Sirrini was a young girl who lived deep in the forest.

But this wasn't just any forest, this was The Clockwork Forest. The lands of Ninimia had become a great wasteland in the aftermath of the Last War, the soil turning up life no longer. Its not clear if it was an intentional biological attack or just one of the senseless casualties of war, but it didn't matter to the wandering few that remained.

The people who lived in the forest were known the world over for their clockmaking skills, whether it be delicate watches or towering grandfather clocks; if it ticked with a heart of gears, they had surely mastered it.

As the denizens of the area watched in horror as the precious last tree shriveled up and shed its leaves a final time they conspired together towards a mad resolution.

It all came to pass many decades ago. The elders of the Wandering Few were sitting in a circle under the dying husk of their last organic tree, lamenting their situation and wondering how to provide for the future. Concerned if they should even try.

As a solemn moment passed between them, they were interrupted by a giggle nearby. A young girl was seemingly being chased by a small metal duck, flapping its wings and waddling comically on the end of a leash she held.
What struck them was the way she was smiling as she pulled the small clockwork contraption along the ground behind her.

It was a simple enough device, crafted by her loving mother from her dead father's spare clock parts bin. The elders saw in that moment a hope for some kind of future, and they set a new directive to the people who wanted to share that future. Organic material was passing from them, but they could rebuild their lives, make a new world that nodded to the past, but that was in actuality something else entirely!

It was that year that the first mechanical trees were planted. The first clockwork ecosystem was just beginning.

Sirrini is the great grand daughter of that young girl, and the gears she wears around her neck are purely decorative. She doesn't see them as parts to a machine, they are viscera from the only real creatures she has known. The Clockwork Forest expands from horizon to horizon now, and has become a truly wondrous and deadly place for outsiders. The citizens of the forest would have it no other way.

She doesn't know that her people were once made of organic parts, or that she herself was one of the last of her people to have her consciousness transferred into a mechanical body. This is just the way things are to her, the way they have always been, and there is no reason she has to think they will ever change.