Adam's heart hammered in his chest as he tiptoed through the dark hallways of the abandoned factory—except it was quite obviously not abandoned. Bare lightbulbs hung from tangled wires overhead, casting flickering light upon machines full of gears and springs, tanks of murky liquid, and stuffed animals with too many limbs.

Most of the machinery lay silent, like mangled corpses of mechanical beasts, but the closer he got to the factory's heart, the more movement and noise he encountered. A steam generator, humming and throwing sparks. A pump, pushing thick red liquid through translucent pipes. Refrigerators crammed to bursting with things that didn't belong outside a body.

A fragment of a melody drifted down the hallway. Singing—that was Mabel singing in that hilariously off-tune way of hers. He followed the song and soon emerged into the factory's main floor. It was lit brightly and filled to the brim with fantastic machinery, but that wasn't what drew his gaze.

Mabel, clad in an overlong lab coat that hung from her skinny frame, bowed over a large table upon which lay—he swallowed—what looked like a corpse. She was humming happily as she stabbed metallic rods into its joints. Her hair was mussed up as if she had just gotten up, and her eyes were baggy and bloodshot behind her thick-rimmed glasses, yet they burned with that fervent energy that had drawn him to her in the first place.

He held his breath as he crept closer. His foot nudged something—a dusty bottle labeled XXX—and it fell over and rolled along the floor. Mabel jerked up and swiveled her head, raising a metal rod in her sleeve-covered hand. Once she saw him, her eyes went wide, and she quickly hid the rod behind her back.

"Adam!" she gasped.

He swallowed, frozen on the spot. "H-hi."

"What are you doing here?" She belatedly interspersed herself between him and the table as if to hide it from view.

"I just wanted to know. Where you always disappear to, what you need all those... materials for." He ran a hand through his hair. "So I followed you. I'm sorry."

She pushed her glasses up her nose. "Did you tell anyone else?"

He shook his head mutely. Mabel exhaled with relief. Letting the metal rod drop to the floor, she kicked it under the table. She looked at him, then away, and fidgeted.

"I was going to tell you," she muttered, not meeting his eyes. "Eventually."

"I can't believe you managed to keep all this a secret," he said, looking around. "From me, from everyone. This is... this is just..."

She clasped her arm with her hand and worried her lip.

"Totally metal," he said, turning to her with awe. "Are you trying to reanimate that thing?"

Mabel's eyelashes fluttered in surprise before a hesitant smile blossomed on her pale face. "You can tell?"

"Only the general idea," he admitted. "I've never seen machinery like this."

"Would you..." She blushed and scuffed the ground with her foot. "Would you like to see how it works?"

He looked her in the eye. "I'd love to."

She threw her hands up, causing her overly long sleeves to flap, and cackled. "Excellent! Follow me, assistant. First, we need to find you a lab coat."

Adam grinned as she hooked her arm around his and dragged him off, her eyes burning with excitement. Time to reanimate some corpses.