As much as Seth would have liked to, and god knows he would have absolutely loved to, he couldn't spend the entire day simply soaking in his magically heated hot tub.

He wasn't lying when he said that he had to wait for a particular piece to arrive before he could complete his latest project, but it might have been a lie to say he had to wait to start it. He could easily start it now, but the bath was simply too good.

Procrastination was such a vile temptress. It constantly lured him in to its comforting bosom and let him rest there for as long as he wanted, even if that was for far too long than a responsible adult should.

And that was when his responsibilities were just feeding himself and earning a paycheck as a lowly IT man. Now that his responsibilities included the lives of countless other people, as well as the structural integrity of an entire budding civilisation - and even the rest of the world now, since this portal epidemic was no doubt somehow his fault - Seth couldn't allow himself to slip into the oh so comfortable embrace of Lady Procrastination.

No matter how utterly divine she was looking after his months of torment and exhaustion. So, as much as he wanted to spend the day cooking away in this tub like he was a crab in a stew, Seth reluctantly decided to be a responsible adult once more.

Responsible adult... Bah, what a complete scam it was.

Letting out a long, grumbling sigh, Seth quickly scrubbed his hair clean before stepping out of the bath. Water dripping from his slender, porcelain skinned body as he strolled bare foot through his workshop.

He hummed a jovial tune to himself, Seth strolled towards the storage area of his workshop, drying himself off with a moderately fresh towel and enjoying a bit of air drying along the way. Although there was no truly logical reason for it, He did make sure to avoid a certain part of the towel... Just in case.

Tying the towel around his waist, Seth slapped his hand casually against the runes carved into the wall of the storage room, as the very simply luminous runes awoke from their slumber and cast their radiance throughout the room once more.

It was true, that he had to wait for particular parts to be prepared before he could use them, but that didn't mean he didn't have parts of his own already. There was a reason, after all, that he always had Lee bringing him large deliveries.

It wasn't just his food rations that were being delivered, but a multitude of mutated creature parts and magical treasures that had been discovered and could be eventually used for his endless experimentation.

The experiment this time was of course building Bob a brother, the first of many actually. So what he needed to do was pick out the right materials to construct his body, while he waited for the puppet to bring him a new supply of crystal cores to use.

However, picking out said materials for creating that body was a bit of a tedious and arduous task in and of itself, mainly because of the responsibilities he was intending for this newly created, fully autonomous puppet to take over.

At first Seth had wanted to create a single puppet that would carry out all of his crafting needs, creating newfound weapons and armour to arm his growing army of puppets and people who had yet to find Requitals, as well as enchant them with runic carvings imbued with the living puppets intent and will.

That had been a plan, but he had quickly realised that it had a few glaring flaws in it. For one, he wouldn't be able to craft custom equipment as well as run his production line of semi-autonomous puppets, the one's that would be powered by crystal cores and carrying out programmed orders on repeat.

If he was wanting this new living puppet to craft something for himself, or one of his compatriots, it meant that his production line would also lose its carver. While he would be able to fill the gap caused by that, it completely defeated the purpose of creating the puppet in the first place.

Not to mention, it made the design needlessly complicated. Never mind the fact that he would be teaching them two extremely complex professions all at once, but the requirements for bodies in such professions were a stark difference.

One required power and a domineering hand, while the other was dictated entirely by a dexterous hand that focused on precision, down to the finest detail such as the depth of a line.

Eventually he decided that it was better to just separate the two positions and make two living puppets to fill each role. He hadn't even figured out if he was truly able to do it yet and he was already planning to make two, and even more afterwards. He was definitely optimistic, that's for sure.

However, while the rune carvers body would be a simple matter, already picked out in its entirety, his future blacksmith presented a singular, yet deeply important, requirement that Seth was struggling to fulfill.

Put simply, he had to be fire resistant. I mean it only made sense, right? He would be working with a forge all day long, handling mythical metals that went beyond the bounds of those known by mortal men.

It was naturally going to get hot as hell, literally, in this forge. So the puppet he was going to craft had to be able to withstand that heat without collapsing, or dying.

Immediately, this meant that his massive stores of wood were completely off limits. Even the most durable plant matter he had collected was still beholden to the wrath of Prometheus' gift to man.

Metals were also subject to the same weakness. Although not at the same level of flammablity as a wooden golem would be, having a being made entirely of metal working a forge that was smelting the same kind of metal seemed like it could only end in disaster.

Seth could already imagine him managing to super heat its own body and adding its thumb to the blade that it was crafting.

Even if he used the most heat resistant metal he had, it would still face this issue if he wanted to forge something out of that same metal, which was a inevitable possibility.

Of course, when broaching the subject of creating a body for his new living puppet, Seth had naturally floated the idea of using an existing body and simply skipping the entire process. There was undoubtedly some heat resistant, formally human, beasts out there powerful enough for him to turn into the perfect blacksmith.

But he would be unable to shake the disgusting feeling that would reside in his gut at the morality of puppeteering the corpse of something that used to be a person like that. He had done it out of desperation in the meadow, and he had hated every second of it. So it was best to avoid that.

Even if he were to take a more Frankensteinian approach, such as stitching together the parts of fire resistant, mutated animals into a humanoid figure, that had one main flaw. He wasn't a Necromancer.

This wasn't just in the moral way, it simply wasn't how his powers worked. Necromancers could use vile magic to reanimate corpses and keep them preserved how they were for eternity, no matter the dishevelled state they were in.

While Seth could do something similar, there were two main differences. For one, the corpses he used still rotted. It was bad enough being around a normal rotting corpse, he could only imagine the absolutely putrid stench of a collection of corpse parts being rapidly decayed under the intense heat of the forge. Absolutely sickening.

The only way to prevent that was to keep it breathing and keep its heart beating, essentially he had to make sure in every possible sense of the word that it was still alive. But Seth was no master of biology.

He would barely be able to put together a functioning human body, with the right amount of organs in the correct place, never mind figure out the proper biology of multiple different creatures, none of which he has ever seen before in his life.

Wood, Metal and Flesh. They were all off the table, so what was left?

Seth sighed softly, drumming his fingers against the side of his leg. That habit had gotten him caught, yes, but it wasn't something he could just turn off on a dime.

As he was deep in thought, Seth stepped out of the storage room and glanced at the forge that he was trying to create the perfect blacksmith for... before he paused for a second and tilted his head.

He narrowed his eyes, focusing on the obsidian black stone that this forge had been crafted out of. When the idea finally settled in his mind, Seth couldn't help but chuckle and shake his head softly.

Of course, the answer had been so obvious. It had been literally staring him in the face. If he wanted to make the perfect puppet to work the forge, and be able to resist everything that he used the forge to create, then why not make him out of the same thing?

What material was better at resisting the heat of the forge, than the forge itself? It really was obvious really.