STEAM CITY… I thought it would be cool if Mr. X did a steam-punk comic. I just thought the look he would come up with, the world he would craft, the characters and their actions, and the plot would be cool. Perhaps a sort of one-off comic bit for the danger-babe-central short comic page, or maybe as a free super heroine steam-punk comic on the free site page, or even just some neat our-story-thus-far splash page mock-up/pin-ups. Of course the odds are long, I mean the current Ghost Pirate story he has going on at the danger-babe-central main comic page he mentioned in emails TWO years ago and that was him thinking back on some old ideas going way back before that! The guy is an idea machine just cranking stuff out and it sometimes takes a while for things to get their turn on the front burners. What follows then here, is a short story that is intended to perhaps intrigue his artistic musing and with luck set his ever racing mind down that possible path of steam, boiler plate rivets, and Victorian corsets. Rook.

STEAM CITY

Javier Sternovich escaped to America just in time for the civil war and all the horrors and opportunities it pertained. By the time the great conflagration had beaten its self to a bloody exhausted pulp and destroyed most of the old moneyed families both north and south he had managed to change his name to Javier Steam and his carpet bag of stolen Russian aristocratic jewelry into a steam locomotive empire and powerful political connections and contracts that made him one of the wealthiest men upon the continent.

It was at the fast approaching looming turn of the century the boom of the 1900’s that Javier Steam decided he would build the world’s first truly modern city. Designed by him and built by scratch by him and intended to last forever in harmony with nature and in peaceful accord of man beyond the lingering horrors of the war which nightly haunted him still and the questionable personal past he had so painstakingly sought to erase. He purchased a large grant of land almost ten miles square in what was then the Nevada northern territories in something akin to a principality and leveraging his great fortune and power he set out to construct what all snickering said was the impossible…. A completely self-contained city independent of any outside need or want of the rest of the world… STEAM CITY.

Robyn Cox awoke instantly and sprang up to a sitting position as she always did. She removed Mr. Wooly one of her stuffed animals from where it had somehow gotten wedged between her legs during her slumber (it seemed inevitable that at least one of her bed full of stuffed animals found its way somehow sandwiched between her thighs every night?!?) and swung out of bed hitting the hardwood floor running. She had always been a high energy girl with a racing mind and body. She shot to the round open window and thrust herself out of it and looked up into the skies. For there were two; the distant sky one could see in patches here and there and the always present white billowing sky of steam clouds that kept the city and its immediate surroundings in perpetual fog. It did not look like it would rain from the distant sky but there was a few patches hinting at heavy mist from the churning steam clouds. She would need her coat today. She needed her coat most days.

Robyn breathed in deeply the early morning air with the long curtains fluttering about her beaming face. “Hi Moonbeam! See anything exciting last night?” The teen waved ecstatically at the balding on top long haired man who sat cross legged on the roof of the house across from room. He was a HIPPIE one of the small group who showed up in the Old World time of the late 1960’s. Founded in 1880 as the cornerstone at the main square attested Steam City had cut its self off from the rest of the world with a forty foot steel wall running around its circumference and beyond that the tarn, a terrible waste land of marsh and deadly water filled pits where coal had been stripped mined to first get the nexus of the city up and running. Javier Steam had been against the strip mining as he kept saying the city was about harmony with nature not destroying it and it was on land he did not own though he purchased the mineral rights to it as his partners insisted upon the necessity.

Javier had selected the location for his ultra-modern city for its remoteness from all other civilization and its abundance of water principally found in a huge underground lake directly beneath the city and lastly upon the blind faults leading down into super-heated rock formations. It was his intention that water from the lake could be piped and pumped down into the rock creating an almost perpetual clean thermal steam to power his city. However to get to that stage reality needed a few hundred thousand tons of coal to start the process and his partners and principle designers had insisted upon strip mining the local countryside for that coal rather than try and ship it in to the remote and hard to reach location. In fact other than a single rail line used during the construction process and now long abandoned and covered in weeds and drowned in foul stagnate water with the last hundred yards of it pulled up there was no path leading directly to the city. The lone rail line sat sullen and mute running like a scar past the half buried kilns and collapsed storage sheds and mounds of rusting metal machines abandoned once the city became self-sufficient and the large metal arched main gates wielded shut.

Beyond the city lay miles of wild waste land made all the more desolate and sinister by the flooded coal pits and pockmarked wind blasted heath. All of that was part of the Native American Territory that like the ten square miles that Steam City sat cramped upon in a huge pile was no longer legally part of the United States of America but a separate foreign land as was Canada far to the north and Mexico far to the south. Thus was Steam City insulated and further isolated by the somewhat uneasy strained relationship of its 360 degree neighbor of Native Americans who did their best to be friendly to the city that sat in the heart of their lands and who utterly ignored them and all their attempts to communicate with them.

At first in the last gasp of the 1800’s the newspapers on the Far East Coast had a heyday with the massive construction of the city and milled about constantly underfoot; but with the completion of the main outer wall and the sealing of the great gates and the pulling up of the lone track of rail the reporters had shifted into the wind. Only occasional journalists would appear or small groups of people wanting to come in and live in the city, all were turned away at the walls. Then in 1914 the Great War broke out and everyone forgot about Steam City until a trickle and then a flood of people showed up in the Great Depression of the 1930’s but they were not let in and camped outside the walls until the Native Americans asked the army of the United States to please remove them. Then the city was again forgotten with the World War of the 1940’s until it shifted to Korea and a few meandering wanders stumbled across the place, hells angels and beatniks and pounded futile upon the walls of towering steel. Then Viet Nam and the hippies came and so on and so on. All were turned away or removed by government soldiers when the Native Americans had grown weary of their illegal presence.

But unofficially and off the record a few of each group had been let in; smuggled in through the smaller postern hidden doors a few such cleverly hid and camouflaged amongst the rusted hulks of abandoned construction machinery for Steam City owned the slim land upon which the decayed rail line immediately sat and thus was not technically land locked. And so the piles of junked machinery and moldering storage sheds sat exasperatedly out of their legal reach to remove from eyesore sight of the Native Americans who would look at the constant fog belching clanking city in the midst of their forest which sat upon its desolate patch of flooded ruined land and shake their collective heads and sigh.

Moonbeam had been one of these ‘refugees’ from the Old World he had bought his way in (so went the whisper) with a brightly painted van full of ‘solar collectors’ which the Council of Founders had taken deep into their steam towers and hid. Now Moonbeam spent most of his days living in a tent upon the roof of the house across from Robyn’s with his large telescope with which he said he was looking for ‘UFO’s’ and little green men from space. Robyn thought that sounded really exciting and always asked him every day she woke up and every night before she went to sleep if he had seen any yet.

Unbeknownst to innocent minded Robyn, Moonbeam was a dirty old man pervert who kept his telescope constantly trained upon her bedroom window where the girl seldom wore much in the way of clothing! In fact she slept naked and innocent as she was had a tendency to hump the shit out of her stuffed animals as she slept banging innocently all night long and thus unwittingly putting on quiet an X-rated show! Even now as Robyn smiled and waved at the dirty old pervert leaning out of her round window her huge firm naked tits jiggled back and forth as the old man who was furiously jerking off his cock hidden behind the large copper pipe upon which his telescope sat fell backwards and crashed the few feet back to the roof and his patchwork tent.

“Ugh, Moonbeam is always falling off that roof every time I see him! One of these days he may do himself serious injury if he is not careful!” Robyn shook her head and called out loudly, “are you alright Moonbeam?” Moonbeam shakily raised up a peace sign which turned into a thumb-up just visible above the large copper pipe and then his telescope which was whirling around on its pivot base slide off the pipe and disappeared with a meaty thud and the upraised thumb became a splayed hand which slowly fell out of sight.

Robyn shook her head and pulled herself back inside her small bedroom. The room was cramped with her soft frilly bed and mounds of stuffed somewhat squished animals and a small white wooden nightstand/dresser sat next to that covered in pink flowers and blue butterflies like the white plushy comforter on her single bed. But here the room ended its sweet young girls gaze for the rest of the small room was filled with schematics and gizmos and grease guns and piles of tools and clockwork gears and large magnifying glasses and the steel ribbed walls where covered with drawings of odd machines instead of ponies and peonies. Above the scared cracked wooden desk piled high with a delicate array of metal bits and wires held aloft on tweezers on stands slowly swam a mobile of mechanical gold fish.

Robyn walked rapidly across the creaking wood floor. Wood was rare in Steam City and it showed the house had much prestige at one time or other, and she pushed the center dial upon the steel ribbed wall and a section lurched back and slide aside upon wheezing pneumatic pumps and the girl paused as her wardrobe (what there was of it!) slowly waltzed past her until she stepped down on a brass peddle and the carousel of clothing stopped, the garments swinging on the racks heady with inertia. She selected a few pieces stepped off the pedal and waited for her shoes to sojourn around grabbed those and hit the dial again to let the wall slide back into place the sound of the parading clothing rumbling to a halt behind its thin panel door.

The vibrant teen girl shot back to her bed and tossed her clothes upon it and glanced up over her shoulder as she was bending over the garments and saw through her curtain dancing window Moonbeam looking at her through his telescope his right arm and should jostling fiercely as the left hand clamped the eye piece of the telescope to his sweating mouth gapping freshly bandaged face. Robyn smiled and wiggled her fingers in a wave at him and then went back to getting dressed.

“Poor Moonbeam his right arm is always twitching with palsy it’s no wonder he can’t work.” Robyn selected  her whisper thin stockings and slid them up her supple well-formed legs they fit so well that she didn’t really need a garter belt but she next slid one on up over her full perfectly rounded hips just the same, “no point in taking chances when modesty is at stake.” The smart as a whip girl mused as she snapped each clip on the top of her thigh high hose.

Next she stepped into and buttoned up a knee high burgundy pleated skirt. It was long enough she wouldn’t need any undergarments which she was grateful for as the perpetual fog of Steam City was often muggy and hot in the summer of which it was now or damp and cold as it was in the thick snowy winter which it would soon be. Her favorite outfit was a pair of skin tight yellow shorts and a white muscle shirt but she had worn that yesterday and it was still downstairs waiting to be ran through the auto-wash, one of her many chores that she had failed to complete yet again! So today it would be the burgundy skirt and that meant the white puffy sleeved blouse! She liked the white puffy sleeve blouse it had been her aunts and it was beautifully crafted with fine embroidery of lace and stitching but it did fit awfully tight in her chest region. She had grown considerably in that area over the last six months not that she had lacked a bosom before that! But now her budding grove had burst into an orchard of gosh darn melon trees! Not that melons grew on trees or in orchards everyone knew they grew in giant glass vats in the hydroponics gardens but still! She tentatively hefted a heavy breast in each hand watching her small long fingered graceful hands get swallowed up in the firm jutting warm water softness and she playfully squeezed them until her large puffy areolas and thumb thick nipples hardened. There was the sound of Moonbeam crashing off his precarious perch of his copper pipes through the window in front of her and she sighed and struggled into her blouse.

She set to work on her ankle boots next. They had a jillion black pearl buttons running up the side and she had to use a special hook to thread each button closed. A practiced eye and hand could do the deed in a few minutes but though she was very apt at skilled work she always found she had skipped a button or two somehow and had to start the whole thing over so it was several minutes before she had both her black boots tightly on.

Next came her great frock coat. It was one of several she owned as frock coats continued to be all the rage over almost a hundred years since the city sealed its self up. This one was cleverly done, designed by a friend of hers who owned a clothing boutique on the main square its self. They had just finished school together and unlike Robyn and her impractical inventions and ideas, Lydia had rose very rapidly in success and position amongst the merchant’s guild. The coat was all of heavy brocade a swirl of gold patterns upon crimson and burgundy and soft ivory. It was beautifully done all the cuts in graceful swoops. The sleeves were tight until they ended in large bellbottom openings and the neck collar was also this gorgeous swoop stiffened and raised up with round curving lapels and it fit very snug at the waist where it was cinched up cleverly with several small belts and it then fell out and away again ending in a round bellbottom sweep at her calves. It was magnificent and way too expensive for her to afford but Lydia had insisted upon giving it to her as a graduation present and in turn Robyn had fitted the thermal couplers and regulators for her shop so she did not have to wait months for the Council to get around to turning the power on.

Frock coat on she plucked at the frilly lace of the wrists of her blouse until they came out of the coats bell sleeves and then added a family heirloom necklace she often wore whenever she left the house and sometimes while in it and sometimes even when she bathed and slept… in fact it was rare for her to take it off usually only when she was working at her desk with minute detail soldering when it would often swing into the magnifying glasses view or threaten to get splattered with flux as she had been doing last night just before bed at which time she  would toss it over her bedpost which as she retrieved the necklace now from the polished wooden post she realized that often she woke with the bed post clamped between her thighs instead of the stuffed animals. She put a finger in her mouth as she often did when contemplating a confusing thought and then shrugged it off and grabbed her top hat off the sister post.

Some girls preferred frilly hats with lots of ribbons and bows and shaped this way or that but Robyn liked a good old fashioned steam pipe top hat. It kept your head dry in the sudden wet mists or actually rarer summer rains or increasingly frequent heavy winter snows of snow and ash and it could be replaced at a haberdashery for a day’s wages or from a rag pickers cart for a trade of goods. Top hats and bowlers were ubiquitous and as cheap as garters. And they made a swell place to hold her goggles!

These all-purpose goggles with their built in various lenses she now snapped into place upon the top hats stretchy decorative head band and all her garments in place paused at her crowded desk with finger tips lightly tapping rapidly at her lips as she thought about anything she might need on the days outing. She plucked a leather pouch with its belt off the back of the metal chair and lifting her skirt belted it underneath and wiggled it around so it looked like a bustle when she dropped her skirt back down again. Bustles were so-so in popularity these days it was the sort of thing every woman wore at some time or other but not all kept wearing it especially with the popularity of pedal machines for transportation what with so many of the steam launches and steam cars breaking down and being locked out for weeks on end waiting for repairs. The wealthier women of high society wouldn’t be caught dead without a bustle of course, but they also would wear bloomers or at least panties when leaving their rooms!

Thus attired for the day Robyn pushed another decorative brass wall dial and a second secret hidden door hissed out and slide open leading her in leaps and bounds down a narrow iron stair case. Downstairs she passed directly into the kitchen of the small thin narrow house where her step-father reading his tin press recycled newspaper set down his cup of ‘regenerator’ and leapt up to greet his step-daughter with several long groping hugs as he hands smashed on her huge firm breasts and fumbled somewhat confusedly on the skirt hidden leather pouch until they had snuggled under it to clamp and squeeze her naked pert round ass cheeks. Robyn smiled and gave her step-father a dutiful peck on the cheek which he returned with a deep tongue kiss until the breathless girl pushed and squirmed her way out of his lecherous grasp and wished him a good day and grabbing a strip of burnt toast with jam (the kitchen mechanical needs tweaked again!) skipped merrily out of the small kitchen and down the narrow hallway blowing a kiss at her mother who sourly held the undone wash up in a galvanized basket as the girl turned right and jetted out the front door.

Robyn’s step-father was a pig of man, lazy and dull witted, with an unhealthy lust for the teenage girl which had found its self expressed much to her beguiled innocence and her mother’s stern watchful eye in sneaking a grope or kiss or fondle at any secret moment alone with her. He had discovered upon first marrying her mother that the busty vivacious teen girl habitually sucked her thumb whenever she slept and he had made a habit of sneaking into her room at night and substituting his small penis for her thumb. His record was four thick blasts down her gulping suckling throat and he was desperate for going for a personal best of five but his wife had caught on or at least become suspicious of his midnight escapades and now she locked the bedroom door they both slept in downstairs (in fear of burglars) and kept the key around her sleeping neck. Robyn remained her perpetually light hearted naive self throughout all of it and saw nothing wrong with her step-fathers extreme displays of emotion for her and was blind to her mother’s scowls whenever she came into the room and found the man with his hands down her daughters disheveled shirt. Despite this she and her mother remained close and the best of friends as after all it was not the girls fault!

Robyn let the steam powered copper sheathed front door hush closed behind her and peered into the patches of glowing fog of the new day. The front door to their narrow house sandwiched between endless rows of buildings of all shapes and sizes was several stories from the street level far below her and she stepped up onto the lower bar of the iron landings wrought iron railing and placing her hands upon the upper bar leaned far out over the busy city and giggled, “WHEEEEEE!” there was a lot to do today. Even though Robyn did not have a full time job as many who joined the merchant’s guild or went to work for the Council did, she did have several part-time unofficial jobs tinkering with this or that for several of the merchants and housewives who paid her in trade and sometimes ration coupons which were about as close to money as Steam City got. The merchants always wanted things fixed that the City Council were supposed to keep repaired but never seemed to get around to it or they just didn’t want to have to deal with the reams of request forms and long lines at the courthouse so those jobs were strictly ‘blackmarket’ and a bit on the dodgy side though the Council seemed to keep a blind eye to such things firmly set in place. The housewives wanted their mechanicals repaired, the dishwashers, the kitchen maids, the cooks, the clothing washer, etc. these jobs were on the up and up and the city had dozens of ‘fix-it men’ shops scattered all about the twisting maze and warrens of its rusting streets, but with so much of the Steam City in a rusty falling down shambles and the Councils Manufactures Yard being slow to come up with the raw materials for the various Council Workshops as well as the independent guild workshops, well there was far too much work for the ‘Fix-it men’ to hope to accomplish on any given day. So she ran into very little opposition to any of her random ‘jobs’.

