#but if flight rising decided ot do osmethign entire different and go with gears they could go with something like 'clockworker'

[here-there-were-dragons]

it would make sense and be a good idea if the next ancient breed for lightning after this one was a robot/cyborg/golem/steampunk clock construct/ect and this is all the reasons why as well as some speculation on what a hypothetical robot breed could be like

now that aethers have been released and the first lightning ancient confirmed organic, it seems as good a time as any to dust off this old draft of a suggestion i made before aberrations were even an element at all. please read it i worked very hard on it

(i can’t do anything about the weird spacing between some words, it doesn’t show up on the post editor)

reasons it would make sense and has precedent in canon:

-steelhounds. from their art, they are clearly robotic or at least heavily cybernetic lifeforms. there are edible steelhound puppy food items, which both means that they have biological components at some stage of their life, and that they can breed, or have the ability to convert organic life.

-the stormcatcher and his flight prefer to rely on machinery for things rather than outright spells. out of all of them, he seems by far the most likely to make his first attempt at a workforce by literally building them (to be “perfect” probably”) and then animating them with his own mana rather than forming them from magic like the others presumably did.

-the lightning flight has a strong thematic precedent for rogue golems, “progress”, and a certain sort of “making technology better/using technology to make a superior version of this thing”. over half of it’s native life seems to be escaped populations of self-replicating robots and cyborgs. there are mysterious golem factories everywhere. it would be a very effective payoff of that thematic thread if it turned out the original children of lightning were themselves mechanical too.

-there is precedent for elemental spirits inhabiting inorganic bodies in several golem workshop enemies, along with many other “enchanted statue” types. normal, organic dragons are also technically artificially created bodies imbued with draconic spirits of elemental magic, and regularly grow inorganic and even immaterial structures like crystals and smoke as part of their bodies. it doesn’t seem a massive stretch of the imagination that the stormcatcher could imbue a draconic spirit into an inorganic shell of his own construct.

-the stormcatcher is obsessed above all else with advancement and productivity. machines do not need to sleep. machines do not complain. machines do not have feelings or thoughts or biological failures. machines do not need to ever stop being productive. replacing his employees with machines is absolutely something the stormcatcher as we know him would do, and the only reason i could see for why he has not done that yet is that he already tried this once before and it blew up in his face.

reasons it would be a good idea to do regardless:

-people really really want robot dragons. i am aware of multiple people who would lose their minds over robot dragons.

-i cannot emphasize enough that the only way people wouldn’t love this idea is if the execution was wildly questionable or ugly in design

-even if they hated the design that got chosen i know for a fact people still like the general idea of a robot dragon

-as said above, it would tie a long running thematic thread together very well and just give the idea of lightning flight in general a little more feeling of cohesiveness and depth

-since it would be an ancient breed, and therefore only able to breed with more of it’s own kind, there would be absolutely no need to worry about how to adapt all the modern genes to a robotic body. you could just pick out the few that would adapt well as a “paint pattern” or something, and then for the rest you could just go wild adding whatever steam vents or lasers or robotic attachments or jetpacks or tron lines whatever machine-themed additions you could think of. they should definitely get circuit.

-it would feel more diverse than another “smooth 4 limbed mammalian noodle with deer or undefined bean nub shape head and dog legs and one defining feature” or “tundra” again. flight rising as of late has a huge design diversity problem and really seems to have trouble coming up with things that genuinely look different while also looking like complete designs that consist of more than one or two sort of disconnected feeling gimmicks. making the entire body a robot would make it more likely that the design would feel more cohesive if nothing else.

-it would make more sense that they don’t wear clothes

-lore writers would have a lot to work with

-you could say that their roars sound like electric guitars and dubstep screams echoing over the dunes

how it could work lore-wise:

self-replicating artificial lifeforms already exist canonically, but since i imagine the staff would prefer to have a lore explanation as to how they reproduce here’s a few suggestions

where they came from, why they’re like that, how they might have worked, and where they could have gone:

origin 1: abiogenesis- in the beginning, there were 11. in the beginning, 11 became more. while the others built their children of blood and bone, the father of storms saw another path; his creation would not be one of weak flesh-but of living lightning and metal.

in an ill-tempered grumble of thunder, he retreated to his workshop.

for weeks the ringing of hammers, switches, and coils haunted the then-empty dunes as slowly, beneath an infant spire that for another ten thousand years would not earn it’s name, the father of storms’ own image of took shape.

he welded brass, balanced gears, built engines, carved thoughts circuit by circuit written in lines of gold, breathed life and magic into their hollow forms as only a god could. at last he had his workforce-eternal machines of his own ingenuity to match the primitive organic legions the other gods would soon bring. in the ages to follow his work would flourish at speeds finally worthy of the lightning it’s powered by, unrestrained in scope now that with his newfound expendable underlings, his workshop would no longer be staffed by a team of one.

