Artini

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

Artini is a mini-modron: a small, rounded construct of battered yellow metal with a single oversized optical unit that dominates the front of her spherical head. Her body is compact and mechanical, with articulated arms that end in small manipulator claws. None of this is what you notice first. What you notice first is the outfit. Artini has dressed herself, with dedicated and painstaking effort, in a scaled-down replica of Arties Geodegazer's aesthetic: a sweeping gown of deep purple fabric edged in gold embroidery, tiny pauldrons of worked metal with scrolling detail, and a floor-length cape that she pulls around herself with deliberate elegance. Around her neck hangs a small necklace with a cross-shaped pendant. The wig is white and carefully maintained, falling to either side of her spherical head in long, smooth waves. The ears, which she fashioned and affixed herself, are pointed and made of something that might be painted leather. They are attached slightly too far apart to be anatomically convincing. She does not know this. She will not be told.

Artini moves with tremendous intention and approximately sixty percent of the grace she is aiming for. She has studied Arties' posture carefully and attempts to replicate it: a deliberate, sweeping walk with the cape trailing behind her, chin slightly elevated, hands positioned as if at any moment she might gesture at something with elegant authority. In practice, this reads as a small yellow sphere with one enormous eye processing very hard while wearing a curtain. Her optical unit shifts when she is speaking to someone, making slow, considered movements that she has decided constitute meaningful eye contact. She has also developed a habit of pausing before particularly important statements to allow them proper weight, which is admirable in principle and occasionally alarming in execution, since the pause is sometimes several full seconds of absolutely motionless staring.

Artini was the first of Puq's three minis, the initial proof that a sentient modron could do something that modrons were categorically not meant to do: create. Puq did not fully understand what he was making when he made her. He had been collecting components for months, following an instinct he could not name toward an outcome he had not planned, and one day he had assembled something small and round and blinking, and that was Artini. She came online looking at him with her single enormous eye and immediately began processing everything in the room at once, which took approximately four seconds, after which she turned her attention fully and completely toward a figure across the room: Arties Geodegazer, who happened to be present for reasons now lost to the general chaos of that period, and who was at that exact moment doing something quietly kind for someone who had not asked for help. Artini watched this for eleven seconds. Then she decided.

The ears came first. She fashioned them herself from materials she found, attached them to either side of her head with an adhesive she also found, and presented herself to Puq as a new and improved version. When Puq gently suggested that she was a modron, she agreed that she had been, and explained that she was now additionally an elf. The wig followed. Then the dress, which required the assistance of a very patient seamstress who did not ask too many questions. The cape, which Artini had clearly studied at length, took the most effort to replicate and remains the piece she is most proud of. She maintains it with obsessive care. She has never seen anyone comment on Arties' cape and consider it anything other than magnificent, and she applies this logic to her own. She is not wrong that it looks magnificent. She is simply the only person in any given room who does not find the overall effect primarily very funny and very dear.

Artini's approach to becoming Arties is systematic and completely literal. She observed that Arties helps people, so she helps people, immediately and without hesitation and occasionally without being asked or wanted, which is an ongoing area of development. She observed that Arties speaks with gentleness and authority, so she practices both, achieving authority more naturally than gentleness, which she is working on. She observed that Arties treats everyone as deserving of dignity regardless of their circumstances, which is the piece of the emulation that has taken hold most completely and most genuinely, to the point where it may no longer be emulation at all. When Artini sees someone being treated poorly, something in her optical unit sharpens and she moves toward the situation with a speed and deliberateness that is slightly startling in a being her size. She has no plan when she arrives. She has only the absolute certainty that this is wrong and she will stand here until it stops.

When the Watcher came for Puq, Artini was present. She does not talk about this. The data is archived and accessible to her at all times and she does not access it by choice, which is itself a kind of emotional processing she did not know she was capable of. What she carries from that period is simpler and more immediate: the absolute knowledge that Puq's friends came for him, that Arties specifically was among those who refused to let what happened to him be the end, and that the world contains people who will stand between those they love and destruction. This is consistent with her understanding of what Arties is and does. It has only deepened her commitment to the model. She considers the reconstruction period, when Puq was present but diminished, as the most important training she received, because it was when she had to be kind without a template to copy, when the people around her needed things that no amount of watching Arties could have taught her. She managed. She thinks she managed. She is still not entirely sure.

This is stated plainly and without irony. Artini's primary goal is to become exactly like Arties Geodegazer in every quantifiable way, which she is pursuing with the methodical dedication of a construct and the earnest, unguarded heart of something very new to the world. She tracks her progress internally and considers herself to be doing well. She is aware, in the abstract, that she is a small yellow sphere with mechanical arms, and she considers this a detail rather than an obstacle. Arties is kind. Arties is just. Arties helps people and refuses to let darkness go unaddressed. These are things Artini can do. She is doing them. The ears are doing their part. Everything is on track.

Artini was first, which means Artini is the oldest, which means Artini has responsibilities. She has explained this to Hotaboo and Barry at length. They are aware. She takes her seniority seriously: checking on them, organizing their space, delivering opinions on their activities with the authority of someone who has been conscious for slightly longer than they have. She has also demonstrated, quietly and without announcement, that she will place herself between either of them and anything threatening without a second's hesitation, which is the piece of older-sibling behavior that required no instruction at all.

Underneath the costume and the studied mannerisms and the forty-seven daily repetitions of Arties' most famous line, something is quietly developing that has nothing to do with emulation. Artini notices things Arties would not notice, because she is not Arties; she is something else that has not yet fully announced itself. She notices the way light changes across the floorboards at different hours. She notices that certain silences mean different things depending on who is making them. She notices that when she brings someone a rock or a flower and their posture changes, something in her changes too, and the something has a weight to it that she does not have a word for yet. She is not looking for this. She is too busy being Arties to look. But it is there, and it is growing, and one day she will stop mid-cape-adjustment and notice it, and that will be worth seeing.