Autoshow Theater

Why pay a performer when the venue could do the job just fine?

The Autoshow Theater is one of the great mechanical marvels of New Kagrenac and the only large performance space in the city. The Theater itself looks like any typical concert hall with extravagant wood trim and wall papers of varying visual appeal that automatically change once a day with the use of mechanisms hidden behind the walls. The stage itself looks normal as well to any person in the audience, but a performer or intruder onstage would be able to see the fundamental difference of this venue from all others: under the stage and in the ceiling are hundreds if not thousands of gears and pulleys ready to be activated at any moment.
While the space is very well suited to live performers and regularly hosts musicians and theater troupes from across The Drift, the theater's greatest draw is its autoshows: preprogrammed plays in which every actor and aspect of the play is moved via hidden mechanisms over and under the stage. Actors in these plays are puppets suspended by strings while parts of the set are usually operated by the theater from under the stage. These plays never have any dialogue and are accompanied by an automatic pit orchestra.

The Clockwork Run

Due to the Autoshow Theater being heavily guarded at all hours, it has become a rite of passage for skilled thieves to steal a component from the stage mechanisms without being caught, and then returning it to its place 24 hours later. Once this phenomenon become known to the Factory, they redesigned the mechanisms with "dummy parts" which are more easily accessible and replaceable in the case of one of these thefts. Of course, tradition adapts and the challenge became to steal the largest or most remote part you could from the mechanism, with greater glory to those who steal the largest components successfully. Factory data suggests that around two of these thefts are attempted every three months, though perhaps a truly skilled thief would never noticed at all.

The Theater was originally designed and built as a way to restore some of the culture that was lost in the Divine Tragedy. In the early days of The Drift travel was not feasible enough to host foreign artists, so the Factory (at the time just known as the Artisans Guild) built this to mitigate that issue.

"It was always a dream of mine to see a puppet show that didn't suck. As it turns out, I just needed the desperation and raw brass to do it myself. My colleagues and I have come to learn that boredom is a powerful motivator even in the end of the world. Perhaps if bread for dinner were entertaining, we'd have a stable food supply by now."
-1st Rate Artisan Hikka, soon after the completion of the Autoshow Theater

Type

Theatre / Concert hall

Urban legend has it that if a performer dies too close to the Theater, the mechanisms within take their soul to make a more lively puppet in their image. This idea mostly sprung from the sad case of Phiriel Althmeir, a great singer who had a puppet built to honor her memory when she was murdered by an angry audience member backstage. Though it does seem as if the puppets move beyond the limitations of string sometimes...