#kabrox18

(from SofiZar on etsy)

she didn't have nearly as many orbiting pieces as there are dots on this stone, but you get the idea. she was pretty big too, often spanning twenty feet in diameter (including the spaces between pieces)

however, she currently looks like this:

art by me! open in a new tab for best quality <3

limbs, fingers, a chest, a head... she certainly didn't have those before. so what happened?

to begin, let me explain artificers and casters, and the unique relationships they share.

an artificer is a lavinian chosen to pilot a caster, a huge mech with a special and impressive mastery over hardlight. andromeda is an artificer, chosen when she was about 200,000 years old--just under a quarter of the way through her life. lua is her caster, and they're much, much older than andromeda. they're somewhere around 15 million years old before the Cataclysm.

artificers were chosen by the caster, and chosen with extreme, mysterious consideration. there's good cause for this, as the process for an artificer to connect with their caster is quite the emotional and mental ordeal.

‘Weaving’ is the present tense act of the Artificer ‘connecting’ with the Caster. It involves physically plugging in a cable to begin. Once the Artificer is consented to do so by the Caster, the Artificer opens a connection to the Caster to create a mental bridge. One Artificer described it as “meeting in the middle” as during this process, the sense of the Self and the Other are lost. The Caster offers all the tangled business of their memories (the past lives of all their Artificers together), and the Artificer offers their own, plus the ability to make sense of the mess. The Artificer takes the millions of memories present, plus themself, and rearranges them into something cohesive—taking the thread off the wheel to form a tapestry—allowing them to fully merge with the Caster. The Artificer is not able to be directly spoken to until Weaving is complete. Once Weaving is complete, the Artificer and the Caster are now part of the Weave—fully functional, operational, and conscious. They no longer have separate minds. They share all the same senses, acting as one body and mind. The Artificer acts as the voice, but will likely display extremely different manners of speech than they would when they are not Woven (the act of being in the Weave.) They are able to receive and respond to updates, incoming communication messages, and so on. The Convergence Master Document

all casters contain the past lives of their artificers within their crystals. memories, experience, emotion, all of it is stored within the caster.

however, it isn't a one way trade. while casters will reflect their artificers combined personalities and characteristics (more individually so with casters who are at Fusion Levels 1-5), the artificer is also affected by Weaving. it's tricky business for an artificer to extract their own mind back out of the caster once their task is complete. the process often changes the very code of someone's existence whether they want to or not. it feels good to Weave, even if it's exhausting. you're much bigger than you really ever could be. powerful. the self is lost, and with it, your problems attached to your Self.

andromeda's experience with her body changing as it did isn't uncommon by any means. after repeated exposure to weaving, artificers were often start to exhibit changes in their chassis structure and behavior. they will walk in a way that matches limbs they don't have (yet), they will need their hardlight generators replaced because they'll unconsciously attempt the output designed for the much more powerful generators on their caster.

however, andromeda's changes were much more drastic than usual. this is likely because she never really had a single shape for a body to begin with. but when she began to with lua, the code for the innate/natural layout of her body--the orbits, the organization of the bits that made up her body--changed. this is due to dissolving and indiscriminate nature of weaving. you lose your Self in there, and you become one with a tapestry instead.

being one with lua meant she touched into their own complex coding and bauplans. her own code would blend with lua's, directing those pieces of her body into a shape loosely like lua's. something with limbs. with a head. a chest. fingers. none of that ever belong to andromeda. but as time went on, every time she left lua, her body would be molded into an imitation of an unnatural shape that was and wasn't hers, in a sense. however, her body wasn't fused yet into what you see above. she... shambled, a good deal more. like a ghost made of rocks. oOoOooOoo

it wasn't until the Cataclysm and andromeda and lua's ultimate defeat at the great Indifference's endless hunger that her body did fuse together. in an event known as the Starfall, andromeda and lua sacrificed the energy of their crystals in a massive burst of heat. burning away the Mortalix. however, the intense heat allowed andromeda's body to become properly malleable, and being one with lua still, the code demanding her individual pieces of chassis to join back together. it hurt. oh, it hurt. but it almost hurt too much to feel.