AN: All credit for the character of Adel Aslet goes to @-Giraffe- , back when that snek was cool. Also credit to Mary Shelley for being an inspiration throughout the games, and especially in this piece.
The Kozlowski house has somehow garnered two opposing reputations. To those neighbors that slog home from factory jobs to a meal and a cot and nothing else - those who are asleep before the sun sinks - the mansion is eerily quiet. To those with a family to tend, or studying that can't be delayed any longer, with anything that pushes sleep back into the dark recesses of midnight, it is the source of the raucous clattering which pilfers ever more hours from their slumbers. Hertzel doesn't think much of his house, not in terms of noise. It's too big, such that there are multiple rooms he disregards, and those rooms are all much too dirty, but they, and indeed the house as a whole, sound just about the way a house ought to. In keeping with his nonalignment with the two groups, he doesn't sleep at all.
Calluses of stuck-on glue dry and scab over his palms. Pain hides under the beds of his fingernails, the flesh there chaffed and raw from prying apart, and otherwise manipulating, minuscule mechanics. Aromatics traipse between a jar of an adhesive compound and his nostrils, which are piqued by the tartness of their scent. The ghosts of welding sparks prick pungent upon his tongue. He swallows them, expending an effort, for his mouth is dry with unreasonable excitement. Thinking only for the present, and only of the future, he pants. Like brainless arachnids, his fingers skitter over his project, quick to leap up from the metallic appendage as if it were hot as embers. Indeed, it brings back memories which sear.
The leg is bleeding out on his table. Cogs and grease spill away from it, and run toward the additional parts he's brought in from either stockroom shops, or other rooms of the house.
Throughout Three, Hertzel has been scavenging as a bandit might, sticking to the shadows and only the most disreputable distributors. The people have decided that his every move is newsworthy, and he despises it. His only solaces are the most garrulous of scum, who would tell their costumes he had become a patron of their stand even if he had turned up dead moons ago. He goes to them, and buys their pieces, and lets them talk and lose their minds as they are met with the cries of the doubters they have deservedly cultivated. There was a kid, just a boy, who had somehow gotten hold of some sprockets. He was a sickly looking boy of harrowed bones and easy bruises, and he was set up at an overturned bucket out behind a warehouse. Hertzel went there late one night, and the kid tried to tell him that the victor, Hertzel Kozlowski, was there yesterday buying parts for his monster, and that rather than talking he spoke with crude and curious hand gestures. It's a queer rumor, that he's gone mute, and with all the lobbies crawling out to expect him to use his status to vouch for him, he wouldn't mind it catching on. As for the monster, robot, android, that's the usual one he hears. It's not altogether false. Frivolous, of course. Most people wouldn't have been able to keep from revealing themselves in a clever way just to laugh at the boy, and most people would use that fact as an excuse to do so despite logic. He uses it as motivation. How does one take an honest look at the numbers of disaffected and meandering people of the world and still find comfort in the crowd?
He said thank you kindly for the sprockets, and then paid for them in coin.
He takes one now, and spins it along the membrane between his first finger and his pollex. The teeth on it rip through the air, and the haze of industry that it is imbued with. Fancies fill his consciousness, of each tooth triggering lines of cogs and joints, and of those translating to a mere strand of electric wire hair, blowing in the wind of that dreadful beach. It was the only part of her which moved, he remembers. Ravenous sounds long gone pummel his inner ear, and his head smarts with the pain of a back torn to shreds. Her, just standing there. He looks down at the table before him, and he sees the parts of her, just laying there, and he remembers his first two prototypes, and how they just sat there. It nigh on eggs him to take a hammer to his progress. That seems to be the only way he could stop himself. Either keep working, or destroy it all in a fit, but he can't imagine leaving the workbench or even falling asleep. As it has been, the fit of dread passes with a loose shake of the head. No, she wasn't perfect, but she was delightful. He isn't delightful, so he has to be perfect.
Here, lay her body before him, torn to shreds. Wires and sockets. Organs without tendons. He won't leave her that way. He'll show the Adel that tended to him that she was right to do so, and prove the one who left him behind wrong. Prove everybody wrong. Her parents, who fought to have it buried with her blessed body, and compared him to a vulture in a well-publicized sound-bite. You don't waste that technology underground! All the sniveling pundits, who turned their backs on their victor, their victor two times over, and call him broken? Obsessive? The leg, the leg, they talk about it like it's ridiculous. Why did he keep that infernal leg, they would ask? For infatuation? Nay, for discovery! It was a marvel of engineering, of course he marveled at it sometimes.
When he's finished, and she's finished, and he walks her out into the world, they'll see. They'll see.
