"Tha'll be 490 gold pieces, as agree'din tha contract. Package delivared en signed for. Pleasure doing business with you."

"mmmm."

"Tha speshell modifications have already been installed. The devais is reactivated. I'm off."

With a lurch, the world comes into focus, your senses rushing you with a barrage of data. After a moment of confusion, you begin to make sense of your surroundings. A bowed and tired looking figure stands, or rather hunches, before you, replacing an oddly lumpy pouch beneath a fold of his draping ash-colored robe. Face obscured by a hood, you cannot make out many other identifying marks, other than the polished staff the figure leans on, which ends in a peculiar crystalline protrusion of the same ash-grey color his robes communicate. You are standing in a dusty workshop of some kind - tools and antiques litter every surface, and you can just hear the retreating footsteps of a small, two legged creature of some kind. Not a likely threat. Glancing at your hands, you take in your form - enormous metallic body parts of a currently dull sheen, riddled with runic markings and, to your kinesthetic sense, thrumming with power.

The grey figure emits a dry, yet clear voice. "Can you hear me?"

A strangely hollow whirring echoes through the room as scarlet eyes blaze in the gloom. (Roll perception: 16)

All systems operating as normal. M-019 ready for orders.

M-019.....I.....shake my head. What was that? 

I hear you.

"Good. Come."

You stand in what appears to be a storage room. Tall wooden crates of various sizes fill the corners of the room in semi-organized piles. Behind you, a similar empty crate stands open and empty. The floor is covered with a layer of dust and fragments of old wood. From down the hall, you can just make out the sound of soft voices, a few earnest discussions, their words jumbling over each other in an uninteresting blur. The cloaked figure moves unsteadily across the room to your right, behind you, pausing before a side door. He looks towards you, and you can make out dull, colorless eyes that light up beneath the hood.

"You may call me... Gren. I have need of your services."

The door opens, revealing an alleyway dimly lit in the twilight. The alley is stained and dirty, with stagnant puddles lying haphazardly about.

"Your memory is... damaged, I think. Missing. Do not try to remember your past - you will find only emptiness. Know this. I have purchased you with the last of my expendable resources. I will need your... skills... to acquire more. Come."

I remain unmoving.

Unit requires primary directive.

A slight shudder ripples through the hulking form.

Odd. No matter.

I follow the figure out into the alleyway, constantly scanning the narrow, grimy area. (Roll perception: 15)

As you pass several turn offs from the alleyway, eventually taking one yourself as you follow the one called Gren, you notice no immediate threats. The ground is largely made of mud and stones pressed into it by thousands of steps. The walls of the alleyway appear to be a worn, smoothed down variety of dark red brick. You do, however, find that a good number of people seem to be moving about on business of one kind or another, many keeping to shadowy back alleys much as you are doing yourself. Nearly universally, those who are active at this time seem to be dressed in continuous efforts to be nondescript, even secretive. Hoods drawn, long cloaks whispering along uneven ground, the two of you are able to pass largely unseen through this area. You notice a single other warforged, whom you glimpse for only a moment, moving down a different alleyway. Recognizable by his size and build as a similar model to yourself, you perceive in the moment you can study him that he is in the process of pulling a large sled full of crates. He seems to be ignoring his surroundings as much as possible, relying on others to exit his path. 

Well after night fully sets in, causing Gren to stumble once in the dark, uneven ground, you arrive at a small hovel with its door cut directly into the surface of the wall. Upon entering the room, before you lies a scene of squalor and poverty as six figures lie huddled, unmoving in misery, around the room. None seem to remark on your entering. Gren, ignoring the other occupants, walks immediately across the room - and through the back wall.

Seeing no other options, I follow, but not before drawing my war pick. With my weapon resting casually, but always ready on my shoulder, I sidle up to the wall and reach out towards it with one hand. When the automatonic creation slips through with no resistance, i prep myself for what could be, for all I know, an ambush, and step through.

The wall, it seems, is an illusion. 

As you pass through, you step into what appears to be a space roughly the size of a small warehouse. tables and bookcases take up most of the room, giving it a maze-like feel. Haphazardly throughout the room are small expanses - specialized workshops, desks lined with stacks of books and rows of vials of potions. The entire room is covered with a slight film of grime. 

"This is my ... workshop. Come."

Gren strides confidently into the room, weaving his way through the bookcases. Within moments, he is lost in the relative gloom of the room, only dimly brightened by unwavering blue lamps set irregularly around the room.

"Over here." Gren calls from what sounds like the center of the room.

Perception Check 16 followed by survival check 7.

OOC: I'm looking for anything that I could use later to repair myself.

You find some potentially useful scraps, and what appears to be a scattered collection of tools. However, you are not familiar with what kind of tools they are, or what their intended uses might be. Even some of the scraps themselves may have other uses - a few seem to have grimy, cramped notes written on attached paper fragments, scrawled in some unknown language.

