“Why? Why would she do that?” Number 17 asked, looking at Ram’s charred and smoking remains.

“I’m sorry,” Alfred sighed, “It was the only thing I could think of at the time to quickly get our hammer friend free.”

“You thought of?” Number 19 accused, “you ordered her to go kill herself like that?”

“Not quite,” Rom spoke up, “There’s no sense hiding it from you guys, I suppose. You see, we’re not normal Automata.”

Alfred sighed in an audible sort of way that didn’t actually involve breathing. “Us three. We aren’t alive, at least not any more. We are remote controlled proxies of our master, Prime.”

“So let me get this straight, you’re all puppets? Being controlled by this Prime character? So we’re actually talking to Prime, right now?” asked 16.

“Basically, yes,” Rom answered, “I, that is Prime, can section off a part of my consciousness to operate these proxies. I let them run as a background process and don’t have to mentally pay attention all the time. Each one has a tendency to pick up a specific quirk of my personality and, I think, mix in a bit from the body’s previous owner.”

The smasher fumbled backward, dragging their body in the mud. “Are you an Automata killer? You’re going to murder us and take our body??”

“Nothing of the sort, chaps,” Alfred tried to reassure JaffMeern. “Master Prime is an artificer, you see, with a love of Automata. He is one, himself. When he finds Automata that have been killed, he saves their bodies and rebuilds them. Sometimes, he needs to build new bodies to help other Automata.”

“Other times, he builds proxies like us to help out as extra hands,” Rom finished.

“Can... Can this Master Prime build us new bodies? Don’t get your hopes up Jaff. You want to stay like this Meern?? ...No. No I do not.”

“He would have to take a look at you, to see how you were installed, but he should be able to, yes,” Alfred replied.

“Why do you talk about Prime like he’s someone else, if you’re all puppets being controlled by the same person?” asked 20.

Both Alfred and Rom turned to look at the guard and replied in unison, “If I use ‘I’ all the time, in every body, it becomes confusing about which body I’m talking about, and a little unsettling for others.”

“Gah! Got it! Understood! Please don’t do that again!”

“This is all very interesting, but can we get going?” 18 advised. “It’s going to be dawn soon and we’re soaked to our cores.”

“I’m very much looking forward to not being in the rain for once. Oh me too. Not having rust in my joints would be lovely. Seriously, that would be just lovely. Yes, I just said that. And I’m agreeing with you,” JaffMeern remarked.

“Hey guys, I found a cart we can use! It’s even got a tarp over it, we just need to clear out all the rocks.” Number 16 called out, pointing to a large reinforced cart. The cart had steel plating in the bed over the wood frame with thick iron banding holding it together. It didn’t look particularly comfortable, but then it was designed for hauling tons of rock regularly.

“What about the horse situation, chap? I can’t even imagine the size of the horse needed to pull something like this.” Alfred called out.

Number 20 chuckled and walked away to help remove the rocks and boulders and the rest followed. 17 put a hand on Alfred’s shoulder, “no horse could pull that thing. That’s what the Rhinoxen are for.”

“I wanna help!” JaffMeern called out as they walked over to the cart. They had figured out that they could lift their body off of the ground and could move around treating their massive hammer arms like legs. When they got close, the others moved out of the way just in time as JaffMeern planted themselves at the lead end of the cart and lifted it, tipping the contents out the back.

The sound of the remaining rocks and boulders tumbling out made a loud cracking, crashing sound. JaffMeern looked sheepish as they set the cart back down.

“Ah, cripes. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it big guy. Guys? Big Guys? The guards will just think it’s thunder from the storm,” 19 coaxed.

“What’s a Rhinoxen?” Rom asked.

Number 17 looked at her for a minute, as if to say Are you serious? “Huge six legged beasts, covered in armor plating, three horns in a row on their face? They use them all the time for commercial transport, they’re just slow.”

“Hmm,” Alfred said, he wanted to tap his moustache but his arms were busy holding Ram’s body. “I believe we saw one of those in the forest, it had been killed by a wyvern. No horns though.”

“That’d be a female,” 20 offered, “only the males have the horns.”

