Potemkin House

So apparently there was this dude name Grigory Potemkin, who was a lover of Catherine the Great of Russia. And legend has it that this guy built these elaborate facades over the poverty-stricken villages along the rivers of Russia so that when Catherine would tour her country, she'd be fooled into thinking that the people were happy and prosperous. So we get the term "Potemkin Village", which means something that looks to be worth more than it is.

True story.

In this case, I adapted the term and used it for this critter here.

A Potemkin House (switching over to my own hallucenations now) begins as a sort of big-ass semi-self-mobile mechanical Faberge Egg-looking thing, which is created (laid) by a mature one of these beasties. They find an abandoned structure like this little house here, and they begin to scavenge metal and so on and build up on themselves until they fill the structure. At this point they become mobile (the chicken legs are inspired by another fairy-tale icon that I picked up somewhere, of houses that walk about on chicken legs... I think it's part of the Baba Yaga mythos, but I'm not sure, and if anyone cares to enlighten me, I'd appreciate it) and then find another abandoned structure which they can lay their eggs near. If there are no other structures nearby or they lack the resources to continue growing, then they settle into a "sleep" which lasts indefinitely unless they are disturbed.

The machine is semi-sentient (about as smart as a bird) and has a variety of weapons both scavenged and self-built (like the water-cooled automechanical cannons and the artillery piece), and are fairly rare. They mostly inhabit old abandonded settlements in the older, lost parts of The Wall where they can find appropriate shells. Like most of the machina which inhabits The Wall, they only attack in self-defense unless there are humans involved, in which case they often wait in ambush and then leave no survivors.