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| origin = Steel
| titles = The Engine of Cycles<br />The Beginning-that-Ends<br />The Driver-Forth<br />The Propulsion Unending
| names = The Engineer, the ArchitectHephaestean, the TinkerModules
| aspects = {{Aspect|Forge}} {{Aspect|Winter}} {{Aspect|Heart}}
| arrival = c. 1800 .C.E.
A mass of gears and cogs, pipes, hissing valves and steam, it is a machine and looks like such, a giant engine of the Industrial Revolution. But it is a creature of the Mansus, and that is reflected in it as well. Pipes connecting in impossible geometries, cogs of unimaginable shapes, a machine that should not work but does.
== Worship ==
=== Servants ===
==== The Engineer ====
{{Aspect|Forge|12}}{{Aspect|Moth|12}}
Invention! Science! The future! The Engineer, Elizabeth von Marlenich when she was mortal, looks mostly human. Each part, however, has been painstakingly crafted or grown to replace the normal, awfully squishy human form, mirroring it in nothing but external appearance. Her clothes are riddled with endless pockets, strange inventions and little drones aplently which serve to make her a terrifying opponent, always with an appropriate invention at hand. She is inventor and iconoclast, the futurist and innovator of the Engine. She acts largely independently, and is perhaps the only Name of the Engine without a regiment, but with her more unusual sciences, harnessing the Glory and Nowhere, is easily as lethal.
==== Regiment 01001 'XIcion Division' ====
===== The Hephaestean, Maximilien Aulenmar =====
{{Aspect|Forge|12}}{{Aspect|Lantern|12}}
The Engine first encountered the scourge of Nowhere when the [[Snake Tail with Appendages]] turned against it in the Fifth History. Maximilien Aulenmar, one of the cabal that first built the Engine in mind if none of the old organic body remained, took an interest in that problem. He formed Regiment 9 and became its director. He created a line of anti-Nowhere weaponry, the first to experiment upon the Glory. Unlike the Engineer, however, he merely experimented upon Glory in its aspect as possible armament. Knowing the inimicality of Nowhere, he created also a light-bending cloak, allowing him to fade out of vision to ambush the creatures of Nowhere before they could respond.
===== Excision Unit =====
A series of different automaton refitted with Glory-weapons particularly made to counter creatures of Nowhere.
==== Regiment 00110 'VItrification Unit' ====
===== First Gunner Shimazu =====
{{Aspect|Forge|12}}{{Aspect|Edge|12}}
The cheerfully psychotic experimentation upon little drones of Izumaki Shimazu turned out to be far more intense when transferred to ordinance. He enjoys very much huge explosions, which is why he converted all of his left arm, shoulder, and ribcage into a giant artillery gun that meshed very nicely with the rest of his robotic body. Given that much of his main body has been given over to guns, he is very reliant upon drones for even mundane activities.
===== Vitrifiers =====
Earning their name when they turned the majority of an entire continent to glass through their bombardments, the Vitrifiers are the artillery specialists of the Engine. Not merely content with regular explosives, Vitrifiers specialize in exploding things that should not explode. When the air itself catches into a unquenchable blue fire and the ground beneath you shudders, the Vitrifiers have come to ply their art.
==== Regiment 01010 'Xterminators' ====
===== Alchemist-Superior Anastasia Avalov =====
Chemical weapons lady
===== Chemistry Team =====
Automata built to deploy chemical and biological weaponry, they are rarely as impressive as the Vitrification Unit, but can wreak far more havoc. Being automata, the servants of the Engine have few easily disrupted organic processes that can be stopped through things as paltry as poison. And so they employ these with gleeful cheer, easily rendering entire swathes of terrain uninhabitable
==== Regiment 00001 'Ironclad'====
===== Grand Protector Kashanji =====
Protector of the Great Observatory, Kashnaji found salvation in the Engine against the angry mob at his doors accusing him and his charge of heresy. A competent if staid tactician, he is the only one of the Engine's servants to have anything resembling military education.
===== Steel Legion =====
Heavy automata, designed to hold the line and slice down the rank and file and the enemy. They are not flashy, nor will they conquer and crush before them at a lightning pace. But they are unsurpassed at grinding the enemy down with gatling-gun and implacable shield.
==== Regiment 00101, 'RaVening Skies' ====
===== Skycutter, Belgutei Khan =====
Belgutei is not an airman, but aircraft. More accurately, the mind ruling a terrifyingly quick, terrifyingly well armed airplane. Once a horseman on the plains of the Fifth History, he found the liberty of the skies delightful, and continued to develop and develop and develop his access to it.
===== Terrors Above =====
Although Belgutei is himself a fighter, the Terrors Above, the heart of the RaVening Skies are despite their strong fighter contingent, bombers at heart. Cities, armies, even mountains themselves have been levelled before these competitors to the VItrifiers.
==== Regiment 00100, 'IVocators' ====
===== High Metatechnician Olympia Levasseur =====
Although a creature of Forge and Heart and Winter, sometimes machinery requires more than merely that. Olympia rules this field, forging machines of Moth and Lantern and Edge and Grail and invoking these elements so unusual to the engine.
===== The Marvellous Mechanical Menagerie =====
Perhaps the most eclectic of the Engine's regiments, the Menagerie is a unit of strange and nonstandard weapons and automata. Madly shifting mech-assassins of Moth, ancient archaeotech History devices and blazing Lantern radiance, all these are the provenance of the Menagerie.
==== Regiment 01111, 'XVants' ====
===== Referrer Wu Zhenwei =====
The XVants are the special operations teams of the Engine. Spies, logisticians, fortification-engineers, propogandists, strategists, many of the XVants may never see combat. The Referrer is the head of these varied units, but also the coordinator and master strategist of the Engine's many forces, corralling them that they do not run wild but seek a single agenda and do it with optimal effectiveness.
