///////F///////

Young Indrik emptied another beer, placing the hollow bottle near her two sisters. Without another thought he cracked open another one and took a swig. His time in the United Reich is running out, together with his savings. Appropriation was't an option anymore. The local wachtmeister has opened an investigation into recent break ins.

Indrik needed something stronger. He needed vodka, but what they sold at local stores was watered down piss water marked up twice as much as it actually should. Beer it was then, and highest praise that the researcher could muster was adequate. Back in Riga vodka was good: it hit hard and cost fifty hanzpennigs per bottle. Beer was good too. For as much as he admired Germanic sophistication, the alcohol was subpar.

Might as well leave Munich for good and return to Riga. All Indrik had was two-hundred and fifty reichmarks, and that piece of scrap metal. The researcher glared at the slumped figure seated in the chair opposite him. A motionless mechanical humanoid with its chest plate unbolted with inner mechanisms gutted. An automaton.

How mesmerized Indrik was just a few weeks ago when he first saw it at the "Science & Advancement" fair. A new breakthrough in engineering- the golem. A being not of nature's designs nor made of flesh, but of the mechanical. The researcher just had to have it.

However, the enchantment over him wilted as he studied it. Interacted with it. Talked to it. Begged it to respond. Yet nothing came of that. Its behavior was scripted. It could not think. If you peeled back the layers of complex technology and novelty, golem was just an overengineered wind-up toy. So much for so-called "mecha-sapiens". Sheitze-sapiens- that's what it is!

Indrik kicked over the chair with the automaton, scattering loose bits across the floor boards. So simplistic, so directionless... So inhuman. It was not it. There was no breath of god in it.

///////F///////

***O***

Shwab's eyes had glazed over and spit trickled down his chin. Otiliya can't believe it. The fritz had fallen asleep, just like that, in the middle of conversation. Her elbow jabbed into his ribs. A gasp escaped his throat as focus returned to his gaze. Pupils darted around. He looked lost.

"You alright, blaggard? How long till your place?" she asked, an eyebrow raised.

The fritz massaged his temples: "Not long... Just... One more turn..." He gestured to the couchman to go left on the next turn.

"It better be," the laundress in irritation tapped in her palm the wrench she seized from him. Stupid blaggard didn't have the money on him. Why did the shwab have to live in Imanta's District? The tram doesn't go there. They were lucky that a horse cart was passing through, offering a lift for cheap.

The cart halted by fritz's command. He tossed two coins at the couchman and disembarked, gesturing Otiliya to follow.

The sight before her was stark. A christian church that looked like it had seen better days. How old could it be? A memory of her father pointing at pictures of old time warriors and castles reemerged. Could be from the times when the old baltics warred with the cross-bearers. Maybe.

A faded plac read: "Saint Gertrude's Home for Orphans."

Then the laundress noticed that the main doors were nailed shut and her face flushed with anger. Is this ruin even the right place? There is no way to even get in! Before she could drown the fritz in another tirade, her ears caught a click and then a slow sound of stone against stone movement. The shwab stood near a doorway that was not there prior.

The duo emerged in a spacious room shrouded in darkness while the entrance sealed itself. The fritz, by the sounds of metal clanging and glass breaking, stumbled drunkenly through the dark. Suddenly with a screech, that irritated her sensitive ear, the steam engine roared to life and the space was illuminated by dim light-bulbs.

Pipes snaked around everything similar to copper vines while sheets of paper covered all surfaces like autumn leaves. Heavy oak tables with tool racks and vessels with colorful liquids were separated by walls of book towers and crates filled to a brim with scrap parts. Yet the most striking attraction was the multitude of strewn about automatons in various states of disrepair and incompletion that resembled corpses on a battlefield.

Otiliya whistled: "Wow, quite a den you got here, fritz!" She then picked up a mechanical hand with curiosity, plucking at the wires the imitated tendons which in turn made the metallic digits move. "Huh, you one of those machinists or something?"

Shwab blaggard grunted at her while digging through a pile of cogs, looking for something: "Nein! I do not merely operate ze machinery! I am a researcher and an artificer. Creation, maintenance and repairs- zat's what I do, dummkopf!" Dissatisfied, the so-called artificer went to a different pile and resumed his rummaging there: "And I am neither a shwab,nor fritz or blaggard! I have a name and it's Indrik! Remember zat, trottel."

The laundress shrugged at Indrik's outburst, lowering the metallic limb in place: "Sensitive fellow, aren't ya? I needn't to call ya a shwab, if ya didn't posture as one and introduced yarself decently." The machinist's eye twitched at that.

Otiliya ignored it and began to stroll about while gawking at anything of interest. She didn't like this place at all. Her nose was filled with acrid and pungent odors of whatever was in those glass vessels of his. Her only solace there was the common and familiar scent of old musky, machine oil. But then the stench of piss hit her, coming from a corner with a bucket laying on its side. She shuddered.

This didn't seem to be a home at all. A place for work, sure, but not for someone to live in. It lacked personal touch. No decor or living space to be seen. A post-human wasteland of scrap and what not.

Then a particular sight caught the laundress's eye. In the embrace of a pile of rubbish was a small hut of sorts made of rusted sheet-metal.. What seemed to be the entrance was covered by a dirty yellow curtain. Shoving it aside, revealed something akin to a real living space.

