Vitae
You're stuck in a room full of gears and pulleys and winding contraptions. Mazelike complexity fills your brain and shoves everything else away.
Your job is to operate and maintain the device. Pay attention and do not let a single element fail. It's incredibly important you do not make a mistake.
You know how most elements operate. With effort and diligence and rapidly stacking bottles of cola you're able to just about keep up with the machine room
Occasionally, you're forced to consult a manual or ask the foreman a question. Nights, do you hate asking the foreman anything.
His responses are always curt, usually snide, and occasionally outwardly cruel. You can see his disgust for you in his eyes. He knows what you are, even if everyone pretends otherwise. Especially you. Once he called you an idiot within earshot of the burgher who owned the plant.
You smile anyway.
The day ends when your body is about to collapse. The machine room is built specifically to siphon the vitae from you. Your kind. Funded by barons and designed by those venal enough to turncoat to transfer your divinity into a measurable, transferable essence, poured into further machines...
You carry your exhausted body to your tenement and collapse at your workbench. Sitting on a shelf is a poppet. Your poppet.
It sits incomplete. It's still eyes stare past a missing face into yours. The faint vapor of vitae within you condenses into pareidolia.
"Please?", the poppet whispers.
You haven't been able to gather the vitae to finish it in... months? Years? You slump in your chair.
You feel nothing, save a blank void inside and a single tear down your cheek.
