Them 11: The Manufactured Newborn

I know what you're thinking: what the fuck is a Manufactured Newborn? It sounds like a heavy metal band.

Oh, it's heavy metal alright. It's made of metal and wire and clockwork and bone and sinew.

Imagine this: you're cleaning the garage one day and happen to find an old toy. Maybe it's a wind-up toy, maybe it's some weird Japanese thing, it doesn't matter. What matters is, you've never seen it before. Okay, fine, whatever, sell it on eBay. Except after you put it down, you can't find it anymore.

It moves and then finds things and adds them to its body. What kinds of thing? Well, it likes metal. And bone. I've seen one tear apart a cat and use its ribcage. Luckily, all you need to do is stay away from it and you won't get hurt. Except...well, it grows. Once it grows to the size of a car, you pretty much have to get out of there.

The Newborn is pretty self-cleaning, however: after growing to a certain size (certainly bigger than a car, I think, the one I saw looked about the size of a big Volkswagen), it will rip a hole in space and vanish. The one I saw, I was too fucking scared to look into the tear in space. I mean, it was a fucking tear in space, you don't want to look into those.

However, I have recently received a report from a friend who encountered a different version of the Newborn.

I saw this man get hit by a car. The car was totaled, but the man kept walking. He looked very twitchy to me and I thought he might be a Puppet, so I followed him. I watched him go into an alleyway and when he turned around, his face was all cut up from the car crash. Under his skin was...well, part of it was his jaw bone, but part of it was dull metal. And I saw that he was muttering something. I got a bit closer, but this was all I could here was: "Return to the Tower. Tick tock. Tick tock. Towerborn return to the Tower. Tick Tock." His eyes started to glow yellow and I thought he might have seen me, so I ran the other way.

"Towerborn." Well, it was rumored that whatever dimension the Newborn came from and went back to was called the Tower. So fuck, I guess it has proxies now.