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Description
In a small dark room in the middle of a snowstorm sits a hunched figure, grinning to himself as his fingers click and whirr mechanically across thousands of metal parts, glinting with the light of the occasional spark struck from the cold stone floor. Every so often the hands pause, metal fingers like talons delicately lifting the completed object and placing it to one side, before beginning a new object. The floor is covered in drifts of them several feet deep, every one a little nightmare of spines and circuitry.

The figure builds rapidly, not with the efficiency of the skilled or practiced, but with the calculated precision of machinery. Every so often he moves to make space for a fresh drift of objects, gradually moving towards one side of the room. Even less frequently he scurries across to the wall, taps at buttons with his talons and a fresh tray of metal parts slides from a recess into his hands.

On the opposite wall, a clock measures out muffled time. There is no face, only a single pendulum metres long, every swing ending with the audible silence of weight as it stops and reverses direction. The figure counts every second passing as he works, from the point he enters the room until the thirty one million five hundred and twenty eight thousand eight hundredth second slips past. Then he leaves the room, now empty. He stalks through a tunnel into a huge underground cavern, walled with rock and ice, lit with shaky electrical lighting, and crosses the workspace.

Little things watch him from under the kilometre long benches, constructions that seem to be made from black wire and safety pins, a mess of tiny eyes on each one flickering through various hues. They click, chatter and rustle, clank, creak, squeal and grind with small bursts of cannibalism as the mentally unstable tear into others, and are quickly taken apart and redistributed, the damaged brain left and stamped into an oily smear on the factory floor.

The figure ignores them until one, shuddering and heavy with rust, crawls after him. The others cower as the old model is torn apart with relentless savagery, head and neck left lying, screaming in a static, breaking voice until the figure steps on it, squashing the noise definitively into the floor, where it ceases. He casts an ice cold gaze and a frozen metal grin across the silent room, and leaves it.

The next room is warm and steamy, icemelt dripping from the ceiling and walls into mountainous piles of disgusting mould, ex-paper. Chains and hooks hang from the ceiling, supporting complex structures of rotten bones and metal. The figure pats a structure fondly on what might once have been a head, before kicking a lever on the floor, dark metal panels sliding apart to release a shaky blue glow. The chains rattle down, dropping the structures into the pool of blue, where they hiss, jerk and writhe as the Blue invades every crack and fissure.

The figure turns away to a hook on the wall where a long fold of tanned brown material hangs, running with a protective slime. He stretches out his skeletal form until his joints and bearings threaten to break, before taking down the outfit and rolling it up. Then, like peeling an apple in reverse, Stained Claws puts on his human skin. The human leather oozes and stretches across his metal frame, spines and bony extrusions piercing through, talons snapping comically through the fingertips. The whole jaw rips away and Claws hisses in anger.

The skin is slightly too small and constricting, so he opens it up in a few places, beetle-black metal glinting in the scalp, arms, chest, hips. He crosses the room, widening the tears, to hammer on the door. A small gang of eElves scurry through, dragging the traditional red suit through the paper slush. Claws pays this no mind, the fabric is already closer to brown with blood, and has been through much worse. The traditional long white beard is grey and matted, and can’t quite hide his teeth. The last eElf is limping on one servo, and he catches it before it makes it through the door, ripping it in half and crushing it, squeezing out the oil onto the floor. It makes a good mirror. Claws scoops up some paper mould, working it into the beard. Much more human now.

The reindeer bone and missile system structures are nearly completely infused now, little bioengineered organisms seeping into every possible space, capturing hydrogen and helium for lift, secreting rocket fuel for control. The sleigh, a few rooms away, will already be piled high with presents for all the good humans. Claws starts to raise the reindeer from the pit, sheets of Blue falling away. He leads the reindeer out into the cavern, their hooves already beginning to leave the floor. A few score eElves follow, carefully applying germicide to keep the levitation in check, fire extinguishers ready in case the rocket fuel catches.

Harnessed and attached to various feed pipes, fuel lines and hoses, the reindeer bob in front of the sleigh, crawling with eElves. The one at the very front is fitted with all the guidance and seeking systems, and the red nosecone. Again, tradition. Stained Claws had to pick up the job as he went along, working from literature because no one seemed able to tell him how to do it.

The sleigh is an odd shape, a spined, glass coated ovoid, prickling with sensors and fins, dragging behind it the presents latched together into small cubes, contained in leather sacks. For every one, an eElf will be sacrificed. That doesn’t matter. The hard part will be finding next year’s reindeer, the current set won’t all last another trip.