It also did not hurt that Robyn Cox’s mother’s maiden name had been Eliza Steam. She was a direct descendent of Javier Steam and thus so was Robyn. The last pair of the line as it were, for shortly after Javier had become a recluse in his central isolated needle-like steam tower there had been a horrible accident in which the entire descendants of the Steam family except for Robyn’s grandmother who had been home sick as a child had died suddenly in a blast of scolding steam when the reception hall they had been gathered in had ruptured its walls in a freak explosion. All there had perished.

That included not only the entire Steam family, except for the aforementioned grandmother and the recluse Javier, but also most of the family of Javier’s second partner and chief engineer Abigail Woodhouse, and a few members of Javier’s other partner in the triumphant Vandal Sedge. The triumphant which had over seen the construction and the running of the city at its outset became The Council after that disaster... which may have been inevitable, as Javier and his partners argued incessantly about the city and how it should be ran in increasingly public rows. The Council that replaced the triumphant became steadily packed with the descendants of Vandal Sedge who continued to name their first male offspring, Vandal so now it was a Vandal Sedge the fourth who ruled the Council and the family its self came to be known as the House of Sedge. The next power block was the House of Woodhouse composed of the direct descendants of Abigail Woodhouse, with one of the merchant guild families, the House of Masters making up the last of the great houses packing the Council that ran Steam City.

Corruption and graft and political kowtowing were common place and the general populace who had known no other form of government for generations gritted their teeth in face of the mismanagement and constant political maneuverings that often lead to open violence in the streets between Houses. One could see the angst and anger and grumbling frustration in the tin type newsletters put out both by official decree and by independent press and in the puppet shows that lined most streets and remained one of the favorite forms of popular entertainment for citizens as the puppets poked fun of the Council and its thugs in ways the theater houses and resident playwrights didn’t dare.

It was NINETEEN SEVENTY FIVE out there in old world time and the outside world seemed to be straggling through a great social upheaval of civil rights and the horrors of the police action in Viet Nam which seemed too much like a war to call it a police action until you saw what the police were doing across campuses and city streets all over the United States and then you muttered, ‘oh… never mind’ and went back to eating your Weetabix’s. Inside the mostly forgotten Steam City such going-ons’ in the outer world were pieced together from the few outsiders let in to stay, like Moonbeam, or the rare occasional meeting with Native American ambassadors who would arrive and drink weak tea in a small steel cage that was lowered over the wall and then dangle there forty feet in the air as they shouted through the wind and steam clouds at the members of the Council who would nod their top hats and bowlers at them behind their round sunglasses and thin lipped unsmiling pasty faces as their blood red tailed coats and black vests glinted in the gasping sun light.

As such any real understanding of the outer world was understandably lost to the average Steam City citizen but there never seemed to be any real desire for anyone to leave the city. You heard about ‘re-forms’ and getting things ‘fixed’ but no one seemed to want to leave the giant metal confines of the toppling city its self and return back to the outside world. Maybe that was because the few people that were allowed in to live there had nothing good to say about the place they were trying to get away from?

Steam City had free education for children as well as adults, free medical care, free two meals a day with other shops providing a rather surprising abundance of additional food for sale, free shelter and lodgings, and a set staple of free bolts of cloth for the making of clothing and squares of leather and such each year for each citizen. There were no taxes and no money. A system of work chits for hours worked were exchanged at guild shops or at private establishments and a healthy system of barter was prevalent. The city its self was self-sufficient and its endless thermal steam geysers generated both direct power to run mills and gears and to turn the city’s few dynamo electric generators. But most of the lighting was from gas which was siphoned from the underground where it resided in great poisonous quantities. The hydroponics labs provided ample food and the extensive underground mines were rich in various ores.

But for all of this Steam City was a rusty smelly dirty greasy falling apart wreck of towers of twisting mazes of haphazard streets and narrow buildings crammed onto the teetering top of one another. The free lifetime education was not compulsory and the subjects taught were almost entirely of math and mechanics with little to no history or literature and a science class that stopped at 1880 for its curriculum. The free two meals a day were mostly of porridge, bread, some jellies and jams, a few chopped up mixed fruits or vegetables, and perhaps a wedge of cheese or cheese like spread. Milk or fruit juice was rare and all meals came with a vitamin pill. Small cave farmed hatchery blind fish made up most of the meat eaten and these were ground into a paste to be applied to the small loafs of bread. The independent shops sold a great deal more variety but the cost was rather high. The free medical attention again was open and readily available but few advances had been made since the shutting and wielding of the main gates so one had to face the dubious fallacies of the late 1800’s for one’s medical treatment and advice and apothecaries were common sites on the street corners promising cures against aliments with potions and charms. Free shelter and lodging meant being shuffled around and often ending up like Moonbeam living in a patchwork quilt tent on top of a house exposed to the elements though as long as his neighbor was Robyn Cox, the closet exhibitionist and though consciously a sweet innocent girl equally subconsciously an insatiable nymphomaniac who nightly grinded in her bed, it was doubtful he would ever complain to anyone who could actually do something about his plight. The free cloth and leather meant every house hold had to maintain a skilled seamstress and a working steam powered sewing machine. The sheaves of leather were so often taken to the cobbler to make shoes and belts and straps that upon free quota day people just went to the cobblers shop and tack store and put in their order paying a fee for the labor rather than going to the Yard and picking up the raw materials and taking them back to their own homes. No taxes meant public service drafts were people were yanked from their homes and places of business for weeks at a time with no notice to be conscripted into public service labors for rather poor paying chits. No money meant chit sheets of a constantly varying value from day to day and a system of barter that was notoriously unfair to many when it came time to trade. And the much lauded system of self-efficient steam powered machines that ran the city was in constant dire straits and often dangerously breaking down and harming the populace. In fact though steam was king of the power source of the city and could be found everywhere hissing and sputtering in millions of miles of pipes, there was not a city block that did not spout dozens of wind mills of all shapes and sizes and the steam turbines powered large building sized batteries that hummed and sparked alongside the steam pipes in large conduits of encased wires.

And the police?! Well there was an investigatory crime division attached to the courthouse in the main square and it investigated and made arrests in crimes committed in the city which were then tried in a public court. But these were only petty crimes and misdemeanors. Murders and serious crimes were investigated by a separate police unit which answered only to the Council and those arrested were tried in privet by the Council who also oversaw and tried and sentenced any complaints or allegations of corruption or abuse of government.

But each of the great Houses that is, each of the largest families, had their own personal retainers often simply referred to as Thugs. Violence therefore was commonplace and it was a rare day not to come across a badly beaten unconscious body or a corpse.

Despite this the average Steam City resident believed they lived in the most advance most perfect most blessed city on Earth. And every time someone came and pounded on the great gates wanting in they would all smile smugly and nudge one another with their elbows and cross their arms across their puffed up chests and snicker with pride.

In the year 95 S.C. or in the old world time of 1975, the city gearing up for its first centennial and planning quiet a lavish bash to celebrate this august occasion found its self dealing with a series of shocking murders. These were not the common run of the street murders one sees in a metropolises of tens of thousands of cramped together people living in a ten mile circle of walled in steel born of a drunken brawl or petty squabble in trade or domestic violence, nor was it the occasional clash of the Thugs of this great House or that, nor was it the lone drifting cadaver found face down in the sewer of this or that political insider. No, these were some of the top inventors in the city. Both self-taught shop keepers and Council bought cream of the graduating crop. All found one by one dead in their homes and shops. Throats cut or heads bashed in or strangled but other than the deaths nothing stolen nothing taken and in many cases nothing else touched. “Seven dead so far and more to come!” The independent tin types and puppet shows both predicted.

It was definitely not the time to be a rather clever inventor and very handy with one’s mind and fingers as was the eighteen year old Robyn Cox. Who now rode haphazardly down the street on the lurching blur of a one person steam spider. She could never afford such a ride but it was simply good practice to test out an object she had just repaired though she had to admit she seldom spent several hours putting loafs of bread into a newly fixed kitchen mechanical as she had spent such time racing around the lower streets upon the souped-up racing steam spider. She finally purred the single-seater steam spider into the junk strewn courtyard of the Mc Higgins’s repair shop where the head mechanic Arthur Mc Higgins gave her a lopsided pursed look as he whipped his hands upon a rag and then took out his pocket watch looked at it and then gave her an arched stare.

Robyn sheepishly pulled her goggles off her face and placed them up on her hat band and sheepishly got off the steam spewing spider and swallowed as she spoke, “I got that transmissional gear arrangement fixed.” The man towered over her as he gazed down at her in a deadpan stare. “An-an that problem with the steam baffle just needed a different kind of converter and I replaced the factory compressor with three smaller ones set in increments along the main line. Seems to really reduce the lag… It ah runs pretty well now.”

“Aye and no one else could have done it better lassie. Well done.” The great bear of a man smiled and removed a wad of chits from his overall front pocket and handed it to her, “but in the future perhaps you should avoid racing back and forth in front of the clients business at insane speeds with his prized racing steam spider in, and I quote; near suicidal fatal wrecks, end quote? He’s been on the voice tube and sending me pneumatic cylinder messages all morning.”

“Ah, sure thing boss,” the now broadly smiling girl shoved the wad of wage chits down the ample cleavage of her over spilling blouse and giggled as the man cuffed lightly at her hat boxing it down over her eyes and chuckling along with her.

It was dark and the gas streetlamps hissed and bleed their flickering moth wing light about the stutter of stairs that made up most of Steam City’s side avenues. Robyn continued her laborious pace of dragging the wooden box full of parts a few yards and then pausing to catch her breath. She had finished a late repair on an air-conditioning unit for a house in the forty degree radial district and had accepted some great parts that had sat in a storage room left over from the first decade of Steam City’s birth. She had high hopes and plans for the parts but the whole getting the heavy wooden crate full of them home had not been well thought out.

 In fact as she looked down at the wire and metal tag that detailed the transaction and right for barter for the source of the parts (it was a very serious crime to salvage parts from the city its self!) she realized she was utterly beat and she would never be able to get the crate home which was another fifteen degree radius and up several winding steps and elevated streets from her current location. Her step-father would be more than happy to help her. He seemed very delighted to join her in giving her a hand or two on her projects. In fact he seemed to really enjoy just showing his intense happiness at seeing her with countless almost ceaseless tangles of hands and crushing hugs and back rubs and front rubs and well maybe waking her dad up to help her in this wasn’t such a good idea. Besides she couldn’t just leave it here in the street and go off and find a voice tube.

She had hoped to rent a steam-phant the elephant looking mechanicals were very useful for lugging stuff around but when she had dragged the storage crate to where the neighborhood steam-phant should be the housing unit stood empty. It was either being used or more likely waiting in some shop to be repaired.

Then she had thought of Mc Higgins repair yard. It was relatively close by and he would surely allow her to store her box there until she made arrangements to pick it up in the morning. She congratulated herself on being so clever and set about lugging the heavily laden crate to Mc Higgins courtyard and shop.

The courtyard and its shop, behind which Arthur lived along with his three apprentices and half a dozen mechanicals, was dark and silent as she approached its arched iron gate. That seemed a bit odd as no repair yard was ever completely silent and that combined with the equally silent fog-steam shrouded street she lurched with her dragging crate would have seemed ominous and foreboding but her imaginative mind was already preoccupied designing a walk-about to get her crate home this night without needing to come back for it tomorrow. If Arthur was willing to loan her the parts and let her use a few tools which she was rather certain he would. She envisioned a sort of metal set of legs with a compressed steam fuel tank and small gear box cantilevering spring drive clockwork engine sort of bolted to the bottom and sides…. Might need to re-fuel the tank a number of times along the way home as it wouldn’t have a heater/condenser unit as a true mechanical would but-

Robyn stopped in her thoughts suddenly as she paused for a breather before the large brass gates cleverly designed to look like a myriad of various sized gears both flat and cylinder screw and round spherical toothed with the two doors themselves being two twenty foot giant gears that would spin themselves effortlessly back and up the heavy bars of the arch. Normally the doors were all a glimmer at night but now they were dark and the young girl realized that all the gas lamps on the street fronting the shop were out?

That was odd as no repair shop would let something be visibly ‘broken’ on its block it was bad for business and certainly not something as noticeable as the street lamps. Very strange. Maybe it had something to do with the gas supply? It seemed the city was falling apart even more than normal of late. She noted that at the far end of the street between twisting tendrils of fog that the steam lift designed to haul heavy equipment from one street level to the next was stuck half way between this street and the one above it. She could just make it out in its nestled web of catwalks and the elevated connecting over hanging personal wooden coach monorails from the pale glow of the single chemical bubbling vertical light bar standing unseen in the courtyard behind the two large cogs sealing the main gates.

There was one such transport now, a wooden enclosed two-seater style of the coaches of the personal monorails, it hung unmoving in direction just dangling from the suspended wires. That was odd usually the mechanical that looked like a cocoon with a green head light that connected the long ‘L-shaped’ spring bar of the coach to the web of wires, returned empty coaches to the nearest platform for the next person to use. Recently the once free personal coaches had started to require the new metal Council chits to take you to where ever you wanted to go and more and more people walked or used pedal cars. Strange this one had its light off and was just hanging there above the street, “doesn’t anything work anymore?” The girl muttered and went up to the small door set near by the two large cog main gate and blindly felt in the shadow of the wall for the voice tube to rouse the gate mechanical.

The girl stopped her searching abruptly and shot a glance over her shoulder and back up at the slightly swaying personal wooden coach that hung above the street. “That coach seems rather finely made. Surely not a public works transport but privately owned.” Indeed she thought she could make out a crest of one of the Great Houses upon its polished wooden door but it was too dark and the fog would not part for long enough for her to be sure. Still odd, for a personal coach to breakdown right in front of a repair shop, she half expected to find Legaries Leviathan sitting inside the courtyard its self at this rate.

Legarie had been a brilliant inventor who had amongst improving immensely the underground mining operations had conceived of an underground submersible digging machine which he believed would allow him to follow what he insisted was an underground network of rivers and lakes that would rival the surface worlds. He was convinced that there was one such network that opened out into the Great Lakes of North America before then winding on to the frozen poles! He convinced all the construction yards to enter into a completion to help him build the components of his fantastical machine so he could undertake his great adventure. The newly forming Council thought it a waste of time and valuable resources but Legarie’s Leviathan fever had over taken the entire city and the newly empowered wisely acquiescence and stepped aside.

There was talk of the whole thing being a sham, of the Council actually profiting from the work and chits, but in the end the parts were assembled and Legarie and a handful of other renowned inventors with a sharply attired crew entered the machine and with much fanfare vanished never to be heard from again. That was decades ago and the subject had become a puppet show favorite. There were endless puppet shows of Legarie and his Leviathan popping up in Antarctica and even on the moon and recently it had become a favorite running gag in the theaters to have Legarie and his crew just show up randomly in the weekend matinees as a small nonsense comical bit wandering on stage from the wings and then wandering off again to the howls of laughter from the audience.

The gate mechanical was stubbornly refusing to respond to the voice tube? The tube seemed to be working fine, the mouth piece was dutifully glowing green when lifted from its latch and flashed when spoken into and it was a direct line to the gate mechanical built into the housing of the wall no humane operator to muck things up. Robyn frowned this was a very odd night indeed. The very thick churning air of steam fog seemed oddly chill and silent. She looked back up at the polished two-seater personal wooden coach hanging listlessly above the center of the street. The damp of the fog beaded condensation on its black varnished sides its windows had the curtains drawn and it had a mysterious cadaverous air about it. Like an old world coffin it looked as it hung there from its support bar the usually energetic mechanical that attached the transport to the network of wires and would race along them leaping at times from one wire to the next at junction boxes as the coaches gyros built into the ‘L-shaped’ connecting rod would groan as they tried to maintain an equilibrium sat dead and inert even its green head light muted and cold.

Robyn looked with narrowed eyes about the dark street with its blind gas lights. There was a puppet stand along the far walk just visible through the fog and night in the overspill of the roofless repair yard’s large vertical chemical light bar which she could just hear burbling behind the thick high wall. The puppet stand was closed up. It’s yawning collapsed and its brightly stripped tarps yanked tight and bolted. Puppet shows fell outside of the Council’s power. They were considered not subject to the Ministry of Entertainment jurisdiction as the theaters did as they did not have ‘permanent’ established lodgings and they were instead licensed by the guilds that did little to censor them and thus risk any loss of revenue. There were numerous Ministries all ran by the Council and there were several Institutes which were left over bits of the old triumphant days.  And they often clashed in endless petty squabbles of jurisdiction and culpability. The people blamed both for the increasingly rundown broken affairs of their city but mainly they blamed the great houses who were mired in both.

