A Steampunk Story of Triumph, Disaster, Inventors, Insane-asylum escapees, and American Frontiersmen with guns. They are not thieves, merely lady and gentlemen members of the Acquisitions Bureau. Theodore Thaddeus Thatch the Third is the quintessential gentleman inventor of 1868. That means he is very ill, chronically unlucky, constantly out of pocket, and widly shunned for his role in the great automaton disaster of 1865. His luck changes however when he is offered the chance to repair a rare piece of clockwork, which turns out to be far more than it appears.