With the preparations ready, the red nosed one guides them out into the snowstorm. Now with only the last few sacks of presents linking them to the ground, the reindeer hovering fifty metres up, he opens up the feed lines and ignites the fuel, the sleigh taking off with enough force to instantly snap the bones of any human. eElves tumble past screaming to shatter into black stains on the rock solid snow, but enough remain.

The sleigh thunders through the sky, the wind and snow howling viciously around the spines. Stained Claws raises a hand, watching his fingers raking through the clouds just above. They tear apart in the wake of the sleigh, lightning bolts jittering through the lines of presents. The first signs of civilisation appear, tiny lights far below. eElves are cut loose with sacks of presents, floating downwards towards chimneys on little clouds of Blue. By the time they reach about a hundred metres up the Blue will run out, but their guidance systems are good enough to accurately drop a sack down a chimney from that height. Presents will explode into living rooms, and the people will be happy.

One of the reindeer begins to shake, bones rattling, flames pouring from the hollows of the skull as the circuitry burns out. The Blue catches in a second, and the reindeer explodes, bone fragments and pieces of wire rattling down the sides of the sleigh, inaudible under the violence of the ripping air. The sleigh dips and spirals, eElves flying off by the dozen, but Stained Claws sits calmly and burns more fuel, correcting the course.

The bulk of human civilisation is now in sight, spreading out in glittering waves across the ice. Within minutes the sleigh is nearing the centre, and a problem begins to arise. The red nosecone, already ancient, is beginning to crack under the stress. If it breaks up, the primary guidance system fails and in all likelihood the sleigh will crash. Stained Claws grits his teeth with a screech of metal, fingers tightening on the reigns. The nosecone fails, cracks widening into splits, pieces beginning to fly back over the sleigh. One lodges itself neatly and painlessly through Claws’ mechanical heart. He hisses in annoyance.

The reindeer are out of control, spinning every direction, threatening to fly off on their own badly calculated trajectories. It is clear that the sleigh can’t take the stresses, spines snapping, glass cracking. Claws lets go of the reins entirely, the sleigh going into a dive, spinning as it breaks up. He crawls to the back of the sleigh, and detaches the line holding the presents. The sacks of little gifts, glowing light with Blue, carry Claws and the remaining eElves upwards as the main body of the sleigh plummets.

The mishmash of ancient machines, squashed hazardously into one design, begin to crash into the ground. The level of danger, Claws realizes, was underestimated. Explosions spread, shockwaves tearing buildings into atoms. The growing collection of mushroom clouds filling the air buffet Claws and the presents from side to side, growing higher and higher. Stained Claws crawls from line to line, grabbing eElves and scraping off the Blue with them, throwing them into the darkness. Finally the sacks settle into stability, drifting downwards, the few eElves left huddled gibbering in the upper levels. The mushroom cloud density is lighter now, and the explosions seem to have ended.

After a few hours of controlled drifting, the presents settle gently into a pile amidst the flames and wreckage, ready for handing out. eElves scurry away with sacks, dodging little fireballs and falling rubble. Claws surveys this in satisfaction. Not such a bad trip, this year.

Stained Claws himself has been trudging back and forth for weeks, delivering presents. The fires of destruction went out a long time ago, in the first ice storm. The eElves are all gone, frozen, broken or exhausted, batteries dead. Claws can go on forever. He grins savagely to himself as he drags a sack through the streets, practising the famous laugh. Ho Ho Ho. His vocal cords are a little damaged, and the voice box to brain connectors a little loose, but to him it sounds perfectly natural and good. So very human.

By mid June, when the storms are at their height, Stained Claws has only one sack of gifts left. He thinks longingly of his factory. The gifts next year will be so inferior, with the eElves having made half of them. Claws finds the final few houses, drags the sack up the broken pathway, and kicks down the door. The windows were already broken, but he isn’t an animal, to come through the window. People lie in the living room. Lovely people. What Claws likes best is how silent they are, not like eElves. Such a lovely desiccated look too.

Maybe in a few hundred years he will have people working in his factory. When all the problems are overcome, and there are enough of them. He spends half an hour carefully giving them their presents. The large spiky ones that go in the chest cavity, opened with his long fingers, just made for slicing skin and snapping bone. The thin spinelike presents, threaded throughout the body, bonded to the bones. The little flat ones covered in needles, that press onto the skin. In time they will wake up, and enjoy their gifts. There is no way they can fail to wake up with the quality of his designs. Why is it then that every year he returns with better ones they still lay there, in new positions, with such looks of horror on their faces?

Oh well. One day all the people will be happy with their presents.

