Perhaps I'm nerdly enough to go to the Terry Pratchett part of the story first. This really reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Igor clan. I discovered this amiabl

Perhaps I'm nerdly enough to go to the Terry Pratchett part of the story first. This really reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Igor clan. I discovered this amiable race in The Fifth Elephant. Igors are a people inspired from the typical hunchbacked Igor archetype, but in Discworld, they are also self-modifiers. Their bodies consist of mixed and matched and patched and swapped body parts among other members of their clan, of scars and self-adjustements. They are infinitely self-improving, self-experimenting. They might end up with a botched job and have to hobble around for a few days, but in the end it’s always fixable. And they lisp. Pratchett litters his books with lots of unexpected gems - I view it like Easter Eggs for books. Could he have possibly added the lisp on purpose???