Pinocchio Steampunk Rewritten Part I Geppetto entered his chamber. He was furious.

s. Pompous jerk he thought, Ill show him. Ill make him regret the day he met Geppetto Merlino from Parma! Geppetto sat down on the wooden chair. As an Italian immigrant from Parma he could only afford to live in a basement in Whitechapel. His home was also his workshop. He thought back about how it had come to this. He had come to England after the Automaton Prohibition Act in Italy had left him without a job, without a home his whole life was taken away by the government. He used to be an inventor thats all he could ever be, all he ever wanted to be. B ut he couldnt; not in Italy; not after the incident on the night of December 13th 1869. As Geppetto had heard, a cleaning automaton had killed a man. Some said i t had gone haywire; some said it was attacked by the drunken victim-to-be and so me say a woman was attacked and the automaton went to help, killing her attacker in the midst of the action. Since this was Geppettos expertise, he knew that an automaton couldnt go haywire they had a strictly controlled source (thats what their operating system was called automatons were mainly powered by steam and clockwo rks but they were just dolls without the source crystals which gave them their b asic functions by special inscriptions) which couldnt be changed once the crystal was complete. Trying to change the inscriptions would be like a blacksmith work ing with cold steel. The first thing inscribed in every crystal was that automat ons can under no circumstances hurt a human being, not even in self-defence. Mor eover, it was a cleaning automaton they had one of the simplest inscriptions of them all as they had only one basic function. Believing that a cleaning automato n could have killed a person would be like believing in Santa Claus and Geppetto knew that, but nobody cared. People started hating everything mechanical and th e Automaton Prohibition Act was passed. Many inventors were left without anythin g. Few of them managed to escape the country and as far as he knew, Geppetto was the only one who made it to the glamorous centre of inventors England. But he couldnt afford to think about that right now. It was time for him to step up and stop living like a rat in the sewers. He used to be one of the most respe cted Italian inventors. His automatons used to be among the best. He had lived i n England for 5 years and for 5 years he was gathering scrap metal and hadnt buil d a single automaton. It was time for a change. That pompous jerk John Titus had a ngered him and hurt his pride enough as to motivate him to enter the Mech Fightin g Tournament. Geppetto hadnt made fighting steambots up until now but Titus had go ne over the line. Telling one of the best Italian inventors he couldnt win a pett y tournament was an insult Geppetto couldnt swallow. To Be Continued...