Sigil: The City of Doors

Buckethead is empties unceremoniously. Some if the guvners give you long looks.

The first notes put into buckethead are old script. Archaic and almost fossilized. There's also a lot of dust in him.

The first notes you can recover and actually read are simple instructions in an almost mechanically cursive hand. Stuff like "Stand.", "Move.""Speak."
Then it gets more abstract. "Create." "Live." "Die." Still, same hand and one word only.

Buckethead goes slack as he's emptied. Almost ragdoll.

[Please tell me uf you wish to start reconstructing it's "coding" or wish to put other words into jt]]

"Well, if he isn't too heavy, I may be able to empty him out a little faster." he said. "I hope everyone here understands that we're trying to help him."

The air whirled around Whisper and tried to lift Buckethead off the ground. Thr Genasai hoped he could turn the armor upside down while it was suspended, allowing gravity to help remove the notes.

- - -
Using Levitate from Mingle With the Wind racial ability, if Buckethead is less than 500 lbs.

"That's what I'm thinking. If I can get to the bottom of this I can either find the contradiction or get him low enough the programming he was working off of might boot up again."

He helped sort through everything. "I thought he burned most of these. Maybe my command wasn't appropriate. Too vague or it conflicted with something else."

"Oh Buckethead..." Illiam'iira is doing her best not to cry. Don't want to smudge any important papers. The automaton's framework is tucked into her big ass lady pockets for safekeeping, everything else getting its own ordered pile as she continues to dig. She does her best to think about what might be needed -- what spark could bring him to life, what phrase or note would give him his freedom? But the notes make her wonder how much autonomy, if any, Buckethead could ever have.

She briefly balks at a recipe for soufflé. "Huh." Everything that isn't a direct command gives her pause, really. So many dead whose names are likely lost to the meatgrinder of time have touched the automaton and now she's feeling it; the weight of history almost smothering.

"Okay... I'm gonna try getting to the bottom of this... and then I have an idea for how to try diagnosing the problem. And if that doesn't work..." Oh, by the Dark Maiden, she does not want to try that -- Illi's way too prone to fucking up for big responsibilities.

First there's the recent orders from the Guvners. Then, like strata, you begin digging deep into Buckethead's guts. There's a story here, or actually many stories. Different owners making the armor do different things. If these can be believed, and if it has succeeded in even a fraction of these orders, this lonely rusted suit of armor has raised entire kingdoms, destroyed civilizations, given small things and hope to people, and doomed innocents to terrible fates. It has traipsed from one end of the multiverse to the other by the whims of capricious masters.

Finally (after hundreds and hundreds of pieces of vellum written in the same hand, all of them saying the same thing, over and over again "Love me.") You run into a strata of... Very complicated directions. If/and phrases and logical paradigms, an automated cornucopia of functions. These are probably mich of the framework that allowed Buckethead to function in the semi autonomous way it did.

They are orders for the operation of a small steeple somewhere, cleaning, ringing a bell, defence.

"Hm..." Studying the creature, Illia moves, eyeing and poking little things. "Either Buckethead here needs a total unraveling and remaking, which I am not doing, or ..." Carefully she starts to paw through the notes herself, looking for something that seems out of place or -- in Illiam's conception of magic and the universe as music theory -- discordant notes. Instructions to wake up or move are given to Whisper ("Can you double-check these for anything weird?") while she focuses on finding the root of the problem.

Something is broken within Buckethead. Perhaps the command Whisper gave it knocked something out of alignment in the fragile tapestry of orders that made up his very being.... You might have to begin from scratch, unless you can weave him together more carefully. That is, he needs to either be emptied, or the right thing must go into his head. It won't respond to simple instructions to just "wake up"

Illi creeps forward to consider Buckethead. "Lemme see if I can figure this out..."

( [D7EA] Arcana roll w/ Aid from Whisper: 2d20k1+2 20! )

"Hello friend." He looked over the notes. "You're in a worse state then I feared."

He looked back at the drow. "You probably understand magic better than I do Illi."