PROLOGUE

Somewhere at the heart of the City of Pyesa, the Land of Gears, people liked to call it, was a house. It had an attic and a basement, an overgrown lawn that had large trees with dark trunks in it. And in this house lived a short, burly man that goes by the name Blunt.

Only that he wasn't a human. He was a dwarf.

They had no choice but to come out of hiding not long ago. They used to be something in the past, making weapons and stuff. But as science and technology progressed, wars cooled down, and melee weapons weren't the fad anymore, they found themselves in a difficult situation.

Their sole source of income was dying. Paired with the dwindling resources, they had no choice but to swallow their pride, give up their passion, and find jobs in the cities. That's why in this Era, it wasn't surprising to see dwarves at construction sites, making intricate buildings that would have been impossible with just human hands alone.

However, Blunt was different. He was stubborn and he hated how most of his kind have stooped so low. He didn't go to the city to become a slave to the humans. He went there to create hyper realistic dolls. He wanted to create one that could speak and think for themselves. The perfect doll was what he wanted. And today might be the day he will finally succeed.

"You go here. And this one over here. And you add this, then… voila!" Murmured Blunt. He was sweating bullets in the basement of his house that flickered easily between 300-550° F.

In one corner was a giant cauldron over a steadily burning green fire. The floor was barely visible under all the rubbish he couldn't be bothered to clean: Metal scraps; newspapers from five years ago to the present date; dozens of unwashed mugs with rats and roaches swimming in its half-consumed coffee; silicone rubber sheets; and so much more.

And somewhere in the middle of it all was the most stunning, and one with probably the most perfectly proportioned face on earth. The one hundred and twenty third doll he created so far.

"This is a test. This is a test. Ahem! Uh… Can you hear me?" Asked Blunt as he searched her for any imperfections but when the doll didn't show a lick of consciousness after a while and after he tweaked all the parts he could tweak, his face slowly turned into that of disappointment.

"Ugh! No good. This one's a dud too, huh." He removed her from her hanger stand to toss her to the pit located to the corner opposite the cauldron, a hole he dug himself that led to the tunnel underground and into a squarish underground room with granite stones as its walls. Failures were tossed in there every month and they had accumulated into a mountain now.

When he was a moment close to tossing her, a subtle mechanical noise suddenly roared from inside her chest, the sound of gears grinding against each other, coming to life.

Blunt jumped in surprise and in his excitement, he hauled her back to her hanger stand and tweaked her some more. Checked if the wires at her back were properly connected. Opened her chest with a screwdriver to lubricate the tiny gears that had trouble turning and that was when he found out what the problem was. The core didn't have enough breathing space.

The core was what to humans a heart. About the size of an adult's fist and this was what's powering the doll. It glowed an ethereal combination of purple and blue. Inside it was this tiny silver wisp that moved in a twisting and spiraling pattern, its muted glow undulated faintly. It took him seventy years to make a functioning one and now that he knew what the problem was, he knew exactly what to do.

He took all the gears out, measured them all to properly reduce them to a tenth of their original size and after a month of barely sleeping, he finally finished resizing them.

"The moment of truth," he mumbled as he placed the final gear to its proper place. He decided that if this one was a failure after all the work he had done, he would pack his things and go back to the mountains to live as a hermit.

To Blunt, making dolls was his life purpose and if he couldn't even make a properly functioning one then he would rather be dead in all honesty.

Sure, he could make hyper realistic ones. He could make a doll of someone he only saw the first time and you wouldn't be able to tell which one is real if you put them side by side. But to him, if a doll couldn't even do the most basic thing like talking, then how was that any different to a corpse? He didn't want that.

"Yuhoo! Can you hear me?" He asked the doll a few moments after he turned her power on. And along with the mechanical noise and a click, the doll's eyes flicked open.

Blunt held his breath as the pair of silver irises stared back at him. And that was how Cog, the first sentient doll to ever exist was created.