Description
In a small dark room in the middle of a snowstorm sits a hunched figure, grinning to himself as his fingers click and whirr mechanically across thousands of metal parts, glinting with the light of the occasional spark struck from the cold stone floor. Every so often the hands pause, metal fingers like talons delicately lifting the completed object and placing it to one side, before beginning a new object. The floor is covered in drifts of them several feet deep, every one a little nightmare of spines and circuitry.

The figure builds rapidly, not with the efficiency of the skilled or practiced, but with the calculated precision of machinery. Every so often he moves to make space for a fresh drift of objects, gradually moving towards one side of the room. Even less frequently he scurries across to the wall, taps at buttons with his talons and a fresh tray of metal parts slides from a recess into his hands.

On the opposite wall, a clock measures out muffled time. There is no face, only a single pendulum metres long, every swing ending with the audible silence of weight as it stops and reverses direction. The figure counts every second passing as he works, from the point he enters the room until the thirty one million five hundred and twenty eight thousand eight hundredth second slips past. Then he leaves the room, now empty. He stalks through a tunnel into a huge underground cavern, walled with rock and ice, lit with shaky electrical lighting, and crosses the workspace.

Little things watch him from under the kilometre long benches, constructions that seem to be made from black wire and safety pins, a mess of tiny eyes on each one flickering through various hues. They click, chatter and rustle, clank, creak, squeal and grind with small bursts of cannibalism as the mentally unstable tear into others, and are quickly taken apart and redistributed, the damaged brain left and stamped into an oily smear on the factory floor.

The figure ignores them until one, shuddering and heavy with rust, crawls after him. The others cower as the old model is torn apart with relentless savagery, head and neck left lying, screaming in a static, breaking voice until the figure steps on it, squashing the noise definitively into the floor, where it ceases. He casts an ice cold gaze and a frozen metal grin across the silent room, and leaves it.

The next room is warm and steamy, icemelt dripping from the ceiling and walls into mountainous piles of disgusting mould, ex-paper. Chains and hooks hang from the ceiling, supporting complex structures of rotten bones and metal. The figure pats a structure fondly on what might once have been a head, before kicking a lever on the floor, dark metal panels sliding apart to release a shaky blue glow. The chains rattle down, dropping the structures into the pool of blue, where they hiss, jerk and writhe as the Blue invades every crack and fissure.

The figure turns away to a hook on the wall where a long fold of tanned brown material hangs, running with a protective slime. He stretches out his skeletal form until his joints and bearings threaten to break, before taking down the outfit and rolling it up. Then, like peeling an apple in reverse, Stained Claws puts on his human skin. The human leather oozes and stretches across his metal frame, spines and bony extrusions piercing through, talons snapping comically through the fingertips. The whole jaw rips away and Claws hisses in anger.

The skin is slightly too small and constricting, so he opens it up in a few places, beetle-black metal glinting in the scalp, arms, chest, hips. He crosses the room, widening the tears, to hammer on the door. A small gang of eElves scurry through, dragging the traditional red suit through the paper slush. Claws pays this no mind, the fabric is already closer to brown with blood, and has been through much worse. The traditional long white beard is grey and matted, and can’t quite hide his teeth. The last eElf is limping on one servo, and he catches it before it makes it through the door, ripping it in half and crushing it, squeezing out the oil onto the floor. It makes a good mirror. Claws scoops up some paper mould, working it into the beard. Much more human now.

The reindeer bone and missile system structures are nearly completely infused now, little bioengineered organisms seeping into every possible space, capturing hydrogen and helium for lift, secreting rocket fuel for control. The sleigh, a few rooms away, will already be piled high with presents for all the good humans. Claws starts to raise the reindeer from the pit, sheets of Blue falling away. He leads the reindeer out into the cavern, their hooves already beginning to leave the floor. A few score eElves follow, carefully applying germicide to keep the levitation in check, fire extinguishers ready in case the rocket fuel catches.

Harnessed and attached to various feed pipes, fuel lines and hoses, the reindeer bob in front of the sleigh, crawling with eElves. The one at the very front is fitted with all the guidance and seeking systems, and the red nosecone. Again, tradition. Stained Claws had to pick up the job as he went along, working from literature because no one seemed able to tell him how to do it.

The sleigh is an odd shape, a spined, glass coated ovoid, prickling with sensors and fins, dragging behind it the presents latched together into small cubes, contained in leather sacks. For every one, an eElf will be sacrificed. That doesn’t matter. The hard part will be finding next year’s reindeer, the current set won’t all last another trip.

