On the day Viktor Archeville turned 18 (June 1995), he was given a doozy of an inheritance: his own ancestral keep! It wasn't much to look at, just a five-story tower straining under more than a century of neglect, but it was in an exquisite location overlooking the majestic Danube river. He spent a few months working on fixing it up, but slowed when he started his college career. After graduation (Spring 1999), he revisited the tower with many, many plans for it. Not only would this be his new home while in Germany, it would be a center for his company (still some years from completion) and a place of learning for all who were determined enough to make the trip.
During the ArchEvil event, Schloss Wissenschaft was destroyed by UNISON Agent Mark Lucas. What remained of it, along with the rest of ArcheTech, was given to Miss Americana and the Scarab.
LOCATION
Schloss Wissenschaft sits in the Black Forest of Germany. Originally a small keep awarded to one of Archeville's ancestors in the 16th century, it stands on a hill overlooking the junction where the Brigach and Breg rivers join to form the Danube river. The closest town is Donaueschingen, a regional rail hub.
APPEARANCE, EXTERIOR
The keep had started as a 5-story tower with a basement/storage cellar. Archeville restored and expanded it, turning what had been a simple keep into a sprawling 110-room castle with an expansive subterranean substructure.
APPEARANCE, INTERIOR
The ground floor contains the grand entry hall (with a large art gallery off to the side), a lavish reception hall (with a large and well-stocked kitchen off to the side), classrooms (see below), staff lounge and dining room (for non-robot staff), and a robot repair/recharge area. 2nd floor holds a ballroom, a large meeting room, a formal dining room, servant's quarters, expensively furnished guest rooms, music room, museum, communications center, robotics laboratory/workshop, business offices, and a balcony overlooking the lands. 3rd floor holds R&D laboratories (primarily life sciences), an infirmary (with state of the art quarantine chamber, pathology lab, and cryogenic storage), more living quarters (primarily for scientists and technicians who show exceptional talent and receive training from Archeville himself), a national surveillance center, and aircraft hangar/helipad. 4th floor contains R&D labs (primarily physical sciences) and a global surveillance center.
The castle's massive central tower contains floors 5-10. (The reception room in the ground floor, ballroom on the 2nd floor, and R&D laboratories on the 3rd and 4th floors make up and expand out from the lower levels of the tower.) Most of the 5th floor is take up by the gym and Combat Simulator Holo-Chamber (which he can use to show famous battles from history, with himself in the the role of one of the commanders), and the 6th floor contains Archeville's living quarters (sitting room, bedroom, and bath, all luxuriously appointed with the best in carpeting, furniture, and decor). The 7th floor holds private laboratories and workshops for personal projects (with their own dedicated power supply, a tabletop cold fusion generator), and the 8th floor holds labs for studying "unusual" items (which includes nonterrestrial, extradimensional, and "magical" items). The 9th and 10th floors are Archeville's massive library/reading room. In addition to Archeville's personal elevator, the 8th-10th floors are connected by a massive spiral staircase.
Beneath the castle are numerous subterranean layers of considerable size; altogether they are about three times as big as the entire above-ground castle. The basement holds wine cellars and miscellaneous housewares; it can be accessed via elevators in the kitchens and Archeville's personal elevator (which runs through the central tower). The first sub-basement is contorted with small winding passageways, and the hangar, with access to the surface coming through the courtyard of the castle or via a ramp leading out behind the castle. The second sub-basement contains all sorts of power inhibiting devices designed to detain and imprison metahuman villains (or unruly experiments), as well as several research & testing laboratories (including his primary psionics/psionic tech R&D laboratories). The third sub-basement contains more laboratories and workshops (primarily robots and alternative energy sources), nestled in a maze of corridors. The fourth sub-basement holds more secret laboratories/workshops (including an extradimensional research laboratory), and a highly efficient fission reactor. Beneath this, an underground offshoot of the Danube River runs through a number of large caverns, and the current of the river powers three backup hydroelectric generators.
MISCELLANEOUS
Exterior granite walls are supported by titanium/vanadium steel bracing, supplemented with force screens.
Schloss Wissenschaft is highly automated, with a permanent staff of only 50 humans and 300 robots. Archeville could streamline operations more -- less humans and less robots via more automation -- but he chose not to because people coming there expect to see robots, and appreciate seeing other humans.
Most of the ground floor is open to the public at all hours ("if you can reach the place," he figures, "you deserve at least a little something.") The classrooms contain scores of "teaching computers" that can answer a number of questions; they are free for anyone to use, though they only display in German. These "teaching computers" have fully interactive file libraries on anatomy, astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, ecology, geology, medicine, physics, and zoology; they can also teach algebra, calculus, trigonometry, drafting, and electrical and mechanical engineering.
The castle has a "Schwarzschild Wormwole Aperture Producer" (SWAP) system, which allows instantaneous teleportation between it and any other ArcheTech facility.
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