Hermitcraft Fallen Angel AU
It was evening when Mumbo arrived at his workshop. The light lit everything in a beautiful golden glow that was soft on the eyes. The air was fresh and put a pep in his step as he walked from his car to the shop. He fumbled with his keys for an embarrassing amount of time, really, he had too many keys.
Eventually, he found the right one and the lock clicked. He took a deep breath as the musty, mechanical smells of oil and dust fell out of the doorway. His workshop housed a lot of strange and questionable creations, ranging from taxidermized birds and tiny mustached robots, to random piles of half-built machinery and forgotten projects. There also seemed to be an unusual amount of doors now that he was looking around. It was so messy that he’d actually seen people recoil at the sight of the heaping piles of junk that always found its way into every nook and cranny.
However, when he arrived at his current project, he was dismayed to see that something had gone wrong overnight. It was supposed to be a simple storage machine that would sort whatever you wanted into nice, organized piles. It’d had a number of shiny buttons and screens that he’d designed for user friendliness, but now they were dull and stained with a dark liquid that seemed to be slightly iridescent, purple when the light hit it just right.
It smelled too, like a mixture of burnt rubber and wet burning wood. He sighed in defeat, something had obviously gone wrong sometime last night for something like this to happen.
Perhaps something had fallen and spilled? There were shelves filled to the brim with various cans and boxes right above his creation, so it was a plausible conclusion. He crouched down to look for any containers on the ground. There wasn’t anything he could see in the immediate area, but maybe it had rolled under the table?
He crouched down, then froze. A wide, glowing, purple eye the size of a softball locked gazes with his own. All thoughts about machine malfunctions were thrown out the window as an uncomfortable number of eyes revealed themselves and slowly rolled to stare at him.
There wasn’t an obvious head, or mouth, or even a discernible shape to the creature. It looked as if someone had poured a bunch of tar, dumped a load of feathers into it, sprinkled some disturbingly realistic googly eyes on top of that, and then gave it to a toddler to stretch and manhandle to their heart’s desire. He didn’t think the creature itself even knew what it was supposed to be.
It faintly reminded him of the illustrations he was shown in history when he was learning about royal inbreeding. All the limbs looked wrong, some parts were too fat and others were too skinny. There were arms that bent backwards and digits that were merged together in fleshy masses.
Then the thing began to move. It was stilted, similar to some of his machines when they broke a part or got jittery from battery corrosion. It was a weird, hypnotizing thing that made his stomach crawl up his throat in disgust. His heart seized as a head, a human head, turned jerkily to face him. The skin stretched unevenly across its face, bunching in some places and sagging in others. One eye was bigger than the other and its mouth split its face like a gorge from top to bottom. Yet, despite the grotesque proportions, the face was undeniably human.
It was a face he recognized, one he hadn’t seen in years.