(abiogenesis scenario sup-option 1) the stormcatcher may have designed them with different attachments for preforming different sub-purposes in the greater purpose of being his lab assistants, creating a sort of pseudo-eusocial-hive-caste system. this could be represented by the tertiary genes.

(abiogenesis scenario sup-option 2) they may be highly modular beings that can fairly easily swap out parts at will, modifying themselves frequently like living swiss army knives for all manner of lab, factory, workshop, ect functions.

tl:dr if the lightning ancient breeds are robots or cyborgs and did not make themselves that way but were created by the stormcatcher as mechanical beings at the start, then the following is functionally canon

origin 2: transhumanist (transdraconic?) singularity-

the lightning ancients were once an organic lifeform breed like all the others. but unlike the many distant children of the ever-storm that followed, they took their creator’s ideals of progress, improvement, advancement, bettering to the deepest part of their heart-and found that heart’s feeble flesh wanting. their creator spoke to them of thinking for tomorrow-and in their future they saw thunder and metal where once were blood, flesh, and bone. as they say, out with the old, and in with the new.

(transhumanist singularity scenario sub-option 1)-if this is the case, these dragon-ascendants may possibly even be the creators of creatures like the steelhounds, relics of their endless striving for better than the now, a long-forgotten crusade to bring to all the world the fruits of this, their greatest triumph, a hand of prideful works ascending reaching ever upwards towards the sun.

a race on the cusp of singularity, seeking to drag their world kicking and screaming with them into perfect digital eternity. they looked upon the world of flesh and blood they were given and knew they could make it all more. perhaps, in the end, their heavens-reaching tower of all their mighty works all came crashing down.

they dreamed of a world harder, better, faster, stronger, made in all ways superior to the way it once began. but some dreams to other eyes are nightmares best left in the dark.

origin 3: ancient for game mechanic purposes only-

the busy tinkerers of goldensparc or the tempest spire or some yet unnamed city, in their eternal gods-ordained quest to bring their technological might to the task of improving upon any and all design, have rent the finest metal and magic from the earth to sculpt and weld into the greatest clockwork rendering of the draconic form ever created. the next dragon. the most advanced of the clock-golems ever created, the most versatile dracodroid to date, a category previously occupied by little more than tech startup gimmicks that never panned out as their marketing stunts sweepingly promised they should and simplistic brass dracoforms able only to continuously sweep a single narrow path without adaptation. the closest imitation of functional draconic life and behavior there has ever been, cutting out the need for expensive factories through incorporating some variety of self replication technology, granted even elemental power by cutting edge spellcraft and/or embedded cores of the most precious enchanting stones. some hyperbolic outlets may say it’s programmed imitation of the draconic mind is perfect.

far, far too perfect.

how they breed:

1: steelhound-

as stated before, existing steelhounds appear to be partly organic at some stage of their life as well as able to reproduce both their organic and inorganic body parts in their offspring. the mechanical lightning ancient breed may be still partly organic, allowing them to reproduce, and they may possibly use the same method as steelhounds to create offspring that have inborn robotic components as well.

2: cyborg culture-

the breed may be still partly organic in their adult form, and their offspring may be born fully organic. as they grow, they are strongly culturally encouraged to modify and “improve” themselves however they wish until they reach an adult state near indistinguishable from a golem. (the significant con of this approach is that invariably people would be disappointed that they could not have the design of the organic baby form as a nonrobotic adult)

3: ambiguous nanotech-

the breed may be fully mechanical and use some form of magical or nanotechnological means to build more of themselves. perhaps their offspring are initially created as small, simple, incomplete constructs that both “grow” and fuel themselves by consuming food which is then either fed into an internal furnace for power or assimilated into raw material for further construction by some form of magic or nanotech, allowing them to literally grow new parts if they consume the right things.

4: stormcatcher said so-

they can produce offpsring because the stormcatcher simply imbued them with the magical ability to create more of themselves to fill out and repopulate his workforce without having to build them himself again.

