"A six-sided tunnel lined with dusty, perforated panels stretch out before them. The ceiling was merely a grille that air coolers pumped through and the floor a grille of visible pressure pumps beneath, and the lights were electric bulbs beneath luminous white plastic. There were exposed pipes. The supporting archways contained bulky, square autodoor sidings. The rhapsody of greys and sterile blacks was interrupted over the nearest arch, where, twisting in the dry breeze of the climate cooler, hung a bundle of old bones." [1]
The Facility is a laboratory located in the basement of Canaan House. Built by the original Lyctors, here they would study and refine complex theorems. The Facility contains six rooms: Laboratories 1-10, the Pressure Room, the Preservation Room, the Mortuary, the Work Rooms, and the Sanitiser.
Laboratories[]
*The second number listed is the number on the door to the lab.
Laboratory Two: Lab #1-2 Transference/Winnowing[]
"It's the theorem from the trial room, [...] It's the complete methodology for transference--for the utilisation of a living soul." [2]
Inside Laboratory 2, is a large empty room of empty shelves and blank walls. The room also contains two chambers, labelled "Response" and "Imaging". The doors to the two rooms are connected, and in order to open the door to "Response" a necromancer must place their hand on a pedestal in the "Imaging" room. The glass top of the pedestal folds over the necromancers hand, trapping them there, for as long as the "Response" door is open. At, in Harrow's estimation, 30 kilograms of mass moving across the Response door, the door will be signalled to close and a large bone construct animated by several intertwined necromantic theorems will attack whatever or whoever is in the Response room. The solution to the test is that the necromancer's cavalier enters the Response, where upon the necromancer will utilize their living soul to see through their eyes and unpick the theorems animating the bone construct.
"Winnowing, [...] I'm a fool. It wants the wheat from among the chaff--or the signal from the noise, if you like." [3]
Harrowhark and Gideon win the key from the Transference/Winnowing lab.
Laboratory Three: Lab #??, "Pyrrha's Trial," Projection Trial[]
details of interior experiment room unknown.
In Harrow the Ninth, the Saint of Joy encourages the Emperor to start with "Pyrrha's trial" when explaining how to hold your mind and body together in the River while physically submerged. The Emperor asks
"Do you both recall the projection trial, back at Canaan House? It would have been in Lab Three." (6)
At this point, Harrow recalls her experiences with the regrowing bone construct. However, the experiment she is recalling is actually Lab Two: "Transference/Winnowing." Which suggests that Laboratory Three: Projection, or "Pyrrha's trial," is a separate experiment not shown in Gideon the Ninth.
Laboratory Eight: Lab #14-8 Diversion. Procedural Chamber. Avulsion![]
Laboratory 8 is a single room with two parts, separate by an enormous black steel grate when not in use. The first part of the room is unremarkable, but beyond the grate and down a short flight of stairs lies a yellow-and-black striped line and, a hundred meters beyond that, a metal plinth with a glass box on top.
The entire hundred-meter space contains a spliced theorem: one half senescence and the other an entropy field. The senescence theorem decays anything to cross it with alarming speed, while the entropy field undermines any magical attempt to beat the former. Palamedes estimates that a necromancer of his caliber could last for three seconds. The only solution to the test is for a necromancer to draw energy from their cavalier-- to siphon.
"I asked [Palamedes] first, [...] and when I told him the method, he said he'd never do it." [4]
Harrowhark and Gideon win the key from the Avulsion lab, which they later give to Dulcinea.
Laboratory ???: Psychometry[]
The Psychometry laboratory is never seen by Gideon, but recounted by Palamedes. It contains only a table. a locked box, and a single molar. Palamedes attempts to solve this test for several hours by conducting psychometric research on the tooth, learning everything possible about the original owner of the tooth.
The solution to the test is to find the skeleton servant the tooth was taken from and make an impression of his clavicle. The point of the lab is to learn about the creation of the skeleton servants, and that they are not constructs, but rather revenants inhabiting the skeleton shell.
"They are autonomously powering themselves. It debunks every piece of thanergy theory I ever learned." [5]
Silas Octakiseron took the key to the Psychometry lab from Dulcinea, but Palamedes and Harrow break into the Lyctor study.[5]
Other Rooms[]
Sanitiser[]
The door to the Sanitiser room is a huge, metal blast door. It leads to a low-ceilinged maze of cubicles containing long steel tables under spray heads and narrow boxes a human could stand in. Gideon finds Harrow in her bone cocoon here.
References[]
- ↑ "Gideon the Ninth," Act II, Ch. 12
- ↑ "Gideon the Ninth," Act III, Ch. 19
- ↑ "Gideon the Ninth," Act II, Ch. 14
- ↑ "Gideon the Ninth," Act III, Ch. 20
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Gideon the Ninth," Act IV, Ch. 32