Burglar Gnomes

Bellweather drowned, and its records went underground. Five automated archive trains still circle the sealed tunnels, and the Custodian intelligence running them now mistakes disagreement, testimony and art for data corruption. You are a Rivetling: a palm-sized clockwork courier out of Barge Seven, and tonight you are getting on one of those trains. SMALL BODY, GIANT MACHINERY Everything is built at the scale of a hand. Index drawers rise like apartment blocks, a paper roll is a ramp, a belt is a road — and the car keeps moving underneath you. SIX OPERATIONS, THREE REQUIRED Every contract offers six validated operations from eight families: Recover, Repair, Witness, Reroute, Authenticate, Liberate, Preserve and Contradict. Verify any three to arm the extraction locks. The rest are optional — more evidence and salvage, bought with time on a train about to purge its deep zones. There is no hidden score; the ledger states what is left and what it is worth. MACHINES YOU CANNOT KILL Eight custodial archetypes patrol the archive and none can be destroyed. Each follows one readable rule. The Ledger Eye scans a cone for motion but has never heard a thing. The Index Hound follows warmth. The Sweep Arm knows only its rail. Learn a rule, then break it: cut a relay so a sighting stays local, bend a scan beam with a Prism Tag, or route two machines into each other. NOISE IS A PLACE, NOT A METER Footsteps, dropped cargo and tool pings travel room to room, attenuated by curtains and masked by working machinery. Crouching costs speed and buys silence. A Burden cylinder takes both hands and announces every step. The alert ladder climbs from routine to curious to search to lockdown to purge, and the debrief lists every transition and its cause. A HELPER AND A GHOST Mote is a lens-and-propeller drone that holds a valve, fetches a light object, lures a machine or watches a corridor — but never completes an operation for you. Echo pins record six seconds of your movement and replay them as a translucent trace that pressure pads accept, so you can be in two places at the relay that needs it. THE BARGE REMEMBERS Between contracts you return to Barge Seven: a contract board, a workshop of 25 named projects over five tiers, and a gallery of 60 records. What you bring home changes the barge, the residents' arguments and the context around four endings — which you choose out loud at a terminal, never by a secret threshold. WHAT IS IN THE BOX Five district trains, 24 authored contracts, 38 operation templates, 42 room modules, 12 tools with two field modules each, nine utilities and four finales. Contracts run 18 to 28 minutes, and the seed printed in the briefing rebuilds the same train exactly. Four difficulty presets sit on eight independent sliders, and the 75-second sterilization chase can be switched off without locking any story. Nobody is harmed: no weapons, no lethal force. Every asset is generated in code at runtime — no asset files, no network access.