Horology
Legacy Name: Horology

He couldn't remember what he had been called originally. The children around town always had different names for him, what was it these days? Doctor Horror? Mister Machine? The names came and went as quickly as the generations of children that came up with them. It didn't matter to him any more, he just called himself Horology.

In his fleeting moments of sanity, he would try to recall how it had all started. Thinking back decades, centuries, maybe even a millennia ago, to when he used to be normal. His father had worked as a clock maker, and Horology had trained as his apprentice, until an accident involving a grandfather clock and a large pendulum had left him missing a hand. Blaming himself for the accident, his father worked night and day in his workshop, emerging three days later with a fully functioning clockwork arm for his son.

The machine worked even better than his natural hand, and soon Horology was picking up skills that rivalled his father. It wasn't long before the next 'accident', allowing him to replace his other hand with another clockwork mechanism.

His girlfriend Alma was horrified when one evening she caught him in his workshop, replacing the limbs of a stray cat with his clockwork creations. He revealed to her his plan to replace all of his mortal body with metal and gears, effectively cheating death. Unable to accept Horology's vision, Alma fled the lab and never returned. The loss of his soul mate took him a step closer to his pending insanity.

With only the stray cat for company, now more machine than animal, Horology worked tirelessly towards his goal, replacing his body piece by piece, always improving on the original. A booster instead of a leg, a telescopic eyeball, the possibilities were endless. His breakthrough came one night when he perfected his newest invention, a clockwork heart. With this final piece of the puzzle in place, Horology, and his Mechanicat were now living brains inside mechanical bodies. He had triumphed over death, and he saw this as his greatest achievement. It would be many years before he realised the true curse he had inflicted upon himself.

As the years passed, Horology watched, unchanged, as his family and friends grow old around him. Had it been made of anything other than metal, his heart would have broken, as he watched his Alma grow old and die alone, unable to accept what he had become. As the years went by, he fell deeper into his insanity. His brain growing older inside a body that could not age, he became fixated on the ever forward movement of time. Measuring time became his passion; he became obsessed with collecting watches and clocks, anything that could track the eras passing him by. And so his life went on, obsessively hoarding, shunned by generation after generation of townsfolk who didn't trust the immortal old man, driven mad by time and loneliness.