Expedition to Clockwork Finds Adventure

Exactly a week before Christmas, an expedition departed from Squirrel Park with the declared intention of exploring one of the spindizzies docked next to ours. The brave adventurers were:

• Airborn (plane/skunk hologram),
• Albrecht (tundra wolf),
• Christopher and Claude (cats),
• JasonRDT (wolf/kitsune/dragon),
• Jim (kitsune shapeshifter),
• Jaxen and Kelketek (foxes),
• and, last but not least, Natasha (superheroic ‘toon coati).

The destination turned out to be a pretty civilized planetoid, registered as “Clockwork” with the Centripedus port authorities. An uneventful train ride took the party from the circumference to the central station, where they were witness to a daring theft! After a brief but spectacular pursuit, one of the thieves was captured. Unfortunately, the local constabulary was slow in assessing the situation and converged on our heroes, allowing the other to escape with his loot.

The situation was cleared quickly though; the victim turned out to be Felicia Silvermane, cat-girl and daughter of Clockwork’s mayor. Oddly enough, the stolen item was a report on Centripedus and the locally docked planetoids. The captured thief, an uneducated, poorly dressed rat-man, was of little help, and the theft itself was the least of the bad news. Pressured by Miss Silvermane, Chief McDougal, human head of the Clockwork Police, explained that the mayor had accompanied a repair team to one of the secondary spindizzy drives out of the city, and hadn’t come back yet. Our adventurers quickly agreed to form an impromptu rescue party, and left for the mountains aboard an omnibus.

The myistery only grew thicker as the party got near a brick dome not unlike the one protecting our own steering drive. Two empty cars were found hidden nearby, one identified as belonging to the mayor, the other apparently from Centripedus. The entrance to the drive was not guarded, and surprisingly enough not even locked. But as the party sneaked in, they were discovered by the new owner of the place, a certain Dr. Von Hochendorf, human, and his rat-man henchmen. A fight seemed unavoidable, but our heroes chose to talk, and thanks to their negotiation skills, violence was avoided. Confusion sprung up as Andreas Hochendorf, wolf-man and the Doctor’s son, showed up with the stolen report, followed briefly by a platoon of policemen. In the end, though, both Von Hochendorf and his henchmen turned out to be more misguided than evil, and the whole incident was wrapped up with very little violence.

Conversations with the various people involved revealed several key pieces of information:

• Years ago, Eric von Hochendorf had been ousted from academia for unethical experiments on sentient beings, and had gone into hiding.
• Back then, Clockwork society was dominated by humans; anthros were marginalized, and non-anthros were barely noticed. The aforementioned experiments were meant to show humans and non-humans were related.
• This situation has changed recently, with a lion-man being elected mayor and gaining respect of the populace, a fact Hochendorf was not aware of due to his self-imposed exile.
• The repair crew (which just happened to be accompanied by the mayor) had stumbled upon his lair by mistake; he had only imprisoned them so they won’t reveal his newest plan to the world.
• This plan was to turn all humans on Clockwork into anthros in order to eliminate the alleged discrimination.
• Last but not least, Miss Silvermane’s report had been stolen by Andreas, the doctor’s son, in the hope that some information contained therein will persuade the scientist to seek a better solution to his perceived issues with society.

It might be interesting to find out what the report has to say about Centripedus and, indeed, our own SpinDizzy.