Hey all. Back after a long hiatus. I've been really busy looking for a job (and still am...ugh...), but I've gotten a few ideas I can't shut up. This following bit is something I'm just writing on the fly, but it's the culmination of several weeks of mental tinkering. It's sort of a hybrid of Full Metal Alchemist, Bas-Lag, an The Iron Dragon's Daughter.

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The city was like a puddle of civilization congealed at the spot where the river emerged from the gorge. It was a foaming torrent out of the plateau's side, forming a small lake before sluggishly moving along its course.

The buildings, once the wautle-and-daub shanties of the peasantry had been replaced by the crooked, utilitarian appartment buildings that the party had mandated. The streets were narrow stone lanes, their new pavement already forming potholes and cracks.

Down the river was the Industrial district. The steel mills and auto factories and foundries for making bullets and rifles. The Industry belched out thick, greasy smoke and sooty clouds that inveigled their ways into the overcast sky.

The Oil and Uranium refineries were the worst. The Geophilosophers who worked with Uranium weren't the most efficient, and a fine dust of thorium was dumped into the water and air.

The river carried the contaminants downstream, but the land funnelled the air towards the gorge, away from the sea. The clouds rained acid and a fine layering of sickening soot.

It was hard to live in Twigh, but not impossible. Take, for instance, Josef Helm, the factory worker. He is one of the men who work the smelter, as is shown by his strong hands and shaven head. He spends his days wearing goggles of smoked glass and a lead apron. He has a scar on his left arm where a drop of molten steel made its way through his heavy leather-and-ceramic gauntlets.

He rides the train home every night, to the small stone building he lives in with his wife and two children. Lanterns hang from the ceiling beams of their house. He brings home money to pay for food, taxes and lamp oil. His oldest son, Edgar, though only twelve, works as a street sweeper, and brings home a silver penny every fortnight. That is enough to pay for his clothes, and his sister's.

Josef married young to an Uplander woman named Sara. That was before the revolution, when the Partisans swept the capital and killed the king and his court--efficiently, of course. A bullet each, right at the base of the skull. They were brutal to dissenters, but kept the trains running on time. The poor could choose to work on farms or in the cities. It wasn't that bad.

Sara was an adept housekeeper. She saved up Josef's extra money, planning on buying a new lantern from one of the Geophilosophers in Angle End, one that wouldn't need coal oil. She still managed to buy meat from the butcher and bread from the baker. Josef might feel chagrin if he knew how well David the butcher knew his wife, but the domestic troubles of one couple are not important to the tale on the whole.
No matter what suffering comes from it.

David the butcher was known by almost everyone in Riverside and Angle End. He was a stout, muscular man with lank hair and narrow, serpentine eyes.

He remembered names. That was his talent. He was a passable butcher, but he was a businessman first and foremost. He knew the wives of the factory workers, some better than he knew others, and he knew the apprentice Geophilosophers--Isaac Grimm bani Daniel Lewis, a fidgeting whelp who bought three pounds of pork every fortnight, came to mind.

Also, however, he knew Johannes "Jack" Foster bani Niall Illborn. And it is with a visit to David the Butcher by young Jack, that the story truly began.

cool. very good.