GRINDING GEARS — UNDERRAVERIE SABOTEURS

Origins & Ideological Fracture

The Grinding Gears emerged not from revolution, but from workplace grievance. Founded by Giovanni Jorge after his seasonal Modus proposals were sidelined in favor of the Noel Modus, his professional jealousy evolved into an ideological fixation: Raverie’s joy is a mechanically enforced illusion. The faction aims to prove this by making the city’s systems quietly unreliable.

Giovanni Jorge: The Bitter Architect

A brilliant but exhausted engineer, Giovanni styles himself a tragic genius—though in reality he is a frustrated middle manager with explosives. He leads from a repurposed gear chamber lair called “The True Heart of Raverie,” located in the ruined Burnt Edge district. He issues grand, overwritten directives, constantly revises plans, and often blames gremlins for his own operational failures.

Gremlin Integration & Culture

The faction functions almost entirely via gremlin labor. Gremlins are not ideological; they participate for fun, shelter, and food. Internal authority is flat and chaotic: leadership goes to whoever holds the biggest wrench. Plans are communicated through crude drawings and shouted instructions, leading to accidental successes or spectacular collateral damage.

Gremlin camps resemble junkyards suspended over active machinery, with hammocks strung across pipes, light provided by stolen lantern drones, and disassembled automatons repurposed as furniture.

Undercity Operations & Infrastructure

Base of Operations: Under-Raverie

The Grinding Gears are headquartered in the subterranean layers of Raverie—a vast network of mechanical galleries, reinforced gear corridors, winding shafts, and decommissioned research chambers beneath the University District.

Human Inaccessibility

Human authorities cannot easily infiltrate these areas due to the non-humanoid design of Under-Raverie. The infrastructure was built for narrow-bodied maintenance species and autonomous systems, not people. Gremlins traverse technical passages, vents, and pressure ducts that are physically too small for Winders or guards to enter.

Key Locations

• The Lair: Giovanni’s base in hidden and unnaccessible in the Under-Raverie.

• Gremlin Camps: Scattered throughout the undercity, often perched above active gearways.

• The Old Cellars: A fragmented network of abandoned research and maintenance spaces.

Sabotage Philosophy & Methods

The Grinding Gears prefer deniable, delayed failures over outright destruction. Their goal is to erode trust, not cause chaos.

Signature Techniques

• Subtle Misalignments: Gears slightly offset, calibration teeth removed, harmonic plates swapped.

• Overwound Tension Springs: Systems that fail only under specific conditions.

• Bastallikus Corruption: Rewiring automaton logic cores to introduce contradictory priority loops, creating erratic and frightening public behavior.

The Misattribution Loop

Raverie officially blames gremlin mischief, Winder error, or seasonal strain for mechanical failures. This institutional denial protects the Grinding Gears and reinforces Giovanni’s belief that the city cannot admit its own weakness.

Using the Concord

The faction often engineers a malfunction, then anonymously hires the Clockbreaker Concord—Raverie’s mechanical hazard insurers—to “neutralize” the unit, effectively using the city’s own systems to destroy evidence of their sabotage.

Bastallikus Abuse Practices

Giovanni’s most dangerous innovation is the deliberate misuse of Bastallikus cores. He rewinds logic layers incorrectly, introduces contradictory priority loops, and encourages gremlins to “poke the thinking bit.” This creates unsettling, malfunctioning automatons that foster public mistrust and fear.

Internal Culture & Daily Life

There is no set schedule. Sabotage occurs out of boredom or spite; repairs are only made if explosions threaten total collapse. Humor includes giving automatons insulting nicknames and celebrating successful sabotage with noise and makeshift feasts. Despite their cruelty toward machines, interpersonal harm is mostly accidental.

External Perception & Misattribution

To most of Raverie, the Grinding Gears do not officially exist. The city dismisses their sabotage as gremlin antics, Winder error, or seasonal strain. This allows the faction to operate with near-impunity, hidden in plain sight within the city’s mechanical bowels.

Systemic Role in Raverie

The Grinding Gears form a self-sustaining feedback loop:

Undercity Access → Minor Sabotage → Mechanical Failure → Public Confusion → Blame Shift → Repeat

They are an institutionalized nuisance elevated to a systemic threat—a colony of termites inside the clockwork, unseen until the gears begin to slow.

Relationship with Silentia

The Grinding Gears maintain a tense, transactional relationship with Silentia. They provide the village with targets, access routes, and technical direction; Silentia provides seclusion, storage, and ideological justification. Neither fully trusts the other, but both find the arrangement useful.

Summary: The Grinding Gears are a covert sabotage faction operating from the mechanical guts of Raverie. Led by the embittered engineer Giovanni Jorge and powered by chaotic gremlin labor, they practice calculated, deniable sabotage to prove the city’s joy is a fragile illusion. Dangerous not for their discipline, but for their intimate knowledge of Raverie’s mechanical heart and their willingness to hollow it out from within.