The center of the great circle of Steam City had once housed only the great spire of the now dark and dead Steam Tower and the court house and Main Square. But with the rise of the great houses and power of the guilds and the Council taking over the running of the city the once radiating spokes that joined seamlessly into the perfect center of the circle now ended abruptly at a great open octagon shaped area with the steam tower, the court house, the main square, off to one side and the new center of the wheel rimmed now with many great buildings to house the great houses and the guild chambers and the Council quarters and endless other bureaucracies.

The Steam Tower had once been a key focal point of the city and instrumental in running the various social and political and mechanical aspects thereof; until Javier Steam apparently disgusted and depressed by the ruin of nature all around his utopian idea of harmony and no doubt frustrated by the constant squabbles with his partners in how to run the city, walled himself up in increasing isolation in the tower until he simply vanished therein. Now everyone viewed the tower more as a tomb of the city’s key founder and its darkened spire as an almost holy shrine. The council however was steadily pushing forth the idea that the tower was more a monument to the city as a whole and privately made efforts to lessen the reverence of the name of Javier Steam and had succeeded to the point that Robyn and her mother Eliza, the only living descendants of the great man, lived almost unknown and unrecognized in the city of his name.

There were no churches in Steam City. Javier had come out of the American Civil War in which two sides had espoused the name of God with endless passions in polar opposites of every view and vehemently in His name slaughtered armed and unarmed in the hundreds of thousands laying waste and ruin to almost an entire continent. In the same way such feverent religious belief propagating religious wars of reformation had forever lessened the undemocratic power of the church and freed man from the dogma of such earthly bowing and knee scraping tyranny before the hypocrisies of so called holy men in Europe so did it in America. Countless Americans turned their back on the church and stepped closer to being better people here on Earth by doing good born outside of the fear of ethereal punishment or the stench of afterlife Junkie reward and inched thus closer to God in the bitter horrors of the aftermath of that war but no city in North America went so far as to not have a single church in it! Javier expected people to worship in privet in their own hearts, but one of the biggest complaints of both the people at large and the partners seeking greater power through the people once the great band of metal outer walls were sealed was the desire for a church, a public building of worship. Shortly after his retreat into the tower and his increasing periods of unbroachable silence from its then glittering lighted spire, the Council that replaced him made it one of their first primary concerns to create The Great Cathedral. To construct this enormous building of righteous public demand, they declared they would have to dissect apart most of the heart of the center of steam city for both ready material and space. The result of this was the great octagon and the building of the large great houses along its side and the guilds new buildings and the enormous elongated church set dead in its center somehow became the housing of not only God but the Council and its chambers as well. Javier certainly long dead in his sealed up dark tower must have wept tears of blood to see it.

Robyn looked at the maze of dark catwalks and buildings all around her and looked at the grill work lining the boiler plate street through which she could see a bit of the streets below glimmering wetly through the steam fog. Mc Higgins repair yard was old. It had been one of the first privet citizen owned repair yards built after the walls had closed that was not part of the cities official offices and yards. As such it sat upon what had once been the surface of the Earth. When Steam City had first been built it had been constructed on pancaked ground as most cities are, the earth trampled and smushed, and then foundations lain. But as time went on it was readily apparent that Javier intended the ultimately finished Steam City not to look like a half sphere rising up out of the earth but an entire sphere, fully round and sunken into the earth. So that excavations went on digging not only down for precious metal ores but to create a void to house this elaborate scheme. The surface of the Earth was soon dug away and the buildings that sat upon it restructured underneath to fit them into the grand design. More for esthetic reasons than anything else the main line of where the surface had been and were once concrete roads had lain was replaced with boiler plate roads. This was unique as most roadways and walk ways throughout the city were of meshed grills of metal so the boiler plate roadways that made up what everyone called the ‘Equator’ was very distinguishing. So much so that most of those roadways bore a BP after their name on map kiosks and on street signs. Thus Royal Road when it dipped down and intersected for several blocks on the Equator became Royal Road BP. So while Robyn stood on a street of opaque steel and iron of bolted boiler plate the gutters were of the mesh design of iron as were all the walkways and road ways above her and though congested and swirled in steam fog there was at the same time a constant sense of exposed openness to her world.

It was thus rather eerie and disturbing that she could not see a single living soul out and about or any movement other than the shambling fog and all the lights but pinpoints from other streets distant gaslights or the background wash of the locked courtyards burbling liquid chemical tube light hidden behind the roofless wall before her casting all above it in its odd green ebbing glow.

Robyn gave off looking about her with her frowning unease and instead returned to shake the useless voice tube in her hand before replacing it in its cradle. There was nothing for it, she would have to scale the wall and manually open the sealed gate. She gave the wall about her a good looking over, it wouldn’t be much of a chore, she thought to herself and stepping a little further down away from the voice booth niche she leapt up and caught some of the ubiquitous steam pipes and their fittings and scaled the wall in a few grunts and tugs dropping to the other side in the much brighter yard.

The green glow of the large upright vertical light bar set almost in the center of the cobblestone yard (Arthur’s father had insisted upon keeping the cobblestone court yard when it had come time for the reconstruction of his area and so the quaint mossy stones set upon concealed iron plates and ribs of hidden steel as did most of the Equators old buildings.) was unexpected bright after the unusual darkness of the street beyond the metal walls and Robyn found herself squinting at first and raising an arm as her eyes adjusted to the green glow. Perhaps this is why she missed the first body despite its large pool of blood and went up to the gate with its built in mechanical and reached under her skirt to yank her tool bag around to nestle on her flat stomach. She tucked her dress front up and behind her tool bag so she could have constant and easy access to its contents though this meant of course that her entire naked pussy was on display but since everyone seemed to be oddly fast asleep and since this operation of fixing a stubborn door bot promised to only take a moment she felt no hesitation in doing so.

With the tool bags top unstrapped and flipped aside she dug into her bag and produced a multi-tool for each hand and set to work on the large cylinder housing the guts of the gate mechanical. Mechanicals ran their tasks from a cylinder inside them. The cylinder spun in place, as one to hundreds depending on the complexity of the task and mechanical, little ‘L-shaped’ transverse fine tooth rods read the cut and raised surface textures of the cylinder. All it took to muck up a mechanical was a bent transverse rod or a bit of gunk on the cylinder to cause it to do the unexpected or nothing at all. She had the cover housing off in seconds and found herself poking around in what appeared to be a fully functioning mechanical unit?

“Everything seems to be working here. Why aren’t you then? Why aren’t you answering your voice tube, eh? And why won’t you let me unlock the door here? Odd.” She lowered her goggles off her hat band and flipped the lenses until she had her night-vision and magnifying lenses set in place. This mechanical was stationary and so was hooked directly into the steam power pipes that ran its small turbine for power. It looked very similar to the mechanical on the coach hanging helplessly above the street just outside of the gate now hidden by the angle of the towering wall but that mechanical would have a steam tank that would be automatically filled every time it returned to a housing unit for its next passenger. The super compressed steam would require a condenser unit and converters to maintain its power source between lengthy refilling’s and these were always subject to wear and tare but overall the system was immensely efficient and simple to repair if a little bit dangerous to use.

Robyn gave up and flipped her goggles back up onto her hatband. She put her hands on her hips and took a step back from the mechanical and then kicked the still locked and sealed door. “I just don’t get it? Everything seems spiffy and yet nothing works?” The sudden remembrance of the dangling silent morose coach creaking in the fog above the street almost on what would now be directly across from her had her inexplicably anxious and she took several more steps backward to try and get the vehicle in sight above the angle of the high wall. “I have never known a coach to just be left stranded like that for so long? Usually another mechanical backup comes zipping along the wires dropping down and patching into the coach to whisk it away to the nearest housing unit/platform. Yet that one has been there for… gosh must be thirty minutes now?” she had stepped back far enough but the fog was thick beyond the gate and walls top or maybe the green of the jellied chemical light bar was just making everything beyond the bright green sheened wall ‘seem’ covered in thick fog, “might just be refraction? AH!”

The girl had taken another shuffling step backward and fallen backwards over the dead body luckily not landing in its still broadening wet pool of blood. “Wha-?!” Her moment of anger vanished into a frozen state of shock as she realized what she had just tripped over, “it’s one of the apprentices.” Shock gave way to a moment of puzzlement and then a sudden wave of fear as she scooted away from the body screaming on hands and feet and butt like a crab until she raced backwards into the large metal tripod holding up the chemical light bar and wonked her head hard against one of its unyielding black legs.

 “Ohhh-OUCH! Blessed Mercy that hurt!” She winced and rubbed the back of her head and then remembered she was frightened but somehow remembering it after so suddenly forgetting it had dulled the sensation so she was closer to being a mix of anxious and curious than scared. She used the gurgling glass tube light bars metal legs to pull herself up to her feet and after a few quick looks around her for pressing danger slowly made her way back to the cadaver.

She stood near the body and picked up her dropped tools and placed them back into her tool pouch and sealed it up and then remembered her head hurt but having forgotten that as she had her fear she found it now just a dull throbbing ache and gave it only a few rubs with first one hand and then both and then just one hand as she stared at the prone figure.

It was one of the apprentices alright. She could tell by his dress and apron. She had waved at him just this morning, had seen him laugh at another apprentice who had smacked his hand with a hammer at one of the outside benches. He wasn’t laughing now and surely wouldn’t be any time soon for his entire throat was mangled and torn and his open shirt chest, bib-overalls, and lower face, where just covered in thick dark slick fresh blood. She swallowed hard and then made a tentative move towards one of his wrists to see if he was still alive but then realized his face was facing up but his body was facing down and rose quickly with a gasp as both her hands flew to her open mouth. His shirt had not been left unbuttoned and opened as she had first surmised in the green light of the courtyard but the back of the shirt had been rented in some horrific struggle and his neck had been wrenched all the way around so he was looking backwards over his shoulders. “So much blood… I wonder if his neck was broken that way or if he was sliced across the throat so deeply it left it nearly severed and it twisted like that when he fell?” She felt nauseous and turned away from the body clutching her stomach.

“I had better tell Mc Higgins. I doubt this could have been some kind of accident. The Council will have to be called for. The boy’s family notified and-” she stopped suddenly with the realization that the entire shop and its upstairs lodgings were dark. Not a gas light or candle or lamp or gel light burned in any of the windows. Suddenly she had an ominous thought, ‘what if the apprentice was not the only one who had been murdered? Could be thieves? Meant to rob the place and done away with the household upon discovery. That seemed kind of odd though. How could a bunch of thieves kill an entire house of people and not rouse the whole neighborhood?’  she paused again mid-step toward the dark and suddenly foreboding shop and house and looked back at the shadowy dead body with a finger in her wet open mouth. “Maybe it was a lone thief who had surprised the apprentice as he worked at one of the outside benches?” She looked around her again at the dark lightless neighborhood. Living next to a repair yard while glorious to her would undoubtedly be anything but to anyone else. The clanking and pounding and screeching and the smells all night and day long without cease. “Still there must be at least a dozen people living on this block. Surely they would have heard the boy scream in alarm?” She looked again at the shredded neck and how it lay at such an odd angle to the body and shuddered, “or maybe not.”

All around her the steam vents puffed and whined and mechanical bits of this and that lay dark and unmoving or occasional clanked in semi-repose. Steam City powered its self mainly by steam. Great constant geysers of steam rose up from the depths of the earth and capped and captured and were accented with other means of production with water being piped down deep into hidden super-heated thermal layers and jetted back up the secondary pipes as super pressurized steam. Both sources of steam was then pumped throughout the city where hundreds of thousands of access conduits and couplers and source box points allowed anyone anytime to connect up to it and use it free of charge.

This use was mainly in two forms; a connected ‘dead-box’ that is a machine or mechanical who had no internal power source but relied on a constant supply of steam to turn its gears and workings in order for it to function. The gate mechanical and gate its self were such constructions, constantly connected to a steam source to run. Second you had ‘live-box’ machines or mechanicals. These had internal turbines which generated electric power but used steam connections to turn these turbines and either ran off a constant connection as such, the arc wielder in the corner of the repair yard was such as this, or else would be connected to a steam pipe so the turbine would run generating g up its electrical charge to charge up a battery at which point it would be disconnected from the steam pipe and used the benches of the repair yard were littered with various household mechanicals of such a design.

There was a third form of steam power which used refilling tanks which were filled from the steam pipes and then the super-pressurized steam tanks would be disconnected and power the device until the tanks needed refilling. This was used by more complex and usually larger mechanicals and machines as it required a much more complex arrangement of converters and condensers and baffles and such to allow the machine to function for several hours between refilling. This also tended to be a much more dangerous form of steam energy and when one talked about injuries in the tintypes and street gossips it was usually from a sudden rupture or failure of such a source of power as this. The lone black old-world coffin-shaped personal coach hanging above the boiler plate street outside the front gate was such a design.

And there was a fourth form of steam power. It was created using synthetic refined liquids which upon being heated into gas form produced an extremely powerful steam that was contained in special super compressed units. These were very difficult to produce and not used by the general public in day to day use. One tended to hear about them and drool but not to actually see such crotch-wetting constructions in one’s own hot little greedy hands.

Besides steam there were wind mills everywhere providing various gear meshing powers to pumps and underground gas of various kinds for lights and for the torch wielder/cutter also over in the corner of the yard. And there were the ‘Cuckoos’ a group of inventors who specialized in clockwork devices and mainly relied on wind-up springs to power their elaborate refined creations. Every house seemed to have a mix of all of these.

And perhaps lastly there were the chemical based power sources. Tending almost entirely to constructional or institutional use these were various chemical combinations whose interactions caused desirable cause and effect. The most common of these were the lights such as the one in the courtyard oddly glowing green at Robyn’s elbow. Such lights as these were called, ‘miner’s lamps’ by most people as they tended to be used in the mines where gases and coal dust made almost any other kind of illumination inherently dangerous.

If you were permitted to asks anyone who lived in Steam City what was the most common element of its construction they would all tell you, “steam.” Which might seem odd to an outsider who would look around them and see nothing but iron and steel and brass and copper and bronze and so many composite metals as to make one’s eyes swim and ears ring; but if you were to ask a Steam City engineer what the next principle component of Steam City was after steam his/her answer would surprise most Steam City citizens when it came out, “glass.”

For all its incalculable tons of metal both shipped in by endless railroad cars from foundries and steel mills all over North America to its own internal constant construction from the day it sealed up its main gates, Steam City was destined to be the world’s largest lighting rod. Even on a clear day, well that is clear in the sky far above the perpetual steam bank fog of Steam City, static lightning rained down on the metal jumbled mass with spine tingling crashes and on a stormy day?! Well the Native American’s cowered in their houses and gambling casinos for a very good reason, as the forest of lighting rained down with such furry and the swamps of oily tarn burned with ghostly lights even through the walls of rain. So for an engineer it was no surprise that before the mix of various metals making up the mass of the city, glass (and various ceramics) was the single most common component insulating at almost every crack and crevice and joint of that selfsame city.

Robyn moved up the few porch steps into the inky black shadows of the overhang and pressed open the unlocked door of copper sheeted bronze that hissed back at her touch on its compressed air hinges. It swung open on pitch darkness and swallowing hard Robyn yanked down her goggles and flipped the lenses to night-vision as fast as her shaky fingers could manage. The chemicals trapped between the lenses bubbled slightly and she rapidly tapped the lenses to get the tiny air bubbles out of her immediate vision.

The room was revealed to her in a green glow not unlike the chemical light tube bar in the courtyard behind her but the illumination was only at a fraction of its power so much was lost in odd twisting shadows of damp clay gray, so that she moved cautiously with shuffling steps and hands reached out before her and then startled and nearly screamed when the door whisked shut behind her cutting off the green courtyards slant of light and casting even more of the room into indecipherable blocks and blobs of irradiated shadow that seemed to have its own odd glow as if the darkness had its own aura.

“Hel-low? Is anybody there?” Robyn winced and cursed herself under her breath she had already decided out on the porch she wouldn’t call out and now in a moment of frightened panic with the door automatically closing behind her she just had! ‘Stupid girl!’ she chastised herself and then suddenly called out again, “I-I-It’s me… Robyn Cox’s from the fifteen radial thirty-fourth grid Hangover Street.” She swallowed hard and then cursed herself again, ‘why had she just called out a second time?! And given her name! And her address! UGH! Stupid twat! Why not just shout out, oh hey murders here I am come wrangle my neck into a piece of ground fish paste!’

The nervous and frightened young girl slid backwards toward the closed door and worked at the gas light fixture there. Gas began to stream out but the auto-igniter failed to function. ‘Someone turned off all these gas wall lamps or else this place would be full of gas fumes, but why is the igniter not working?’ she carefully turned the butterfly key and closed off the seeping gas. There came a low groan from somewhere in the dark recesses of the downstairs shop. She startled at the sound and then crept forward with her tongue firmly clamped between her perfect small white teeth.

