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A retired clocksmith steps into the city's augmented weave when his apprentice vanishes into a stolen shard. Guided by craft, a wren companion, and a ledger of names, he learns to level up, bind tethers, and outwit a commerce-driven specter of the grid. A LitRPG tale of gears and care.
Marek Varin measured the morning by the sound of a winding key turning in his palm. The shop smelled of brass filings and lemon oil: the small citrus bottle he'd bought from a street vendor for stubborn spring grease. Outside, the city exhaled into the first hour, a low hum from trams and an occasional laugh that leaked through the wooden door. Inside, light fell flat on counters of polished wood where dozens of clocks stared with unwound faces. Marek moved among them like a slow conductor. He had fingers that remembered how to coax reluctant gears into obedient rotation. They were thickened with a lifetime of work but precise; he could, without looking, set a minute wheel to the exact tooth.
A pocket watch lay open under a green banker’s lamp. Its escape wheel had been misaligned by a careless pawnshop. Marek adjusted the pivot with the tip of a file, listening to the tiny tick that told him when the wheel had returned to rhythm. Marta, an old collector who treated the shop as her refuge from high-rise vacancies, watched with a worried smile.
"You think it will keep time?" she asked.
"If it doesn't, it isn't the parts. It's the keeper. Keepers get sloppy when they stop hearing their own heart." He snapped the case closed and buffed the face with a lint-free cloth. The lens on his spectacles—augmented, not in the modern sleek way but a clumsy brass frame he had soldered himself—blinked a soft amber. A line of icons scrolled across his vision: local weather, a note about a delivery, and one little notification that had been blinking for days: ANIMA GRID: LOCAL NODE HEALTH: STABLE.
Marta paid him with a coin and a slice of pain au raisin from the bakery across the lane. She always paid in pastries. The small transaction was a ceremony. The city felt like an instrument that depended on many small rituals to keep its tune. Marek liked rituals. He wound the new watch, felt it breathe into motion beneath his palm, and set it on a velvet cushion. He could have been content with a day like that: repairs, tea, the measured time of gears.
He did not notice the first twitch in the air until Lila arrived, a shadow at the doorway with a backpack full of loose cables and an excitement that always came in short bursts. She was not his daughter; she was the apprentice he had taken on because she reminded him of the way time used to mean something to him when he was younger. She moved like a bright hand in a world of small, careful things—hair in a knot, sleeves rolled, eyes already scanning.