Sector 112
Location: Mechanus
Deep in the grinding depths of Mechanus lies Sector 112, a collection of penal cogs. This sector was chosen as a place of punishment not only for its remoteness, accessible only via the Labyrinthine Portal, but also for its sheer unforgiving efficiency. Here, each criminal—whether mortal, petitioner, or planar entity—themselves becomes a cog in the grand machinery of justice. Its inaccessible location ensures that escape is nearly impossible.
The sector is an intricate maze of platforms, ramps, and towering pistons. Endless mechanical arms descend from above to deliver tools, remove debris, or pluck up workers who falter in their tasks. The air smells of heated metal and the acrid tang of oil, and the walls echo with the hiss of steam and the clank of hammering machines. Chant goes that sector 112 is a relic of Primus’s early experiments with “rehabilitation”—an exercise in which punishment becomes purpose. Every sentenced individual is assigned a job that is supposed to correspond, in some cryptic way, to the crime they have been found guilty of committing.
Chant goes that long ago, this cog served as a testing ground for newly designed models of inevitable. It was here that prototypes first honed their relentless pursuit of lawbreakers. The experiments proved too extreme even for Primus it seems, but the infrastructure remained in Sector 112—a mechanical oubliette for the condemned.
The Tale of the Guvner Who Fell
Casriel Aximand (planar human wizard [he/him] / Guvners / LN) was a meticulous member of the Fraternity of Order, his life devoted to the art of refining laws. Yet, it was not his devotion but his pride that brought him to Sector 112. Casriel had dared to challenge the Axiom of Concordance, one of the foundational edicts binding Mechanus: None may integrate the Grand Equation without authorisation. He hadn’t meant to do it—or so he claimed.
For years, Casriel had been studying the equations that govern the movement of Mechanus’s gears, using a pack of rational moignos to calculate the exact moment when three cogs might perfectly align. It was a purely academic exercise, but in his magical zeal, Casriel somehow created a minor temporal anomaly, altering the speed of a small gear’s rotation by precisely one-tenth of a second. The effect was so minute that it barely registered. But in Mechanus, causing even the smallest deviation of the machine is a crime of the highest magnitude.
Inevitable enforcers arrived with startling swiftness. Casriel barely had time to gather his papers before he was shackled in mathemagical restraints and marched through the Labyrinthine Portal. His protests fell on deaf ears; the inevitables simply chanted, “Deviation detected. Correction required.”
Life in Sector 112
After a short and entirely predictable day in court, Casriel’s inevitable punishment was excruciatingly precise. Assigned to the task of polishing axles, he was expected to scrub every spindle on his assigned platform until it gleamed without a single imperfection. The twist? Casriel’s axle was part of a mechanism that moved so slowly he could only polish an inch at a time before it disappeared due to rotation of the cog. His entire shift was spent crawling along the axle, repeating his work endlessly.
At first, Casriel railed against the injustice. He quoted legal precedents, cited ancient legal geometric treaties, and even tried appealing to the mercy of the inevitables. His words fell flat in the mechanical din, the inevitables only responding with their favourite phrase: “Deviation detected. Correction required.”
As tedious weeks turned into agonising months, Casriel’s defiance eroded. The relentless monotony of the work, coupled with the constant reminders of his “deviation,” wore him down. Yet, in the quiet moments between polishing and cursing his fate, Casriel began to notice something: the axle he polished was now so shiny that he could now make out it was inscribed with patterns. Not just decorative flourishes, but intricate equations—and equations that seemed eerily familiar.
The Mathematics of Rotation
Casriel began to suspect that the equations were part of a greater puzzle, a secret hidden within the machinery of Mechanus itself. He started to work more deliberately, tracing the patterns with his fingers, committing them to memory. The inevitables didn’t seem to notice or care, so long as his axle remained clean and polished to perfection.
Rumours spread among the other prisoner work-crews that Casriel had discovered something extraordinary. Whispers spoke of a hidden code, a secret cipher in the Grand Equation that might unlock the secret of the Labyrinthine Portal. Some of the prisoners began to assist him, subtly altering their tasks to help Casriel uncover more of the patterns—and shield him from prying inevitable eyes.
Of course, such deviance could not go unnoticed forever. The mechanical prison wardens began to keep an ever-closer watch on Casriel.
What happened to Casriel remains a mystery. Some say he deciphered the code and vanished into the Labyrinthine Portal. Others claim he was caught and “reformatted,” his individuality erased as punishment for his insubordination. A few whisper that Casriel still works in Sector 112, polishing axles but planting tiny seeds of chaos in the system—imperfections too small for the inevitables to detect.
Whatever the truth, Casriel’s story has become a cautionary tale among the Guvners. It is said that his crime was not the act of altering the rotation of Mechanus’s gears, but the hubris to believe he could solve the Grand Equation. And yet, for those unlucky enough to find themselves in Sector 112, his name is whispered with hope—as a symbol of defiance against the unforgiving and unyielding grind of law.
Canonical Sources: Planes of Law [2e] Mechanus p26-27 (adventure set on cog in Sector 112, where the PCs are sentences to hard labour)
Source: Jon Winter-Holt