The mechanite never got a chance to process that weird stray thought, because it was followed closely by a sharp pain in his right shoulder.
“Ow!” he hissed, “What the—” He turned his head and suddenly found himself face-to-face with a very nervous-looking, dragon-headed humanoid holding two delicate brass tools to his exposed shoulder mechanism.
“O-oh…” they stuttered, pulling away their tools and standing up. They looked to be wearing something like a religious vestment. “Oh, by the Holy Maker, you're awake. That's… unfortunate, I'd hoped, um…” As they spoke, they set their tools down gingerly on a nearby small table that held an entire box of even more and stranger implements.
The mechanite was barely listening, because he found himself reflexively taking careful stock of his situation. Without moving his eyes off the dragonborn for a single moment, he deduced as much as he could about the layout of the room from just the peripheries of his vision. The initial impression he'd gotten from staring at the ceiling wasn't quite right; the space itself was vaulted and gilded like some kind of temple, but all around the large room were a dozen or so… workbenches? Narrow tables of wood and steel covered with tools and half-finished clockwork contraptions.
As soon as the dragonborn looked aside to put away their tools, he subtly tried to move his limbs to determine if he was restrained, but instead found that most of his body was numb and nonresponsive. Paralysis, maybe? If so, it either hadn’t fully set in yet or it was just starting to wear off, because his head and neck obviously worked fine, and he could tell he had at least some mobility in the servos of his hips and chest. A few quick taps finger-to-finger and fingers-to-palm confirmed that his right arm, currently slumped off the edge of the table, was still reasonably dexterous, but with a tingling partial numbness that would make fighting difficult, if it came to that. Was it worth it to try and palm a sharp tool from the box?
The acolyte wrung their bronze-scaled hands and backed up a few steps, stumbling a little on the hem of their own robe. Probably not a fighter, then, unless it was an act. Their facial expression and body language projected nothing except genuine-seeming concern and slight embarrassment. “I-I’m going to go get Seeker Zulthind,” they said, as though that should mean anything to him.
The dragonborn’s gaze shifted over the mechanite's head, to somewhere else in the room beyond the other side of the workbench where he was laid out. “Um, mister wizard?” they called out in a slightly louder voice, “Y-your friend’s awake. I was able to do the right arm, but, um…”
Before they had even finished speaking there was a clatter of bare metal feet and a swish of robes, and an entirely different and much more normal-looking sort of person rushed up between him and the retreating dragonborn. He was another mechanite, conventionally metallic with a flat silver faceplate and unremarkable chassis, though there seemed to be some inlaid goldwork peeking out from under his disheveled blue robes.
“Oh thank the gods, you're actually alive,” the new stranger babbled. “We weren't sure whether—with that amount of damage, even with your core intact, I thought—” words seemed to fail him, and he just leaned against the the back of the acolyte’s empty chair and let out a puff of steam as some of the obvious tension left his joints. For a guy with a static faceplate this stranger had very expressive eyes, and he seemed to be genuinely relieved.
The prone mechanite stared up at him from the cold table. “Uh… you're welcome, I guess?” he said stupidly, for lack of anything better springing to mind.
The wizard let out a single staticky chuckle, then turned to address the dragonborn before they left the room. “Valetta, if you have a spare moment, could you inform the other mechanite as well?” he asked politely, “I believe he’s still upstairs conversing with Nim.” The acolyte, Valetta apparently, nodded and continued out of the workshop. Then the wizard sighed and regarded him with a sort of apologetic self-consciousness.
“I, ah…” the stranger began, then looked him up and down with a pained expression. “I hate to ask this of the person who’s clearly had it the worst out of the three of us, but, well… I don’t suppose you have any idea who we all are, or how we ended up in this predicament, do you?” he asked.
“Huh?” the mechanite responded, not really understanding the question at first, then… then, he realized.
He didn’t know who he was.
The realization didn’t hit him as hard as it should have, all things considered. He was still trying to get his bearings, and the other mechanite had mentioned damage. He took the the calculated risk of trusting this guy enough to take his eyes off him, and finally turned his neck to look at his other arm. How badly was he—
His left arm was gone.
He stared. His arm was—it was gone. Just a stub of pale flesh-toned shoulder plating ending in a mangled slag of cauterized mechanics.
The mechanite felt his core stutter. “Wh—wha—?” he tried to say, his vocal unit glitching as his mind tried to catch up with what his optics were telling him. Without thinking, he lifted his right arm to reach across and feel—no.
His right arm was wrong. It wasn’t his. He stared at it, stared through it, through the primitive skeletal brass clockwork that ticked and glinted and wasn’t his. And then, almost as an afterthought, he finally lifted his head off the table to look down the length of his body towards his legs. Stumps. Like his arms.
He didn’t feel surprised. He didn’t feel—anything. His mind was a flurry of noise and static, of thoughts that weren’t thoughts because he couldn’t even remember thinking them. The wizard was saying something, but he couldn’t hear him over the white noise in his mind, like his aural transducers were submerged in lapping water.
The static in his mind was pulling him under, dragging him down into someplace dark and cold and empty. Then—
My friend! Is it true? You’re alive?!
The silent voice cut clear through the noise in his head like a beam of pure starlight. Suddenly he was back on the workbench, his back and head propped up in the arms of the concerned wizard, his new prosthetic arm limp across his sad excuse for a lap, his eyes fixed on a doorway on the other side of the room.
A third mechanite stood there. The tattered remains of a short green cloak ghosted across his chest plate, doing little to cover the ragged edges of a wound that must have killed him. It had to have killed him. But there he was, smiling.
The mechanite just stared. He wasn’t sure if he felt anything, even now. But there was a rising pressure behind his optics, and something began to drip down his carefully sculpted cheeks.
The smiling mechanite strode across the room towards him, the very last traces of stress and fear barely noticeable on a face that shone with relief and reassurance and an infectious confidence that everything would be alright in the end. He walked right up to the table and gave him a look that held no pity, no disgust, just a wry sort of comfort.
“If I had to guess,” he said aloud, “I’d say you’re just as lost as the rest of us, is that so?”
The mangled mechanite nodded, and the smiling one laughed lightly.
“Well, my friend, I think that mystery can wait a bit longer. For now, let’s get you fixed up!”
For the first time in what he was sure was a very, very long time, the mechanite felt like like he might, someday, be alright.