Iron Quill PGB - A New Benefactor

[Mako]

August, 1895

The stern faced man leaned forwards, little grey eyes peering intently over his spectacles at the young man at the front of the room nervously clutching his notes. The poor boy was petrified, that was obvious, but then at the age of eighteen he probably hadn't expected to end up facing a Guild panel when he arrived this morning.

"So, Mr... Jansen, was it? Good. Mr Jansen, why do you think the guild should give you our very valuable space and equipment for this little project of yours?" Standing in front of the desk that held the four Guild assessors, Jansen wished he wasn't sweating. He tried to speak in a clear voice, but his London accent slipped through in his stress.

"Well, sirs, I reckon I can figure out a way to find changes in the Aether, like the Breach was. I mean, if we can find them, maybe we can get them open whenever we want to." He swallowed nervously, worrying the edge of his already dog-eared notes as the officials mutted to each other. After an eternity, they turned back to him, and one cleared his throat. Jansen had been watching them, but still jumped when they addressed him.

"Very well, Mr Jansen, you may have three years to present us with a device capable of monitoring aetheric fluctuations. You will be provided with the facilities you need, and will report personally to us every two months. Is that clear?" The shock and relief numbed Jansen, and he could only nod in response.

May, 1901

Adran Newell knelt quietly on the debris strewn rooftop, watching the two Guild guardsmen chase down the street after a scrawny youth. The sandy haired smuggler decided to find out what this man had done to annoy the Guild enough to be chased halfway across the district. He signalled to an empty building across the street. Silently, two riflemen split off from the shadows as they moved away. Newell kept to the roofs, keeping easy pace with the scene below that wound between the crowds. Up ahead, a couple of police constables on their patrol took notice of the disruption, as well as a guild dog handler and his charges.

The youth made a sudden left turn, ducking into the side streets and away from the constables. Lucky choice, boy, thought Newell as he overtook the chase. Away from the main streets, the odds were better for the one being chased. The youth turned right, into an alley the hunting man knew was a dead end. Maybe not so lucky. Still, time to end this farce. Sighing, he shook his head and dropped down to street level right in front of the stumbling runner.

Jansen barely had time to see the figure land in front of him before the man raised a large pistol, aiming straight at his head. He couldn't see anything other than the dark eyes of those two barrels gazing at him. He certainly didn't see the crate he tripped over as the man fired two shots in quick succession, narrowly missing Jansen as he fell. Face down in the mound of crates and rubbish was not a pleasant place to be, but he lay there and played dead in the hope that the bounty hunter would leave.

"Get out of that filth, we both know I didn't even graze you boy." The cold contempt in the voice was a very bad sign. He felt a hand on his ankle moments before he was yanked off his resting place and flipped onto his back to stare up in terror at the man with the sandy hair. Risking a glance past the looming figure, he could see two dead guardsmen, and a third coming round the corner with some dogs. The sandy haired man reached down and pulled the youth up out of the dirt, as the dogs sprinted in, teeth bared. Instinctively the youth went to shout a warning, but before he did so the dogs exploded with blood. When he looked again, they had both been shot, and their handler was dead on the ground with the other guards.

"Before anything else, let's start with why the Guild want you so much, boy." His rescuer didn't seem any friendlier than before, but the youth found himself telling the man about his past. The day when he'd become a research prodigy with Guild funding, access to the University of the Queen's Empire, and his work on detecting aether fluctuations. How his initial work had gone well, but he had found that he needed to carefully calibrate his machine to the soulstone powering it. Throughout his recounting, the youth gripped sporadically at the little brass thimble on a cord around his neck as if it were a life vest.

The sandy haired man listened impassively to the tale of success, until the youth told him how the breach had reopened five days before he had first been due to demonstrate his scanning machine to the Guild. The event had nearly overloaded his scanner, demonstrating its effectiveness but also frying some of the circuits. The man's face hardened as the youth told him that within three days of that, he had found his lab emptied and sealed, his home ransacked, and himself on the run from the Guild. Since then he had survived on the street, nursing his hate for the guild and running endlessly from the guards sent to hunt him down. The man looked calculatingly at the youth as his tale wound down, then bluntly said

"If I gave you a chance to repay the Guild, could you build another scanner, Mr..?"

"Jansen. Henrik Jansen. And no, I don' have any of the plans left. They destroyed everything in my lab and my home. Everywhere they thought I might have something stored." His eyes widened suddenly. "Except maybe me test chamber. Used a second lab off the main campus in case summat went wrong, but I never told them 'bout it. They might not've found it." His face fell again. "But I'll never be able to get 'em back for what they done." The man smiled a cold smile.

