919, 9th Era
Endergaln
One of the unexpected side effects of living in a highly mechanically-advanced city was that the simple marionettes Sav had taken to making and giving away to the street kids who crossed her path now no longer impressed.
“What is that?” the first child she’d tried to give a puppet to said, wrinkling her nose. “I’m supposed to move it?”
You are literally a beggar, Sav didn’t actually say, but the expression on their face made the urchin cackle before she ran, jeering.
The younger children were still enchanted by the manual puppets she’d been accustomed to making, but after the age of 7 or so they ceased to dazzle. So Sav upped her game, using the new techniques she was learning from the workshops of House Beryl. The new responsive puppets weren’t the most complex – Sav could only afford small scraps of the metal that enabled the creation of the small automatons – but they could march or fly on their own, and follow the person they were attuned to. This was enough for most of the children, but Rose-Quartz, the one who’d scorned her initial offering, proved harder to win over. This only made Sav more determined.
They never quite managed. Perhaps justifiably, Rose-Quartz was inherently suspicious of anyone who seemed to want her approval or to give her things. As the number of kids wielding manual or automaton puppets rose in the streets of Endergaln, Rose-Quartz stayed aloof from it all, even in the face of the most complex non-magical automaton Sav had ever made—this one sang a library of triple-voiced songs and traced an intricate pattern in the air, a step down from Samakhael only in its lack of independent thought. Rose-Quartz had laughed at it and said, “Pretty, but what use is it to me?” Last Sav had seen it, it was being carried out of a hock-shop by a pleased satyr.
At least she began to accept work from Sav when Sav needed a message run or a manuscript slipped into the Pink Feather Gazette’s inbox. And if the payments she retrieved from the Pink Feather were sometimes lighter by a coin or two, well, Sav was prepared to accept it as the price of doing business with this prickly, untrusting orphan.
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