Synopsis: A Wrench in the Looking Glass

The London Victor Barnes inhabits is a polluted product of the industrial revolution. Dark clouds cover the sky and the only the most elderly have any memory of the sun. Disillusioned and bored at his elite prep school, Victor spends his nights with a gang of other over-privileged under-motivated young vandals. A smashed mirror and the 'physical' incarnation of bad luck that comes with it send him home on temporary leave where his technology-obsessed parents are playing host to a traveling genius inventor, an artificer of small curios.

The Artificer is in need of a young apprentice and Victor has just been kicked out of school. At his parent's behest, he boards the Metropolitan railway out of Paddington Station and discovers the dingy shallow world he has occupied for the last eighteen years is but the surface of the great city of London.

Armed only with a wrench possessing supposedly mystical properties, a gold pocket watch, and Bad Luck herself in the form of Althea of the Mirror, Victor begins a journey that will reach all the way from the broken factories of the far underground to the strange airy heights that lie above even the thickest dark clouds.