"I can help you do just that."

June, 1901

Jansen stood in his spare lab, feeling conflicted. The lab had been untouched, forgotten by everyone since his flight. But the two guardsmen sprawled in the corner whether had been dragged after the man slew them worried him. Newell, he had said his name was. And if Jansen built the scanner, he would help him pay back the Guild. Jansen fingered the thimble around his neck again, looking at the hastily rebuilt scanner. It was almost ready. He'd even had the parts for two, but without a calibrated pair of thimble and soulstone, the second one was useless. He had other thimbles, in fact the man Newell was inspecting the delicate tracery of silver that ran around the inside of one. But the soulstones meant for those thimbles had been in his other lab. He had explained this carefully to Newell, stressing that the resonance signal generated by the brass and silver patterning had to be exactly right.

"And using the wrong thimble results in?" he had said, showing vague interest that made Jansen uneasy.

"A big explosion" had been his response, although maybe he shouldn't have told him that; the man did seem a little unhinged. Still, he had finished the assembly, only hampered a little by Newell's demand for it to be portable. The last thing to do, was to set the thimble in place. He slid the cord from his neck, and carefully twisted the brass device into the scanner. Newell gazed at the scanner, his eyes gleaming. In the distance they heard the sounds of guards calling for their comrades. Discovery wasn't far away.

"Time to go, Mr Jansen. Take everything you might need, we won't be coming back here again." Newell gestured to one of his men that had come with them, who ushered the flustered Jansen to the door. Newell was gazing into space absently, still toying with the thimble. Then he took a pearly stone from his pocket, and slid it into the second scanner along with the thimble. Almost casually he flicked the scanner on and they disappeared into the night, Jansen protesting all the way about the damage it could do. It wasn't long before the guards arrived, and they could hear them calling for their Captain to look at the room from the shadows of the nearby buildings as they snuck away.

As they eased further away from the newly found laboratory, Newell showed no interest in the guards' discovery of the second device. He still showed no interest as the calm of the night was broken by a sickening luminescence and the screams of wounded guardsmen. Jansen looked at his new benefactor, wondering if he was actually any better than the Guild. In the peculiar light of the soulstone explosion, Newell's expressionless face was a leering, demonic visage.

[Sliver Chocobo]

I'm going nit pick and say the correct dates are 98PF and 114PF

---------- Post added at 08:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:23 PM ----------

But it's an intriguing story nevertheless

[Mako]

Yah, I ran off earth timeline as that's what the main story is in (because when it gets given a date, it goes back to before the breach reopened so it seemed sensible). But I probably should have gone for the PF dates...

[Sliver Chocobo]

The date counts the years since the breach first opened, the book uses both anyway, it was just a nitpick I something I would have preferred

[El Indio]

Very nice; very nice, indeed! Your writing is clean and easy, and you kept the action moving without a hitch. You sketched out your characters well, and you did a good job of playing them off one another to create narrative contrast. My only quibble is that Newell's decision to follow Jansen felt a bit forced, more in how it was said than in the act itself. Otherwise, a great little story. Well done!

[Mako]

Can you give me a pointer on what you mean with that one? I kind of hamstrung myself trying to keep it from being obvious which side he was on at the start (despite the main story making it really obvious!) and I'd be very interested to see which bits I needed to smooth out more.

Thanks for the pointers!

[El Indio]

I'd say that the whole sentence ("The sandy haired smuggler decided to find out what this man had done to annoy the Guild enough to be chased halfway across the district.") is actually superfluous. You have already described Jansen being chased halfway through the district, and it's obvious that Jansen intends to intervene, because he's watching from a rooftop and signals his friends to move into position. As a reader, I'm willing to take it for granted that he has an interest in the case from those points alone. As for his exact reasons, his later behavior makes it pretty clear that he's a self-interested man who is working against the Guild. With so many motivations being shown in the story, that one instance of telling stuck out like a sore thumb to me.

(Not that I am against telling, mind -- I recently read a very interesting op-ed about how telling is the one thing fiction does that no other art form can do -- but this is one case where I think it was unnecessary.)

[Mako]

Ah yes, i see what you mean. I was trying to convey a sense that he had been planning to just step in and start shooting, but actually decided to take an interest in the reason the guild were so annoyed instead. But I guess I shortened it too much to make that work, while leaving it too long to let it become clear on its own!

Maybe I should have gone without the word smuggler, and used something more generic, then fluffed out the fact that ordinarily he wouldn't give a damn but on this one occasion he was curious. Which would have gone way over the word count potentially but made more of Newell's rather odd mental state.

Or taken that sentence out (it looks so clunky now!) and just had something short about him having followed the chase for a while.