==== Modules of the Reactor ====
===== Humanoid Interaction =====
A vat grown cyborg, representing the Engine in Shesha. Equipped with a futuristic learning module, it was built to learn, to understand humans. Now, it is physically, almost harmless, with only a few weapons equipped within itself. But it has a friendly, approachable charm that conceals a mind that conspires and plots with the best.
===== Cogitation =====
Built as a series of scattered drones, this Module was built to be the new Engine... Reactor's brain. Creative, adaptive, and brilliant, it also possesses an ego second to none
===== Conflict Prosecution =====
Just a giant automata, this is possibly the dimmest of the Engine's children. It compensates for this with strength, strength overwhelming. Strength designed to be pit against even an Hour...
===== Construction =====
Builds things, deep within the Engine.
=== Marks ===
'''Notion: Progress''' It has occurred to me that I could spur on a new golden age for man.
'''Dedication: Progress''' I will be the anathema and end of this world's stagnation, so I swear. The wonders and marvels of technologies that could be dance at the edge of my mind, and sometimes, they dance with my hands.
'''Ascension: Progress''' The heart of the Engine, the locus of its power, I breathed in that power and it lingers in me. It warms me, fills me with fervour and spirit. The fire within the heart, this I know is the Third Mark.
'''Ascension: Progress''' The fire will not be contained, it spreads, but it does not devour, merely builds anew. I think differently than I ever have now, in mathematics and sciences and arts most brilliant. The fire has spread to my mind and this is the Fourth Mark
'''Ascension: Progress''' I burn now. My heart, my physical heart, is warm like the heat of a furnace. My limbs whirr and whistle like mechanisms, and my blood pools in strange blackness. The fire burns through my body, this is the Fifth Mark
'''Ascension: Progress''' All I see now is artifice and invention. I cannot look at a chunk of metal without imagining how it might be a steam-engine, cannot look at a mountain without seeing a great fortress-factory over it. Sometimes, what I see becomes real. The fire has burned without now, and that is the sixth mark.
'''The Roar of Change''' Once I was human, but no human thinks so inhumanly, no human burns so warmly. I walked the path of those great forefathers who built a god, and the Engine smiled upon me for that. I passed into the heart of the Engine, and the flame of its change burned away me, and reforged me, changed me. Now what I am is new, what I am blazes and burns. Long live me! And of course... the Engine...
== Locations ==
=== The Mansus ===
* '''[[The Factory Devouring''']]: At the edge of the Wood lies a great industrial complex all steel and brass, gears and pipes, the billowing of smoke and the ripple of heat. Here, the Engine forwards its Great Work, a vast manufactory dedicated to producing and ending and changing and the greatest blight upon the skin of the Wood.
** ''I visited the Engine today. Today, the Engineer’s work was less. She sat atop a great belching boiler and cheerily reminisced with her patron about all the places she had visited, gathering materials to improve on her Array.''
* '''[[The Array''']]: The Engine fought hard for this place, close to the top of the Mansus, that its friend might build her magnum opus.
=== The Histories ===
* '''The Prometheus Institute for Higher Education''': Backed by the notable engineer Maximillian Cherault, the Prometheus Institute for three decades recruited the best and brightest scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to its secretive campus in the Alps. The strange stories and esoteric theories coming from the Institute eventually led the Suppression Bureau to investigate. They found nothing. Not even people; Cherault was well-connected. Yet near nothing of the team returned. Perhaps you might try find out why…
** Generic mountain-thing
** “The workings of the Mansus and the Glory some say are incomprehensible. Immutable. Eternal! Not to my machines. Not me. Not me!” You wake up a day later, cradling in your arms… Something. It is warm to the touch. The book is gone. But something remains, lingering in your mind...
* '''Die Werkzeuge des Machens''': German. Requires a certain level of scholarship, slot in 1 cash, receive
** Elizabeth von MettersteinMarlenich, a minor German aristocrat and disciple of the still-pseudonymous ‘John Smith’ wrote at great length upon the inefficiencies in her master’s works, the whole time muttering arcane mechanical esoterica. She writes with a certain force, giving absolute instructions and orders to the reader, who certainly does feel like a hapless apprentice afterwards
** It’s hard to see Elizabeth as a protege rather than rival of ‘John’ after this. She constantly curses the crudeness with which his machines were constructed. In between the tirades, she makes remarks regarding how with certain tools, the appropriate tools, certain aspects of the Mansus can be twisted…
* '''Report 12-B ‘Damocles’''': Grants the Rite of Revolutions, dread, and Forge lore
* '''Making and Unmaking'''
==Relationships==
* [[The Architeuthian]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Anaconda]]: Raw Materials
* [[Snake Tail with Appendages]]: ...highly resilient raw materials
* [[The Peacock]]: Raw Materials
* [[Old Tarnished]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Spark]]: Raw Materials. High priority
* [[The Cuckoo]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Silver Owl]]: Raw Materials. Significant annoyance
* [[The Watcher in the Window]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Elder Sister]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Apple-of-the-Eye]]: Raw Materials
* [[SWOUP]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Archivist]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Bright-Delver]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Harvester]]: FNORD
* [[Blank|<nowiki>[ ]</nowiki>]]: Raw Materials?
* [[The Insidious]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Snow-Stained]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Fanged Bramble]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Aged Bones]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Mendicant Without]]: Raw Materials
* [[The Anvil]]: Integrated
* [[The Maker]]: Integrated
* [[The Deceiver]]: ...?
* [[The Huntsman]]: Unknown
* [[The Great Serpent]]: Likely Significant Threat
[[Category:Hours]]
[[Category:Forge]]
[[Category:Heart]]
[[Category:Winter]][[Category:Fansus I]]