The down stairs shop was a low ceiling affair with a large heavy legged table set immediately in front of the door and a long bar top set just behind that with a wall behind that of rows of niches and volumes of books and ledgers. The back side of the bar was cut off from the rest of the room by a small flat piece of wood that matched the bar top which was hinged on one side and could be raised to allow someone to pass behind the bar or lowered to prevent this from occurring with any ease. It was currently  up and through her bubbling green low-light lenses she could make out that many of the volumes seemed to yanked out of their niches and scattered upon the bar top but Mc Higgins wasn’t the most tidy of bookkeepers and she had to wonder if anything was out of the ordinary in the scattered opened books. She had waited breathlessly for the moan to repeat its self and scanned every visible location but after a few breathless seconds she walked back up even to the large table. The table too was covered in scattered books and mechanical parts and again she wondered if that was normal or not? She had been in this repair yard and lower shop dozens if not hundreds of times yet she could not recollect if the place looked like it had been ransacked or normal?

There was a large door set in the wall to her right. That led to a storage area for customer items and wrapped around in an ‘L-shape’ hidden back behind the wall of the bar top and its pigeon holes of books and lose sheaves of paper and tin press sheets where it was full of shelves of boxes with jumbles of parts. To her left running right alongside the bar was a broad stair case leading up to a warehouse of more parts and tools and a second locked door that she surmised lead up into the privet housing quarters of the building. Past the staircase on her left the room opened on to a ‘T-shaped’ work room with many work benches and tool shelves and storage racks intermingled with steam powered presses and drills and steam powered saws and grinding wheels. Most of the repairs were made down here and the place was a rather filthy maze of cases and tables and strewn everywhere with various assemblages in assorted states of construction or repair. At the far end of this would be a second door to a second smaller courtyard where a smelter and forge could be found along with coal bins and hoppers of scrap metal and a second gate leading to the next blocks alleyway. There was a storage paddock for larger sized constructs and mechanicals that was sandwiched between the main courtyard and the smelter and smithy with locked gates of galvanized mesh wire opening into both yards but with no direct gate out to the streets beyond its high metal wall. It was a good works shop if a bit primitive and limited in what it could offer for services and a bit sloppy for her tastes.

She started up the stair case toward the upper rooms of warehouses intending to knock soundly on the door to the apartments above which she believed she remembered being at the far end of the maze of shelving and storage bins, when she was stopped up short by a lump of shadow on the stair. It was another apprentice and this one had a large metal piece of machinery shoved through his back. An oily pool of blood and greasy black oil was revealed as she shakily turned the body over to see its face. The neck was untouched this time and she wondered if this had been the source of the moan? But the body seemed very cold to the increasingly creepy touch and stiff and its mouth was crusted with blood so she guessed this was not the source of the recent moan as this lad had surely been dead for at least an hour or more? His blood unlike the one outside seemed dried upon his knit undershirt which he wore with suspenders and a pair of blacksmith pants and untied leather shoes. He wore low-light vision goggles upon his open staring eyes just like hers, well her goggles had an assortment of lenses and combinations thereof, his were just a simple pair of low-light single lens goggles but still it meant he had been wandering around the house in the dark! Just like her! When he had met his tragic end!

This unnerved her slightly the idea he had been stumbling around in the dark just like her before he died. Had he tripped on the stairs and impaled himself upon that sharp piece of metal? Or had he been stabbed from behind as he was ascending the stair case perhaps looking for a source of some moan?

She quickly looked behind her; she was scarring herself silly here. She should go get the authorities at once! Two bodies certainly meant everyone was dead here! She quickly descended the stair case as the dark and prudence and her frightened nerves would allow and bolted toward the door until another this time much louder moan stopped her up short. It was coming from behind the bar. She swallowed hard and muttering about stupidity and curiosity and dead cats she forced her shuffling feet and outstretched hands in the direction of the bar. She would just peep over it, yeah that was it? Just a peep over it and then run right out the door and get the Council cops.

She had to step up on her tippy toes and even then half pull herself up onto the wooden counter and lean over the edge into the inky black well… a large book slid this way and another that and she scrambled to catch a third that threatened to fall over the edge of the lip of the bar and into the inky blackness she was trying to surreptitiously peer into and missed it and it slid off the counter top with a loud slippery sound and the farting sound of a thick volume of pages ruffling but there was no immediate crash instead the book disappeared and then made a delayed crashing noise that echoed mysteriously and then repeated its self twice more in lesser and lesser degrees of severity.

 She dropped back to the front side of the bar and cursing her clumsiness moved around to the open passage to the backside of the bar inched her way around it until she was crouched and buried in the pitch darkness. With her head and goggles out of the thin green courtyard light that continued to bleed through the glass paned and metal slatted front windows of the room she could just make out not a body but what was an open trapdoor that led down a steep stair case. She bit her lower plump pillow lip and then moaning herself placed a shaky booted toe on the first rung and climbed down the ladder like stair into what she could just barely make out to be some kind of metal room. It was small but as her head cleared the opening in the floor and was fully inside the circumference of the room she realized it was better lit than the upper room and she careened her neck around to find the light source that would explain this.

In doing so she nearly tripped over the large splayed volume which had come to rest upon the bottom third step but she recovered and caught herself preventing a tumble and stepped somewhat quietly into the cramped narrow room. It was full of pipes and conduits and obviously considering the erratic way the flooring and walls worked around the large support structures of the undercarriage of the house above it had all been added after the official builders had long pressed their seal upon this section of the block and moved on. “A secret room!” such things were highly illegal and Robyn found herself staring about her in wide eyed, half bent over due to the low ceiling, wonder at it all. The light came suddenly more into sharpness and the young girl realized it was emulating from behind the staircase and around a large juncture of pipes. She crouched down more fully and inched her way to where the light source seemed to fade and grow with uneven flickers.

She peered around a pipe even as the light suddenly grew in power. It was a man. A man who was leaving a thick smear of blood behind him which she could now discern in the sudden blue light but which before her own green tinted goggles had been unable to make out from the corroded green surface of the wet pipe dripping floor plating of the small secret room.

The steady blue light was coming from a small chemical lamp the man held in his hands, its fading and growing being caused by his pulling himself across the floor and thus covering up the hand and light with his head and chest as he inched along. It took a moment to recognize the huge build and back of the head of the man but as soon as she had Robyn dropped the subterfuge and raced over to his side. It was Arthur Mc Higgins and he was dying from a ghastly wound in his belly. In fact half his intestine seemed to be hanging out and Robyn struggled not to barf in the man’s up turned face when she had pulled him up onto her knees from both the sickening view of his exposed guts and their disgusting smell!

The hand lamp the man held was of a bright blue light and Robyn had to flip up her goggles in order to see better in it as it had an odd canceling effect against her low-light vision lenses. “Arthur! What happened! Oh my gosh! I will get you a doctor!”

“No time lass, providence has sent you. Take this lamp and this here key and open that box hidden there in the shadows of that upper wall pipe. Hurry now don’t ask questions I can sparse breath and I am fading fast.”

Robyn laid the man’s head down and did just as he had instructed though it took her a while to find the cleverly hidden box as it was built expertly into the junction box of the large steam pipe and she had to climb up on two smaller pipes and then scrunch down against the low ceiling and the keyhole its self was on the underside of the bolted box and invisible to sight she head to reach around and fit it in with her fingertips. But after a few grunts and frowns she had managed to pop it open upon its seam hidden side and reached in to pullout a large metal ball which fit into the box so as to leave room for nothing else. She clutched it to her large bosom and climbed back down and returned rapidly to Arthur who moaned as she moved his head up off the boiler plate floor.

“Take it to- Poole. Down, down deep he resides. You have to go down to go up. Take it to- it was your grandfathers. Poole will know. Old fool.”

“Wait I will get you some help. You are going to be alright. Who did this?!” She was trying really hard not to cry or ralph.

“Me-mechanicals… attacked us. Should have thought of that… nice… nice ah… pussy… ahhhh.” Robyn looked down and realized her skirt was still tucked up behind her tool pouch and that all this time she had been shoving her hairy pussy into the dying man’s nose.

“Mechanicals? But that is impossible.” But the dreamily smiling man on her lap was already dead and she closed his eyes with her sticky bloody fingers (which wasn’t easy as the eyelids kept sticking to her blood sticky finger tips and pulling back open and she was eeew-ing and yuck-ing up a storm until she finally managed to get them closed up) and made her way to the stairs with the blue lamp in her blood sticky right hand and the left hand clutching the heavy metal ball to her huge cleavage as her right hand tried to pluck her skirt out from behind her tool bag and drop her skirt back over it but it was tucked in there tight and she did not want to put down the light or the ball or stay a second longer in this slaughter house so she just left her hairy mound exposed and stepped over the third rung of the ladder stair case with its wedged wiggly book and stopped as above her on the stair was the glowing eyes of a mechanical its metal hands held out toward her were covered in crusted blood!

Robyn screamed despite herself and fell backwards off the stairs landing hard on her bum and bouncing slightly off her full rounded cheeks. The mechanical just kept a measured pace as it descended toward her with its outstretched arms and blood clotted hands and she awkwardly climbed to her feet bumping her head upon one of the many low hanging pipes running through the room. She looked around the room and realized she should be able to lead the mechanical into the maze of pipes and then leap or crawl away and race up the ladder stairs while it laboriously walked back around as it did not seem to have the agility to come directly after her nor the speed to catch her. But even as she was making her mental plan the mechanical placed a foot pad on the third step and the broad spine of the book slipped rapidly and the construct came plummeting head first down the stairs smashing into a pipe and denting it. “Okay, that works too!” Robyn muttered and leapt over the mechanical’s lashing arms and landed a boot on its backside slamming it to the floor with a loud clanging sound and raced up the stairs past it.

The jumping blue light in her right fist glimmered off several mechanicals who were suddenly parading about the room she had just climbed up into; with nearest trying to wedge its thick round torso through the narrow gap of the bar counter, the wooden top splintering under its efforts. She ignored it and leapt over the top scattering books everywhere and then dodged another mechanical that was trying to cut her in half with a ragged piece of torn metal with a leap upon the large table. Upon the large table she was momentarily safe as it was wide enough in all directions that the mechanicals were forced to try and climb up onto its surface to reach her and they were having a very hard time doing that. On the other hand she was trapped in a dark room with what appeared to be half a dozen homicidal mechanicals. So she had had better days to be sure.

Despite her fear which was palpable and made her mouth turn to copper wash she found herself also sangfroid in her puzzlement of the mechanicals actions. A mechanical’s actions and movements ran on a cylinder housed inside their bodies upon which were inscribed carvings that told it what to do. These were rather complex and had to be tailored to each mechanical type. The cylinder removed from a kitchen bot and placed in a construction bot would not let that bot now suddenly make fruit preserves instead it would either not function at all or prance about erratically until it utterly destroyed its inner workings. The idea that someone could have made half a dozen cylinders for a number of different model types of mechanicals and then inserted them without anyone in the house being the wiser was utterly impossible. The inscribing of cylinder command cores was a highly skilled occupation and understandably awash with endless red tape and reams of checks and balances and oversights. Scribes lived in the best houses in the best districts and were often selected while in school and patron by the great houses. It was inexplicable that one would do such a thing as this and yet it was the only explanation for the mechanical’s frenzied actions of murder. “But then… why had they been turned off or in hiding when she had first entered the house? Why did they wait until she had found Arthur downstairs? The sphere! Of course they wanted the sphere!” The young girl looked down at the device and held it up in front of her face so as to view it better and then noticed that beyond its shimmering surface a mechanical was entering the room with a steam saw which it now fired up as it approached the table. “None of this makes any sense but it is definitely time to go!”

With a leap and bound she was at the door. It was locked of course and there was no time to try and work at the panels and somehow she doubted it would respond to her input commands or even her attempting to hardwire the device with her tools. She yipped and dodged the raging howling steam saw blades which made short work of one of the mechanicals compatriots and she raced in the direction of the staircase leading up to the warehouse. As she did so she noticed one of the mechanicals was racing around turning on all the gas lights. Unlit gas was rapidly filling the house! She needed to find an exit out of this place fast!

The downstairs windows had metal slats set at an angle over them and she did not like the look of the dark work rooms to the left where these mechanicals must have been hiding and where the one with the saw had just recently arrived. She continued her mad flight to the stairs and ran up them just remembering to leap over the sprawled body of the dead apprentice even as the steam saw sunk deep into him causing his torso to leap and jerk under her leaping legs and splatter the entire stair case and no doubt her bitching cool frock coat as well.

She continued to scamper up the stairs and into the large warehouse room beyond wondering why the fastest moving mechanical of the bunch managed to wind up with the damn steam saw! It wasn’t feathering the throttle but holding the trigger full bore so the small tank would run its self dry in oh just an hour or so! She ran and slid across another large table full of boxes of gears as the saw somehow slammed into the table top causing it to lurch and spurt wood and metal shavings all over her backside. “Very fast mechanical!” she noted and ran pell-mell back and forth through the racks listening to the screaming saw just seemingly inches behind her! She raced around one rack and saw a small opening where a table and chairs were laid out with part books and schematic charts. And turned right she remembered there being- she ducked as the saw came cutting through the rack she ran alongside the blade chasing after her eating its way through crates of parts and cloth baskets of parts on metal mesh hamper hangers as easily as if it were cutting through warm fish paste.

“Ah, just where I remembered it!” She yanked the large mirror off the wall and backtracked in a loop to where she had found the small open space with the table chairs and technical manuals. The sound of the saw was no longer directly behind her but moving in rapidly at an angle and then the mechanical was in the little island of the table and chairs and he was bringing his saw down on her cringing form but the blade feasted upon glass and behind the mechanical Robyn dropped her arms and scooted around the book case which had hidden her and with hall her might she pulled the rack down upon the back of the mechanical. The heavy case knocked the mechanical and the shattered mirror sitting upon the half ruined chair to the ground with a mighty crash. Robyn leaped forward and wrestled the saw free of the mechanicals arm and then cutting through bookcase, books, chair, mirror, she severed the things head from its shoulders and buried the blades deep into its much more important chest cavity where the blades snarled jammed and then snapped. She let the steam saw die and scurried to gather up her blue lamp from the nearby floor where it had rolled after she had set it upon the chair in front of the mirror, thanking the fates it was undamaged and scooped up the metal sphere from off the table where it was hidden under a tent of books. She moved quickly but as silently as possible through the maze of part racks suddenly unsure of her position in the overall room. She could hear mechanicals shuffling along obviously looking for her or the sphere and she could smell the horrible odor of the methane mixed to gas to make it noticeable to alarm to all who used its otherwise untraceable lack of scent.

She stumbled and fell over another body of an apprentice. This one was locked in a death grip with a mechanical that had plunged its cold metal hands into the young boy’s chest. A small powerful clockwork drill lay in turn buried in the mechanicals chest. She looked at the hand drill and raised an eyebrow. She knelt and searched through the apprentice’s pockets and found the key ring she had hoped he would be carrying and with it sharing a hand with her blue lamp she kept searching and hiding until she stumbled across the door hopefully leading to the upper privet living quarters. It took some fumbling amongst the surprising number of keys on the ring but eventually she found the key to the door and unlocked it just as a mechanical came shuffling around the corner of a rack and flung its self toward her. She knocked it back and opened the door and slammed it closed behind her, locking its stout lock and falling breathless with her back to the door. A metal hand ruptured through the door panel and felt around for her as she scrambled away and up the short flight of stairs to the upper rooms proper.

The upstairs’ apartments were spacious considering what usually passed for accommodations in Steam City with a privet bath for both the master bed room and the apprentice rooms. There was a kitchen and dining room and a lot of woodwork?! Which was both impressive and unfortunately to be found to extend to the doors including the one being rapidly torn to shreds at the bottom of the stairwell. There appeared to be neither mechanicals upstairs nor any mechanical devices of neither any kind nor any voice tubes or anything of metal nature?! In fact the more she rapidly searched from room to room she found the almost entire upper floor to be built incredulously out of wood and furnished in wooden chairs and tables! Even the beds were made of wooden frames?! She finally found a window large enough to squeeze through and after using her tools in her pouch to unscrew and remove the metal framed round glass window and toss it unceremoniously back on the bed upon which she was standing teetering upon the headboard she began to twist and pull herself through the narrow opening even as she heard the doors which she had taken the time to close and lock to every room being systematically bashed and battered in by laborious mechanical hands.

She just managed to escape out onto a narrow metal ledge with a green weathered copper tile roof not far below her when the mechanicals found her door to be next on their menu to be battered in and room searched. She inched her way along the narrow ledge away from the round window and wondered what mechanicals with cylinder core minds programed to kill would make out of a window lying on a bed in an otherwise deserted room? Would they conclude the window was sleeping? Or could they somehow deduce she had removed the window and escaped to the roof?

Robyn had no desire to find out what they might make of her vanishing act unless she first got clear of the area and far away and then maybe over a warm cup of tea with lots of sugar she muddle through the thoughts and conjectures of how simple command prompt cylinders could cause mechanicals to act so far beyond anyone’s ability to foresee complications and have pre-responded with appropriate codes?

She had just managed to make her way to the enormous support struts to an upper level and clamber heavy handed with her lamp and sphere, she had dropped the keys in the bedroom behind her, and was just pulling herself into the crotch of pipe housing junction when there was a muffled explosion followed by another larger explosion from the repair yard below her which sunk and then erupted in flames. She could see the headlines in the tintypes tomorrow; “ANARCHISTS BLOW-UP HISTORIC FIX-IT YARD” … no survivors.

