Prologue

The robotic shell of a head sat untouched, cold, and lifeless on Colonel Peter A. Walter I's workbench. Its dull, unlit photoreceptors were open, unblinking, and its mouth was agape in a deadpan look that almost imitated monotonous surprise.

Colonel Walter was very far behind on this particular robot - his first robot. Well, his first robot with human resemblance. He'd recently had to redraw his entire blueprint, still lacking a name, as the hostility of Becile's copper elephants in the east began pushing their way west. They had been slowed significantly by Walter's nearly fourteen-story-high steam-powered giraffe, Delilah, but had not stopped the beasts entirely.

But now, the army wanted men. Expendable men, not the fleshy kind. Metal men. And that's when Walter's intentions for the robot made a forced change.

The automaton was nowhere near complete, but he knew he must check it now to be sure there weren't any notable flaws. He'd rather go back to the drawing board this early on as opposed to later when it was nearing completion. He needed to know that it was sentient. It needed to be so, and sooner was better than later.

He wound up the temporary key at the base of the copper skull, where - if he needn't make any repairs - the back of the head would meet the nape of the neck, and the key would be hidden by a thick copper neckplate.

Clockwork gears began whirring healthily. Its photoreceptors glowed softly against the candlelit workbench, one blue and one green. A slight malfunction, Walter noted, but it didn't appear to be much of a problem. In time, perhaps he would fix it. Perhaps not. It gave the otherwise-soulless automaton a bit of character. He was more excited, however, that his invention was seemingly-operational, and upon strictly eyeballing his creation, Colonel Walter decided his robot had no detrimentalities thus far.

Ecstatically, Walter pointed at a small white hare in a cage located near the corner of the shop. "A rabbit," he proclaimed, not breaking his gaze from the alluring mismatched stare of the copper head. "This is a rabbit."

The beheaded bot blinked its photoreceptors a couple times, closing and reopening his mouth. Joints cracked, scraped, whined, and groaned in protest as the bolts in the jaw loosened where they had been fastened too tightly, before the automaton repeated, in a glitched, broken-sounding monotonous voice.

"R-r-r-raa...bit..."