Section Seven, The Truth is Beyond the Walls Options

[Sparrowsmith]

Monday

It was 8 o'clock in the city, night, though you couldn't tell the difference. Acid rain fell down from the dull orange glow of the sky in heavy droplets, rolling along the ground and dripping lazily further and further down into the depths of Section Seven. This night was calm, silent, still. Half a million heartbeats ticked away within the safety of their homes - or whatever shelters they could fashion - away from the gentle burn of the rain. Non-fatal, but warm even when cold, the rain did no favors for anyone besides feed the barely edible food. The treatment facilities would fix the food, but the rain remained. Methane burns, water evaporates, turbines turn, magnets spin, and power shoots out into the city. Acid rain, the only problem of the city, was the remainder of that necessary equation making contact with the cool glass dome that protected the city from the harsh conditions outside.

The city: a labyrinth of mysteries - all unsolved and all shielded from the public. So long as the market exchanged commodities and the labs continued to produce new tech, no one was willing to rock the boat. And this is how order was kept, until two days ago. One man had rocked the boat, and he had suffered for it. Somewhere between his home in the Upper City, and the university he taught, Professor Quentin Cods encountered some difficulty. He never made it to class on saturday morning. Whether he disappeared by his own will, or met some worse fate, is unknown - but the paranoia about him in the last few days told the whole story.

However, this isn't the first time Cods has disappeared for days, and his most loyal of students know that if there is any clue as to his whereabouts, they will be buried in the very depths of the city. On the outskirts of the acid forests - dense areas of inedible vegetation, too dangerous for treatment - lies a secret. The only weapon free mind and imagination have left here. Connected to the framework of the city by a makeshift power line, built from the very trees surrounding it, and containing every basic tool necessary to construct absolutely anything: The Retreat waited.

The Retreat itself consisted of one large room, two floors, and one window. The one window perfectly aimed to see the clock tower, one of the very few places that could from the Lower City, and served as a lookout for approaching citizens. The shelves and tables loaded with assorted tech and tools, it could be possible to make almost anything, though if necessary parts could be built from scratch from the makeshift smelt in the corner.
There are only two ways in and out of The Retreat. The first is the emergency exit, a trap door on the first floor which leads to a ladder scaling underneath the factory and to a hatch into the inner pipe work of Section Seven - it has never been necessary to use this method of escape. The second is the large wooden door opposite the window to the clock tower, which creaks purposefully upon opening, and which the brightest of Cods' students would be coming through within the next few moments...

[OoC Once at least one of you is in The Retreat (preferably all of you) I can start giving out clues...)

[Naridar]

"Sure, lemme have a look", William answered as he looked at the plans, his sight stopping at a bunch of cogs and springs connected to the top of the watch. He couldn't ascertain exactly what this part would do, but he found it most likely that it served as a method for storing the energy made when one winds up the watch. Luckily, the parts listed on the blueprint were common and were available in the Retreat as well.

"I think we should first gather everything that's needed", he said, while quickly looking through the piles of parts and components on the tables in the room and finally put a smaller heap of them on the table they worked on. "We should start with the central gears," ,he began to screw cogs on a small metal plate, "Alan, can you assemble this part?", he pointed at the gears connecting the wind-up part to the numerous tiny gears he was working on. "And about methane production," he turned to Vince for a moment, "if they can give us anything, like, graphs or statistics, that would be great. Just don't mention patterns, that might be suspicious if there's indeed one and we shouldn't know."