Robyn looked past the furious blaze and could just make out that all the street lamps were back on and that the lone personal transport car which had broken down in front of the main court yard of the repair shop was gone and then she turned and scrambled along a series of pipes and wires until she was back on the more comfortable ground of a catwalk stair and made her way up it to the next level as the fire brigade sirens coughed into the late night air.

By the time Robyn made her footsore way home to her room and collapsed, much to moonbeams disappointment, fully clothed upon her bed face down and fell fast asleep a lone man in a black trench coat and red vest of the Ministry of Public Safety was kicking at a charred box of half melted parts siting outside the large tottering gear gate of the Mc Higgins repair yard and looking again and again at a half burnt tin type tag with its melted wire tie and he muttered into the dark smoggy air as fire men raced around him, “Robyn Cox.”

Robyn woke up gagging and coughing and opened her eyes to see her stepfather franticly yanking his robe closed next to her bed. “Good morning sun shine!” He smiled at her with beads of perspiration dotting his forehead and glasses. “I just came, er, up to tell you breakfast is almost ready! Now be down soon! Alright!” And the man quickly left her room muttering to himself, “So close, so close to a new personal best! Darn it!”

Robyn rolled off her stomach and noted she must have drooled on her pillow all night as it was somewhat stuck to the side of her face which felt kind of covered in drool too. She frowned and swallowed against the slimy burnt plastic taste in her mouth and throat and muttered, “okay, daddy.” But the man was already gone her bedroom door whisking closed behind him. Her face felt hot and sticky and she suddenly wondered if it were covered in blood from the night’s surreal adventure! She leapt up and bounced off the edge of the bed and checked the small round mirror above her nightstand but the goo on her face was gray and white and not blood at all. She often seemed to wake up with such snot on her face, well whenever her dad woke her up it seemed. She pulled open her blouse and was surprised not to find the drool/snot all over her tits as well as that was usually the case. Her skirt was soaking wet and she noticed the mound of stuffed animals that lay in the center of her bed that must have been underneath her and caused her to sweat so much there. She began to wipe off her face and slip out of her clothes until she was stripped naked and had most of the gunk off her face though it seemed to have gotten on her hair and made it stiff in places and she shimmied over to her window and threw the curtain and drapes back and leaned out into the bright and sunny day. “Hello Moonbeam! See anything neat last night?” Moonbeam’s right arm was twitching furiously behind his mounted telescope and the pipes that cut off the view of his body at chest height. Though he was looking right at her through his telescope she couldn’t be sure if maybe he wasn’t looking above her house for those little green men from mars so she waved energetically at him her huge tits shaking furiously and her naked muff wiggling back and forth just above the round window sill. Moonbeam shot bolt upright and then he fell backward off the pipes as he always did landing with a muffled thud upon the rooftop where he lived in his patchwork tent. “Oh Moonbeam….” She shook her head giggling and after a large stretch and shimmy pulled herself back into her bedroom to ponder over last night’s strange adventure.

The grisly night’s images made her shudder as she thought over them and she grabbed her arms and rubbed them as she tried to forget the images of those poor dead men in that now house of ashes. She looked at the sphere sitting on her desk beside the goggles she had tossed there last night and frowned at it as it lay amongst her various projects that cluttered her desk. She picked up the sphere and then set it carefully back down again. “First thing a shower and then breakfast and then we will see.”

Taking a shower when dad was in the house and mom was away at work, as was the case today, meant of course that her step-dad would instantly show up and insist upon helping her soap up her body and wash her hair and yep, there he was just as soon as she closed the bathroom door and before her robe had hit the floor bursting the door aside with a large sponge in his right hand and a rubber ducky in his left and a very large smile upon his face. She rolled her eyes, there was no use trying to argue that she was old enough to wash herself, her stepfather loved her so much and these father daughter moments seemed to be what he lived for, so she just sighed shook her head and stepped into the enameled bathtub as he set about working furiously at the small bathroom boiler and faucets and hoses.

In no time at all she was sitting in a tub full of bubbles and her step father was aggressively rubbing the sponge all over her bath oiled body. She preferred a shower as it was faster but when her father was washing her it was always a bubble bath and the man chatted incessantly asking her questions about her day and how things were and how maybe they could go on a picnic if she had not solid plans and so on and on as his hands moved and squeezed and groped over every inch of her young firm nubile body. The rubber ducky always seemed to find its odd long ribbed necked big head in some rather embarrassing places upon her lower body that made her squirm a bit but she methodically removed the gentle affront to her womanly dignity and tried not to let it linger too long in those natural crevasses of her young body lest she blush too deeply and get a little too hot and bothered by its squeaky strange attractions to such places. The bath always tended to end abruptly with the ducky’s increasingly aggressive trespasses and her father by now completely soaked through falling into the tub with her. She always got up and toweled off and reached for her robe and retreated up to her room to dress when that moment inevitably came. While her father would come up spitting bubbles and coughing and gasping and muttering and then calling out to her to, “have a nice day honey!”

Her step-father always made her giggle and laugh and she was thankful that her mother had found such a decent man in face of her own biological father’s terrible accident when she was still just a baby. She really knew very little about her biological father or how he had died; and other than a single picture of him and her mother holding each other in their arms on the day they found out she was pregnant there was no sign of him in the house nor would her mother talk about him.

In her room Robyn Cox closed the door behind her and moved over to her bedroom window and leaned out of it to see if Moonbeam was alright. He was back at his telescope and she smiled and gave him another big wave but he only stiffened up again and making a sound not unlike a bird squawk fell over backwards out of sight again onto the roof from the raised up pipes he continuously perched from. Robyn shook her head and giggled and turned back to her room. She always felt invigorated after a good wash, and she had to admit that for some reasons a bubble bath with her step-father lathering her up and Mr. Ducky always left her feeling much more, well, tingling and alive than an old shower did. So she was fit to burst and dance and bounced across her room to her hidden clothing closet and pressed the decorative dial to open it and see what she would wear today?

She had a good idea where she would be heading today. Arthur had said something about Poole and going down deep and a suggestion that the sphere might have belonged to her grandfather Javier Steam but it was hard to say if he really had meant that as he was preoccupied with dying and all at the time. None of it had really meant anything to her until she had seen the clockwork screwdriver in the chest of the mechanical. The Cuckoo’s had an almost separate quarter in Steam City underground and one of their numbers who even she had heard about was a legendary inventor named Poole. It was rather vague but she felt that if she ventured down to the Cuckoo quarter and asked around for this Poole she might just be on the right track for finding out what this sphere was for and how mere mechanicals had been made to attack and murder fix-it men. That was sort of like a fire killing fire men or an exterminator being devoured by a horde of rats. It just didn’t make much sense.

Since she would be going down into the lower half of the sphere of Steam City and to the rather ridiculed and less fashionable Cuckoo clockwork shops and streets she felt wearing one of her nicer frock coats and dresses would be a bit much. She decided upon one of her favorite combinations of day wear that was now back from the laundry room downstairs (bless you mom, sorry I flunked out on the chores again!) and had been whisked back upstairs to her room by the automated sorter rack and returned to its proper hooks. She snatched out the ensemble and plopped it on her perpetually unmade bed and then gathered up her attire from last night and dropped it down the laundry chute in the side wall. With a finger in the mouth after thought she went back to her bed and stripped it down and crammed all of that down the shoot as well. She would stop in and start the laundry before she left and she was sure if she asked her dad would transfer the wash to the blow dryer which would return it up to her room to her clothing racks. He was always egger to wash her clothes for her! Though for some reason some of them would come up missing whenever he did her laundry? One of the reasons she never wore any bras or panties or bloomers is that they always seemed to disappear whenever she sent them down to be laundered! Her step-father was always very sad when this happened and he insisted upon going out and buying her new undergarments to replace those he somehow lost. Where he found these garments were beyond her for they were nothing but lacy frilly bits of string! Some of the bras actually had holes in the cups were it was darn near impossible to keep her always puffy proud nipples from slipping through! And once he had provided her with undergarments made entirely out of some kind of stretchy shinny rubber latex material which fit her so poorly that her boobs were pushed up almost to her chin and the bottoms wouldn’t come even half way up her backside and the way the crotch had dug in soooooo very deeply! Well! Despite her father who had insisted she model them for him saying it was the latest public outing wear and upon seeing her wearing them, that they should take her out at once in the unmentionables to one of the public parks for one of his famous picnics she refused and spent the better part of an hour trying to wiggle out of those garments! They remained on a rack she never bothered to touch at the back of her caracoling closet and somewhat dreading her father being once again taken in by whatever shameless hoodwinking shop keeper who kept misinforming him of what was comfortable proper undergarments or publicly acceptable attire for a young girl, she just forgo the bra and bloomers or panties completely, though she did often still wear the corsets of which she had twenty! But not today!

No today she was going to wear her ‘work clothes’ the ones she often wore when she was going to be doing some really dirty oily slimy greasy work. She giggled to see them on the bare bed and began to remove them from their interlocked hangers and put them on.

First went on a pair of thick wool socks for she would be wearing her heavy lace up tan leather work boots today and not any of her much more fashionable ankle boots or thigh high boots. And then on went the super tight shorts. These were a bright yellow and it took a considerable amount of shimming to get them up and over her full round buttocks. She had to breathe out completely until she felt like she was going to pass out to get the front buttons done up but it was worth it for it was like wearing nothing at all. The tight stretchy fabric had no front closure only the two side buttons, one on each side of her hips that pulled taut the waist band when fastened. The shorts were even tighter in their fit than her step-father’s questionable rubber nickers and dug in much, much deeper in the crotch region so much so that it cleft her down there like the business end of a penny nail carpenters draw claw hammer. Indeed it spread her lips and mound down there so wide that she knew she would be spouting a steady damp spot all day but that was okay as in the constant steam fog it was hard to keep anything from getting damp or wet. The yellow material was very sheer and she could easily see her thick tawny pubic hair through the thing stretched garments material. Though her great long locks were of golden blonde her bushy pubic hair was of a darker corn silk reddish hue that had a tendency to shine and glint in even the feeblest of light. The short legs of the shorts did not come down to fully cover where the swell of her ass cheeks began so the bottoms of her buttocks were on display. She loved these shorts! It was as close to naked as a person could get in public and the idea of being naked in public always sent a thrill through her young racing heart.

Next went on the white muscle shirt. It was several sizes too small for her massive round globed chest and if the shorts were sheer then the skin tight shirt was utterly transparent! Her always hard puffy nipples were easy on full blown pokie display as her heavy tits jiggled freely in the tight confines of the deep plunge cleavage of the small tight shoulder much put upon straining spaghetti straps. She loved the shirt for the same reason she loved the shorts and she thought they made a great outfit when combined.

Next went on her tan work boots of a sued buffed look. Then her tool pouch which she slipped around to her right hip so not cover up and lessen the effect of the skin tight shorts. And then she added a pair of fingerless gloves and shoved her arms through a large yellow button shirt with large pockets. She left it unbuttoned so it let her huge breasts peak out and jiggle around wildly as she walked and the un-tucked tail of the shirt somewhat hid the deeply entrenched backside of her shorts giving her some passing modesty as she wiggled past. The oversized shirt lent a peek-a-boo aspect to her otherwise practically naked wardrobe that let her comfortably address even the most pious of matrons in the street without generating any untoward sneers or biting comments as she passed. It was not the most risqué outfit she wore in her day to day ensemble no that would be the corset and skirt combo. That outfit consisted of a corset that made no effort to cover up her nipples at all and a skirt that hung down to her ankles in the back but parted in the front to leave her crotch exposed where she would wear one of her step-fathers odd and daring string pieces of underwear. A pair of opera gloves and her thinnest and tightest thigh high boots would top off the piece. She wore it only at night and only when the ‘reveilles’ of this or that holiday had similarly scantily attired women drunkenly walking the streets with passed out men lying here and there in heaps in the gutters.

For a hat she put on one of her aviators leather helmets leaving the chin flaps undone and she quickly slipped her goggled on top of its brow. She slipped the heavy metal sphere into a large leather backpack and then dropped in several bags of small gears and parts that she knew she would need to trade for information as the Cuckoos did not trade in chits. She then placed the leather backpacks straps over her shoulders and instantly noticed it really shoved her breasts together and put them on full headlight display. She giggled at that and wondered if that would prove more useful as a distraction in her inquires or more a hindrance in having to deal with out of work loafers hanging about the street corners?

She noted once she did up the lower belt across her sternum it would just send her massive breasts into a sort of concentrated compressed jiggling mass that was perhaps a bit TOO attention demanding? She mused at that and then decided not to do up that last strap until she was well into the clockwork part of Steam City as the people there seemed more repressed sexually overall and less likely to chase her down the street trying to rape her! She laughed a short bark out loud gasping laugh at that, she maybe innocent in many ways and perhaps even a little blind to things and naive as her mother kept saying and complaining about but she still knew enough about the way of Steam City were men ran almost everything that a pretty girl like her who was willing to jiggle a bit and wiggle a bit and flash a little of her naughty bits here and there could get along pretty sweet without letting things go any farther, where all others found only dead ends and firm muscled chests blocking their way.

She would need all the jiggle and wiggle she could muster if she was going to find this Poole and figure out what this sphere thing was so worth killing men for?! “But first, breakfast!” She slipped the backpack off her back and carrying it by one of the straps headed down to breakfast with her step-father which would mean oatmeal as that was all he knew how to cook with that funky white creamy sauce that smelled like fish paste and tasted like wet slimy raw plastic! Ugh! At first she couldn’t stomach the stuff but lately she had found it to be rather delicious! “An acquired taste,” she smiled and decided to ask him where he got it so she could pick up some herself for late night snacks.

The lower levels of Steam City that is the streets and alleyways and catwalks and mesh of wires of personal transports and steam lifts and housing blocks and market squares and such that made up the region below the boiler plate Equator was the much poorer districts and home to most of the miners who dug deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth radiating out from the sphere of Steam City and home to most of the steam fitters and pipe workers and it was also the location of much of the recent pumping stations and sewage treatment plants and steam power plants and steam gathering stations and redirection centers. In fact most of the large clunking machinery such as the hydroponics labs and various aforementioned sewage and water treatment plants and processing hubs that once dotted the surface of Steam City, the Equator now covered in boiler plates had all been moved over the years down into the bowls of the lower half of the city. Oddly enough there were few people living down her other than workers of such plants and many of them actually resided on the boiler plate Equator or higher up in the more airy lofty regions of the upper half of the spherical city. This was because all that machinery took up a surprisingly enormous amount of space so there simply wasn’t much room for housing or markets or the necessities of day to day life in the bottom half of the city.

It is doubtful if the original layout of the city had meant for so much of the workings and processing centers and manufacturing plants to become subterranean as the city grew in scope and scale and grew over time to fill out its fore planed destiny of spherical shape. Rather with the Council taking over and the guilds rise of power and the great houses of extended powerful and increasingly wealthy families rising up and tearing apart the center of the upper sphere to rebuild it into lavish houses rimming their great lush plaza octagon it is more likely that so many public works buildings that had once resided in these locations were just systematically shoved into the under sphere and what may have been once conceived as an equally beautiful and lovely living environment was now nothing but a smelly congested sickening cesspool of twisted non-rational maze of pipes and hovels. Most of the city worked here but only the poor lived here; well, them and the Cuckoo’s who had crafted their own alternative to steam power in the form of elaborate clockwork mechanisms. It was through the filthy loud smelly often times violent dark world with dim twinkling distant gas lights that she descended until she finally found herself in the turn-key or wind-up kingdom of the clock-smiths as they called themselves only the upper world called them the Cuckoos in relation to the loud chiming bird clocks they made and which could be found in most apartments topside.

Robyn was grateful to have left the eerie dark domain of endless pipes and platforms leading only into more catwalks and doors to factories and processing plants all shoved willy-nilly amongst giant girders and struts and enter into the altogether quite charming world of the orderly shops of the clock-smiths. She sighed as her feet touched down on the first long strip of level footing and well lit gas lamps of what looked like a small town of shops and homes fit along a comfortable lane that swam backwards and rose up in the distance and returned above zigzagging this way and that. “And not one giant rat attack on the way down! Whew! Thank the makers!” Robyn touched her goggles in a salute at a stern faced man in armor with a poleaxe and he only pursed his lips and stared at her. Behind him several exterminators were fueling up their torcher tanks at a gas hydrant and getting ready to head back up into the dark bowels, rat hordes were serious problems in the lower half of the city and crews like these worked around the clock in shifts walking the gang planks and catwalks and what few bits could be called streets there. Most of the factories and such had direct steam lifts for their workers to use that ran from the boiler plate roads straight down were they were located but thousands of non-workers had to make their way around down there and rat horde attacks or the mythical giant rat attacks had to be suppressed.

Robyn stepped aside for the exterminator’s one of whom wolf whistled at her and winked and she blushed and smiled and giggled at him as the dark quickly swallowed them up except for the little licking blue flames of their torchers which eventually also vanished.