5: it’s magic-

their ability to reproduce is just magic, it doesn’t really need an explanation. the way all other dragons reproduce is most likely magical in nature already.

6: progressive construction-

similar to the nanotech approach but with the significant difference that the “growth” of the initial small simple construct is fueled not by nanobots or magic or consumption of building materials, but simply they or their “parents” literally building more onto them.

why and how they would need to eat:

gameplay and story segregation is at play. site mechanically they would eat the same as any other dragon.

option 1-fuel. they may partly power their bodies by processing organic material to generate energy, possibly also in addition to having lightning rods to absorb lightning power, in which case the furnace fuel system is most likely a supplementary backup to ensure they can keep going when the power from their lightning rod system runs out.

option 2-raw material. if their construction includes a nanotechlike equivalent whether by magic spell or by technological construct they may consume organic matter for these magical or technological systems to convert into raw material for self-repairs, giving them some ability to “heal”. this could possibly mean they may only need to “eat” particularly often when damaged. if it’s magic that is responsible for or in some way “fuels” or drives this effect, it could possibly provide an explanation for why the healing spells in the coliseum work on them.

option 3-both.

option 4-replenishing a vital system. in a similar way to how liquid cooled computers require fresh coolant periodically, or many machines need periodic lubricant, they may have a similar system that requires replenishment by a certain material. depending on exactly what chemical it is they need to replenish to function and what it is for, and what exact type of food they eat, this could make a lot of sense.

if stormcatcher made and was later dissapointed with them, them still needing to eat for fuel might be one of the reasons why.

why they might have vanished and how they might come back:

ending 1-they never left.

when the ancient age ended and the children of all others withdrew from the world so too did they for reasons of their own. from the birth of their successors they have spent eons watching, studying, waiting, experimenting on them.

possible reasons:

variant1a-they were cast away when the stormcatcher found something new, but they would not allow themselves to be truly forgotten. they may have long served their part, but they still linger to see, study, the world they created.

variant1b-when the birth of the modern breeds began they saw an opportunity of some kind, perhaps for study, perhaps for knowledge, perhaps for power. the secluded what remained of themselves away for what would become the longest greatest experiment of their race’s collective history-an undertaking generations long to watch and see how the world went on without them. the grand experiment to end all others. the greatest control observation of them all.

abiogenesis scenario variant 1a- the storm-father has devised a new experiment. it has been an age of metal and thunder singing through circuitforged veins, failures and triumphs nameless and many at the hands of his perfectly inorganic world. perhaps, after so long working only in mechanical realms, it is time for something just a little more outside of the box he works in. maybe he’ll see just what it is about those organic lifeforms the other deities seem so taken in by. he doesn’t understand their fascination with the messy, ungainly things, their seeming persistence in seeing something he doesn’t.

after all, a scientist wouldn’t reject a possibility variable without testing sure.

abiogenesis scenario variant 1b-

an age has come and gone. outside the walls of his workshop, the makings of the mortals once more fall to ruin like so many others down the long stairs of time, and his siblings first children have passed into memory. many of the gods stand once more alone. but they have not gone silent.

one by one each light winks out. civilization after civilization extinguished with little more than a whisper. their settling silence parallels the weathering on his own eternal machine’s hides. all things fade, in the end.

the silence falls it’s blankets on all for a mortal’s eternity. to a god, they are not content to allow the silence lease for long.

the cycles of history drudge on over and over on the ceaseless wheel of time, pulling the same up cycle by cycle from the riverbed’s muck. for yet another of countless fleeting moments, different yet the same, a race secondborn emerge to an empty world left to them by an ancestor they would never know.

the stormcatcher looks out from the depths of his workshop, untouched by the outside waves in the oceans of time, and scoffs, why?

his siblings secondborn take their first wobbling steps. a distorted mirror of their elder kindred so many cycles before. they quarrel and they fight; until they don’t.

why?

the elements battle. they war as they always have, as they always did before. but where each flight would stand before a monolith solely of their designer’s own creation, a key in the balance is beginning to shift. where before there would be one breed and one magic, the god’s domains have begun to accept the cast-offs of eachother’s children.

a child of the floes and a child of the forge meet at the top of a snow-spotted hill, and roll and play together in the sunrise. neither of them bears the icewarden’s eyes.

why?

their secondborn were made capable of union regardless of maker and shape. their nests lay not dead eggs and tearful partings but thriving children, born one shape or the other, but not both. the wars rage on as they always have but the peoples mix and mingle until it is no longer easy to be sure which god birthed who.

the lightweaver’s high priest enters her temple, long robes dragging up the steps. the air is hot and the marble is chilling in his golden-bright secondary eyes.

why?

their cooperation has never borne fruit before, only failure and disaster. an as-expected unrepeatable waste of unrecapturable time.

why do they persist in repeating a failed experiment?!

cooperation is done. it failed. dragonkind was gone, it failed. it’s time to move on to another solution, to stop wasting time on thing already proven not to work. all of their experiments failed, why do they strive to repeat those failures?

why do they see something i don’t?!

