The Clockworks

The Clockworks
Location:	Obverse
Natives:	Lords Temporal
First appearance:	Wildthyme Beyond!
Appearances:	PROSE: First Meetings

You may be looking for clockwork.

The Clockworks was a place of logic and reason maintained by Iris Wildthyme's people, (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) the "Clockworkers" who kept the multiverse structured and orderly. (PROSE: Wildthyme Beyond!) Everything was watched and recorded from the Clockworks. (PROSE: Future Legend)

The most powerful race of the Clockworks, the Lords Temporal, (PROSE: First Meetings) were one of the oldest species in the multiverse, (PROSE: Elementary, My Dear Sheila, Iris Wildthyme and the Colonic in Space) who, when it was still young, (PROSE: Elementary, My Dear Sheila) had been tasked with maintaining its basic structure. (PROSE: The Blue Angel)

The capitol of the Clockworks was Saga City. It was ruled by the High and Mighties, (PROSE: Wildthyme Beyond!) a council who, among other things throughout their history, were responsible for the banishment of the Monstrons millennia before the 42nd century. (AUDIO: The Iris Wildthyme Appreciation Society) Spectacular forests grew at the heart of the cities in the Clockworks. (PROSE: Wildthyme Beyond!)

History

When the multiverse was still young, the people of the Clockworks were allied with the Sentients, the Modulars, the Recursives, the Binaries, and many more species. (PROSE: Elementary, My Dear Sheila)

Iris told Panda that she had lived as a child in the slums miles outside the Clockworks. (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) According to other accounts, as a girl, she lived in the mountains of the Clockworks with her Aunts. (PROSE: Wildthyme Beyond!, First Meetings, Iris at the V&A)

After Iris Wildthyme left the Obverse into the universe, the Clockworkers followed her and remained on Hyspero for millennia while they waited for her to return to them. (PROSE: Wildthyme Beyond!)

The fabled Key to the Clockworks, if assembled into a cube from its six segments, would allow the user to open the gateway between universes at will. (PROSE: Future Legend, The Unhappy Medium)

Iris regarded the Clockworkers as rotten to the core. (PROSE: The Colonic in Space) A version of Iris destroyed her superiors, then led by a Supreme Being, at the conclusion of an epic rave called the Tim War. (PROSE: From Wildthyme with Love)

Behind the scenes

• It has never been clarified if the Clockworks is a country, a planet, or even a galaxy. The term could be a description of a domain through time and space: in Christmas on a Rational Planet, the Carnival Queen referred to the Spiral Politic as the "Majestic Clockwork".
• The residents of the Clockworks are occasionally referred to as "the Clockworks" by metonymy, or, more rarely, "Clockworkers", but they are never given a more definite species name within Magrs's Iris Wildthyme novels. First Meetings establishes that the "Lords Temporal" are the most powerful race in the Clockworks, and other Iris Wildthyme stories, including The Scarlet Empress, Verdigris, and The Elixir of Doom, identify Iris and her House of Aunts as coming from Gallifrey.