A little bit of behind the scenes lore for REanima
Art by Sabira / @floweroflaurelin
If you've read REanima, my short story set in a dystopian future about bounty hunter Saiziege (MythicalSausage), the augmented Copper King CuprePaxi (Pixlriffs), and copper golem Parlse (PearlescentMoon) then you may have wondered what happened to all the other copper golems that made the repair of little Parlse something that had to be kept so secret.
Since I've been going through my notes this morning, trying to find something else, I thought I'd type up a bit of lore that I jotted down but never included in the story, mostly because it only came to me weeks after I'd posted it on AO3.
These are literally only notes transcribed from the notebook that I always carry with me, and they're also not fact-checked/heavily researched, so they're mostly just to give some flavour to the backstory of the character of CuprePaxi.
Be warned: this is heart-wrenching.
Behind the cut with you!
In the past, CuprePaxi created innocent, childlike copper golems as companions for people (maybe even as 'eternal children' for those who couldn't have them, due to the excessive amount of pollution in the city causing high levels of infertility). Each one took a long time to make, as they were hand-crafted, and he regarded them all as his children. Because he knew that - at some distant point in their future - he would probably be called upon to repair them, and he didn't want to cause them any distress when he did that, he programmed each of them to regard him as their father, their protector.
Copper became incredibly scarce because so much of it was needed for the infrastructure (wiring, piping, etc.) of The Wall. (This touches on the impending copper shortage our current world is looking at.)
At some point in the recent past all the known copper golems were confiscated by the authorities... and - in one giant crucible - they were melted down.
CuprePaxi lives to this day with the knowledge that circulated soon after this event: that workers in the foundry were horrified to hear hundreds of small voices calling out for 'father!' as the crucible was heated.
Because of his underworld connections, Saiziege had advance knowledge of the impending copper golem confiscation, and so he hid little Parlse away. When the officials arrived to check his home, he managed to convince them that he couldn't afford a copper golem of his own, and so Parlse escaped the purge.
Even CuprePaxi himself sometimes gets eyed up as a potential source of the metal because of the liquid copper channels embedded in his skin. Whenever he's visited by an official who brings him an android for repair and he spots them looking at those channels, he immediately puts on a show of vanity, explaining that the copper is synthetic and he had the channels inserted because he thought they looked good. And all the while, he knows that - just as easily as they melted down his children - so would they gladly gouge out his copper channels without a second thought if it meant a bit more of the metal to build a bit more of The Wall.
