The Frankenlair
Officially Room B12: Experimental Temporal Mechanics.
- Status
- Active in Book 1 — abandoned Book 2 onward
- Official Name
- Room B12 — Experimental Temporal Mechanics
- Nickname
- The Frankenlair
- Location
- Basement wing, Science Building, Northfield University
- Run By
- Everett Frankwyler
Overview
The lab looks like it lost a bet with a scrapyard. Buried in the basement wing of the Science Building, just past a vending machine that eats quarters but coughs up Cheetos if you kick it right, Room B12 is where Everett Frankwyler built the original Time Displacement Unit—alone, underfunded, and mostly ignored by a department that stopped taking him seriously years ago.
The air inside smells faintly of burnt plastic, stale instant coffee, and ambition. Cables hang from the ceiling like techno-jungle vines. The floor is a battlefield of scorch marks and mismatched tiles, one square outlined in yellow tape and labeled “Incident #3 — DO NOT STEP.”
Notable Features
- A cracked plastic wall clock, permanently twenty minutes fast
- Walls plastered with scribbled notes, chaotic diagrams, and a photo of Nikola Tesla in a party hat
- A narrow window near the ceiling, daylight filtered through ivy and dust
- A sticker on the glass reading “Objects in mirror may be earlier than they appear”, with a Sharpie addition underneath: “Time is a flat circle. So are cookies.”
- An ancient filing cabinet and a whiteboard used for tracking jump theories in real time
- A center worktable holding the prototype device—strapped to a mannequin's forearm, oversized, half-dismantled, ringed with exposed coils, pulsing with soft greenish light
- A speaker system later rigged with Oliver's early-warning system, the “ZZZT Alert,” to announce jumps in progress
- The lab's only functional electric kettle, treated with something close to reverence
Role in the Series
This is where it all starts. Room B12 is the room Everett summons Lucy to with an email that's equal parts apology and academic dare—“I believe I have constructed a working prototype for chrono-mechanical displacement. In plain terms: time travel. Yes. That kind.” It's the room the team returns to after every early jump, the room where the rules of the device get argued out chapter by chapter, and the room that stops being a safe harbor the first time a jump refuses to bring them back to it.
Everett doesn't believe in fate. He believes in equations. He believes time doesn't like being caged—that it sulks, that it bites. Room B12 is where he found out he was right.