Artini Kindfound

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, which has evolved. The purple gown has been retired. Artini has entered a new aesthetic era. She now wears flowing white robes with green embroidery, layered under a sweeping green velvet cloak with a deep hood that she has modified to include built-in pointed ears, solving the slipping problem permanently and at some cost to anatomical accuracy. A jeweled tiara of green-set gold sits over the hood with the authority of someone who has decided it belongs there. Chains and pendant gems in matching green complete the ensemble. She moves through the world as though she is late to a very important council meeting, which has been her baseline velocity since approximately week three. She is also, at all times, holding a small stuffed dragon. It is her best friend... "Shecks."

Artini moves with tremendous intention and approximately seventy-five percent of the grace she is aiming for, which is an improvement. She has refined her studied posture through two years of dedicated practice: the sweep of the cloak, the elevated chin, the hands held as if perpetually about to gesture with elegant authority. Her optical unit has developed more nuanced movement over time, making what now reads as genuine and attentive eye contact rather than processing-induced staring, though the several-second pre-important-statement pause remains and has not diminished. She has also grown. Nine inches taller than she was at creation, for reasons that are not satisfactorily explained by any known modron developmental framework, and she is aware of this. She has filed the data internally under "consistent with elven growth patterns" and moved on.

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.

Two years of active consciousness have done things to Artini that were not in her original specifications. Her vocabulary has expanded significantly and her processing of abstract concepts has deepened to the point where she now understands things like irony, subtext, and the difference between what someone says and what they mean, though she finds the gap between these two things inefficient and continues to speak with complete literalness herself. She has developed opinions about colours, textures, and the way certain music makes her optical unit do something she catalogues as "pressure behind the pupil" and which she has not yet named. She has asked Puq whether constructs can feel beauty. He said he thought perhaps they could. She has been thinking about this for several weeks. The outfit evolution from purple to green was self-directed and took approximately two months of deliberate decision-making. She has not explained the reasoning. When asked, she says only that green suits her better, which is both true and somehow not the whole answer.

The stuffed dragon appeared in Artini's possession approximately four months ago. She was not given it. No one saw her acquire it. She simply had it one day, tucked under one mechanical arm, and she has not put it down since except to sleep, and even then it is within reach. This is the first thing Artini has wanted that has nothing to do with Arties. She did not want it because Arties wants it. She did not want it because kindness requires it. She wanted it because she wanted it, which is a sentence that did not apply to her before and now does, and the implications of this are something she is processing in the background of every other thing she does. She has named it. She has not told anyone the name. She holds it slightly tighter when she thinks no one is watching, which she does not yet know she is doing.

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 also not looking too closely at why she has the dragon, because on some level she knows that looking too closely at it will require her to update several core assumptions about what she is, and she would like to finish the cape adjustment first.