The Locomotive Works
She certifies what the works can do. The sale decides what those words mean.
- ~180 min
- 12392 words
- 59 scenes
- 9 branch points
- 5 endings
- Veyra, Republic of Orsava, January to October 1997
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
For nine months in 1997, the Radan Locomotive Works is the Republic of Orsava in miniature: 6,400 names on a payroll four months late, a foundry that heats half a city, and a state preparing to sell both for less than the machinery would fetch under cutting torches. Chief technologist Irina Vask must write Schedule T-7, the technical annexe that says what the works can actually do. Four bidders can promise anything. Her tables decide which promises are legally possible. Each employee receives twelve thousand privatisation coupons. Outside Gate Three, brokers buy a complete book for eight hundred asters — one average month's wage, cash today — from people already owed four. Director Anton Verek is quietly concentrating the books in an employee trust that promises 4,800 jobs and a hot foundry on credit no bank has approved. Shop steward Daro Meln has organised a forty-eight-hour strike during the acceptance test for the last export order on Radan's books. If the stoppage lands as announced, Volska State Rail may cancel thirty locomotives worth 144 million asters and demand back an advance the works has spent. The four bids offer four different survivals. Karsin Heavy Industries can make locomotives but will close the foundry. Volska can preserve 3,200 jobs if its order and hard-currency approval survive. Anton's employee trust would keep the plant whole if working capital appears. Northstar wants the river land, paint hall and 820 final-assembly workers, and its due-diligence lead Sabine Krall says so when asked. It is also the only bidder to put severance money in escrow. The Locomotive Works is an adult industrial drama about voucher privatisation, labour power and the violence hidden inside definitions. Choices alter production viability, wage arrears, workforce trust, the heat in a furnace and how much truth survives in the annexe. Five endings distinguish the life of a plant from the lives of the people who built it.
Content notice
- economic coercion and wage theft
- unemployment and threatened poverty
- political and corporate corruption
- labour conflict and strikebreaking
- a nonfatal industrial crush injury
- alcohol and tobacco use
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- class prejudice and xenophobia shown through behaviour; no slurs written out
Cast
- I Irina Vask protagonist; chief technologist of Radan Locomotive Works no portrait yet
- A Anton Verek works director; promoter and concealed controller of the employee trust no portrait yet
- L Lenka Sorel Ministry of State Assets privatisation commissioner no portrait yet
- D Daro Meln shop steward for Metalworkers' Union Local 14 no portrait yet
- S Sabine Krall Northstar Transit and Land Consortium due-diligence lead no portrait yet
- O Olek Bran foundry master responsible for No. 2 furnace and the district-heat load no portrait yet
- T Tomas Rul H-14 horizontal-borer operator and keeper of its compensation table no portrait yet