, which isn’t surprising. I’m sure she’s quite used to battlefield rests. Alice and Jackie each select one of the remaining ones. Alice lays down, Jackie just sits on it and removes his goggles. I should check in on him soon, but I’m truly exhausted. I lay down, turn to face the wall the cot is built into, and fall asleep before long.