Robyn passed down the wide street lined with shops and houses that fell away to instant blackness just beyond their cheerful designs. Another man in armor and with a poleax was walking down the street toward her and with a large key around his neck was inserting it into the lamp posts and twisting it several good go’s before moving on to the next one in the line and repeating the process. To her amazement she realized that the lamps lighting the street weren’t gas at all but some kind of wind-up powered electrical lamps. Much brighter than the chemical ‘miner lamps’ she expected to see more of down here and none of that horrible burping smell of the gas lamps. She smiled at the man in his task as each lamp he stopped and winded grew instantly brighter and he gave her a workman’s nod and went on with his task.

She saw another armored man in his stiff iron plate attire and billhook across his shoulder talking to yet another armored man who was sitting down next to a fountain and adjusting his shin guards as the standing fellow suddenly broke out laughing. Robyn frowned these did not seem like the types to ask questions about an almost mythical clockwork builder named Poole. She looked around at some of the nearest shops and saw most of them had ‘closed’ signs it had not occurred to her that just because it was morning in the world of light and steam that it might not be concurrently be business hours in the land of steam and dark. Steam wisps floated across the spacious street and she looked for lighted windows and saw a few further on. “Oh dear I seem to have come after hours as it were? There are some people in civilian wear... Looks like they may be entering a tavern. Perhaps I should try there that might be a better place for gossip and information than a shopkeeper who is solely intent upon selling his wares.”

Robyn smiled as she passed through the throng of men and women standing outside the tavern and they smiled back and tipped their hats and bonnets. The inside of the tavern was different from the few she had seen in the upper hemisphere. The council did not approve of strong drink nor of public houses which sold it so most social drinking was reserved for holidays and most drinks were sold out of tent suspiciously identical to the puppet show tents which would be closed on such days. There were a few drinking halls but they tended to be used for weddings and funeral wakes and they certainly did not look like this! Her eyes widened to see a stage of nearly naked men shamelessly dancing to the banging of a drum, fife, and violin as women laughed and guzzled beer and slapped the men’s exposed butt cheeks and tugged at their shorts with their teeth. “Oh my!” the young girl exclaimed and then recoiled as a nearly naked man with a serving tray thrust a foaming mug in her hand. “Ah thank you,” she shouted above the clamor of voices and loud boisterous music. A few people pushed past her and she moved out from in front of the door along the side of the crowded room. The whole place was packed with women fashionably attired who were yanking off men’s clothing and laughing and shouting. Some of the women bent the naked men over their laps and spanked them with their bare hands or with what looked like rubber coated steel paddles that hung on leather thongs around the men’s own necks. Most of the men were tied at the wrist and some shackled at the ankles as well. There was a bar far back over the heads of the roaring crowd with naked men dancing upon it and women reaching up and yanking on their- their- thingamajigs! “OH MY!” Robyn exclaimed again and put a hand up to her open mouth but though blushing she was now openly laughing despite herself. She just barely kept from being soaked from her mug when jostled by a woman riding on a naked man’s back as he crawled about on all fours and she whipped savagely at his buttocks with a ridding crop while laughing hysterically. Robyn looked down at her revealing wardrobe and muttered, “I don’t think my outfit is going to do me much good here!” And then blushed and laughed out loud again so hard she almost doubled over as the men on the stage were now completely naked and their manhood’s being yanked on and fondled and smacked at by a revelry of drunken screaming laughing women.  The naked men were yanked off the stage by the women gathered there most by their now rather stiff male bits and swallowed up by the crowd while a fresh line of clothed men were ushered out of the curtained wings and who began to dance and strip as the music continued to blare. This group had several rather fetching young men in it and Robyn pushed her way through the throng to the stage, “I had better get a seat up front before the next show gets underway!”

Robyn staggered away from the still roaring bar full of clothed women and naked men and pulled at her soaked shirt. She couldn’t be sure if she had more gin spilled upon her or inside of her but she was definitely sure from her spinning head and unsure tread that she had a goodly amount inside of her!

According to her chromitor built into her goggles she had been inside the strange tavern for several hours perhaps as many as six and she was pleasantly surprised that many more of the shops were now lighted up in their windows and their place cards promised they were open for business she set her feet firmly for the nearest one and ended up several sideways strides latter at a completely different shop but it was open as well and she pushed through its bell jingling door.

Robyn weaved up to what was a short white haired balding man wearing a brown waist coat and watch fob standing behind a low counter that came up to his chest, “Hello how can I help you?” The man smiled broadly and adjusted his spectacles upon his wide nose that looked like a turnip or was it a rutabaga?

“I have never touched so many men’s thingies in my life!” Robyn blurted out in a drunken snarl. “In fact up to about oh…” She pulled down her goggles and looked through hem and then snapped them back upon her forehead. “A few hours ago I had NEVER touched a man’s thingy before! But now I can honestly say I have touched dozens, nay perhaps hundreds of them and I have to wonder how do you pee through them when they are all hard like that?” she paused and leaned on her elbow on the counter and raised her eyebrow at the man waiting for an answer.

“Ah you have been down to the gathering of the Cult of the Nymphs. Very popular cult that one is; They have gatherings like that about four times a year, rent out the town hall and empty about half the shopkeepers of their spirits and er, tonics. I just wish it were a little bit better business for the rest of us merchants but oh well a pleasant bunch all around.”

Robyn started to speak stopped frowned and then slid slowly off the bar and landed hard upon the ground. “Ah, you need to dust down here. Very dirty,” her muffled voice rose up. A boot came momentarily into view, “someone has moved the floor. So many cocks! That’s what you call them! I am a good girl and I learn well! Gwad I love ‘em hard like that! Ohhh! Sweet mercy I think I soaked myself!?!”

Robyn woke sometime later with a splitting headache upon a pillowed bench seat that was surprisingly hard considering all the stuffed pillows topping of its removable metal cover. “Ohhhhh my head hurts.”

“Ah you are back in the land of the living then?” The old short man with the balding white hair was smoking a pipe and reading a book siting behind his counter just a few feet from her, his face a little red and sweaty.

“Shush! Shush! Not so loud…” she moaned and whimpered and sat up only to groan loudly clutching her head and sink back down upon her back. “UGH. I feel sick.”

“Yes there is about a ten wheel barrows full of you lot being collected up in the streets by the watchmen to be loaded up on steam lifts and sent back topside to their husbands but don’t worry I am not that cruel I remember what it was like to be young once. Oh and we don’t, by the way.”

“Don’t what?” Her head felt like it was going to explode and she kept her hand clamped firmly to her clammy forehead to keep it from doing so.

“We don’t pee through our willy’s when they get hard, or if we did we would have to stand on our hands I suppose.” The man clamped his pipe back between his teeth and nodded at the young girl who gave him an odd look and then went back to moaning.

Another nap without the jarring rough bed spins this time and a bowl of some kind of soup and she was feeling much better. “Thanks, I am sorry I am being such a pain.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Now somehow I don’t believe you came down here for the revelries. You don’t look the type; you know thirty to fortyish with a haggard housewives dead pan gaze. So why don’t you tell me what you came down here for that you couldn’t have placed a voice tube order for and waited for it to be delivered topside?” The old man replaced his pipe in his teeth and clamped down hard on it and half crossed his legs where his book sat penitently lying open.

 “Huh,” she laughed a short soft laugh. “Yeah, I guess this is going to sound rather wacked but I am searching for a guy named Poole. Mc Higgins of the repair yard said I should find him. Something about Javier Steam.” The girl looked up from under a hand that was pushing away her thick blonde locks of hair out of her sheepish face.

The man gave her a hard look from his own red sweating face and then picked up a tin type lying on the counter before him. These were thin sheets of metal tin that came out of a tin type press which most homes had that engraved/or pressed indented upon it the day’s news and which you then dropped back into the metal recycle bin rollers under the machine for reuse. One could subscribe to many such tin types or just punch in the request for a single issue of the day or any back issue. “It says here that Mc Higgins yard and house burned down. They suspect foul play and still combing the ruins for bodies. Found two apprentices so far.” He tossed the metal sheet down at the feet of the box seat she sat upon and it made a slight clanging noise upon the metal floor.

“I saw him just before he died and he told me to find this Poole. That’s all I know about this,” she kicked at the tin type with the steel toe of her boot.

“Humph,” the old man chewed on his pipe stem for a while and then shrugged. “Well not much anyone could tell you about Poole even to the extent if he is real or was real and dead. Anyway if he is alive or was alive he was always rumored to live down on the lower levels but not here in this town. No, over near the center of the lower levels, over in one of the few areas that was built in the lower hemisphere back when there was still dirt and rock above and Javier Steam still walked the streets of his fresh shiny toy. You will need to head in toward the lower center to the crypts of Steam City, to the catacombs and vaults where the court house and Steam Tower once rooted themselves. Severed off now, or so I am lead to believe. I think the Council has all but sealed them off with their Great Church foundations. Built those straight down into them as if to that very purpose, if you catch my meaning. You won’t find any pathway leading to the center of the sphere down here anymore girl. You will have to go up to boiler plate, the Equator and then out into center of the upper hemisphere into the open of the octagon where the great houses thugs hang out in the gardens there. No sane or safe place for a young girl like you. And then I would reckon into the Great Church which is off limits to all but the Council who have their rooms there and the great houses families who go there to worship and once there down, down, looking for some unbroken pathway into the ancient catacombs. And good luck with that, child! Humph!” He placed his pipe stem which he had been jabbing in her direction as he talked back between his teeth and returned to his book which he had let sit on his lap flipping the pages ignoring her.

“Well…” the girl got up a little unsteady. “Thank you for the information and the help there and all.” She smiled at the old man and then wobbled her way out of his shop the little bell above the door ringing its piercing chimes like needle thin daggers through her head.

The man watched her go until the door latched shut and then he leapt up sweating and red faced and yanked the book off his lap were his engorged exposed penis was painfully caught in his half yanked up zipper. He huffed and puffed red faced as he shakily worked he bloody zipper out of where its metal teeth lay embedded in his cockshaft and wheezed and panted when it finally ripped free. “God damn bitch woke up fast that last time and I nearly zippered my dick off trying to get my erection back in there! But Gwad damn it! That was the best five and halfway to a six, titty fucks of my life! And well worth a scar or two!”

Robyn traced her way back up the long torturous route to the central meridian of the Equator after checking her back pack outside the shop to make sure her heavy metal sphere and bags of trade cogs were still in there and safe. “I guess I got that information cheap!” She smiled and then noticed as she entered the brighter surface levels the hard yellow stains covering the front of her shirt.” Must be from the spilled gin?” She mused and then sniffed at her cleavage and wrinkled up her nose, “Why do my boobs always smell like fish paste of late?! Ugh!”

It was well into dark night when she reached her home and she thankfully stripped out of her clothes and took a quick shower before heading up to her room naked with back pack in tow. She hung the back pack and goggles on the back of her chair having left her clothing in the Landry room to deal with tomorrow and grabbing up the arm load of her bedding (thanks dad!) she had flirted up the stairs to her room and quickly made up her bed with its piles of stuffed animals. Then she sauntered over to her open window and pushed the long gauzy drapes aside and basked in the faint moon glow that bleed through the ranks of steam cloud fog and spied Moonbeam who had his telescope trained in her direction again no doubt looking for his UFO’s and space men. And she smiled and waved at him while his palsy started up again all along his right side of his body until he stiffened up and toppled over backward off his perch upon the pipes with a second latter dull thud of his body hitting the roof top where his tent sat. She shook her head and smiled and pulled her naked body back into her room.

She woke the next day with her thighs firmly wrapped around one of her wooden bed posts her ankles crossed behind it and her butt raised up in the air on a stack of stuffed animals. She frowned at the not unusual position she found herself in and untangled her long legs from her bed post noting the wet slime trail coating it thickly and frowned. “Must be from the steam fog... perhaps I should consider closing my window at night?”

She got up and stretched and began doing some exercise toe touches and jumping jacks until she heard a familiar moan and meaty thwack of Moonbeam falling off his precarious perch on his pipes and she shook her head in wonder at the odd man and finishing up her naked aerobics decided to pursue her wardrobe for the day’s activities.

She had no interest in trying to navigate the open central part of the octagon and its wandering bands of thugs hanging out in the parks and gardens in front of their various great houses employers. Nor was daylight the ideal time to enter the off limits great church where black and red robed men armed with muzzle loaded pistols and long halberds of razor sharp steel prowled the immediate grounds and hallways while Council members feasted and debated into the late hours of evening. No, night would find her amongst the shadows weaving her way carefully into the church and hopefully surely down into the catacombs therein. But to have any hope of doing that she needed first to spend the better part of the day down at the public library/hall of records and while that was situated upon the octagon it was one of the many buildings along its southern edge and far removed from the semi-unofficially privet gardens and parks of the great houses or the leafy green grounds of the Great Church Council Chambers building. She would visit the library hall of records and then return for a nap and a change of clothes more suited for skulking in shadows. But for now for her day excursion she pushed the dial on the wall and her closet swooshed open and she began to tap her finger on her chin and then sucked noisily upon it as she considered her options. “Sedate yet fashionable…. Ah!”

Robyn Cox walked along the metal plate hallway of the public library hall of records her knee high boots stiletto heels clicking loudly on the shiny polished floor as her hips swiveled with clockwork pendulum precision in her tight above knee skirt of gray. A strong ribbed corset rode above the low waist belted skirt top where her belly button was on display and the frilly open lapels of her white blouse swimmed about her leaping chest over which the corset rode stopping just under her lurching heaving mounds of her unbridled breasts. A gray and gold speckled frock coat floated behind her rapid tread and the small little hat pinned amongst white frills in her upswept hair was devoid of her usual goggles this day. Instead she wore small round green tinted sunglasses upon her small nose. She carried a steam-fog umbrella which contained a lighted underside that turned on when opened in her gray leather wrist gloves. She moved with assured indifferent agitation and everyman tipped his hat to her and stepped rapidly out of her way.

She pivoted upon her heel stopped before her third clerk of the day and removed a glove and slapped it into her open gloved hand giving off a sharp report in the echoing halls where many of these clerks sat at desks half piled upon one another along its long sides.

The man half leapt out of his chair at the gloves ‘thwack!’ and looked up meekly and startled at the gorgeous young woman standing so impatiently before him with an umbrella under her arm.  ‘Was it raining,’ he wondered but did not dare take his eyes off the woman before him to glance over his shoulder at the windows that ran from floor to towering ceiling behind him. “Yes ma’am what can I do for you?”

The woman glared at him like he had just stepped on a small child while wearing iron boots and arched and eye brow above her green round lenses and coughed a snort of a laugh, “are you serious?! I have been on the voice tube all morning to you lot for the institutes need for the blue prints for the old catacombs and underworking’s of the Great Church and you tell me after several transfers and hold on’s that I have to come down her in person and look at the charts as you can’t let them be messengered over and then I get here and you give me this, ‘what do you want, ma’am’ crap?!”

“Oh bugger,” the man whispered under his breath. “Ah while I was not the one who had the privilege of talking directly to you on the voice tube I do believe I can assist you in directing your inquiry to-“ He was just leaning up out of his chair to point in a random direction when the young woman stomped her foot put both fists on either side of her proud hips and glared at him. Placing her hands on her hips like that yanked back her coat and showed her blouse to be nearly transparent where two of the largest ripest fullest most perfect huge titties jiggled their hard nipples and large ruby areolas peered unblinking out at him. They were indeed the largest most pert tits he had ever seen and as she now started tapping her foot they jiggled mercilessly before his reddening face as he quickly sat back down behind his desk sporting the first spontaneous public boner of his entire life!

“I hope you weren’t about to fob me off on some wild goose chase?!” The young woman was furious and he could only stare at her massive quivering firm globes and stutter at her hoping to the Mercies she couldn’t see his tented pants from her position. “I am tired of this runaround! Now if you can’t assist me then I demand to speak to your superior at once!”

“Now there is no need for that ma’am. I am sure I can help you with what you need.”

“You can?” Her tone leveled out and she crossed her arms under her huge full round breasts causing them to shudder even more and forcing the thin fabric to pull even tighter across the hard raised nipples and puffy areolas so that they seemed mouthwateringly on naked display before him.

“Right as rain Miss. Sure as shooting rats in a barrel I can,” his whole face was an even shade of apple red and he fidgeted in his chair unable to wrench his eyes off the frowning woman’s heaving perfection of a bosom.

“Alright then…… Well?! Are you going to help me or just sit there with that stupid foolish grin on your face all day?!”

The man coughed and grabbed a file folder off his desk which he slapped over his groin as he stood up into a half bent forward position and muttered, “right Miss if you will just follow me then.” Behind the stooped over man with his file clutched to his crotch Robyn followed desperately trying not to laugh.

