I met mr. Boulette in his kitschy restaurant. We were seated in a private room. The see-through floor to Oursulaert III was off-putting. We were served oysters fried in the fat of some nearly extinct cetacean, topped with kaviar from some fish that actually is extinct in the wild. The drink was some extremely expensive wine, I already forgot the story behind it, I didn't drink it.
After some preliminary chit-chat, he came to the point. According to Boulette, the brass cogwheel is part of a mechanism that can unlock some sort of vault. There are ten such gears, and he has already collected four. Well, three, now that I have one.
He got all excited trying to rope me in for his treasure hunt. He explained that this secret vault holds the gold of the Takmahl empire. It was built just before it's fall. The gold was stowed away by their Emperor at the last moment before the Imperial family was caught and murdered by a revolutionary mob. The gears combine into some sort of combination lock which has to be dialed in, in just the right way, to open the doors to halls of gold.
I've never heard of this nonsense, nor have I ever encountered anything like it in the academic literature.
But Boulette was adamant. He wants my help to get the other cogwheels, and "then we'll split the gold".
He's figured out where they are.
Five of the remaining six cogwheels are in the Arjam library at the PIE chapter house on the Lok'ri estates in Oris.
