ok so uhm the main thing i had to keep in mind with their off string design was mobility. OBVIOUSLY. their legs are built the way they are for the sake of traversing through harsh, bumpy and uneven terrain (for a multitude of purposes. i think in general their ancients would just want them to be mobile for important meetings and even in case of emergencies! ancients thinking about the future that DOESN'T involve mass ascension ... unheard of) and have springs based off the "prototype"'s (myths.) feet to absorb impact when falling. fields especially has a special ability to jump higher from the added mechanisms he has in his legs :]

their feet are talon-like for the sake of grip and their legs are generally very agile despite their chunky design! with multiple joints that allow for flexibility. their hips are also built to allow their legs to stretch to the side and whatnot. they're just very flexible in general.

now for my favorite part!!! the jelly-like substance that each of their puppets has acts as their "blood". despite being considered iterator blood it isn't fluid, and is comparable to the texture of the silicone from a breast implant—doesn't spill, is a great regulator for heat, and prevents any possible damage to their innards !!! the ancients figured that they'd need their neurons to function properly sooo they just shrunk down copies of their data into tinier neurons and just. filled em up with them. the neurons float around freely inside of them.

i also think that their cores are somewhere inside their torsos like a real heart, protected by the silicone. they also have a bunch of wires and functions inside that require frequent coolant so they probably have a bottle for it somewhere along their back that can be taken out at any given moment.

SBS (Stacked Between Stones, it/its) - debateably not even an iterator anymore. it definitely used to be one, but it lost its memories in a botched transfer into a mobile puppet and now believes itself to be a purposed organism of some kind. it avoids thinking about where it came from. instead, it takes pleasure from exploring the world and honing its own survival abilities. it experiences the cycle, but is unaware of it, not remembering past deaths as something with a mark of communication would. it's incredibly prideful of its own competence, and initially offers help to RP out of curiosity; to see if it could keep her alive.

RP (Relentless Percussion, she/her) - her creators were convinced that the failure of the wider iterator populace to create a Solution was due to some instance of flawed reasoning that had tainted their data via the sharing of research. therefore, they reasoned, an iterator completely isolated from their peers would be able to find a Solution, as their data would be free from this theoretical error. hence, RP was built without access to her communication arrays. they were still built, as her creators wished to communicate with one another, but an advanced program was created to prevent her from accessing it. she spent the thousands of cycles between the global ascension and the beginning of the story working on breaking through that program. however, she was too scared to say anything once she had access, since she had never conversed with her peers before. she instead used her access to hack into private broadcasts and spy on iterators, with the aim of gaining an understanding of how to act. she is the person who initiates the story, as through her spying she discovers a plot to kill another iterator (SOP, he/him, ive posted about him under the name 13 Vases Upon Vines). since he has all non-local broadcasts blocked, she decides to mobilise herself and make the journey to him herself, meeting SBS and WP in the process