Fiddling about with writing, would appreciate feedback/help.

...maybe they find a room he uses - or used to use - for surgeries and stuff? Or the room he uses for a morgue, maybe. Or even - if they're particularly good at reading on the fly (because I can't imagine that they'd be able to take anything out of the room with them without it being a huge risk), a bunch of notes on some of the creepy mad scientist stuff he's been doing. Because any good mad scientist is going to keep notes of his experiments, so that he doesn't forget what worked and what didn't.

 

Heck yes.

I think it's time to reveal to the thread if not to the characters what's actually going on. The doc studied the folklore of the heroine's people, and since they have some influence on this side of the fourth wall from Judaism, it's there he found out about the golem. Primitive clockwork/steam-powered robots are a thing in this 'verse and magical equivalents probably should be as well, but their story is about an ensouled construct which could think and react like a person. Only their prophets or extremely powerful holy people could make them, but he being an imperialist douche figures anything they can do he can do better. Attempts to just build them didn't work, so he decided to build one and implant a soul into it from a human, and the orphanage is a ready supply of disposable children, whom he realises would have a more fresh and thus more powerful soul than an adult. Mostly the process involves killing them in a wide variety of ways to see which one works. Naturally, even just trying to make an ensouled golem is fantastically illegal under this country's law since they have different gods who didn't grant permission to create life other than in the standard way, even before the whole killing children part, and the craftsfolk of the city are all bound by guild law and would report him if he tried to get them involved, so he's been contacting craftsmen and women across the country who won't communicate with each other and figure out why he needs lots of wooden/metal/clay models of people to experiment with.

Heroine's dad is tied up in this; he started making golem parts for the doc when he was a young immigrant with a new wife and needed money, and the doctor was still just trying to build them from scratch with no killing involved. It's blasphemous but he figured the god's wrath would fall on the doctor instead of him and he didn't think for a minute it would ever work, which it still hasn't. He isn't aware of the full extent of the shit going on; he may know some death is involved but definitely doesn't know how many, or that it's children.

I was going to have Dad still making parts for the doc and the messenger paying him, but on further thought it might be better if he'd broken it off and fled some years back and the doc sent the guy to track him down and threaten him instead, and Dad moved to the little town with none of his community there as a sort of ashamed pre-emptive exile before anyone found out his blasphemy.

 

Hm. Maybe Dad stopped making parts after Heroine started getting old enough to ask questions? It's one thing to go "okay, I've got to get in enough money to feed my young family", but having to figure out a way to explain why he keeps making wood/clay/metal replicas of people/people parts could've been enough to make him go "shit, this isn't good, I need to stop" because he didn't want to risk Heroine growing up thinking blasphemy was a perfectly okay thing to do. (Especially if belief is a thing that powers protections in this world.)

(If dad does know that some death's involved, he may also have been spun a line about all the deaths being by volunteers who gave informed consent, maybe something about the doctor recruiting from people who were terminally ill anyways. If the doctor's with it enough to realize that he needs to avoid getting reported, he's probably with it enough to realize that most people are going to be Super Not Okay with murdering kids for any reason, let alone to try and create a blasphemy.)

 

That makes sense! I was picturing the doc spinning him a story about Dexter-style vigilante justice.

At this point in the story, Dad and heroine's childhood friend are in the city, and trying to find where she is. The half-elf thief happens to go out one day, not as much of a drunk mess as he was when he appeared earlier in the story; heroine's friend runs into him, recognises him, and has kind of the opposite reaction the heroine did, totally starstruck and dismissing all the off notes - yeah, of course he'd have scars, he's a fighter, okay he's a bit skinny but so are most elves, and he doesn't recognise the cult tattoos. Half-elf thief ends up agreeing to help; a reputation boost for very little work. He could get away with not doing anything, but werewolf hears about it and nags him into actually asking around. They do find a lead, and so they and Dad track the gang to the orphanage.

 

Okay, this is about as far as I got. I need help to figure out a proper timeline so the dad arrives at a good point, and also what the hell happens when the kids find out what the doc is doing. I have vague visions of the orphanage burning down but that's just my brain trying to pick the most dramatic thing without figuring out how the hell it would work or why it would happen, and destroying the evidence would be a terrible idea. I'm wondering whether the doc should come out of the confrontation alive and be legally tried and hanged, or not.