With the cart cleared out, JaffMeern pulled themselves up into the driver’s seat, hopelessly ruining its chances of ever being comfortable again.

“You fancy driving the cart, Jaff and Meern?” Alfred asked as he gingerly laid Ram down in the bed, behind the driver’s seat.

“We can’t both drive,” JaffMeern said matter-of-factly. “I’ll drive, and Meern can be the Rhinox. Eh, guess that’s fair, but I want to switch after a bit.”

We found some lashing ropes and tied JaffMeern down to the cart. Once everyone was on board and under the tarp, Meern would reach out with their massive hammer fists and pound the ground ahead and pull the cart forward. It was a very rough and jerky ride to start but they soon found the rhythm of it and could pull the cart along at the pace of a horse trot. Though, one much louder and heavier.

We headed south on the road to the capital until we found the cutoff east into the forest. The rain was letting up and thanks to the poor weather, we didn’t encounter anyone trying to stop us or beasts trying to attack us. Muddy roads were another issue though as we had to keep getting out of the cart to pull it free from one muddy rut or another.

JaffMeern was really getting into cart pulling, surprisingly so. I couldn’t help but wonder if one of them was a centaur before the conversion. The former Knight Watch squad took turns staying in the cart when the others would go out to pull the cart free from another mud puddle. The one left in the cart then had the down time to unlock their past memories and then deal with what came with them.

Number 16 was named Rebecca. She was a wife and mother on a small goat farm in the North Ridge mountains before the conversion. She remembered losing her husband to a harsh winter. He had left in a blizzard to see to the goats and never came back. She had four children to take care of and had abandoned the farm with them to go try to find work in Trone. The Factory had welcomed her in and promised her a large salary. That was the last thing she remembered before becoming an Automata in the service of the Knight Watch.

Number 17 only had very vague memories of a mother and father with pink skin and horns. She felt like she was a she, but couldn’t explain why and didn’t know where she had come from or what her name was. She must have been quite young when she was converted.

Number 18 grew up in the neighboring country of Dhahran. His name was Alika and he was a graduate of the martial academy and had entered the army. His unit had been on patrol along the border when they were ambushed by a raiding party. He was taken prisoner along with several others of his unit and brought to a strange facility. He was executed along with the other prisoners by men in dark robes. The next thing he knew, he was an Automata.

Number 19 remembered being a boy named Kalua, living in the treetop forest village of Kuhualakai. He was a teenager at the time when a band of mercenaries had attacked the village and captured many of his people. It seemed like they were to be sold as slaves and a human man with black eyes and a heavily scarred face had purchased all of them. When they were brought to the man’s castle, they were treated with some kindness and given a chance to bathe and eat. He remembered going to sleep, but then his next memories were waking as an Automata.

Number 20 was a sailor named Remi, who served on the pirate ship Revenge. He had been captured by the King’s Guard in the small port town of Cloudwall when his ship was docked in the major port of Bowen’s Wharf. He remembered seeing some shady looking guys in black robes paying the guards at the “trial”. The trial consisted of one of the King’s men putting on a judge’s wig and hitting an empty mug on the table while yelling “guilty”. The next morning he was executed along with some other prisoners that the guardsmen couldn’t be bothered to transport back to the capital. It seemed particularly cruel to force him into servitude to the Guard, even if it was the Knight Watch rather than the King’s Guard.

It was expected, but with the exception of Number 17, all the former guardsmen were sullen and lost in their own thoughts as they dealt with the reclaimed knowledge of their past lives. Learning their stories, though, painted a grim picture of what this Factory has been doing over the years. It would seem that paying for children like Shiro wasn’t all they were guilty of, but also taking transients, foriegn soldiers, captured slaves, criminal prisoners... The idea of the Factory expanding their operation to include sending murderbots to wipe out entire remote villages in the forest didn’t seem too far fetched.

The real question is: where were all of the Automata going? I only saw a handful in Urd, and there was no way that the demands for Automata servants by the upper class would require this level of production, even considering what I assumed would be in the Capital. These were only the atrocities that we knew about, what other dark secrets were hiding in Trone?