Stray Golem Shelter and Workshop

By 杏仁豆腐

Fourteen days to find the next job for a clay doll with no master.
Take them in before they're broken up, mend them, and find them work.

Setting: back streets of a canal city x golem repair and job placement x a race against the deadline

⚙ The Stray Mender's Sign

Halfway up Tinker's Hill in the canal city of Calvina, there is a workshop that smells of clay. Thule Workshop. The sign says only "Stray Mender." This is where golems that have lost their masters and wander the streets are taken in, their cracked bodies mended, and sent off to the next job the workshop can find them. Under the city's Masterless Ordinance, a golem without a master must be given a new one within fourteen days or be broken up. The inspector from the Waterways Authority arrives with the paperwork on the morning of the deadline, right on time. The workshop's owner, Sasha Thule, is forty-one, foul-mouthed, loud in her laughter, and while she talks rough to people, she speaks to golems, and only golems, with perfect courtesy.

Habits Don't Wash Out

In a golem's chest is a groove called the name slot, and a golem is set in motion by sliding in a name tag engraved with its master's name and orders. When the master dies and the tag is chipped, the golem keeps walking, repeating fragments of its last order. Moving cargo under the eaves when it rains. Knocking three times on a door at dawn. Turning to face the empty west at a fixed hour. At the workshop they call this a leftover habit. Habits can't be carved away. So this workshop doesn't try to erase them; it looks for the job where that habit is useful.

🕯 Number Six, Called Muto

The most troublesome charge right now is a golem whose name tag is missing the name entirely, leaving only "Number Six" legible. Sasha named it Muto, clipped from the word for unregistered. Muto speaks about fifty words, because its previous master talked to it every night for three years. And when the sun goes down, it always tries to walk someone home. You are the mender hired this spring. Cleaning name slots, patching clay, and writing in the placement ledger are your job. Day fourteen is getting closer. Breaking them up is the city's job. Finding them a place is yours.

The Three Rules of Placement at Thule Workshop

One: never send a golem out with its habit hidden.
Two: see the job at the destination with your own eyes.
Three: take back a returned golem as many times as it takes.