Dead Tired - Volume Four - The Competitors One - Anne-atomy of an Anne-droid

Gonna do like... a bunch of half-chapters introducing all the competitors (that matter) in this style! Hopefully I can capture a bunch of new character voices well <3

The Competitors One - Anne-atomy of an Anne-droid

Her name was, officially, 4NN3, but she’d like to think that if she had friends, they’d call her Anne.

‘Anne’ was a simple machine, or so that’s how she felt. 

She worked in a small alchemist’s shop, deep in the cultivator district of Storm’s Gate. Here, people came and bought elixirs and potions and antidotes. Here, they sold precious animal parts, the cores of defeated monsters, and ancient treasures fought over and stolen from other realms. 

The store made decent money, though she saw none of it.

Anne worked in the back. 

It was a small space. Some five paces deep and one pace wide. There were shelves to one side, through which she could see the false back of the store. On the other side were devices. Cauldrons and alembics and small torches.

The owner would place items on the shelves, and she’d turn these into magical tinctures and remedies and weapons.

That was her task, what she was made to do. She was the forty-third puppet of a keen-minded artificer called... ah, but her name didn’t matter.

That woman was dead. Had been for a century. She’d entered a fight with a master of the Jade Golem sect from the south-east and was killed.

Anne lived, though.

She was a golem born not of gears and wires, but of jade, bronze, and spirit inscriptions. her mind was not mechanical, but formed through a cultivated Soul Imprint Matrix that mimicked human cognition by copying the Dao Heart of her creator.

Her creator who had died, but not before giving Anne to the grandfather of this shop’s current owner.

Anne was meant to help a friend of the family with his shop, brew some simple things, make some elixirs, and earn her creator a few measly coins on her return.

It had been a century... or more.

And so Anne toiled. One day, she would break down. But there was work to do.

She did like work. Work was good. It set her mind on something else. When the work ended and the furnace shut and the cauldrons ceased to bubble, her mind would spin, and she didn’t like that very much. She had been suffering from Anne-somnia for a very long time now.

She had ambitions, but all she had known was the shrinking back of a little store.

Today was different.

The owner had brought in a package. It was ordinary stuff. Ginseng extract and fresh grave dirt, ink from a strange sea monster... ah, but it was wrapped in paper.

Not just any paper. This was an advertisement.

Curious, she unfolded it. Above her head, her Anne-tenna twitched as she read.

A tournament? A tournament open to all?

The prize? Immortality. 

But no, not just immortality. Immortality granted by a name that she knew. It was a name that appeared in some of the oldest alchemical texts, those that had been copies of copies of ancient tomes. Harold. 

Yes, she knew this one. She had even heard the shopkeeper speak of it. Of the great lich that had foolishly decided to challenge the Jade Empire and who was now sequestered in the far north-eastern deserts.

Ah, but how had this advertisement come here?

She scanned it, and discovered that it gave a place and a time. More. There was a spell woven into the paper. Casting it at the right time, out in the open, would allow one to be transported to the site of the tournament.

A trap, it had to be. 

But... she kind of wanted to try? 

What if this ancient monster offered her immortality? Was she not somewhat immortal already? Only her life didn’t feel that good.

The Anne-gst really got to her. 

For the next few weeks, she did her work, but in the times between, when there was nothing better to do, she’d pick up the page and stare at it, reading and re-reading it in the light of her furnace. 

She hid it on the rare occasions where the shopkeep poked his head in, and she dreamed.

She was Anne-noyed with herself for allowing it. But... but maybe... maybe it was worth trying? 

What else was left for her.

Anne could ask the shopkeeper for materials, at times. New tools and the like. She asked for paper and a brush and received both along with fuel for her furnace and the usual consumables.

She made the ink herself.

It took her another week to forge a letter of un-Anne-ployment. 

This was it. She was going to go to this tournament and st-Anne’d amongst others, proud of herself for once. 

***