The night was heavily shrouded in steam fog and Robyn both thanked and cursed the blinding mist as she moved from heavy swaying bush to tree trunk to bush as she inched her way by silent degrees to the little outcropping of metal blocks roughly a stone throws away from the side of the elongated Great Church. If the various maps she had painstakingly contrasted and committed to memory been correct then the small structures lying on the green leafy grounds of the Great Church were more promising in offering an avenue down into the catacombs then anything she could realistically reach from inside the Great Church its self. There were indeed two direct routes leading down into the catacombs from within the long gothic ribbed building but they seemed lined with several imposing doors and both ran straight through two separate small guard rooms. No, the only plausible access point she might have a chance with was located in those gathering of squat metal sheds ingloriously set off to the side of the magnificent structure and half hidden in hedges of a new planted hedge maze that had several seasons to go before it would be formidable. She could easily leap over the thigh high maze at its current height and make her way quickly to where the lumps of metal would someday be hidden by the maze in one of its many dead ends. A clever disguise, well in a few more years, as there were no maps of the maze in the public records so it would certainly not only hide the metal boxes and their hatches but it would take a bit of effort to find them by path and then by searching the hedge its self at exactly the right spot. Luck was on her side though and she made several sprinting hurdlers leaps and found herself hidden in the shadows pausing to catch her breath and looking into the swirling steam fog for any red shimmering armored guards.

Out came her tool pouch and she slipped down her goggles with their various lenses selected to low-light and magnifying as she set to work on the locks to one of the hatches. The lock was meant to keep a passerby from the days when all this was still covered in buildings from accidentally opening the shaft and falling down it, not to keep a determined person out of it. So it did not take her long to spring the cylinder lock and type the key code memorized from the library hall of records map into it sending the hatch spinning out of the way and revealing along dark shaft plunging downward.

The ominous shaft should only drop about thirty feet before bisecting into several branching catwalks that at one time would have been open to anyone looking up from streets bellow but the Council had sealed off most of the streets that ran directly under the foundations of the octagon and its buildings by encasing them into tunnels of boiler plate or removing them completely or blocking any access point they might have to the underworks.

Robyn slipped her gyro-coil gun from her holster and snugged the flower petal grappling hook end to the lip of the inside of the rim of the shaft and then carefully squeezed herself into the hatch opening and lowered herself so she hung by the handle of the gun and its wrist strap and reached up and keyed the latch to lock it closed. Then she turned up the light of her suit. Her suit was surfaced in chem-light small octagon patches and it made her entire suit glow. With her suit turned up to its brightest she gave the side of the gun a brief adjustment to a knob on its side and then slowly squeezed the trigger. The coil of line unreeled from the gun barrel and she slowly descended down the shaft.

It sure seemed longer than twenty feet till her feet touched firm footing and the side reading on the dial of the gyro-gun said ‘thirty-five’ as she locked it into place and left it dangling there for a moment. She looked around her and moved down the cat walk first in one direction and then in the next her skin tight suit glowing brightly and illuminating an almost ten foot radius around her. Satisfied that the catwalk was not sealed immediately in either direction and that nothing with huge teeth was in the neighborhood she paused at the dangling gun and pondered with her finger in her mouth. With a slight adjustment the petals of the flower grappling hook could be instantly retracted letting the metal coil and hook fall. She could then reel it back in and place it in her holster for use latter in her descent…but. She looked up the inky shaft, if she was forced to come back this way to exit the sealed off route to the catacombs then she would never in a million attempts hit that grappling hook on to that small lip around the door. And the steam canister in the gun would only give her a few dozen such attempts. It might be wiser to leave the gun behind and instantly ready to retract and pull her back up to the hatch and a known escape route than to take the gun with her and force her to find a yet unknown avenue of escape.

She removed her finger from her mouth and nodded. She would leave the gun attached to the hatch lip that way she would have one way out that she could be reasonably sure of, and she moved on following the right tunnel catwalk as that seemed the most direct route to the staircases leading down to the catacombs on the maps.

The way down was stranger than she had known in her eighteen years in Steam Cities maze of passages as much of the cat walks had been either purposely walled in dead ends or torn away or had rusted to such a point they had collapsed completely into heaps upon other catwalks and stair cases further bellow rendering those impassible if reached. Still she continued along the way of the maps general route and with a few breathless leaps of fate and a few near gangways near fall collapses she reached the firmer plated hallways of the catacombs. Here walls lined with the sealed hexagons of the deposited dead lined in endless rows from metal plated floor to metal plated ceiling all the hexagons numbered but unnamed. She passed down row after long row of these hallway-like rooms until the tombs opened out upon a great open space where obviously much super structure had collapsed and a raging ocean of water roared through the fallen debris far beneath her. There were stair cases leading down closer to the wreckage and there piles of metal to jump down upon that rose like a mountain out of the black foaming torrents. She moved from one large twisted pile of junk to the next with leaps and hand over hand climbing along half buried wires until she reached a large raised series of metal platforms that leaned out over the raging waters and she managed to swing and land upon one of their railings and pull herself up and over it back on solid land again.

She climbed up the stairs which ran along a stone wall of solid earth until she stopped dead in her lighted footprint tracks as a black shape came toward her. It was a man for which she was slightly grateful and it was a hunched back old man in a tattered waistcoat and patched baggy tweed torn cuff pants for which she was mixedly grateful (a handsome young man would have been much more delightful after her trepidations and ordeals!) he carried a blunderbuss for which she was grimly ungrateful as he clutched it to his chest and kept nervously adjusting his cracked spectacles at her as she waited patiently for him to say something.

“Mr. Poole, I take it?” She offered after feeling one of her calves start to cramp up in its frozen position with one leg up on the next step.

“Ah,er, well, maybe, who wants to know?!” He seemed to have completely forgotten he clutched a weapon to his chest and she was unarmed.

“I am Robyn Cox; my mother’s maiden name was Eliza Steam. Recently just before he died a man named Arthur Mc Higgins gave me this.” As she talked she had slowly but steadily removed a leather back pack from her back and set it upon the ground and now she pulled out the sphere and held up from her kneeling position. There was no sign of any recognition upon the man’s blinking grimy face. “He told me to bring this to you. That you would know what I should do with this. That it was my great-grandfather’s Javier Steam’s.”

The man made no reply he just seemed agitated by her presence but not entirely conscious of it. The young girl picked up the back pack by a strap in her right hand and held the metal sphere out before her in her left hand and slowly walked up the stairs as the man retreated nervously but ignoring her back up to where the stair case leveled off into a stone platform full of wooden barrels and crates and a wooden table and wooden chair. She followed him slowly but steadily wary of the blunderbuss and his nervousness.  The girl startled slightly as her feet hit the stone. She had never walked on rough uneven stone before. True she had walked on the cobblestone courtyard of Mc Higgins repair yard and the Great Church and the Great Houses parks and gardens had stone walk ways but this was one big slab of rock and it was uneven and she kept catching her toes upon it and tripping.

The man moved over to a pile of crates and tossed the blunderbuss down upon them where it made a loud clanging sound and then he moved a few more steps and half fell into a wooden chair and set an elbow upon the cluttered wooden table. She continued to follow him a bit more relaxed now that he had discarded the weapon and she walked up near him and sat down on one of the crates dropping her back pack in front of her and placing the metal sphere beside her. There was a weak glass lamp on the table with a wick burning some kind of clear sweet smelling oil but the brightness of her cat-suit full-body suit was enough to illuminate the entire area.

The man lifted up his cracked round glasses to rub his face and she could see he badly needed a shave and had a large scar running down one side of his face and his right eye was made out of some kind of clockwork lenses like her goggled on her forehead. He wore a waistcoat on his hair body done up tight but the shirt under it was mostly tatters one arm wore a shirt sleeve cuff almost as if it were a band of a wristwatch. His gray and white hair stood up on his head all in all he was unkempt and in ill condition. He lowered his cracked glasses, “Poole, is not my name. It is the location isn’t?” He jerked a thick thumb over his shoulder where hundreds of feet below them in the inky dark the black waters roared. “Black Pool is what they called this place. Goes on for miles like this. Use to be hundreds of us living down here out of reach from the Council and the guilds and the oh so great houses and all their ilk. Then the Council started their Great Church of course we called it the Great Collapse, whole world came tumbling down around us. They tried to seal us off but we gave them what for, for a while anyway. Then they started using gas in the tunnels and that pretty much did off the last of us. Anyway it’s the name of the place or use to be, the Black Pool, this is where the Leviathan was launched, remember that?” He started to move his hands about, “Yeah, puppet shows, eh? But it was real enough. It really happened. Names are often forgotten I am not surprised old Higgins would remember it as a person rather than a place.”

The man seemed to forget she was there again lost in his mutterings and musings. “So do you know anything about this metal sphere then?” She nodded over at the large heavy orb siting on the case next to her.

“Higgins’s is dead you say,” the man was picking up something off the table with his finger tips and chew it and then spitting it out and repeating this as he now looked her over.

“Yes, he was murdered by mechanicals. I know that sounds crazy but I was there I saw them do it. they even blew up his house afterwards. He gave me this metal sphere here and said to come here and find a man named Poole, but I guess he might have just meant to find this area.”

“Hmmm, must have meant the area. Your mother’s name is Eliza Steam? Well I knew your father then. Robert, fine man, one of the clockwork bunch but he came down here when it became too hot for him up there. Council thought he had become too nosey. He found something out. Not sure what though? He died down here. They killed him. Can’t remember if it was the Council guards in one of their raids or just a gas attack but,” he blew his lips to make a loud spitting sound, “gone all the same. All gone. Just me, I suppose.”

“My mother said he died in an accident when I was only a baby.”

“Well she would wouldn’t she. Sure as Hell wouldn’t want you tramping down here after him. And yet here you are none the less. Can’t beat fate.” He seemed to notice the sphere for the first time and paused with his fingers to his mouth and muttered, “No can’t beat fate.”

“So they sealed off the catacombs to destroy all you living down here at Black Pool? I mean-“

“Wha-? No they sealed off the catacombs to keep anyone from getting into their precious church from underneath or into Steam Tower and I suppose so no one would know they took all the bodies.”

“What bodies?”

“You saw all them vaults up there? All those crypts? Empty, not a corpse in the lot. Took them and ground them up for fertilizer or maybe to supplement the fish paste rations, who knows but all gone and no fresh ones ever coming down. Bodies now go into that church to be interned and well, where do they go? Just vanish. Hmm, Higgins give you that then? Mind if I see it?” He got up out of his creaking chair without waiting for an answer and plucked up the globe and spun it around in his hands and then looked at her from over the top of his broken glasses his mechanical eye whirling in its socket. “You’re a Steam then? Then I guess this belongs to you. Not a lot of you left is there.” He handed her back the metal sphere and returned to his chair where he dug into a sack and pulled out a pistol. He then dug out a fist full of nuts and turning the barrel in his hands began banging the handle of the pistol on the nuts on the table cracking them and picking up the nut meat with his finger tips and stuffing it into his mouth.

“So do you know what this thing is?” She held the globe in her hands and frowned at the man shaking off a momentary unease when she had seen him yank out the pistol.

“Wha- Yeah, it’s a key isn’t? A key to Steam Tower. It’s how you get in. Them Council blokes have one and they try and try to get in but it’s all traps and mechanical whatchamajigs and those they send in, well they don’t come back out now. Yeah it’s a key. Seen ‘em use it once before. Up there. I was captured once. Won’t take me again. No, no, your father rescued me. Rescued a whole lot of us from those sadistic bastards. He was a good man. World’s a lesser place without him. You go up to the door and you put that there in the round hole and it opens up. Simple. Then you take a few steps inside and the entire place turns yeah into ground hamburger. Even simpler. I suppose you will wanting a door next?”

“Well I… I’m not sure? I mean I was told to take this to some guy named Poole and now it turns out there is no such guy and now I find out it’s a key to Steam Tower where my great-grandfather locked himself up decades ago.”

“Oh more like several decades ago, Missy.” He went back to cracking nuts with his gun butt. “I think we can all safely say that ole Javier Steam is long dead up there in his tower. You will be chasing ghosts if you think that little ball will get you some kind of answers. I mean, do you even have any questions?!”

“I suppose it does seem foolish to risk one’s life to visit an empty tower,” the girl looked down at the orb and frowned.

“Ah, no risk. You will dead. Certain as you like, dead. But I will say this; your key is different from theirs. You see their key is like this.” He held up a single grimy fist. “And your key is like this.” He held up both of his fists side by side in front of his face. “Now when they go and put their key into the hole in the door they have to stick it back… far.” He made a fist and pushed it in front of him like he was reaching it faraway. “Your sphere will only fit in about half that way. You see the sides go out like an expanding cone and are all covered in gears and such. So maybe your key is bigger and might turn off some of those nasty blades and flaming jets and slamming shut walls and such? Or maybe not?” The man shrugged and went back to smashing nuts and picking up the meat and jabbing it into his now somewhat messy face.

“Well, I mean I have come all this way and I guess I should at least try this thing out and see if it works, but I have seen the blueprints and diagrams there are two door in the Great Church that lead down to the catacombs to doors which I am sure lead into the underworks of Steam Tower but there is a guard room you have to traverse to each door and several other very secure looking doors. I am not sure how I could ever get past all that to either of those doors.”

“Hmm, you can’t I have been and seen at least one of them remember. They were going to shove the lot of us in to trip the traps and such but the traps reset faster than you can imagine so it was just a means of execution really. Kind of sick to use ole Javier like that too as the Council represents everything he detested in life and those being done in were the sort of blokes he would have liked.”

“Well then there must be some way to get to the doors from down here. I mean that must be why I was told to come down here by Mc Higgins.”

“No, there aren’t. That’s why all this was done.” He gestured around him. To seal off the octagon and the church and the great houses and the tower from any access from below. There is no way to get to those two doors except through them there halls up there in that so called church.”

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense! Why would he send me all the way down here if there wasn’t any way to get up to those doors from here?”

“Well probably because he knew there was a third door. Yep, not far from here either. A few hours over some rather nasty gunk covered rocks but you don’t need ropes or takle just a hike and there it is. A big black door set squarely in the very bottom foundations of steel of Steam Tower its self. You see those bone heads up there don’t know that from the very beginning Stem Tower was meant to go all the way through the very center of the both hemispheres of Steam City. And while he was still alive Javier had them build that tower downward quite a ways. Of course all that is mucked up now. No way of knowing what the grand design was meant to be. Council has gone and chopped it all up and taken many of the large buildings that were in the upper hemisphere and shoved them down here so they could have room for their huge privet residences and their parks and gardens. Living like kings they do on the backs of the workers. Everything ole Javier was trying to get rid of and here it all is vile as hell.”
“There’s another door?! Down here? Unguarded? Just a walk away?”

“Hm-hm. Just down those stairs there and then across those rocky bits and then along those catwalks and back down along that bit of watery bit and there’s this big black door setting right in the middle of a mass of black metal nestled in the rock. Never finished up the underwork down here and with the Council plating everything off and tearing stuff down I guess they never will.”

“But that’s incredible! I mean it’s just a bit further and there I am!” The excited girl leapt to her feet and snatched up her backpack and started to put the sphere into it. “Can you show me the way? I can’t offer much but I did bring some items to trade.”

“Whoa! Now wait a minute. That whole unguarded bit might be a bit misleading. You see that last bit there is a stretch along this black pebble beach kind of steep in places and the black water crashes along that shore and there is some nasty creatures that live in there. Go on and take a look in that bag over there. Go on now!”

The girl frowned and dropped the sphere in her bag and shouldered it onto her back cinching it into place and then moved over to wear flies and insects were buzzing around a wet looking large sack of cloth. She opened it cautiously and recoiled at both the stench and horror of what she saw. A large severed head of some kind of amphibian almost three feet across its broad head and its eyes were as big as her hands.

“Scales like plate and three rows of small sandpaper like razor sharp teeth. Once in a while ones comes up the stairs out of the water and I have to deal with him. Luckily I got some rigging fixed up so I can get myself up out of harm’s way and pop at them.  Stubborn lot they just stand there and take it hissing like mad until they fall over dead. But out there? No such sanctuaries to flee to. They nest on that bit of black sand. Burry their eggs there and watch it from the waters like birds of prey! You wouldn’t stand a chance. What have you for weapons, uh? It takes three or four blasts from ole Betsy there and twenty minutes to reload her between shots to bring one of them buggers down.”

“How much do you want for Old Betsy?”

“Nothing doing lass. I need that weapon and besides didn’t you hear me? One shot won’t kill one of them brutes and they move fast and there will be dozens of ‘em. You can bet on that.”

“So you won’t take me along that beach, fine. But what will you take in trade to lead me up to the beach?”

“Ack! Just as pigheaded as your father was! No wonder he was on the run from the Council. But you are doubly stubborn got it from both sides of your family so it’s no wonder. Javier was a stubborn one from what one hears tell. No, I won’t be leading you to your death. I have seen enough of that for one life time and I won’t have your blood on my hands. I should have never mentioned that damn door. But I thought you had some sense in you and you seemed to have reasoned it out how pointless it would be to enter that empty tower. Huh, look lass why don’t you use that effort and sense and just leave Steam City? Huh, never thought of that did yeah? Yeah, if you can get all the way down here then you can easily slip out one of the outer vent holes. I mean did you know that since the Council took over they have started dumping the City’s waste out onto the mire? Yeah! Why yeah think them injuns are so pissed all the time. Just tons of sewage pouring out and the coal fumes and gas leaks it’s a toxic waste land out there. Ole Javier must be tossing and turning in his tower at the like. Just use that head of yours to escape this place and see the rest of the world, eh?”