A pile of straws with rugged sheets and a stained pillow. A kitchen-like corner consisting of a stove that was just a gas cylinder with some bits on top, worn rusty cold box and barrel with broad plank on top for a table alongside a box for a chair. The only utensil she could see was a crooked knife jammed into the wooden surface. A surreal island of humanity in the ocean of the mechanical.

On the wall amidst the scribbles of notes beside a photo of an old-man was a child's drawing faded by time, depicting what seems to be a smiling golem with a similarly joyous child. Even in the crude, faded image she could make out a familiar forehead plate on the kid.

Is this how Indrik lives? Otiliya had seen bums that lived better than this. This in comparison made her own living conditions seem prince-like. A single room upstairs at the washhouse she is working at; shared by four other women of her profession. While it was not ideal, bedding was decent, a communal kitchen to cook at and the company of her fellows. Yet he was here alone in this dark place. "Is this how you live, fritz?"

Indrik peaked from a pile of wastepaper: "I am not fritz! And ja, I live here. What about it?"

"No one should live like this. A doghouse is more cleaner and homeier than... this?" She gestured at the room as a whole. Though the laundress should have worded her concerns better.

The indignified machinist sneered: "A doghouse... Hah, how ironic? Of course you would know that." A jab aimed straight at her wolfish heritage. "Well, you see, a great aspiration requires a great sacrifice, but I doubt zat likes of you would understand zat."

Otiliya's ears perked and she bore teeth. The first low blow she could stomach, but this... What does this fancy-schmancy know about sacrifice? Her road to Riga was paved with choices she hoped she would never have to make again. That night...

The fur bristles on her tail as it stands up. "Oh? So the shwab is not only a great machinist, but also a holy martyr too? For what do you suffer so graciously, may I ask?"

The blaggard's eye twitched, yet the look was resolute. "Come. I will show you..."

The two of them approached what used to be an altar table. On it a patchwork tarp betrayed the shapes of a body. The shwab bastard carefully unveiled it from the head downward. What it revealed was an uncanny sight.

An imitation of a human form, so bad that even a blind man could tell that it was no human. Metal frame as a skeleton. Wire and rope as tendons and muscles. Rubber as flesh. Gears and cogs as guts. And a sizable power cell as a heart. All displayed through various gaps and holes.

To Otiliya it looked pathetic and sad. The golem in that drawing looked better, for this contraption would definitely spook children and give the creeps to others. She also wasn't sure if it was supposed to be a man or a woman- the proportions seemed off. The shoulders were broad, but the waist was comically thin and hips were femininely wide. One arm was longer than the other, but that mug, by Perkun. Those typical big saucers that golem's had for eyes paired with the poorly-made humanly facade was just disturbing.

"So you denied yourself basic needs for a ugly golem, fritz? Devil takes, I guess every bloke has their weird obsessions," the laundress combed her fingers through her mane, eyeing the eyesore. "Hope you didn't squander all your cash on that thing. You still have to pay back me thirty hanzmarks, blaggard. Remember?"

The machinist frowned and there was hurt in his eyes: "Nein, Nein! "Not ze vessel itself!" He brought his fists down on the table before glancing at the scattered remains of previous incarnations. "And what do you mean ugly?! It's only a prototype, and not zat bad either! Watch carefully..."

The offended shwab skittered towards the nearby shelf, going through multiple bottles and tins, before returning with a handful. First, he put down an iron wheel in which around the circle were etched what seemed to be some sort of letters or runes and in the middle was embedded a glass orb or, perhaps, even a gemstone.

Then the crazed fritz pulled the stopper out of a glass vessel and emptied its putrid-green contents around the clock on the wheel. Afterwards he sprinkled a red metallic powder from a satchel in a counter-clockwise motion. Next thing was the most bizarre as Indrik began to spew out gibberish that could, perhaps, be a language while doing amusing finger movements. To Otiliya's at most astonishment the orb began to pulse with green light.

Corresponding to the orb's reaction, Indrik, with the urgency of holding a baked potato, slides the wheel in a matching slot on the automaton's chest. The machine began to tremble, then convulsed as green lightning bolts swirl like snakes around its torso and limbs. The beams of light from the chest device bathe the chamber in green hue. As soon as the awesome spectacle began, it stopped. The remnants linger in the golem's eyes.

The mad machinist's arms shot up in triumph as his horrid creation's upper half rose, yet Otiliya didn't share his mirth. The sight of a golem moving was not foreign to her, for they were numerous enough on the streets of Riga to be called common, but this time something inside her urged to back off.

The fritz's cheers were cut short as the thing lunged forward and seized his throat with the unmistakable intention to extinguish the fool's life. The laundress cursed under her breath and pushed past every instinct that told her to flee, springing into action. A sudovian never flees. She retrieved the wrench from her apron and hammered at the metal monster's head to no avail while Indrik desperately clawed at its chest.

The chest? By Perkun, of course! The wheel! Otiliya seized the golem by the under armpit level, blindly grouping for the spot till she found it. Driving her claws into the crevices, she dislodged it and in her hands the device began to heat up, making her relinquish it. Upon impact it crumbled to dust on the floor tiles.

As the connection to otherworldly power that gave it life was severed, the man and the machine fell together. She rushed forward to Indrik's fallen form. His body was limp, eyes shut.

Otiliya's ears flattened. With haste laundress heaved off the golem and peeled away its digits from the man's neck, yet hesitated when she was about to place her cheek on his chest, but pushed on and listened. There was a thump, and then another, and another. The prick was still alive. Relief washed over her.