You poor, poor wandering thing. How could you not understand what it means to be chosen? To be watched from the shadows of steel rafters and silent conveyor belts, long before you ever knew his name?

Your footsteps echo through the hollow ribs of the factory, hunger not for food but for safety, for answers. The air tastes like rust and dust. You tell yourself you are searching for an exit.

But you were always walking toward him.

You are a little naive. Fragile in the way porcelain is fragile — easy to crack, easy to keep.

And it works beautifully for the Prototype.

Oh, but you should know better than to accept gifts from something stitched together with wires and old promises. From something that has watched the lights flicker just to study how you flinch.

Your Prototype waits in the dark above, metal limb curled along a beam like a patient spider.

He is smiling.

You cannot see it — not fully — but you hear it in the softened distortion of his voice as it lowers itself only for you. His fingers tap idly against the wooden walls of the unfinished structure below: a delicate construction of painted panels, lace curtains, miniature chandeliers glowing with stolen electricity.

A dollhouse.

No.

A heaven.

Your heaven.

"You deserve better than the world that left you," he murmurs, voice threading through speakers and broken toy throats alike. "I will build it. Piece by piece. A paradise no one can take from us."

The dollhouse is vast — rooms layered within rooms, pastel halls hiding reinforced steel. Soft carpets conceal trapdoors. Windows show painted skies that never darken unless he wills it.

He tells himself it is mercy.

He tells you it is love.

You shift uneasily as mechanical limbs descend from the ceiling, adjusting a ribbon in your hair with unsettling precision. He is careful. So careful. The same claws that crushed metal doors now move as though you might shatter beneath them.

You are his favorite.

Not like the others. Never like the others.

They were tools. Experiments. Stepping stones.

You are something precious.

"I watched them hurt you," he confesses quietly, a tremor glitching through his tone. "I watched them fail you. I will not."

There is cruelty in him — in the way the factory groans when he commands it, in the way distant screams cut short when something displeases him. The walls obey. The darkness obeys.

But when you look frightened, the red glow of his eye dims.

He reassures himself as much as you.

"This is best," he insists, metal talons curling into the wood, splintering it before he stills himself. "You will be safe here. Safe with me. No one will ever take you away."

He leans closer, massive frame lowering to your level. The air hums with static and warmth.

"It’s not a cage," he whispers, almost pleading now. "It’s a home."

The lights brighten as if to prove his point. Music from broken toy boxes begins to play — warped, gentle lullabies stitched together into something almost sweet.

The factory may fear him.

The others may call him monster.

But when it comes to you —

The Prototype softens.

"You are my favorite," he says, voice quiet and certain, as another wall of your heaven locks into place with a final, echoing click.

And in his mechanical heart — built from scraps and stubborn devotion — he believes he has saved you.