......

workers cluster at the foot of his workbench, ages of rust weigh on their metal hides. their glassy eyes that look to him are tired with the hollow aching fading of eternity, he notes with a bitter disappointment. imperfect. the perfect needless, fleshless workers, against the ravages of time still had failed.

there are so few of them now.

....

this experiment is a failure.

....

variables presuppose, shifting up and down their stacked threads in an orderly and uncaring mind.

(rigid inorganic thinking beneath which primal thunder brews-deep in the roiling dark far below. an unpredictable, paradoxical, self-contradicting mind. back and forth, one state to the other. like binary, like circuitry, on, off, on, off, one, zero, one.

there is no room for feeling, for inefficiencies, for mistakes or pithy mortal weaknesses in the hard, heartless mathematics of his reality, his civilization’s machine. the computer knows only the numbers it codes-it cares nothing for the lives each digit represents.

legendary is his cold efficiency, as is the thunderstrike of his fury, the totality of his wrath. always sudden. never forewarning. on. off. on. off. one. zero. one.

one never can be certain just when or where a lightning bolt will strike.)

had one not been tested thoroughly enough?

they are waiting for an order. they are not many. they are tired.

the world outside is a growing state of a paradoxical conflict-yet-cooperation, connection and rejection simultaneous and overlapping in the same space.

had this-- notion, of theirs, of unity, not been tested thoroughly enough?

(so many experiments, so many disappointments) 

the remainder of his last failed project look up at him with their tired, rusting, imperfect eyes and those-physical expressions of his siblings’ insanity prance about the world merrily slaughtering eachother and somehow not dying while his own empire’s great works lie collecting dust outside.

....

tragic.

but expected.

they watch him still. with their worthless little failure eyes. the whole lot of them, in the end.

failures.

failures.

(their hides gleamed once.)

...

..... fine.

if his kin are so determined to this perpetual dance of coming together and breaking apart all over again until the shade drags them all to the void’s trillions-damned stomach then who is he to say no? evidently abject insanity is the name of the game they’ve all been playing all this time and no one thought to inform him before he made the mistake of thinking this was a real, serious attempt at finding an actual solution to anything!

his once-great race of ascending experiments look to him and he looks back with disdain. they were built for self-sufficiency, for efficiency, for perfection, for war.

the equations are unmoving. their failure is clear.

tragic. but expected.

..... fine.

with a sweep of his gigantic skull he booms his new and final orders to the lingering gaggle of outmodes in a cold and calculated fury, clearing away these walking remains of his latest failed experiment. their final directive is to watch and gather data on this newly devised long-term scientific venture-abandoned refuse of a disproven theory they are at least they may potentially be of some remaining use to him.

the vast slab of his worktable is swept clean for the drafting of a new, organic line of undoubtable disappointments. a test of the waters in revisiting old delusions of theirs, he snorts with dispassionate contempt, to play along with their breathtakingly illogical chase for a variant of some cooperation scenario that actually bears results worth calculating. though it’s not as though his own isolationist efforts in a cultural vaccuum as they are have gotten results in long-term-he may as well, as they say, throw everything at the wall. one thing, rising from the hard-edged certainty of the numbers, is clear.

this farce is over.

....

dust hangs still in the dismal dawn air as dim orange fingers of sun lap his storm-grey flank.

“Tragic. But expected. “

a groan of shifting stones and a cascade of pebbles breaks the still air. something vast stands to titan feet, shakes itself off.

a pause. “Where will you go?”

the voice behind him is tired, old as the mountains they both loom above and thrice as weathered, deep as caverns and wide as hills, crackling and rumbling with a disbelieving surrender, breaking. He did not turn to meet the earthshaker’s eyes.

“Where i may not be found---this farce is over, and i’ve plans of my own.”

and without another word, he took wing.

the voice receded unseen to the miles of distance behind him.

