An unfortunate, but entirely forseeable, consequence of Falkensburg's status as a centre of the Clockwork Assembly is the tendency of tiresome, semi-coherent cranks to arrive, hands full of cheap tools and heads full of wild ideas, intent on completing some half-thought-out masterpiece. Frequently, these bizarrely-talented idiots have conflated their plans for a perfect mechanical creation with some unique and no doubt painfully heretical religious ideas that really should have been beaten out of them during childhood.
Thus it is that, at various times in the last century or so, lone preachers, arms still covered in grease and beards still full of brass shavings, have appeared in Beschaeftigte Biene Square, ranting and raving about the salvation soon to be brought to the fortunate citizens of Falkensburg by their useless (and, on one notable occasion, completely non-operational) apparatus, at least until moved on by the Falkensburg Guard.
The Spinning Messiah
An excellent example of this is the Spinning Messiah, famously created (by parties now unknown) during the Great Diversion earlier this century. A worryingly-intricate conglomeration of gears, pistons, popping powder-flares and rotating silver hoops, the Spinning Messiah caused such unaccountable fascination among those gullible enough to deserve no better that even Judge Xavier von Kreis was brought into the fold of its venerators. The influence of von Kreis was able to shield the Messiah and its devotees from action by the Guard, and many believed the heretical, murderous cult (for such it undoubtedly must have been) to be immune from action on the part of the civic authorities.
Thankfully, wiser minds were not constrained by the dictates of purile officialdom, and in 1134, unknown vigilantes hired a troupe of blind men and women to shatter the Messiah (along with the building currently housing it, and four of its no-doubt brainwashed worshiper-slaves) with a fusilade of cannon fire.
The Boris Theory
It has been theorised by many at Lügenkuche College that Head Prefect Boris was, at least initially, another Clockwork God. The theory postulates that he was the result of an attempt by Magister Ilhaam to improve upon the human form and create a race of immortal, uncorruptable super-beings. If this is the case, then the experiment can only have been a failure. Nothing else could explain how the vanguard of a new and superior species came to be employed as a mere beadle, even for such a revered institution.
- the Eclecticon
