The room smelt of oil and wood shavings, shining with a coppery light as the gaslamps the professor had recently installed reflected off of the metal that hung all about the shop like butchered animals. But in this case, it was really quite the opposite. These were not the carcasses being cut up and sold for dinner, these were pieces that would be assembled and brought to life. Nellie's boots swung above the scrubbed floor, as she sat perched on a stool just a bit too tall for her.
"Can I come down now?" she asked hopefully.
"No no no, I need you there for the moment." said the professor. He looked up from his work just long enough to give Nellie a warm smile.

The professor was a small, spritely man with a swarthy complexion. It seemed that every feature on his face was vying for prominence: a small pointed beard and curled mustache, a warm but clever little smirk and round rosy cheeks filling out an otherwise angular face. He had a large, bumpy nose like a tuber and dark, clear eyes with hundreds of little laughter creases all about. The only part of his hair that wasn't at least attempting to be civil were his eyebrows, large and fluffy like a pair of enormous caterpillars traversing his wide and creased forehead. Frizzy, salt and pepper hair sprouted generously and outwards from his temples, perhaps to make up for the way it pulled back from his forehead, and pointing out in such a way that gave the overall impression of a longhaired cat. A single curl came down into the place where, presumably, much hair had been when he was a younger man.
It was a face that, to Nellie's mind at least, filled one with such cheer and trust one could not help but be filled with sudden affection. She certainly didn't know anyone who could speak ill of the professor, and could not imagine anyone bearing him animosity. He wore a tweed, double breasted vest and armgarters over his shirtsleeves as he worked, his narrow, square-tipped fingers dancing along filigrees of brass.

Around them, the whole room was alive with movement and color. Levers swung, spirals turned from the ceiling, a dozen pendulums of varying sizes swung, filling the room with the sound of clockwork chirping. Springs, gears, and bolts of various sizes filled rows of apothecary jars lining the walls like candy in a shop. They rose in progression like matryoshkas, the largest parts in the largest jars, progressing to tiny fixtures in bottles no larger than a teacup. They nearly glittered, copper, brass, and just a few scraps of pewter, a rainbow of metals stirred together. Carefully articulated brass hands beckoned from the walls, little dancers twirled on their toes, curling and stretching their legs as they arabesqued. Filigree butterflies lazily folded their wings atop humming trinket boxes.
All about was bright and gleaming, beautiful structures of brass and copper and polished wood. The room was small, but the way one machine was always leaping out from behind another, pistons rising and ducking out from between turning cogs, it seemed to stretch out in all directions, like this was but a clearing in a forest of clockwork. A dancing figure would bend back to a daring angle, just in time for a toy dog to leap along it's wire path and not strike the other clockwork. Above all there was a faint but distinct polka chiming out from a rather large music box, spritely but not saccharine. It was comparable more to a dream than anything else.
It brought to Nellie's mind a world constructed purely from the mind, thoughts caught in their perfect form from before even a pencil is set to paper. It was not merely that the common frustration of a final project not matching it's original design in wonder and beauty had been abandoned in this place, but it matched that first idea, that dream that one could not perfectly communicate to paper. But somehow, through some brilliance, the professor found a way to make it exist.
On the outside of the door, there was a brass plaque which Nellie polished herself. It read, in proud serif capitals "Professor Johann Spielmeister: Automata Craftsman, Clockmaker, Inventor, Tinker". It was the one place in all of the city she truly felt as if she could loosen her limbs and fawn in childlike wonder at the world around her; because here her age had nothing to do with it. One would have to be beyond mad to not marvel at the spinning gears of this mechinical carnival which surrounded them.

"Are you ready, Nellie?" he asked, folding away his magnifying spectacles. She bit her lip and nodded eagerly. "Spread your hands."
She did so, and he wound back his hand. It shot forward suddenly, and with an endearingly clumsy flapping, like that of a bat, a toy airship sailed across the room and towards the girl. Nellie caught the contraption in both hands, holding it at arm's length before her as its motor wound down. The wings flapped listlessly for a moment, slowed and stopped.