[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/qSXKgkY.png[/img]
[sub][@Nanaya][@Estylwen][/sub][/center]
Otis, however, ignored Davil’s pleas and the puppeteer’s taunts. He had at least somewhat expected the former to bungle things up, going by previous examples, and he was well-accustomed to the sorts of words spewed from the oral cavity of the latter. Conquering the world with nothing but their mind? The folly of someone who knew nothing and created nothing. Technology was an extension of the will of humankind, the clearest indication of how one can take the principles that govern the world and twist it to suit their needs. The towers that scraped the skies were not craft from some benchwarming nincompoop thinking about them. They were built with bodies well-experienced in the craft of masonry.

Huh.

Otis’s head twisted in thought. He had overthought it. The puppeteer had only spoken about conquest, spoken about it like a pirate or a thief, incapable of production, in which case yes, a mind may be enough to do so. That, at least, was fair.

Leaving Ciara to answer Davil’s cries, the Strigidae himself got to work pulling apart the Mannekin before him. It was just a torso after the shadowy evisceration that had been delivered upon it, but the core components remained. Internal gears to generate physical power, with your standard Essence-conversion rune to convert atmospheric magic into kinetic force. A two-stage transformation process, alongside spherical gears inscribed to the shoulder and hip joints that would receive commands from the command web to operate parts of their body. This particular Mannekin featured a three-set gear system too, allowing it to manipulate its limbs at differing speeds for differing purposes. It wasn’t an ingenious design, but it possessed both utility and simplicity, making it ideal to serve as a disposable army for Wingram’s examinations.

What he sought, however, was the spindle-like object that served to receive magical signalling and transmitted those requests to the auxiliary gears. That was the origin of the whirring of these puppets as they moved, an inscribed piece of aged and lathered oak that even now spun with an obvious desire to [i]attack[/i].

And it wasn’t something that Otis had any intention of overwriting. He [i]could[/i] disrupt and hijack one core, make it subservient to his own whims. Taking what was within hand’s reach, for no reason at all.

Or he could use it as his standard instead, as his litmus test.

Thus, the Seeker’s reasoning. Essence made up all of existence, and the fundamentals of magic was altering what already existed externally. As the Mannekin’s construction was not foreign to him in the ways that mattered, it was indeed a magical construct. It possessed some form of autonomy, judging by every situation where the Mannekins approached in a disorderly, but not wholly disorganized, mob, but it did not issue its own commands. There would be someone else doing this then, sending something in the air to serve as a way of signalling. These were constructs, not organisms, so life-to-life links established in standard telepathy spellwork would not work, and maintaining such a network was exhaustive too. It was wide-range signalling then, signalling that could not be disrupted by combat.
Couldn’t be airborne. Too vulnerable to disruption in closed spaces like this.

Couldn’t be lightning-based. Readings from a quick spell he crafted detected nothing abnormal, and there was only anti-synergy using lightning with wood.

Couldn’t be visual. While there had been instances where the Mannekins showed a response to their environment, primarily in chasing down their quarry, every instance had been triggered by…

Audio. Commands were never verbally issued, either by the woman or the boy, and they had not always been speaking, but that was no indication that the ‘vessel’ that delivered their voice was shut off during that silence. Animals had long been proven to be capable of hearing sounds that humans can’t, and only specific sounds could truly cancel out other specific sounds. Vibrations as well, [i]did[/i] possess synergy with wood and strings. Twas the form of musical instruments, perhaps, of the violin or cello, resonating at pitches he could not hear but that the spindle-core could parse.

That would be Otis’s hypothesis.

A shame, really, that he didn’t have time to isolate the specific signalling noise and then reverse only that. The brute force solution, inartistic as it was, ought to be attempted.

Breath escaped his lips, tranquility smoothing out his furrowed brows.

[b]“Calm.”[/b]

The essence of tranquility subsumed the air and stilled everything, until one could not even hear the sound of their own heart, the sound of their own lungs. A maddening silence, to still even the hearts of the artificial.

If that was enough to cut the strings of the puppets, then Otis would be pleased enough.

If that wasn’t though?

Then it’d be back to reloading his bullets and blasting, while wheeling further down the hall and leaving Davil to muck about like a pig in the mud.