A Part of the Scenery

A great many places of peace and quiet could be found on the Academy, its sprawling grounds home to gardens, fields, and rooftops aplenty. Places of relative tranquility, balanced efficiently between loneliness and proximity to the classrooms. In one such garden, Beta sat, book in hand, pondering the contents he was reading. Most of the places to sit in the school were distinctly human-sized, and it was more efficient for Beta to sit here than in a study room. It was preferable, considering that it was the stuff he was made of. He sat upright on a boulder, and perused a book of man's deeds, covering most of the last three hundred years. Beta was still learning how large this world was, and how many people were in it. For time immemorial, he had been a mindless construct, built only to serve. But now, there were more thoughts in his mind, more things to be known. Beta had developed a fascination with the outside world since his 'awakening' as most of his teachers had called it. His teachers called it a sense of 'wonder', but Beta was not sure if that was correct. It didn't 'feel' like wonder, but then again, he didn't know what 'wonder' felt like exactly. He continued to ponder this, his thoughts distracting him more and more until the problem seemed intractable. He did not know how to proceed.

Golem Beta sat upon the stone, runes faintly glowing, but other than that, he was simply a large statue of a man, holding a paperback history book.

Golem Beta was 'stuck', as one of the other professors had described it. Quite an intractable situation indeed. How was something like Golem Beta to make sense of the things which it had never experienced, and then to ascribe notation to those concepts. No satisfactory methods of rapidly resolving the discrepancy between his thought processes and these feelings presented itself as Golem Beta sat at the rock. Well, wouldn't it be himself, or he? He was learning slowly to replace instances of thought conducive to items with thoughts representative of conscious individuals. It was less a matter of gender, Golem Beta assumed that he could 'assign' himself whatever pronouns he chose, they were rather arbitrary considering the material of his construction. There was, however, a masculine sort of nature to Golem Beta's form, he could not deny, and Golem Beta had chosen, for the time being at least, to apply those terms.

Distracted by his delving into philosophy, he had quite forgotten his surroundings, and had reduced power to his other systems in favor of saving the energy in his core. Despite the considerable amount of energy the Academy had 'given' to Golem Beta, the pseudo-man still felt the need to hoard it. Diverting energy to his surroundings, he was surprised to find little people around him. Two were very close, and his groundsense detected two more near the boulder. Golem Beta froze, looking around but not moving his head, so as to not disturb the little one on his shoulder. It was...asleep? Golem Beta glanced down, and spied the other small one, lying close to his feet at the boulder's base. As his core directed more power, protective and conduit runes around Golem Beta's chest began to softly glow, flickering on faintly with a light blue hue. He considered moving away, but he did not wish to disturb the rest of the small ones. Golem Beta needed no sleep himself, but he understood the necessity from the knowledge he managed to steal from Osgood. There could be terrible consequences for the young ones on his shoulder and at his feet, if he moved.

And so Golem Beta did not. He gently closed the book, and turned his head slightly so that he could see the others around him, and continued to think on his individuality, which was becoming a harder concept to realize by the day. He mused, absently (and unknowingly) humming a tune, a low and smooth rumble with a low and smooth melody.