Hand of the City: The Ingenuity of Artificer Daniel Obrove; Or, Aiming High; Or, Necessity Begets Invention
It stands to reason that scientists don’t want to be limited in any respect. Being unable to express the full potential of their endeavors due to petty moral constraints, a lack of funding, or rejection of a project due to ignorance and fear is bound to foster
disgruntlement in a mind inclined towards elevated understanding. Sometimes, the barriers to enlightenment are more tangible, not consigned to monetary or social concerns. Inventors especially require large designated spaces to work, since their output takes up actual, physical space. Without room to work, invention cannot flourish.
Daniel Obrove
has room to work, more than enough in fact, but he still has obstacles preventing his creativity from truly flourishing. His home of Wisteria City has been profoundly generous to inventors; the facilities at its renowned Artificer's Fellowship are top-notch, allowing for ceaseless drafting and production of all manner of doohickies, gizmos, and widgets. Most important of all is that the Fellowship workshops have room to
grow, with the only vacant lots on the entire city-planet lying adjacent to the building. Whereas other Wisterian guilds that are looking to expand are presented with no choice but to build upwards, the Artificer's Fellowship doesn’t have to resort to that yet, though their campus’s stature is enviable even now.
At first it might appear as though Daniel Obrove has no reason to complain. All his life, the city has been good to him. Orphaned at birth, he rose from low standing to become one of the Artificer's Fellowship’s most talented young tinkerers, working on projects that earned him a prodigious rank and accolades from Mayor Grigor Volkstaf himself. The young man had the world in his pocket, with nowhere to go but up. Yet therein lay the problem. For Daniel Obrove, Wisteria City’s sky really was the limit. He was forbidden from ever leaving.
Centuries ago, Mayor Volkstaf first broke ground on the planet that would, over the years, become overrun with cobble and mortar. He began construction of Wisteria City with the goal of creating a true mega-metropolitan utopia, a glimmering societal oasis in which even the most destitute could find opportunity. He knew that if his plan were to succeed, then the city would be sure to attract enemies from without. Bandits, tricksters, monsters, and
worse would turn their eyes toward Volkstaf’s urban opus and seek to ruin it. To prevent this, he exerted a good portion of his great mayoral strength to establish a massive ward of protection around the entire planet. Cloaked in protective magic, the planet was ready to be further cloaked in sprawling urbanity. Volkstaf’s blockade worked so that people could not enter or leave the city’s vicinity without his say-so, or, later on, the word of appointed city officials. Centuries later, when Wisteria City became a hub for visitors both interstellar and interdimensional, the magical barrier acted as a physical embodiment of the city’s strict immigration laws. Volkstaf’s vision of utopia was nearing completion, and he had the means to see to it that no outside forces would spoil his plans.
The barrier’s presence around Wisteria City also meant that Volkstaf could keep people
within its borders, namely important members of his staff or those with need-to-know knowledge of municipal operations. Given that the star inventor Daniel Obrove had his hand in the creation of several public works, he was one of the unfortunate many barred from ever leaving the city. Be it travel to a different dimensional plane, or merely to one of Wisteria’s planetary neighbors, Daniel is forced to remain. The city is vast, and has many problems for an inventor to solve, yet it’s the principle of the thing that puts Daniel on edge. He would be content to stay if only he knew he had freedom to leave. He is grateful to Volkstaf for creating Wisteria, and for endorsing the Artificer's Fellowship to the extent that he has, but he can’t help but hold some resentment for the extremes to which the mayor has gone to keep the city protected.
The mere
thought of his confinement drives the inventor to rebellion, and to that end he has been quietly studying the world-ward to discover a way to breach it without alerting city officials. The task is difficult, though. The field is made from ancient magic known only to Mayor Volkstaf, and observing it too closely will draw suspicion. Still, Daniel’s coming close. He has thus far determined a means to slip small observational drones past the barrier. With their aid, Daniel is able to scout out other locations, receiving his first glimpse of the worlds beyond. By vessel or portal, he would find a way to escape and prove that the outside wasn’t as hostile as Volkstaf thought. All Daniel needed was time.
Manual Dexterity; Or, It’s All About Finger Strength; Or, Additional Information
Key to Daniel Obrove’s endeavors is a mechanical arm, the design of which he has been improving over the years. Quietly referred to by the inventor as “The Hand of Creation,” the device’s function hinges on five partially unstable elemental cores. The friction caused by their disparate natures produces enough energy to perpetually fuel the device, while the use of two pairs of opposite cores, joined by a fifth element not tied to any opposite pairing, allows the cores to exist in proximity to each other without cancelling each other out.
The Hand of Creation is sturdily crafted, but overexertion does pose the risk of freeing the cores from their housings and causing a reaction. The device is more articulated than an average person’s arm, is stronger, has compartments for spare tools, and is constantly at peak levels of power, but the trade-off is that Daniel cannot do anything
too remarkable with it, for fear of upsetting its five cores. Daniel’s technomancies are cast through his fleshy meat-arms, while the Hand is used for physical work.
The four contradictory elements used in Daniel Obrove’s mechanical arm are
passion, reason, eternity, and transience. The fifth, unifying element is
anima, the fundamental energy of the world itself. Each conflicting core is housed within the device’s frame behind the third knuckle of each finger, with the fifth core kept behind the thumb. The opposite elements are staggered so that the pairs aren’t right next to each other; transience is neighbor to reason is neighbor to eternity, which finally sits next to passion, which is hidden behind the index finger.
The Hand of Creation is mounted on a miniature conveyor belt gadget looped around Daniel Obrove’s waist, allowing the arm to be swiveled into whatever position is required. If spun around fast enough, additional Hands of Creation could act as propeller blades and allow the inventor to achieve lift. This is ill-advised, however, as the centrifugal force would undoubtedly cause all those elemental cores to become free of their tenuous bindings and react with each other. Because of this, Daniel Obrove is best off limiting himself to only
three arms.
The reason that Daniel Obrove’s five-core perpetual energy source isn’t being used to power things on a large scale is that the cores become harder to keep contained the larger they are, even when held in equilibrium.
The Hand of Creation also serves as a control mechanism for Daniel Obrove’s series of drones. Normally they explore and record information manually, but Daniel can at any time tap into a probe’s feed to directly observe whatever world it’s been deployed upon.
Just because Mayor Volkstaf has cordoned off and strictly regulated his entire world doesn’t mean he considers it the
best solution. It’s simply that, in the thousands of years since the city’s founding,
a better answer to outside threats hasn’t appeared.
The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
Daniel Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the celestial entity with his eye on forging Utopia, Daniel. He is not his former life, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. He's the Obrove if Obrove were a brilliant inventor confined to a single world, while
the Archon is Obrove gifted with the divine capacity to shape worlds and not a whole lot to do now that the world’s been shaped.
More component parts to the Obrove machine can be found on their alt list,
here.
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