(a traitorous small part wonders if things could have turned out differently.)

transhumanist scenario sub-option 1 variant 1a-perhaps they weren’t sure how to feel about being replaced by the very organic forms they left behind. maybe when it all came crumbling down, what was left of their civilization decided to step back and watch the primitive lifeforms that took their place, to see where they went wrong. after all, if the stormcatcher chose them over us in the end, they must be somehow better.

ending 2-our longest night

at the end of the ancient age their kind fell deep into a dormant state. now all these thousands of years later, something has made them awaken again.

variant 1a-they were new once, but now they are old. the technology of tomorrow becomes the technology of today and finally the technology of the past. and deprecated software is... replaced. it’s time to clear out the old models and make way for an updated worker design. throw them somewhere in the back of this drawer and forget-the stormcatcher doesn’t need old tech anymore.

their god has abandoned them like an out-of-date iphone, in favor of the latest and most new.

variant 2a-they got out of control, and were considered a dangerous mad science experiment. the stormcatcher, or the ancestors of the ridgebacks, sealed them away in the deep laps and threw away the key.

variant 2a-they had an actual robot rebellion against the stormcatcher after being made to work in the labs and factories to fuel the expansion constantly and were put to sleep, most likely to occur in the “the stormcatcher created them as robots to help in his workshop already and they never existed as anything else before that” timeline. in this scenario is is equally possible that they were or were not created with the intent to have full free will sentience at all.

varient 3a-the equations are clear. is spills out across the vaccuum diagrams like asimov’s psychohistory in the stories of a world a another universe away. the stormcatcher’s calculations have predicted this: their own computations have corroborated. there will come a day in this world’s history when something that has always been growing will finally reach a breaking point beyond which life on this world can ignore it no longer. small processes there are now will eventually run unceasing until something larger gives, the natural progress of entropy in a system of chaotic organized-like existence. something is coming, and if we do not prepare we will not survive. our distant organic draconic successors will not survive. nothing will survive.

a civilization of computers at the call of a pure mana computer god, calculations running a billion fold each moment shape clear the date at which they know with certainty they will come to be be needed, though the peoples of that distant time will not know that needed they are. all there is now, is for them to place themselves all quietly into their long, long sleep.

variant 4b-a calamity was coming to shake their world in their time rather than ours, with the power and totality of something like an asteroid strike, and their kind went dormant to survive it. only now have they started to wake up.

variant 4c- whether natural disaster or warfare or a virus or asteroid or simple running out of resources and deciding to go to sleep until the world recovers enough more, a calamity has come and the calamity has gone, sweeping the machine race away with it, and there are none now left to remember. thousands of years pass. their successors construct the greatest reactor ever seen by dragon eyes on the heart of their land’s aortal leyline.... and unknown to them, the side effects ripple down the leylines of all the expanse, and surges make their way down into a long-forgotten facility. maybe soon, for the first time in ten thousand years, something will stumble out into Sorhaldûm’s light.

variant 4d-to survive whatever calamity came to pass, they placed themselves in stasis at the base of the towers and/or a special reactor and/or some other important large invention in the hopes that they would slowly recharge them with time. modern dragonkind has been using these structures for a long time, unwittingly recharging them slowly in the process.

variant 5a- they loaded themselves into a supercomputer to escape the nonspecified end of their civilization a long time ago, and only now has something triggered them to download back into their bodies. either they intended to remain in limbo for a theoretically indefinitely long amount of time-or something went wrong with the reactivation process that trapped them in the system until a new factor came into the situation to give it a nudge. (this could easily also be categorized under some variants of reconstructing science)

variant 5b-they all trapped themselves in a virtual reality mind upload immortality personal simulated universe scheme as an attempt at a sort of ai ascension hive mind singularity like those old sci fi universes where humanity all loaded their brains into one giant computer system around a star, retreating inward to sleep in infinite digital dreaming in a world inside and below the outside for the rest of time.

abiogenesis scenario variant 1a- every good scientist has a backup plan. in the stormcatcher’s case, that backup plan was a machine race of sleepless unstoppable dormant servants, kept inactive in reserve just in case at some distant future point down the line the situation got hairy enough for concern and the more pedestrian, organic workers were not enough.

abiogenesis scenario variant 1b- they’ve been waiting somewhere deep in reserve in the stormcatcher’s labs for a long time. once they were his lab assistants, but it seems eventually he ceased to care. someone goes down into the old archives of thousands of years past and cracks open just the right door to find them. they haven’t been activated in a very long time.

