“You’re always doing paperwork” I said to the captain one day. The young girl looked up at me.

“And you’re always hazing Roderick, aiming your revolver at Ezra, shoving Marcus into the wall, -“

               “You make it sound like they don’t fight back,” I laughed, “What does that have to do with your paperwork though?” I asked her with a shrug, leaning against the wall. She smiled slightly and sighed.

              “I thought we were sharing,” She said warmly.…

   A while after my first few weeks at the Rejected Gear, I went to catch up with Leander’s younger brother, Aurelian.  I had told him I was a pirate a long time ago but I don’t think it ever really set in until this conversation.

“So you weren’t kidding. You’re seriously a pirate, Ara? You don’t work; you just steal other people’s hard work?” He asked me over a sip of ale. I expected his reaction to be a little less negatively judgmental but I had to remember that he wasn’t a little…

  I shifted my posture slightly in my seat as I felt the dark, almond shaped eyes of Virote’s first mate, MinhTu, staring me down from across the doorway. I kept my unsteady gaze attentive to the wooden floor planks of Captain Bennett’s study. The air in the room was thick with the awkward avoidance of eye contact and unsteady heartbeats of all those waiting for the captain to sign the paper in front of her.

“So these are your terms?”  I perked up when she spoke. Virote gave one slow…

It was all in an honest days work, or so I kept telling myself. I mean, women were not usually allowed on ships of any kind so I had to do something.

How was I going to get to that cargo if I could not even get on the ship?

Then it hit me that there are two socially acceptable professions for a single woman in the Victorian Era. A prostitute and a seamstresses. So I went with the easiest money I could make...a seamstresses.

I would go to the First Mate, I would ask to be…

Size

• 70ft long, about 30ft wide, and at the Envelope
• 50ft long, about 17ft wide at the Gondola

Power Plant

• Experiment High pressure Steam/Electric Boiler
• Prototype Large Scale Aetheric Extraction Reactor

Propulsion

• 4 Independently controllable propulsion pods
• Primary- rotary steam engines with 4 blade props
  • Speed- at 75%…

***Please read Back to the Drawing Boards first***

“Will you just stop already??” Tim yelled, running through the streets of White Chapel as he fired the MK2 about a foot over the man’s head he was chasing.

“Christ!!!” The man said in a thick accent, flailing about as he ran through the streets, “You’re going to kill me with that bloody voodoo rubbish you’re shooting at me, why the hell would I stop, you damn yank”

Peter O’Callahan…

The sun began to peak its head above the horizon. The light winding its way in to every nook and cranny it could find, including the yet completed roof of the lab just on the outskirts of London. Inside sat a sleeping scientist, leaning back on two legs of a chair that had been waging a constant battle with gravity since just after he’d fallen asleep. With sketches on the table, a tool in his hand, and an access panel open on the propulsion pod of the majestic air ship close behind…