Rowan Needham had always felt more at home among the gears and cogs than among people. Not that he disliked people, mind you, it was just that their complexities and contradictions often left him bewildered. His workshop, tucked away in a quiet corner of Northwark, was his sanctuary. It was a symphony of clanking metal, whirring wheels, and the sweet scent of sawdust – a place where logic reigned supreme. He found solace in the predictable rhythms of machinery, in the precise alignment of gears that transformed raw energy into purposeful motion. Rowan believed that everything, from the human heart to the intricate workings of a clock, followed an underlying set of rules. And it was his lifelong mission to decipher those rules, to bring order to the seemingly chaotic world around him. His creations were marvels of ingenuity: self-winding clocks that never needed tending, intricate automata that mimicked the movements of birds and beasts, even a rudimentary calculating machine capable of performing complex arithmetic.