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

The young Indrik's stay at Munich is at its end. By the end of April he will be gone. Back at Riga. What is a better way to celebrate one's failure than with some drinking? And drink he did, at the Gorreshof tavern on Gorresstrasse 38, for he preferred beer there the most: the Augustiner.

However, on the down side, he had to tolerate the esoteric ramblings of his acquaintance: Franz Hartmann.

The age of progress and industrialization has brought a shade of doubt and disillusionment upon the upper and middle class. Everything has been explained, everything has been discovered, so they flock en masse to the mystical, and fantastical.

The Occult movement is the blight upon decent society. Like little children they play dress up and form their little clubs they call "societies." A brain rot trend that hopefully in a few years will pass into obscurity after fools lose interest and move on to the next. All this spiritualism nonsense made Indrik sick.

It only shows the strength of one's mind and character. How fragile theirs have to be to resort to archaic idolatry?

For example, the Darvin's evolution theory. It didn't disprove the existence of God. It only revealed how intricate and complex the lord's work truly is. Though Indrik had his own gripes with it. Where do demihumans fit within the whole ape's transition into modern man?

Meanwhile, Hartmann in the background chattered on about rituals and runes, and such. How annoying, but he did pay for all of the researcher's drinks, so Indrik would indulge the man's madness. He wouldn' be surprised that Franz had made all the sheitze up. After all, he was known to be an unreliable compulsive liar.

Indrik had enough, so he challenged this so-called "sorcerer" to show him this great new discovery of his, so they, the two drunkards, stumbled on through the streets of Munich towards Hartmann's apartment.

When they arrived, Franz walked off to get something, leaving Indrik alone with time for musings. What will that fool do? Perform rain dances, flail his arms wildly? Will he return dressed in druid robes? Maybe he will wear a turban? The researcher's drunk imagination entertained him immensely.

Shortly after, the fraudulent mystic returned, carrying leather bound tome. It looked old, gothic age even. With flop on to the round kitchen table, Franz flipped it to a specific page. Then he seized a knife and carved unknown symbols into the wood of the tabletop in clockwise order. Afterwards, he scoured the cupboards, returning with random herbs and spices which he scattered across the surface.

Then he, as Indrik predicted, started waving his arms around and bellowed out words with no meaning, but soon his amusement turned to astonishment. The runes glowed crimson as the table lifted up, spinning in its axis. Faster and faster it spun till it burst into flames.

The Indrik was aghast, driven into the kitchen corner where he cowered, while inebriated Hartmann laughed. The horrid spectacle didn't last long. The firefly whirlwind waned as its momentum disintegrated together with its core object, leaving only a pile of ash on the floorboards.

This was it. The researcher demanded the mystic to explain what just happened. How did he do it? Indrik didn't have to persuade the man much at all, the alcohol had done that for him. Frantz presented him with the specific page in the book. The majority of the script looked high-gothic german, but then there were specific passages that were in an unfamiliar alphabet. It seemed middle-eastern in style, but that seemed not right. From antiquity, perhaps?

Hartmann pointed at the unknown script, telling the researcher that this was the source of power. The words themselves. He called it the speech of Solomon— of King Solomon.

After that incident, Indrik prolonged his stay in the United Reich, learning what he could about the speech, about Solomon, about sorcery and about alchemy. It was a linguist's nightmare. The speech is fragmented and no author seemed to know the specific order. What books mentioned the subject in any capacity were far and few in between.

But through all of that, he learned about one thing that truly grabbed his mind. It made an old hope stir. The concept of a homunculus: seeding life into the stillness. This was it. This was the breath of God he was looking for.

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

***I***

Indrik felt something collide with his cheek, jolting awake from his daze and feeling the cold floor under him. He needed to tighten the bolts on his forehead plate; that was already the third mental episode in twenty-four hours. The center of his vision darted around sporadically, but soon he eased up. He was in his workshop; he was safe. Then his gaze landed on the... wolf wench. Memory returned back to him as his hand grasped unconsciously at his throat. "How long... was I... passed out?"

"Maybe twenty minutes," the laundress towering form lowered to his eye level and she pushed a tin cup against Indrik's chest. The researcher seized, drinking generously. The water had a metallic taste. She, probably, had drawn it from the bucket in his quarters.

The moment of peace was disturbed by the measured tapping of Otiliaya's foot. She glared at him expectantly with arms crossed over her chest. He could only spare a single: "What?"

"What 'what'?! What do ya mean 'what'? I am waiting for explanations!" She demanded while glaring at him.

Indrik's face displayed genuine confusion. What in the hell was she blabbering about?

Otiliya groaned in annoyance. "Don't play dumb! Ya maybe a shwab, but ya ain't that stupid." But when she still got no answer, she pinched her nose ridge. "Do I really have to spell out to ya, fritz? How about the witchcraft? Or the killer golem? Does that ring any bells in that empty head of yours?"

"What about it?"

The laundress couldn't believe his audacity. "What do ya mean?! That shite was not normal at all and ya just sit here, scratching yer arse, like it is a common day thing!"

That made some gears turn. Oh right, she didn't know. Indrik was showing the child of his genius to her for the first time. The researcher had been so used to people in his workshop already knowing his process, that he forgot that only one who ever was here, other than himself, was Makaravich.

"Oh, zat? It's actually quite simple. I used words of power together with some alchemical compounds to breathe life into that automaton," Indrik said as he rose up, staring at the motionless machine.

"The process is not yet perfect, but look at it? It actually moved on its own! It was its own will zat drove it to kill." The researcher beamed with pride. Five years of constant failure and now he managed, for the second time, to make golem alive. After the first time, yesterday, Makaravich disappeared with Indrik's research, kickstarting today's events.

