Spending a major charge for an automaton? Boring!
Mechanomancy isn’t just about automata.
This is something a really creative clockworker came up with. Where is it today? Who knows? Perhaps in some dusty old attic. Or in some grade school’s geography lab. It’s not like anyone’s looking for it.
After all, who would need the most precise divination tool ever?
It’s pretty complex, so pay attention: Imagine a ball of gears, two feet in diameter, on a pedestal. On the pedestal there is a wheel (it’s marked “Time Wheel”), a gear lever , and a display (it looks like it’s been taken from an old water meter ). The display currently shows:”+ 0000002005 NOV 05 16 03 10″. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what this means: 2005 AD, November 5th, 16:03:10 pm . If you turn the time wheel the display turns (so does the ball of gears, but I’ll get back to that later), and the gear level shifts the amount of time one complete rotation on the time wheel means. (1: 1 minute, 2: 1 hour, 3: 1 day, 4: 1 month, 5: 1 year )
Now, from between those gears, there are thin metal rods coming out, each with a little piece of metal at the end of it. Some of these pieces of metal look like the continents (or more precisely, the tectonic plates) . Some are shaped like little clouds, or snowflakes,or little lightnings, the sort of stuff weather forecasts represent the weather with. Two of these metal rods are a lot longer than all other ones, and these have six inch metal balls at the end of them. These are marked “Moon” and “Sun”. (the sun even has a little flame thing welded on it).
Here’s the funny part: when you turn the time wheel, this whole thing shifts and spins and stuff like that, and guess what: it’s perfectly reflecting what Earth looked like at the time shown on the display. And the display has ten f*cking digits for the years: it can show billions of years! Yeah, if you turn it long enough, you can see the continents move. And it’s always precise to the second: if you turn it to 1969 ,there is a little spaceship coming out of Earth and landing on the Moon on the exact same second it did in real life! If you turn it to 1492, there is a little ship going from the coasts of Spain to America, again, precise to the second. It only shows historically important things, (it even rings a little bell, like toasters when the toast is ready) but it can show the Entire history of Earth. If you turn it back 65 million years you can see the meteor that killed the dinosaurs hit Earth. (it’s another little ball of metal on a stick,only it’s marked “METEOR” ) The weather is perfectly portraid too: if turned to the time that hurricane hit New Orleans it shows a bunch of little clouds in that area.
You get the idea. It’s useless if someone wants to know his or her personal future. But it can show the future and the past of Earth(it shows a little flying saucer thing around 2030, and Europe sinking all of a sudden around 2100), and can give a 100% correct weather forecast. That must be good for something.
You know what else is weird? Tomatoes.
I agree. Tomatoes are quite weird.
This machine makes me smile in all sorts of not-family-oriented ways. Why should clockworkers want to imitate life so much, anyway? There’s got to be lots of uber-mechanized devices like this out there, single purpose stuff especially.
Can you predict when the world started, and when it will end though?
How about Ascensions?
This machine doesn’t “predict” anything. Actually, it’s a model of Earth and it’s history.
No, it doesn’t show ascensions.(even a major artifact can’t do that) I know that in UA free will shapes the fate of the world, and this machine is a really precise model of it: the future it shows shapes parallel with the real world’s.
So, perhaps if you turn it to 3000 AD today it will show the Moon hitting Earth, but if you try it again two days later it won’t show a thing.
At the begining of the world there is nothing sticking out of the ball of gears, besides the sun and moon.
Oh yeah, if you turn it to the “end of the world” it falls to pieces. Congratulations, you just smashed a major artifact!
This artifact could be great for Cliomancers, but imagine the stir that would result if they turned the clock back and found a real Atlantis, or if a geologist tried to look at Pangea and saw something completely different from the traditional model.
Tomatoes? WEIRD.
This is a fantastic artifact and write-up. I like the detail, especially the ‘ding!’ of the date being reached. Wicked!
I like the idea that it ignores/is blind to Ascensions and that it just shows the world puttering along as if the Clergy filling up doesn’t count. That’d give a bit of hope to some people in the OU.
Imagine if you turned it to 0000000000 JAN 07 00 00 00 and saw a giant hand crafting the stars and the skies…
And, I’d imagine if you went all the way to the end, the ‘SUN’ would suddenly glow red hot, then white, and expand on (til now hidden) little spokes inside, getting bigger and bigger melting the rest of the artifact as the characters start shouting and flailing at the dial. And then the guns and blaming comes out.
Fun!
That IS fantastic.
I also like the mention of being more mechanistic. A bunch of mechanomancers probably have no interest in making robo people. They build huge weird abstracts of time and forces, machines that do strange things and maintain things against entropy, enforce patterns. That sort of thing. Dehumanizing bits.
That is really cool.
Question though, does it fit with the view that divinations of the future show the future as it would happen if the divination was not acted upon?
(IE: You turn it to 2009, see no clouds over Australia, say, and you can then set off a nuke or engineer a volcanic eruption somehow to contradict it.)
Personally, I go for the “Unless Acted Upon” route combined with the “Shows Hardcoredly Most Probable Future”.
You can ALSO go that, ironically, though it is magickal, it can only take into account the Statosphere and Mundane Reality (because Magick rips causality and is a force of chaos, apparently).
So, in order to show dates BCE, you’d have to put “- 0000001500?”
This is a brilliant idea. Were I to use this in a campaign, I think that I would have two separate globes. One indicating dates in the common era (AD) one showing dates before the common era (BC).