This is a rose garden puzzle, with gears as roses. However, there are only two sets of gears instead of three, and the lines next to the row letters go up and down as they pass over the gray hexes.
Rows
| A | Spanish law firm | GARRIGUES |
| B | Yogurt brand | NOOSA |
| Type of ore in World of Warcraft | DRACONIUM | |
| A baker or a cat, for example | KNEADER | |
| C | Scottish instrument | DOODLESACK |
| Dumplings | MOMOS | |
| D | More economical vehicle for transporting goods (3 wds) | MINI CARGO VAN |
| Color on Captain America's shield | RED | |
| E | Type of tie-breaking shots | PENALTY |
| Components of a home security system (2 wds) | WIRED ALARMS | |
| Org. Andrei Sator sabotages | CIA | |
| F | Beat in a hot dog contest | OUTATE |
| Uproars | RIOTS | |
| G | Containers lined up at the curb, perhaps (2 wds) | FULL TRASHES |
| H | Foot of a lion? | REGULUS |
| With this, as in a formal document | HERETO | |
| Czech lager | PILSENER | |
| I | Understanding of what you're thinking? | TELEPATHY |
| Something that can be bear or bull | MARKET | |
| J | __________ in one's belt | NOTCH |
| Signal distorting phenomenon | STATIC | |
| Button in an email client | SEND | |
| K | Old game console, for short | NES |
| Tagline for a Himalayan product, perhaps (2 wds) | PUREST SALT | |
| Locking mechanism | DEADBOLT | |
| L | Genesis creator | SEGA |
| Fancy vacation house | VILLA |
Dark Gears
| A gender in German | NEUTER |
| Anxiety or discontent | UNEASE |
| Checked off | TICKED |
| Decorative pattern formed from tiles or glass | MOSAIC |
| Dolores Umbridge's Horcrux | LOCKET |
| Having practical value | USEFUL |
| In a prudent manner | WISELY |
| Interjection heard from a player on the field (2 wds) | IM OPEN |
| Moana stacks these | STONES |
| One of four postulated for Phantom Stranger | ORIGIN |
| People who live outside their native country | EXPATS |
| Strong insistence | AVOWAL |
| Thor's home | ASGARD |
| Unreasonable delay, in law | LACHES |
Light Gears
| "__________ is not an advantage", per Mycroft | CARING |
| Braced oneself, as before a demanding situation | NERVED |
| Car Ferris Bueller takes | SPYDER |
| Cry in battle (2 wds) | TO ARMS |
| Fluid produced and used in the mouth | SALIVA |
| Forcefully removes offending entities | PURGES |
| Nearsightedness | MYOPIA |
| Old-fashioned spelling for sound composition | MUSICK |
| Piece of wood used in typesetting to space paragraphs | REGLET |
| Respectable job for Gordon Gekko | TRADER |
| Song or poem with a story | BALLAD |
| Stringy staple food | NOODLE |
| Western movie villain | OUTLAW |
| Winning __________ and minds | HEARTS |
While solving the grid, we realize a few things. First, each row passing through a hex leaves a letter there. Second, those rows criss-cross every time they go through a hex. Third, the gears turn (with light and dark turning in opposite directions) and the words for the rows appear in one of the orientations.
Here is the grid in the different orientations.
Two letters go on each hex, one from each row that passes through it. If we order each bigram with the lower lettered row first, it spells DIAGONALISECHARS, short for “diagonalise characters.” The words for the rows appear in 5 of the 6 orientations. In the 6th unused orientation, if we look along the diagonals, we can find GOOD, LAWFUL, NEUTRAL, CHAOTIC, and EVIL, in approximately the right places for a character alignment chart.
There are no characters in the filled grids, but there are 9 characters that appear in clues. These can be placed into an alignment chart relatively neatly.
| Lawful | Neutral | Chaotic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Good | Captain America | Thor | Moana |
| Neutral | Mycroft | Phantom Stranger | Ferris Bueller |
| Evil | Dolores Umbridge | Gordon Gekko | Andrei Sator |
If we diagonalize their names in row-major order, we get CHARTSSET, or with formatting, CHART’S SET. The set of things in an alignment chart is ALIGNMENTS.
Gears felt like a natural component to try to utilize for the factory, and once I thought about how letters would fit on gears, it naturally started looking like a rose garden. This is the first rose garden I’ve constructed, and the choices of orientations for different rows made it seem too complex to use much tooling (like qxw), so this was mostly a manual process.
Most people seem to ask about the correctness of the plurality of the answer given the cluephrase CHART’S SET. Despite “Alignment” singular having the strongest association to the chart, the grouping of things in a set is a plural (e.g. the Integers), and thus the set in the alignment chart is “Alignments.”