The Albatross Express | Holo-simulation | HoloArcade
The Drifting Isles move a few miles a year, and every chart drawn of them is a lie the Guild keeps filing.
Arthur Pemberton inks corrections in the margins while the sea under him refuses to hold still. Winifred Pemberton has set a thousand accounts in order and stops at the last line of her own. Bea Langford holds a chartered deck with too much patience for a captain her age, and no one asks why. You board the Albatross Express out of Highmoor Sky-Dock as a fellow traveler, new to the route, seated beside Oliver Penhale, who has already decided the light will be right somewhere over the water. Hattie Crewe logs the hull out and watches it go.
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Brightwell's Workshop takes in whatever arrives broken and sends it back working, or admits it cannot.
1 sceneSteampunk
Sepia Photograph
Music
Highmoor Sky-DockHarbor Town runs the moorings, the turntable, the levers and the loading cranes, and the dock takes whatever the sky sends it: freight, mail, passengers with too much luggage and reasons they keep to themselves. Walk the riveted deck and the plating rings underfoot; the air is wet iron and coal smoke, the glass arch sweats, and someone is always counting crates out loud. Come at dawn and you get the crews; come at dusk and you get the ones watching which hold glows.Board if you must. Just know the manifest rarely matches the cargo, and nobody down here asks why.
Sepia Photograph
Music
Brightwell's WorkshopGuild-certified benches, a vice that has bitten more thumbs than it counts, and shelves along the brick that nobody has inventoried in years. Regulars come for the workbench area and the stool beside it, for the storeroom, for the back door left open to the hills.Step in and sawdust and cold metal find you first, then the light through the tall windows, thick with floating grit. Nobody looks up. Stay long enough and the bench starts asking what you brought.
She has spent a lifetime setting other people's accounts in order and cannot settle her own.
1 outfitSteampunk
Sepia Photograph
Voice
???Silver hair poufed high and gone soft at the edges, fair skin lined deep, gray eyes that drift off mid-sentence. A small woman, and hard to catch: she watches the passing traffic of the quays the way other people read, taking it in and filing it. She writes. Whatever she is working on stays under her arm and out of sight.Past her prime and working anyway, she keeps an attic room and a cheap pen, and she has worn the shine off her own name by asking after other people's. What she cannot manage is the part that comes after the asking, the part where a thing is finished and handed over. She stops at the last line. Every time.
The harbormaster of the Drifting Isles keeps the ledger closed and the horizon open, and trusts neither.
1 outfitSteampunk
Sepia Photograph
Voice
???Stocky, brown-skinned, black hair pulled into a bun that never slips, she works the quay with a manifest in one fist and a brass spyglass in the other. Every hull that ties up gets weighed, logged, and watched. She grants berths the way other people grant pardons.She is Harbor Town to the bone, and the water she scans is the same water she will not let anyone else name. Ask what she is counting out there and she will hand you a mooring fee.