Otiliya could only blink at that. "Are touched in the head, shwab?! Devil takes, it tried to croak ya! Why even try to make a golem like this?"

"I cannot fathom how you can't see it." Indrik pulled out from a drawer a foil-covered cylinder and strode to an automaton near a pile of parts, starting its power cell. Then the researcher proceeded to open a panel on its back and inserted the cylinder. It began to spin and a needle was dragged across its surface. The golem awoke and began to sort the parts in neat groups.

"Ze golem only functions based on the orders that are inscribed in the order-index. You see? This one's instructions are only to sort these specific parts and piles. But beyond that? Nothing. It is incapable of thought or reason on its own," Indrik brushed aside the piles with his foot from automaton's range of sight and it halted. "It has more kinship with a gramophone zan a man. If you wanted it to do something else, zen you would have to switch the command-index."

Then he pointed at the recent experiment: "But zat..." He turned it over to show an empty index slot. "Zat moved on its own. It was alive. Ze impossible made possible. As I said, the process is yet to be perfect, but, if I manage to align the runes in the correct order, I could breathe in zis still body ze likeness of a soul," Indrik put the lifeless automaton's hands over its chest.

She placed her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow, questioning his motives: "But why? This whole thing is clearly dangerous. Ya meddling with things ya should't. Why risk it?"

The researcher's features sombered: "Because I want someone. Someone with whom to share all ze joys, and all ze anguish. Just someone..."

The wench bursts out in a fit of laughter, but, when she saw Indrik's downcasted reaction, her ears lowered: "Oh, ya were serious... Fri-... I mean Indrik, right? Uh, I heard ya shwabs were stiff and humourless, but, by Perkun, I could not have imagined it was this bad-"

"I am not German... I am german-baltic," he interjected.

"Oh... Anyhow. have ya ever tried... simply going out and talking to folks? Because to me it looks like all ya need is a friend and not all..." She waves at all of his workshop: "That."

"I had friends.... long ago... But when it mattered the most, they left me for dead, crawling through filth. Not even attempted to help... Because of that incident, my brains are held in place by this scrap piece! It... It... ," Indik was frantic. All the instances when he was double crossed flooded his senses, but there was one that was ever covertly present and had been inflamed ten fold now. Similar to a malignant tumor, which while dormant was relegated to a tolerable backdrop pang, had in the wake of its awakening become a single burst of spontaneous agony. 

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

The researcher was sent back fifteen years ago in the soft orange dimness provided by the gas-lamps of the maintenance tunnel- D42F5, right before the central pipe had hit a critical pressure and was about to explode, sending a chain reaction through the whole sector F.

Indrik and the other tunnel-rats had reached the outskirts by now, but it was too late as the wave of heated kinetic energy overtook them. Rubble had him pinned, yet he was still alive, same as most of the group who were able to move freely. The young researcher pleaded with them for aid, however, the lads, who he had considered his brothers and only family, only passed around looks of contemplation. When the rumbling of the "second-coming" shook the tunnel, their choice had been made and they left him behind.

As the consecutive wave engulfed him, a piece of wreckage smashed him into unconsciousness, causing great damage to the skull's frontal bone.

The coming weeks were a blur. Indrik remembered the pain as he dislocated his shoulders to be able to squeeze free. He remembered drinking from puddles of leaking groundwater and gorging on any critter he stumbled upon on his way. After what seemed like years he had reached the surface of upper Riga while onlookers gawked at the ghoulish thing he had become, yet the fate had not stopped amusing itself, for the orphan house he had lived his whole life had closed its doors forever, leaving him with nothing.

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

***O***

Otiliya watched as Indrik just stood there, blank eyed, with a drool hanging off his lip. A mental episode, perhaps? When she poked him, the shwab bursted in a fit of sobs. It is an ugly sight to behold.

Laundress felt puzzled at the situation, for what stirred within her were feelings of the uncomfortable and of the pitiful sort. Something deep down urged her to give some kind of comfort to this fritz- though, stuck-up and unhinged, yet now so exposed and vulnerable in a grotesquely captivating manner. She, despite her reservations, awkwardly embraced the pathetic wretch, back-stroking warily, as if a stray dog.

After a moment too long, the weeping gradually ceased and the sudovian woman felt that it was an appropriate timing. She pulled back, looking straight into the man's glossy gaze, and said: "Indrik... I think it is finally time... To pay up me thirty hanzmarks."

Indrik indignantly grimaced, but reluctantly barged off to dig through junk again. Soon the researcher with a sharp exhale emerged from a pipe pile, clutching a strongbox. He went to the "kitchen", flopped it on the "table" and opened it. With a little rummage he declared: "Best I can do is nineteen."

Otiliya's eye twitched and she pulled the fritz by the collar of his lab-coat: "What ya mean nineteen?! That's only almost two thirds of what ya owe me, shwab!"

"Zat's all I got, ungrateful baba," the shwab blaggard shoved the opened box in her face. "A sophisticated projects, such as mine, requires a generous amount of funds!"

The laundress immediately snatched the box, stuffing the light-brown bills and silvery coins in her apron while muttering to herself loudly: "Gah, at least the day was not completely wasted. Four unspayed days at the washhouse covered..." She eyed the workshop again for anything of any worth fruitlessly. " Nothing of value in this izagaztuv either, all junk. Comon, frizt! You got to have at least something little more to offer? I saved ya pathetic life twice!"

Indrik groaned and was about to say something, but stilled his tongue, storming off to a wall near his sleeping den. He knelt at the level of rotting wooden furnishing and removing one of the planks. Then he returned with one sealed bottle of Wolfschmidt's Vodka: "Is zis satisfactory enough for you, wench?"