The Updates

Transport In the City

Today the subways still exist, and (largely due to their exceptionally robust design) still work just as well as when they were first built. They are owned and maintained by the Ministry of Public works, who are the ones who provide oil for the wheels and employ members of the Steamworkers' Union to do the routine maintenance on the carriages.

Taxis: The devastation wreaked by the end of the Last War meant all the streets of the city had to be re-paved. This provided an opportunity: the Grey Order had produced wonderful steam-and-clockwork powered horseless carriages which chug along marvellously so long as there are special grooves on the streets to guide them. The repaved streets had the correct sorts of grooves added, and the Ministry of Public Works rents a number of taxis from the Grey Order and sublets them out to taxi drivers - keeping a small number back to provide civil servants with a handy car pool.

The Taxis do not go into the slums, but most other districts have at least a certain amount of coverage - in general, districts which are either well-off (like the noble quarter) or have a lot of places that people are liable to want to take taxis to (like the craftsman's quarter or the government district) have better taxi coverage than those that don't.

Wings: Clockwork metal wings, complete with a control glove which responds to minute movements of the right hand, are the status symbol of the rich and powerful. Many models are available in a variety of styles - large feathery wings for benign philanthropists, frightening bat wings for those who simply must look frightening and diabolical, garishly painted gossamer wings for fashion victims...

One mustn't leave one's wings unattended on the street for long, mind. They'll get stolen: wing-theft is common, mainly because the target of the theft is also a handy getaway vehicle.

Sabotage of a man's wings is very, very wrong, but also very easy. Simply pulling out a gear or two will prevent them from functioning.

Rumours about transport

The subways are haunted. If you step on the wrong train, it'll whisk you away to the land of the dead forever.

It's probably just me, but have you ever noticed how there's a stop named Shell Beach on some of the older maps? And no trains ever seem to go that way...

The Steamworkers' Union don't actually do any work on the trains. It's the beggars you always see on them that do all the maintenance. That's why they don't get moved on.

There's a clever way you can sabotage clockwork wings. It's dead easy to just rip out a few gears, but that'll just stop them working. If you know how, though, you can knacker the landing mechanism, so the stupid toff who owns them won't realise his wings are busted until he tries to land. I've seen it happen twice now and I'm still laughing. Wheee! Splat!

I don't ride on the subways myself. They say the Emperor himself designed them. Would *you* willingly sit on a block of metal that zooms around at high speeds and that was designed by a dribbling loony?

Never take a trip in a red taxi: the Grey Order can eavesdrop on everything you do in there, and even take control of the thing away from the driver. The government know about this, of course - that's why civil servants always ride blue or green or black taxis.

The subway tunnels connect with the catacombs beneath the city in some places. The sewers, too.

The Steamworkers' Union and the Clockworkers' Guild hate the taxis. Hate them. They're an example of Grey Order technology operating smoothly and efficiently for the benefit of all. My uncle's a taxi driver and last week he was beaten up by a gang of Union heavies, who then smashed his taxi into little bits.

There's no way of stopping the trains on the subway - not even in an emergency. One day I saw a small girl fall off the platform. The train had a good five minutes to stop, but it just powered on right over her.

The inventor of the clockwork wings was murdered by shamanic worshippers of the Sky, who consider his invention a blasphemy, a brutal invasion of the sacred firmament by the unworthy.

The reason Shell Beach is on some of the older maps is that it was a codename for a station secretly built on the other side of the Wall, so that the Emperor could transport forces there en masse. There was a bureaucratic cock-up, and the maps for the secret Imperial forces got switched with the regular maps. The station got taken apart but the tunnel still exists, you could try to find it amongst the subway passages if it weren't for the risk of being squashed by a passing train.

No, Shell Beach was the station under the Palace. It got burned to the ground during the revolution and now it's boarded up. I heard it had a secret passage connecting it with the innermost chambers of the Palace-- it was going to be used as an escape route when Horizon fell, but everything happened too fast.

Clockwork wings were invented by a shamanic cult following the Sky, in order to convince people to ascend to the Heavens and abandon the earthly realm.

There are at least three subway trains now that have gone wrong and can't stop at stations. They just keep on going round and round. The people on board have all starved to death.

There's an intelligent race of rat people wot live in the subway.