"EGGMAN, MORE"
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Prelude
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Egg.
Man.
Neither one…
Both now.
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Chapter 1: The Cant, Forlorn
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Whatever hoarse unending call could rasp that single putrid cry of blasphemy: It spoke all too late to stop the machinations of perverse genius that addled the weird doctor. He was warned. Warned not once but thrice.
Warned once by the hammer maiden not to seek its creation.
Warned once by the meek mechanic of flight that it could not be done.
Warned once by the stalwart guardian of the vermillion jewel that its power would be too great.
He did not listen, and so, the music of Dark Science he has heard.
And there in the dark twilight, of a black, ghastly, awful, shadowy spot, where there was no sun and the crusted, cratered moon, full and breathless, dripped with a yellow light, deep and rich as if gracefully caste off from a yore-spawned candle above the vast dampness of a wet ocean was the very sight of ruin.
Bolt, like nail, and wrench, like hammer, were beaten together with melting iron that shrieked the cruel smokey cry of a minute-late baker who, against all warnings of divine grace, acted in violent volatile proleptic swiftness with his oven-mitted hands to defy the orders of the sacrosanct which claimed that man’s nature should rise like yeast. Rise as if instilled by the breath of life, forgotten and misused by the deepest pits of creation.
The thing – for we must call it that being not man or beast or entirely unliving – itself was the image of poisoned steel in a world of bone and flushed marrow. Born in the chthonic burial place of the singular forefathers, it languished at a creation of storm. Beyond the Green Hills and Emerald Coast, they had brought steel from the sky and earth. The Pachacamac’s Chaos brought them labor. But it was that Doctor, hollow and terrible, that spirited them to dream his dreams and enact his will.
Tonight, its mounted lights are to stare, justly, at a sky that is amber and absent of humanity.
But that, dear reader, is not where the story begins…
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Chapter 2: Stitch the Wires
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Hedge.
Hog.
Press farther…
Know no pity.
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Chapter 3: The Instruments of Life
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Crawling and cackling, its beat has sprung from that merciless pulse. An undulation of bandaged soul now bloated and coarse with oils of vitriol. Oil alone will not do. Forge skin for it out of - mirror. One mirror pitched with the black night of his Shadow and held brights by tangled splinters of his Silver. No queen of bats will know its secret name. No racing hawk may swoop upon it. The name of it is secret and sepulcher. To gaze upon its mane is to give away once flesh for blinding truths and broken confidence.
This melody of being, just like all things, was itself a song born of threes:
The first act was made in hate. For early did the dawn-spiders help the doctor, once good and wise, to point, like lances, the great beacons of its lamps to gaze upon a blood-dark ocean like ancient terrible eyes. Creation was painful, and for all its pains it fixed upon the sea. The sea, running rapid. The waves richest in the blues. Gathering around the wretched man, golden rings in hand, rushing through the sand. Make-believes reborn. Myths in mind rethought. Until in the absent landscape the enemy was known.
The second act was an act of steel, cold and cruel. Inmalleable to the forces of flesh. Unaging lest by creep of time or heat of the volcanic cataclysms, so demanded by the labors of its creation. For 14 days and 14 nights, 14 architects drafted with bygone blood plants to take from the veined heart of this world (this world has many hearts) the necessary fuels and fires to craft steel columns that could support the visions of The Doctor. And so seas of men were cast to bring the molten metals, copper and bronze and tin and lead unto a boiled heap upon the stone given by their master’s commandments. And in steel undying was the mechanism of their vision branded unto an earth that would forever leave behind the manufactured scars of war.
The final act was its haste. A speed proclaimed in the ballads of men that history’s most studious records have forgotten. But the creation upon such a rocky tempered stone was of steel and size impossible to achieve vermin-crushing momentum. How could such a scale climb a mountain? How could it avoid the perils of a valley? The answer there was scale. For as the scaffolds rose to heights unfathomed by the clouds, for as the weight of steel mounted down the liquid core of this planet. The infant motor of automata became greater in size and scope. What of mountains to an object of such magnitude? What of valleys when a footstep is greater than such widths? For it was that yoking man’s calculation. A novel postulate understood by anything in view of the microscopic world. “Build more” he commanded “to the mass and to the engine” – for there can be no concerns of scale in fashioning a thing of such unconquerable power and momentum. “Build it so great in size that even the mountains become flat in comparison.”
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Chapter 4: Sing, Sing, Sweet Madness
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Blue.
Blur.
Faster, faster…
Impulse grows near.
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Chapter 5: Its name, Robotnick
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A man. I swore with the words of a man once! If only the son could mime those cowering words to his father. The father! The son! What was his cursed name? Of Gerald… of moons… of the gap and dark between the stars. It was not a name… It was a gasp. A headless yawning scream. A lullaby or anthem or inaudible hymnal promise to the straining reach of all the practical scholarly philosophies, both, natural as being from the earth and, in their very hiding, innately blasphemous in such a twisted application.
It is night now and these things, too, must deeply dream. For it would take more than a right of gilded bands to waken from the endless sleep. Somnium; the feverish pace of slumber; the jostling race of sleep: It was only this path of the under-mind that could laud such a creation. A lauding to give it a name:
A name of velocity and charge, pace and hurry, movement and rush.
An enduring sprint.
A Sonic speed.