I snag the closest tool that looks like it might be useful, as well as some random pieces of material. (Sleight of Hand/Stealth: 23)

Then I follow Gren into the back.

You said I was going to help you acquire more ... the lights on my head pulse gently ... resources. What does that mean? I was built for one purpose as you no doubt know.

After a few moments of wandering through the workshop, you find yourself standing before a large stone rectangle built into the floor. The structure sits like a sarcophagus, squat and heavy, with ornate panels covering each side. The top is similarly stacked with books and ledgers of some kind. As you approach, Gren looks up from a thick sheaf of notes. 

"What you were built for, and what you will do, are no similar things." rasps Gren, closing his notes. He glances over, appraising your physique. "Your original purpose was to fight. To overpower your opponents strength for strength... to break their bones with sinews of metal. Congratulations - their bones are now crushed in a thousand broken cities across Eberron... along with the rusting pieces of a few million of your brothers. Now your bones.. are mine. At least in name." 

Gren pauses for a moment, then steps down and away from the sarcophagus, approaching a large movable panel on an easel, covered with maps and small symbols. "I require... resources. Objects for research and... study. Dragonshards, or other sources of power. Money and material wealth as well. I have spent all I can and more to achieve what you see here. It is... not enough. I have located more. You will help me steal it."

I am not optimized for stealth nor subterfuge. As you say, my purpose is to achieve victory through overwhelming force.

Whirring echoes through the room.

And my memory core is fragmented. It will take time to reassemble the pieces into a cohesive whole, if such a thing is even possible. What I do know is this. All of my kind know how large or small our family is. There are some who could help you better than I: the Envoys.

"Certainly, certainly. An envoy might suit this purpose better... but you will have to do. Something you must... understand, now that the war is over, one cannot simply... make another tool for a purpose. The Creation Forges, where you were born, were largely shut down. Envoys are rarer now than ever before. I searched for two months just to find you. I have not ... much time."

Gren turns back to the board and begins to move a few pieces across the board, leaving small glowing streaks in their wake. 

"Enter... here. Disable guard... no, no. Wall too strong there. Try here... yes... ye- no. Arcane detection field. Got to be a way. Got to be a way..."

I move around the table to peer at whatever Gren is looking at. Roll perception: 5

OOC well that's not what I was hoping for. Nat 1 on the perception roll. 

The scattered plots and sheets overwhelm your senses for a moment, and you are unable to piece together what exactly Gren wants you to see. It doesn't help that what few written notes there are seem to be inscribed in at least two completely different languages, neither of which you are familiar with. You recognize some geometric patterns here and there, but the overall impression is of a highly disorganized mess.

"Hmmm?" grumbles Gren, eyes glowing with reflected light.

What is this mess supposed to be? I understand that you can comprehend this ... I gesture at the haphazard mess before me ... but if I am to assist you, then I must have all the information that is available.

OOC: Rerolling perception to see if I can do any better. We'll chalk the last one up to the recent system reboot and that I haven't had time to do a debug/defrag. 23

Perhaps it was the reboot, perhaps a simple change in orientation. The pieces of the puzzle before you coalesce suddenly into a single tapestry of highly detailed schematics, floor plans, and long lists of associated numbers, some of which appear to indicate times, places, even dates. It dawns on you that you are looking at a highly detailed schematic of a highly secure trove of some kind. The glyphs themselves aren't familiar to you, but you are able to observe a pattern forming.

Gren looks at you as your system resets, then glances at the piled mess before him. 

"I suppose I might have been... messy. Things should be clear in time. The objective..." He taps a single diamond shaped glyph on one of the large maps in front of him "... is here. A trove of material wealth, but more to the point, a single jewel of magical properties that I require. Getting to the chamber shouldn't be too much of a problem, as I have investigated every barrier between us and the prize. However, I am unable to complete the the task. One of the final traps set for those who would steal from this trove is a detection field attuned specifically to beings of magical power. Spellcasters. That sort of thing. This is at least partly where you come in. "

Gren suddenly coughs raggedly, his already raspy voice dying beneath a heaving, sore breaths. He stumbles away from the table, fumbling along a shelf for a moment before finding a darkly tinted glass bottle, its contents dubiously viscous. Without a moment's hesitation, he downs the dregs left in the bottle, only lowering the bottle as his coughs diminish. He groans slightly, and sets the bottle back on the table. 

"As I said, where you come in. That trap will instantly recognize me and alert greater security. I need you to open that l last door for me. Then we can... proceed."

I will need sufficient data before I can begin to calculate possible scenario outcomes and probabilities. Numbers and composition of the guard force for a start. But the more data you can provide the more efficient I can be. Names, ages, backgrounds, domiciles, all of these can help me build targeting profiles on the target, and the less opposition we face, the better.