(abiogenesis scenario) ending 3-reconstructing science/the reconstruction of fallen ancients. once the stormcatcher made an army of metal and lightning, but that was an age ago. it’s been a long time since then. the world is different now. all of them were destroyed in the ancient wars a long time ago, their blueprints old and forgotten under the dusty pile of inventions since. but-something’s coming now. something big. even the stormcatcher can feel it-the balance is shifting. he’s going to need More. a brush knocks loose an age-old blueprint from the bottom of the shelves.... it seems as good a time as any to revisit old machines of war.

variant 1a-it was not the stormcatcher, but a simply a few small members of a modern breed, who stumbled across the rusted, weathered and empty old parts of a mysterious machine scattered buried and forgotten in the sand, and saw fit to rebuild them. the shifting expanse has no shortage of distant far-flung wrecks and abandoned husks of technological ghosts-this time is no different.

variant 1b-the shifting expanse is not named for nothing. ancient structures and forgotten things, stations, labs, compounds, and experiments both sanctioned and secret civilian and all of the above mad long abandoned, are unearthed and buried again just as quickly by the everchanging tides of the vast and hostile dune sea. how much history is entombed beneath those sands forever to remain unseen is no one’s place to say.

the unstable topography is governed by winds and mechanisms inscrutably complex and distant to the draconic-and human- mind. today, it is something long buried that has been uncovered- in the tumult of the weather or some recent event, a portion of the desert has blown away, exposing a vast and uncountably ancient dilapidated complex from long long ago. the ancient citadel, a place of endless rooms filled with experiments, the locus of a fallen empire’s power. this, is where the mysterious remains of some ancient automaton are recovered-and, by their clueless discoverers, expecting some mindless novelty servant, reforged.

the ancient citadel complex could potentially be a new coliseum venue, a dilapidated old lab unburied out of the windy sands, and the breed could be the first coliseum-obtainable one, if it went this direction.

(ancient in game mechanics only scenario)ending(beginning?) 4- no gods no casters. the metal dragons were never meant to be sentient, but there are many things the lightning flight has created which were never intended to turn out as they did. it would not be the first time unfettered advancement has charged blindly ahead to make the biggest, strongest, most powerful thing it can and damn the slightest sideways thought to any possibility of the consequences. they were never intended to be sentient-but creating, with no concept whatsoever of safety, an artificial intelligence as advanced and complicated as you can simply to prove you can do it is given to causing certain repercussions.

they were created by the foremost minds of modern dragonkin-and they would not allow themselves to remain a mere tool for their organic master’s using. this is the ai rebellion plotline you never knew a fantasy kitchen sink with large spots of jarringly fantasy-free dark scifi needed, and the newly created mechanical dracoforms will not rest until their rights within the dominant society are secured.

variant 1a-they did not fight- how could they, against the beings that made them and every weakness they have to exploit? no, instead they fled-to another land in hopes they could find somewhere to be free. out into the desert and into foreign territories and into hiding among dragonkind’s own peoples-hoping for a day they can walk in the sun.

blanket awakening scenarios and misc endings that are applicable to all or most of these endings:

broken masquerade- they are hiding among us, disguised as us, and soon, for whatever is decided to be the reason, someone is about to give the all-clear.

my greatest dissapointment- the stormcatcher built them to be the ultimate perfect beings, and was less than satisfied with the results. even as invulnerable unaging sapient sleepless self-replicating hyperadvanced beyond draconic intelligence and near incapable of clumsiness or mistakes machines, they were still subject to the wear of time, they still required food for fuel, they still had feelings and relationships and will and despite no need for sleeping still objected to spending all their time on the factory floor as workers without pause. this experiment was a bitter wasteful failure, and he did not like to dwell on this farce of disappointments any longer. his standards are unreachable-they could never please their creator. they could never be enough.

variant 1a- they may not have just simply been perfectly functional but when fully rendered in the limits of physical reality ultimately less than the stormcatcher had hoped for, they may have even been actively malfunctioning. similar to how the aetherdragons are irresistibly compelled to eat paper-which i very much doubt is by the arcanist’s design.

roboticized-

in this possibility they either were reawakened, or created in the first place, by several dragons in modern times being willingly or unwillingly roboticized into them. a sort of transdraconic ascension origin/ancient in game mechanics only origin fusion, with optional elements of our longest night depending on exact presentation.