With the preparations ready, the red nosed one guides them out into the snowstorm. Now with only the last few sacks of presents linking them to the ground, the reindeer hovering fifty metres up, he opens up the feed lines and ignites the fuel, the sleigh taking off with enough force to instantly snap the bones of any human. eElves tumble past screaming to shatter into black stains on the rock solid snow, but enough remain.

The sleigh thunders through the sky, the wind and snow howling viciously around the spines. Stained Claws raises a hand, watching his fingers raking through the clouds just above. They tear apart in the wake of the sleigh, lightning bolts jittering through the lines of presents. The first signs of civilisation appear, tiny lights far below. eElves are cut loose with sacks of presents, floating downwards towards chimneys on little clouds of Blue. By the time they reach about a hundred metres up the Blue will run out, but their guidance systems are good enough to accurately drop a sack down a chimney from that height. Presents will explode into living rooms, and the people will be happy.

One of the reindeer begins to shake, bones rattling, flames pouring from the hollows of the skull as the circuitry burns out. The Blue catches in a second, and the reindeer explodes, bone fragments and pieces of wire rattling down the sides of the sleigh, inaudible under the violence of the ripping air. The sleigh dips and spirals, eElves flying off by the dozen, but Stained Claws sits calmly and burns more fuel, correcting the course.

The bulk of human civilisation is now in sight, spreading out in glittering waves across the ice. Within minutes the sleigh is nearing the centre, and a problem begins to arise. The red nosecone, already ancient, is beginning to crack under the stress. If it breaks up, the primary guidance system fails and in all likelihood the sleigh will crash. Stained Claws grits his teeth with a screech of metal, fingers tightening on the reigns. The nosecone fails, cracks widening into splits, pieces beginning to fly back over the sleigh. One lodges itself neatly and painlessly through Claws’ mechanical heart. He hisses in annoyance.

The reindeer are out of control, spinning every direction, threatening to fly off on their own badly calculated trajectories. It is clear that the sleigh can’t take the stresses, spines snapping, glass cracking. Claws lets go of the reins entirely, the sleigh going into a dive, spinning as it breaks up. He crawls to the back of the sleigh, and detaches the line holding the presents. The sacks of little gifts, glowing light with Blue, carry Claws and the remaining eElves upwards as the main body of the sleigh plummets.

The mishmash of ancient machines, squashed hazardously into one design, begin to crash into the ground. The level of danger, Claws realizes, was underestimated. Explosions spread, shockwaves tearing buildings into atoms. The growing collection of mushroom clouds filling the air buffet Claws and the presents from side to side, growing higher and higher. Stained Claws crawls from line to line, grabbing eElves and scraping off the Blue with them, throwing them into the darkness. Finally the sacks settle into stability, drifting downwards, the few eElves left huddled gibbering in the upper levels. The mushroom cloud density is lighter now, and the explosions seem to have ended.

After a few hours of controlled drifting, the presents settle gently into a pile amidst the flames and wreckage, ready for handing out. eElves scurry away with sacks, dodging little fireballs and falling rubble. Claws surveys this in satisfaction. Not such a bad trip, this year.

Stained Claws himself has been trudging back and forth for weeks, delivering presents. The fires of destruction went out a long time ago, in the first ice storm. The eElves are all gone, frozen, broken or exhausted, batteries dead. Claws can go on forever. He grins savagely to himself as he drags a sack through the streets, practising the famous laugh. Ho Ho Ho. His vocal cords are a little damaged, and the voice box to brain connectors a little loose, but to him it sounds perfectly natural and good. So very human.

By mid June, when the storms are at their height, Stained Claws has only one sack of gifts left. He thinks longingly of his factory. The gifts next year will be so inferior, with the eElves having made half of them. Claws finds the final few houses, drags the sack up the broken pathway, and kicks down the door. The windows were already broken, but he isn’t an animal, to come through the window. People lie in the living room. Lovely people. What Claws likes best is how silent they are, not like eElves. Such a lovely desiccated look too.

Maybe in a few hundred years he will have people working in his factory. When all the problems are overcome, and there are enough of them. He spends half an hour carefully giving them their presents. The large spiky ones that go in the chest cavity, opened with his long fingers, just made for slicing skin and snapping bone. The thin spinelike presents, threaded throughout the body, bonded to the bones. The little flat ones covered in needles, that press onto the skin. In time they will wake up, and enjoy their gifts. There is no way they can fail to wake up with the quality of his designs. Why is it then that every year he returns with better ones they still lay there, in new positions, with such looks of horror on their faces?

Oh well. One day all the people will be happy with their presents.