I had posted a cringe first draft of this right before The Fall. Since then, it grew way bigger than I expected. Behold, a gothic rom-com monstergirl waifu.
>TFW No Emotional Support Homunculus :'(
We start with an incredibly lonely alchemist dabbling in homunculi, his motivations sadder than he’d like to admit. The principles have been well-trod; easy to grow, hard to sculpt, harder to keep alive. Those of a grim persuasion prefer undead minions, those of an ethical bent use golems and other constructs. Neither make for good company.
Initial results...aren't great. A meat-puppet: Pluripotent cells grown over bone, tubing, and metal. Hairless and pale, all-black eyes, crouches like a spider, eats bugs, drools, blinks out of sequence. Also, it falls apart over the course of seven days and has to be rendered down and re-spawned (no kidneys/liver/glands). Not the "companion" he was aiming for, but it had the manner of a dog that speaks.
“Like it here. Like you. Like being.”
___________
After a few more iterations, he's got something. Trying to give it some willowy grace, it comes out lanky but soft, soft enough it needs clothes to not distract him. To the degree that such things have gender, it's female. It stands up most of the time, though it's posture leaves something to be desired. It still drools and eats rats it catches in the dungeon (teeth are human, but the jaws open too far, purple tongue too long). A bit needy, as well.
"We want to be good for master. Is Ergh good?” “Ergh” was a gurgle from it hawking up protoplasm, but the name stuck. It fetches, it carries, it asks questions and seems to understand the answers, the contours of its face are not-unpleasing. Also, it devours books, his modest library occupying it every moment it's not at his heels. Textbooks. Treatises. Travelogues. Trite bodice-rippers. He puts a second chair by the fire, the big, musty one that sat too long in the under-under-basement.
It still degenerates over the course of a week; by day 6, unstable and delirious, day 7, it's leaking goo and in obvious discomfort.
>“Everything blurry. You, face. Book, words. Us, inside.”
He renders it down and doesn't spawn a fresh one for a while. But damn is it lonely in a dungeon lab beneath an abandoned manor in a haunted forest in a cursed kingdom. Reading of an evening becomes unbearable, as he looks to the chair by the fire where Ergh isn't. He comes up with a procedure that'll turn the one-week lifespan into maybe a month, extracting and filtering the humors, topping it up with fresh vitae-matter. Still has to get melted down and re-grown eventually, though. Some memories carry over between renderings, as he isolates brain fluid and uses it in the next iteration.
____________
It drools less, it's posture improves. One night, it finds a book of woodcuts, ladies posing in expensive dresses, faces lovingly detailed. Ergh looks from the pages to its reflection in a beaker. The alchemist watches.
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