The party lingered briefly in the Motherlode after their first close encounter with their quarry. Nessa reflected on her mistakes in the tavern’s dim light while the group regrouped over drink and argument, eventually convincing Azimuth that Tockworth could not be reasoned with, only stopped. Ragnum drained the last warmth from the Motherlode’s stock with a packet of Dust of Dryness, stripping several kegs bare before carving “RAGNUM WAS HERE” into the table despite Punmiri’s objections. The mark was swiftly repaired by Punmiri and Azimuth, and Poons recorded the incident in her diary under a single blunt line: “kill Ragnum.”
With that, the party moved toward the workshop under cover of stealth, slipping past a Clockwork Stone Defender without engagement, but found it difficult to approach. No windows broke its surface, no obvious seams offered entry, and Igna's repaired Shield Guardian stood at the only entryway. The party decided they needed to split; Ragnum and Punmiri became "Team Distraction", turning toward Turbine Heights to sever the city’s power, while Azimuth and Nessa prepared to breach the workshop itself as "Team Extraction".
Turbine Heights lay choked in steam and grief. The bodies of gnomish militia dotted the pathways, and to avoid a patrol, Ragnum and Punmiri slipped inside the abandoned jail. Inside, they found the Goblin boss Yuzzik and Bobgoblin Slonk, both having killed their adjacent cellmates for their food and prison swag. They were former members of the Go-Getter Goblins, and worked under Ipgrix, though Poons did not remember him from the Bleak End Records of Imprisonment. After tense negotiation and intimidation, Ragnum secured their temporary cooperation in exchange for their release.
At the same time, Team Extraction watched the workshop from a nearby residence. Their conversation drifted through memory and shared history in Little Lockford, heavy with what had been lost and what still remained unresolved. When Tockworth departed the workshop alongside a newly-forged automaton, they moved. The pair released line of wheeled animal music-box contraptions into the streets, manipulating the shield guarding to leave its station and follow the quarry. They rushed through the front door, with Nessa speedy enough to pass by the Animated Armor smiths and up Tixie's ladder, into her bedroom. Azimuth appeared next to her with cartographic teleportation; both had reached the upper interior unseen.
Inside, they found Tockworth’s vault. Plans to approach it were drafted, discarded, and replaced with more elaborate ones, until Azimuth was holding a broken wine bottle filled of oil and ball bearings, and had no real idea of what to do with it. Nessa finally ended the uncertainty by unlocking the vault the practical way, her skill in thieves' tools seeming to be enough. She recovered the fail-safe key inside, but an alarm spell was triggered immediately. Tockworth arrived through dimension door in a surge of anger and fractured recognition, her presence a storm of steam and failing restraint.
Team Distraction continued to the power station, where the source of the disturbance revealed itself as a Clockwork Defender had been jammed within the power station’s mechanisms after being pushed from the ledge by a dying militiaman. They shot down the defender and Slonk lifted Ragnum up to the jammed turbine, who yanked out the disturbance. The power station was cleared, restoring airflow to the turbines, and Punmiri then used the restored controls to lower the city’s bridges. She finally cut the power grid, only now setting the stage for her companion's intrusion.
As Team Extraction faced down death, the lights went out. Azimuth slipped past Tockworth in the chaos, scattering oil and ball bearings in his wake, while Nessa vaulted through the structure and raced for the fail-safe mechanism. She reached it first and turned it, and across Little Lockford the remaining constructs went still at once, like puppets whose strings had been cut. The surprised Tockworth turned to chase but slipped on Azimuth's concoction, her body venting steam as she attempted to chase them down.
She reached chased them on the streets outside her workshop, blanketing Azimuth with scalding steam. The cartogropher could see he wasn't nearly as quick as Nessa, and realizing they were outmatched in a straight-up fight, made a heroic last stand. He bought Nessa time to break away with the recovered key, and Tixie cut him down with her force-empowered sword-arm, barely able to recognize her former lover. Team Extraction had been running back to their base in the chaos, and Nessa reached them at Smodlertown's edge; Ragnum grabbed the key, and hurled it into the magma below.
The pair then converged on Tockworth as she turned her fury outward, flanked by their temporary Goblinoid allies. Slonk held her in place while Yuzzik’s arrows broke her temporary forcefield, and Ragnum followed with relentless blows, too quick for Tockworth to catch. Nessa used the opportunity to double-back to Azimuth through the streets as combat reached its zenith. Though she nearly killed Slonk with steam and sword, Tixie was outgunned, and her systems faltered as Punmiri rang a dolorous bell within her head. Even then, she spoke to “Poots,” insisting that her "apotheosis" was only hours from completion, before vanishing via dimension door toward the Overlook.
Nessa reached Azimuth as the gnome was on the verge of death, and for the third time in three days, revived him just in time with a healing potion. However, as the two limped back to the group, the power around them returned: the streets lit up, and an iron shell began to rise around the Security Center like a closing eye. They rushed to the overlook, but as Ragnum pounded his knuckles against the iron, they saw that force was hopeless. However, a wily gnome always has a workaround to brute strength, and Nessa proposed an alternate option: Igna's Apparatus.
Azimuth paid Yuzzik ten gold to stay in the power station to hold the turbines, and the remaining five mounted the Giant Lizards which hung around the Overlook as mounts to Warehouse 6. They convinced Igna to assist, and the crusty mage happily agreed, driving her machine across the bridges as Yuzzik repeatedly foiled Tixie's attempts to control Little Lockford from the Security Center. Using the Apparatus of Igna, they tunneled beneath the iron shell into the Security Center. Inside, they traveled upstairs, and found Tockworth at the height of her unraveling transformation. Her body was bound in black wires and machine-logic, the boundary between flesh and construct dissolving in real time. They stealthily moved forward as Tixie talked to "Poots", until finally, "Poons" ended it. A guiding bolt passed through Tockworth's machine body and found what remained of her organic heart. The transformation stopped, and the city was saved; though not cleanly, and not without cost.
In the days that followed, Little Lockford began to stitch itself back together. Yuzzik and Slonk picked their moment to comically run off, not giving so much as a goodbye to their liberators. As families gave rituals to their dead and fought back monsters that had entered from Cavemouth, Azimuth was named Security Overseer by Mayor Kreem. Nessa and Merben had a heart-to-heart, with the crossborn admitting he wanted to learn more about his mother's people; the two agreed he would remain in Lockford for now, and she would return once she figured out the status of the Glitterati.
Ragnum chose to leave the Deepways behind alongside Nessa and Punmiri, asciting that he had been hiding from his problems underground for too long. Igna began to drill upward through the tunnels in her Apparatus as the three adventurers followed atop their lizard mounts, following the carved path to the surface. Before they left, however, Punmiri gifted Azimuth a locket to replace the one he carried of Tixie. The little gnome would remember that giant woman, forever.