System Status—functional.  Hello and welcome to your new consciousness.

Warning: Impediment to:

Motor Ability: Composition—Saronite.

Auspex: Composition—Linen.

“Is it ready?  I want to see, damn it.  We’ve waited long enough and we’re just about out of time.”

“Listen, if you’ll just be patient, we still need to run a few tests to make sure it’s suitable for field work.  You know if we fuck up again it’ll be our heads for this.”

Congratulations!  You are model 26, DK series.  You have been selected to serve the royal line of Lordaeron with efficiency and reliability.  Your duties will include but are not limited to:

Securing new territory for the Kingdom of Lordaeron

Protecting the Royal Person at all costs

Sowing fear and death in the living

Obeying all commands of subordinates of the Royal Person

“Just a minute…look, you’re the one who decided to use this older model.  I still say we should have just started from scratch instead of—“

“Don’t you start with me.  Unlike some people, I actually received my tenure from above the dean’s desk!  Need I remind you, it takes years to make one of these things, and we got lucky when this one was just wandering around Silvermoon when one of our acolytes picked him up.  Don’t you see Laurie?  They actually got one of these things working before the Dark Portal reopened—all we have to do is make a few improvements here and there, and I’ll finally get published!”

“We.  We’ll finally get published.  And your childish little remarks aside, Professor, we still don’t know what half of the shit going on above his eyebrows does, or even how it works.  Where the science ends and the sorcery begins—“

“—is a question we don’t need to answer, so long as it works.  Look, it can hold a damn sword, right?  Something sharp?  And it knows how to stab things and it takes orders.  We mapped the whole thing out, so we can just reverse engineer from what we know of this one to make more.”

New Hardware installation detected: Composition—Saronite.

New Programming detected:

Heavy Weapons (Melee)

Infiltration

            -Immigration and Naturalization

            -Improved Linguistics

Educational Processing Improved.

Warning!  Unable to locate previous programming.  Please consult artificer to repair the following:

Cloaking device.

“What’s going on in here!?”

“Baron!  My lord, I…we were just finishing running the final activation—“

“No time for excuses Braun!  We need that thing up and running immediately—the battle has commenced, and we must have every available soldier down there in New Avalon, and that includes your little pet project on the gurney.  Get that sheet off of it, give it a weapon, and get it down there, or so help me I’ll see to it that your lab assistant pays a visit to the Abominatory for limb enhancement!”

Impediment to Auspex removed.

Location confirmed: Laboratory, similar in design to origin factory, Scholomance.

Targets Acquired: Four sentients:

                                    Human—3 (1 deceased [functional])

                                    Equine—1 (1 deceased [functional])

“Now to just make the final adjustments…” male, living.

New Programming Detected

The following have been added under classification subordinates of Royal Person:

Cult of the Damned

Awaiting instruction.

Auspex obsured.  1 master present.  Female, living.  Facial function, smile.

“What is your name?”

Engage conversational routines.

“Twenty Six.”