“Go? Leave? Go where? Listen will you take me up to the beach or not?” The girl had crossed back over to the man who was now pouring himself something that brought back memories of her gin binge and made her stomach turn at the smell. She stood in front of him as he drained the liquid from a tin cup.

“Whatcha going to do? Try and out run them things once you reach the beach? They’re bloody fast I tell yah! And you all loaded down like that with all them packs! Ha!”

The man helped himself to another tin cup full of the oily smelling liquid. Robyn looked down at herself and frowned. She was traveling light! “I have just the one pack on my back to hold the sphere and a few trade goods so I can keep my hands free, but I can leave the trade goods here. I have an empty holster for my gyro-gun but I can leave that here too. I am far from encumbered.”

“Well, what about all them packs you got tied across your chest there, eh? You think you can run with them large bags weighing you down?” He poured himself another drink and drained it off.

“Packs across my- those aren’t packs those are my boobies!”

“Wha-?! No not those, those huge things you got strapped to your- oh my gwad.”

“Like I said those are my breasts,” the young girl put her hands on her hips and gave the man who was now leaning forward in his chair so his face was inches from her bosom a sour look and waited for him to stop staring at her boobies. It was a long wait.

“By all that is holy, they are! Them is your tits! And fucking huge too!”

Robyn gritted her teeth she was use to men and some women staring at her chest and yes she had often used her womanly endowments to her own advantage in her young life but she had never ever had someone actually ‘talk’ openly about her breasts or stare at them and acknowledge they were staring at them! Everyone before had tried to pretend they weren’t staring at them or weren’t even aware that it was so obvious they were staring at them. This was just plain awkward and she reached down and tried to button up the front of her single piece cat-suit. But it was no good. The skin tight blue-black garment was covered in small tiny pinkie nail sized octagon shaped light cells that could be turned up in brightness or all the way off by a large dial on her lower stomach. The suit buttoned up tightly from above this dial to her neck line but once the garment reached her sternum her huge breasts were simply too large for any further buttoning to be done. So her enormous cleavage ran from her neck almost to her tiny waist as her firm jutting full round breasts quivered and jiggled like white mountains upon her otherwise thin frame. She gave off trying to pinch another button over her huge mounds and just put her hands on her hips and gave the man another dirty angry look.

He filled and drained another tin cup and then whipped his lips on the back of his hand and went back to leaning forward and staring at her breasts again?! “I have never seen tits so fucking big and firm before! I got one hell of a boner popping in my pants right now! Sweet Mercies above! You could feed a whole army with them fucking heavenly jugs!”

Robyn was shocked. She blurted out a surprised breath and then felt her cheeks blush with a mixture of anger and further shock and then she was disgusted and all the while she suddenly realized the dirty old pervert was giggling and smiling as all her moods where causing her breasts to jiggle even more as her fist clenched hands shot down to her side and she leaned forward in indignant rage and then recoiled back in shock and wide eye surprise and then leaned to one side with hand on hip with an open mouth of disgust all the while he stared and cooed and clapped his hands as if her breasts were a puppet show for his pleasure!

“I bet you titty fuck donkey dicks with that snake pit! Good Lord I think I am going to explode in my pants!”

“Wha-?! You sir, are the crudest rudest most disgusting vile toad I have ever had the misfortune to cross my path.” Robyn spun away and proceeded to head in the general direction down the back side of the rock outcropping hoping that was the direction the man had said the door lay.

“Holy sheet! And one hell of an ass to match! Damn, you are as fine coming as you are going! That’s a sweet ass you have there ma’am full round… bubble butts we use to call them back in the day!”

Robyn merely glared over her shoulder with a face full of hate and rage.

“Wait now, wait! Don’t go! Wait! I have a boat! You know what that is? It is a steam powered vessel that goes on water!”

Robyn poked her head back up over the barrels that lined the backside stairs she had been descending and looked at the man with a frown though she now realized he was very near sighted and she doubted she was much more than a blonde blur to him from this distance. “A boat you say?”

“A steam launch to be precise. It can go up to that door even in this current. I been there a few times in it. You’re not the first who wanted to see that door. Though you are the first with a key to open it.”

She returned hesitantly back to the old fat man in his tattered garments. “You can take me in this steam launch to the tower despite the monsters in the water?”

“Well it will be a bit hairy that is for sure and I cannot guarantee we will make it back alive. But for the most part the creatures don’t seem to mind the steam launch it’s the bit where you jump out into the surf and run up their beach toward the door that will send them hissing fast on your heels. And that bit you understand you do alone.”

“Alright, agreed you take me in the steam launch as close as you can to the door and then I am on my own.”

“And another thing it’s a one way trip. I won’t be loitering around waiting for you to come back out of that tower or to see if that key of yours even works. I take you up as close as I can to the beach and then you jump out and make a dash for it and while you do I am gone. Understood? It will save you hundreds of yards of travel a long a beach swarming with the things but to be honest girl I don’t like your odds at all once you jump out of that boat. They will be swarming after you something fast!”

“I understand that. Now you understand this, I will not have you speak to me the way you just did and I will not have you stare at my body the way you are RIGHT NOW! My face is up here! Do you understand me?!”

“Fair enough, lass. I apologize for my words before that was right rotter of me, but as far as my eyes I can only say I will try but by the Mass lass you got some eye magnates there, you know what I mean?”

The man was already back to staring at her breasts with a wild smile on his face and Robyn gave an exasperated sigh and rolled her eyes, “right then show me to this boat of yours.”

The small skiff with its large steam boiler and hoper of coal plunged awkward against the swells and seemed to threaten to topple again and again as it crested the black waters foamy surge. “Alright this is it! Here is where you jump! Run like mad, lass. And for the Mercies sake don’t look back!”

Robyn leapt over the gunwale and landed hard in chest deep icy rank water. She crashed forward against the churning surf and waded as fast as she could against the pull and push half swimming half striding up onto the black pebbled shore. The shore was steep and lead in front of her to a large black door set back a few yards in a large black wall of metal. She struggled up the steep bank white-brown foam shooting up all around her as she dug in toes and fingers into the slimy hard black and gray pebbles. She was halfway to the door when she heard a loud explosion. She looked over her shoulder to see the old man dropping the discharged blunderbuss and one of the strange amphibian creatures spinning around in place just inches from reaching her clutching at its wound and hissing.

The skiff was sideways to the beach now rolling on the swells as the man in the vest worked the wheel with one hand and yanked out a pistol from his belt with another and fired another shot which whizzed past her ear striking a second creature which had just emerged from the shadows of the large black doors porch and which now yanked back its talon inches from her head to clutch at its ruined eye. The grim faced serious man at the steam launch wheel now yanked out his last pistol and fired it at a third creature coming along the beach at her catching it behind the front leg and sending it sprawling. But none of the injured animals were dead and they hissed and clawed at the earth and would be back upon her in only a few seconds. She scrambled around the one with the destroyed eye thrashing in front of her and continued her mad scramble for the door sunk in shadows.

She reached the large door and in the last few strides had swung her backpack off her shoulders and yanked out the sphere. The open concave slightly cone shaped opening was off to the right side of the center of the what up close she could now see were two doors and she scrambled to it taking the few strides to look down the incline and back out to the steam launch were she saw the man striking one of the creatures with an oar that snapped over its head as it tried to climb over the low sides of the steam launch. He grabbed a gaff hook next and set to work on another one that had managed to get its self half into the boat. The craft pitched crazily the wheel now abandoned and it motored out of view in a lazy circle blocked from sight by the black metal walls of the overhang’s supporting sides.

She quickly inserted the sphere as hissing began to erupt behind her and scaly paws and razor sharp claws crunched on small black bits of rock. The sphere erupted into parts meshing with gears around it and things began to spin. The great pair of doors hissed as steam blew out and they parted slowly. Too slowly! She yanked on the sphere and it resisted her pull as it reassembled its self and then yanked free as she ran to the sliding apart doors which had stopped with the removal of the sphere and now just as slowly started to close back up again. She could see several of the amphibian shapes out of the corner of her eye hustling up the incline toward her and she darted through the door and did not stop but raced along its empty corridor where lights slowly ebbed and faded and ebbed here and there. She spun the dial on her suit turning it all the way up to its fullest brightness and raced for a suddenly revealed in her suits glow a staircase a few yards ahead of her. Behind her shoulders she could hear the clatter of clawed feet upon metal tile and hissing growing in volume, at least one of the creatures had managed to follow her inside!

Slowly fifteen foot tall mechanicals began forming from the gear covered walls. They were roughly in the shape of men made out of thousands of running gears and they wielded long spears of spinning gears she raced past them and one made a step toward her but then turned and joined its brothers in attacking the amphibian creatures that had followed her inside. For indeed it had been more than one!

She paused on the steep stairs which automatically at her first step began to ascend up, an escalator to the next floor, and with hands on knees she chanced a look back as she gasped for breath. There were four of the large gear clockwork men fighting six amphibian creatures. A fifth clockwork man already lay in pieces still being clawed at and chewed on by a lone creature and a seventh scaly monster had not quiet made it through the door before it squeezed closed. It lay its front half bloody and severed with its back half guessed at on the other side of the now sealed doors.

As she watched a pair of the large lizard like creatures brought down another of the clockwork men and tore him into pieces while behind them a clockwork man speared a leaping monster and drove it to the floor stomping down on its head with a squelching popping sound. “This fight will not last long and whoever wins will come for me next!” Robyn turned and raced up the upward moving staircase taking the steps two at a time.

It was a steep ascent to the next floor and she was out of breath again, after all those large sacks of flesh on her chest weighed considerably and were not lungs! The next floor was even darker than the first and her suit was the only light. Still breathless and with as much caution as she dared she hurried forward into the large vaulted room making her way forward hopping for a spiral staircase or steam lift as Steam Tower was tall not very wide. It was a great needle high above the rest of the city especially now as the Council had removed much of the upper hemisphere of the central part of the city that would have arced up to it and replaced it with a large flat octagonal expanse of ornamental gardens and parks of trees and rumor had it the begging of a cage creatures? A zoo!

The entire walls and floors of the tower seemed riddled with pipes and gears more so than even the cluttered Steam City seemed to contain?! She raced along and as she passed the walls slowly came to life and began to move in undulations or inert gears and sprockets and cylinders suddenly coming to life and turning with oily clunks and clanks and sparks as rapidly spinning gears met the teeth of slower cogs.

Small metal arms moved up and down and around and around and pistons hummed both visible and hidden in the layers of the now rapidly moving walls. Then the scale imposed upon its self and suddenly large vast arms were chugging through the dark space the wake of their movements tugging at her golden locks though they were hundreds of feet above her, great gears meshed and grinded and all about here the heady hiss of steam rushed and screamed and caused ice to form on pipes which cracked as the pipes rattled and so she found herself now jogging her sides aching through a shower of icy flakes.

Robyn came up short and bent over her hands upon her knees gasping for breath. There were no stairs, no lift. She looked up at what must surely be the center of the great tower and could only guess at unseen expanses of gears meshing and working up its entire length! “There are no floors in here, no levels, nothing. The whole tower is just one big giant machine. What’s it for? What does it do? Is it the backup for the rest of all the other power for the city?”

“The doorways and their singular hallways seem to lead into and through the side of the tower but the center is just filled with workings no floors or rooms or anything!” She walked around calmly now as no new threats seemed to be emerging from the living walls. One by one she found each staircase leading directly up or down to its door and she could see the decaying bodies of those who had tried to get past the entry way booby-traps. “Those pair of doors surely lead up to the Council’s chambers in locked sealed and guarded in their church. And those no longer lead anywhere as the Council sealed them off long ago. And that one is the one I came in and up through.” She had made a full circuit of the inside of the tower. Its walls proved to be very thick so she could walk around its inner circumference rather quickly.

“It’s hallow then filled not with apartments or books or my great-grandfathers remains but with running machinery. So all these pipes… where’s the gauges, the valves. Where’s the controls, the panels, the switches. And what is it doing?” she left off wandering its outer edge after her third trip all the way around it and ventured back out into its middle. The floor was black metal tile and was interrupted with pipes jutting up here and there and blocks of mechanical flywheels and such but nothing resembling a control panel or even a place to take readings of any kind. She had zigzagged across the large cluttered floor of the circular tower a few times before she decided to take an analytical approach and search the entire circular floor by quadrants. After all she was certain she would never have another opportunity to search the tower and she was even doubtful she would be able to successfully leave it!

It was during this measured pacing that she found the place to insert the sphere yet again. It was in an open area near but not quiet center of the circular floor and it was little more than a concave depression in the plate. She quickly removed her back pack from off her shoulders and the orb from the back pack and slid/dropped it into place. Once again it exploded into parts that meshed and with the exposed gears of the concave depression and began to furiously spin.

Slowly the plate flooring directly in front of the spinning orb dropped several inches and parted with spouts of steam and the whole assembly slid back under the rest of the floor while more pieces emerged and reassembled themselves until there in front of the startled girl was the specular of Javier Steam! He lay in an uncovered scooped out niche of a black solid block of metal. She had to climb black metal steps to stand next to the recombinant body which looked impossibly well preserved. She reached into the open tomb and felt his corpse for signs of life so fresh did he still look though old and haggard. But the skin was cold to the touch and the neck showed no pulse. He was dead. But apparently embalmed with some kind of waxy chemical sprayed onto his body and clothing so that all was slightly filmy to the touch and smelled of beeswax. Moonbeam kept a bee hive on his rooftop she saw his bees scattering out amongst the flower boxes and small patio gardens of the houses of their neighborhood. But every time she would ask if she could come over and have him fill her honeypot he would roll his eyes back up into his head and fall over backwards off his pipes?!

Javier’s hands were not crossed across his chest but instead lay along the side of his reposing body. This was because his hands and forearms were mechanical! At first Robyn thought these mechanical arms might have been the reason for Javier’s seclusion so many decades back. Some kind of horrible accident and disfigurement but then with cautious somewhat squeamish closer study she realized they were some kind of oversized gloves he was wearing?

It took several pacing pep talks but the girl convinced herself to remove the gloves and take them from the crypt. With the large gloves removed from the deceased she now needed some more pacing pep talks before she could force herself to try them on. To do this she would have to remove her lighted suit as she was certain that the technical workings of the gloves and that of the suit would invariably clash and since the skintight garment could not simply let her roll back its wrist length sleeves she had to remove the garment either stripping down to her waist and letting it dangle or shedding it all the way off and setting it aside. She choose the later and in a few moments had slipped out of the skin tight garment and had draped it across the steps of the raised sarcophagus to allow it to continue to shed its necessary light.

The gloves slipped on surprisingly easy though they hung down past her hips in their oversized shape and each weighed a ton! At first there was simply no noticeable effect what so ever and then suddenly the gloves rattled a few of their mesh of gears and then went dead again. “I got naked for this?!”

Then she felt a sudden pin prick in both arms and squealed in alarm but before she could yank them off the gloves both rolled their forearm gears and letters rolled up in metal type that read, “Steam Cell Structure Confirmed” and the gauntlets suddenly came to life with all their gears moving and hissing steam as the joints glowed red and in the instant the heavy metal gloves had no weight at all upon her arms.

“WOW!” she held them in front of her, “True I got gorilla arms here but do these things feel powerful!” she bent down and punched a section of boiler plate flooring and looked wide eyed at it buckle and then pealed it back and crunched it in one fist like it was a piece of tinfoil. “Oh, that is so cool! I wonder what else they can do?”

There was a buzzing of whirling wheels on the right gauntlet glove and she turned over her wrist so she could read the spinning metal type as it clicked into words; “Flight” it read. And Robyn pointed the twin gloves above her head and said, “Alright then, steam on!” and vents popped out of the sides of the gloves and gouts of steam erupted and in a blur she was rushing up into the heights of the tower, racing twisting spinning around pipes and giant swinging arms and counter balance weights as she raced up to the very top where she yelled, “stop!”

She pointed the gloves down and the vents instantly reversed blowing gouts of steam downward. She hovered there her face was wet and her hair soaked and she had come very close to being scalded by the jets of steam during her pell-mell ascent. “Ah, have to remember it works better to point them down at the ground and fly that way, ugh.”

There at the upper level at the very top of the tower where it had gradually narrowed down to a small glass dome where daylight flooded in glinting on the thick glass casting rainbows in the steam jets of her arms. Here she saw a little room or more like a niche built before a great round window that was joined into the bottom half of the glass dome top and she jetted over to it and landed with only a minor stumble. The view was spectacular to say the least and she marveled at it for quite a while until she realized that in the center of the niche were two large raised empty cylinders. She realized right away her oversized gorilla gloves would fit into the pair of them and after only a slight hesitation of thought she plunged both gloves into the sockets. There was a momentary pause then a singular click and then the entire tower began to shake as she watched in utter shock and surprise she saw Steam City below her transform into a giant walking robot!

The enormous construct shambled along the Nevada hills with chunks of earth and metal falling in its wake. She controlled the lolling mammoth walking orb with her gauntlets sunk into the tower niche floor as it shuddered along in great loping strides and she raised an eyebrow as she stepped over the tiny casino, “well at least the Native Americans will be glad to see us go. Now I have always wanted to see this so called, New York.”

The end.