Infernal contraption, will you not leave me in peace?! I have sweated and toiled away many a night for your sake! I have endured the terrible tauntings of three generations of Swedes making my rounds about town for your precious porcelein parts! I have gifted you with years, years, do you hear me? I have planned and plotted and drawn and scrapped and dreamt... Oh, how I have dreamt!

I have slaved through hundreds of designs, dozens of years, and bolts so countless my fingers grow numb at the thought! I have assembled a family, an army, a nation! I have lovingly crafted gadgets and gizmos, doohickies and devices, fabrications and flamboozles! They have subverted the villagers! They have trod across foreign lands in search of precious cobalt and zinc oxides! They have built this palace of oak and wire and gears and rubber... glorious, glorious rubber! They have served me, and they have paved the way for you, you my sweet, sweet, contrivation! I have raised you above them all, as nothing less than the son I never had!

But that is no excuse to rouse me from my restful slumber!

I care not for your cantankerings! I care not how your joints might squeak, how your many elegant limbs might sway melodically, how your gyroscopes might wirr and your turbines might humm and your valves might steam! Springs sprung as if spun from steely silk, gears of minuscule faerie teeth that mesh as elegantly as the winds themselves, fanbelts suitable to bind a queen, and you cannot tell what ungodly hour this might be?!

Your time shall come, my love. Their soldiers shall be as many playthings to you and our family. Flesh shall rend and flay at your slightest caress! Wet bones shall snap at the terrible shudder of your very foot-falls! Their musketballs will dance about you as so many summer rains, and their seeking-cannons will squander their bombastic barrage like so many flighted snapdragons! How the kings shall tremble in their final days, as you tower above their palaces and plazas, their cities reflected in the gleam of a single ruby eye-lens!

Yes, my child, it shall be glorious! The castles and keeps of the petty tinpots of the past shall collapse beneath your might, and in their place we will bring Wonder! We shall craft cities of teak and cherry whose spires glisten in tanzanite luster! We shall pave the seas with mile upon mile of glorious chromium bridging! We shall tame the skies in billowing velvet sacks and articulated leather chambers! We shall fashion a new empire of peace and pewter, pearls and progress!

But by all that is rational, it shall wait until morning!