✎ Fel's Creative Journal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tinfoiltennis) wrote2010-12-01 05:57 pm
tinfoiltennis) wrote2010-12-01 05:57 pm
✎ chapterfic - hetalia/ebz - it was not meant that we should voyage far [1/?]
Title: It was not meant that we should voyage far. [1/?]
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia/Echo Bazaar
Characters: Every nation ever at one point or another. This part: Canada, America, and a few random extras.
Rating: PG for this chapter.
Summary: An Echo Bazaar crossover AU. Fallen London: once capital of the British Empire, now home of the Bazaar, a mile underground and a boat ride away from Hell itself. Deep. Dark. Expensive. Marvellous. Here you can find everything from immortality, to unnervingly good mushroom wine.
Or so the stories go.
But stories can rarely be trusted, and all the wildest stories in the world couldn’t have prepared Alfred and Matthew Jones for what they would find when they descended into the fallen city on a journey that would lead them right into the heart of a rebellion against the Masters of the Bazaar themselves…
Word Count: 5031, this part.
Notes: Holy hells, Fel is writing a chaptered fic, everyone run for the hills. Started as my NaNo project for this year (which I won, yaaaay), and… it’s gonna be a long haul, guys. The title is from an HP Lovecraft quote, “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” The EBZ people describe their ‘verse as “more comic horror than cosmic horror”, so it fits. :’D
Warnings: General warnings: A crossover with a (very addictive) online game, a lot of speculation and elaboration on my part on the universe of that game, human!AU, the occasional bit of 1800s sensibilities, and later on in the fic, a lot of OCs. :’> This chapter: not so much really, except for NaNo quality writing and a slow start.
✎ ✎ ✎
Our mom always used to tell us something back when me and my brother Al were still just kids. “Don’t you go looking for trouble, boys, because trouble will inevitably find you.” Well, actually she didn’t say that in so many words, but the way that she did say it isn’t exactly fit for saying in polite company. She also said it in French. Maybe that’s part of the reason that it always stuck in my head, but Al… Al was another story.
Alfred and I are twins, two sides of the same coin. Or at least, that’s how people describe us. We definitely look alike, sure, but after that… that’s where the similarities end, really. Al’s always been loud (almost obnoxious), opinionated (rude) and enthusiastic (in everyone else’s faces), and me? I’m just quiet. People tend to mistake me for Alfred at least once a week.
Never the other way around.
It’d be nice if people did remember I exist every once in a while, but I’ve discovered that you can learn a surprising amount when you’re just stuck in the background. While Al goes around doing all the talking and the action, I watch people, and I notice things. And sometimes, they’re useful things. But I’ve never been good at getting people to listen to me. Maybe if I had been, me and Alfred would’ve never gotten into this mess.
… Sorry, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I guess this would start making more sense if I told you a little more about us first. I already told you my brother’s name, but mine is Mathieu, although most people tend to call me Matthew or even just Mattie. Alfred and I were born in the United States of America in the July of 1868, to an American father and a French-Canadian mother. The French ran strong in Mom, giving her both a fiery temper and a headstrong, independent disposition. I guess that’s where Alfred gets it from; you just can’t say no to either of them. I take more after our father, I guess, apart from the French. Alfred understands it, but he’s never really caught on to speaking in it the way I do, which is why he always ended up missing half of Mom’s advice.
What he did catch onto was Mom’s stories. Alfred’s always loved stories – adventure stories, magic stories, stories about pirates, you name it, Al’s probably willing to listen to it. The only thing Al’s ever loved more than a good story is the chance to go out there and try and have a story of his own worth telling. So when the stories about the Fifth City started making their way over the Atlantic, it wasn’t really that much of a surprise that Al just lapped them right up, even right into our teens. Glim, the Unterzee, the Bazaar, the Shuttered Palace – there wasn’t even all that much that made it across to our little town in New England, and I’ve since found out that most of them were exaggerated or just completely off. After all, I never thought that I’d ever actually be going there. It was across an ocean and a mile underground, which should have made even the idea of it impossible, right?
Wrong. I made a stupid mistake when I thought that; I forgot to factor in Alfred. After all, Al might have had a tendency to run into things without looking first, but even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to actually make it to Fallen London, right?
Right…?
✎ ✎ ✎
Matthew Jones didn’t ask for much. Really, he didn’t. He was happy with his life; helping his mother out around the house, helping his father out with his work as a carpenter, popping down to the local tavern with his friends when he had time to spare. But if he could have one wish right now, it was that his brother – his loud, brash twin brother who liked to forget that Matthew even existed half the time except when it was convenient for him – would stop waving a flimsy piece of paper in his face while Matthew was trying to read.
“Mattie, have you seen this?” he demanded, breathless and red-faced from where he’d just rushed into the house. Oh God. Alfred had that tone in his voice. The excited, enthusiastic one. The one that said ‘I am about to suggest something extraordinarily stupid and reckless and there is nothing that you can do or say to stop me from doing it or from dragging you along.’ The one that usually meant that in the ensuing mad adventure, some sort of disaster would only narrowly be averted and Matthew would have to avoid being seen in public for the following two weeks in case people mistook him for Alfred and started causing trouble for him. The one that, last time it had seen the light of day, had eventually resulted in the near-destruction of half the neighbourhood’s clothing after a stray bullet from a mistimed shot had broken the lock on Mr. Hanks’s goatpen, sending the beast roaming through the town and eating everything that dared to be foolish enough to lie in its path. Alfred didn’t mean to cause trouble; once you got past the obnoxious ego, he was actually quite well-intentioned. But boy did he have a knack for creating chaos.
“I’d be able to see it better if you didn’t keep on waving it in my face, Al,” Matthew sighed, pushing his glasses up his face and wondering what crazy idea his twin would be dragging him into this time. Alfred beamed at him – albeit a little sheepishly – and stepped back a little, handing him the paper with an almost palpable aura of excitement. No, in fact, his brother was practically vibrating as he waited for Matthew to read the flier. Matthew sighed – inwardly, this time – and looked down at the paper in his hand. It was weathered, and a little tattered at the edges, and looked like it had been ripped off the side of a building. Actually, considering Alfred’s track record, it probably had been ripped off the side of a building, hadn’t it…
“Messers. Selby and Johnstone, esquire, providers of voyages both exciting and convenient, proudly present a NEVERBEFORESEEN OPPORTUNITY for the DISCERNING and ADVENTUROUS Gentleman or Lady. For a LIMITED TIME ONLY, join us on a THRILLING adventure on one of our newly-commissioned fleet of airborne dirigibles to descend to the DEEP and MYSTERIOUS place of their invention, the heart of FALLEN LONDON, a mile underground and sequestered in the CAVERNOUS space they call THE NEATH…”
Matthew looked up from the paper and back to his brother, his expression incredulous. “Fallen London? Al, that’s –”
“An awesome idea, right?” Alfred interrupted, grin widening until it practically stretched from ear to ear. There was a manic gleam in his blue eyes, and it suddenly dawned on Matthew that it was going to be a very, very long day. “Think about it, Mattie, when are we ever gonna get this opportunity again? We don’t have to just listen to all the stories, we can actually go and see what it’s like for ourselves!”
“We?” Matthew said cautiously. Yes, he had been right, his brother was going to try and drag him into this.
“Sure! I mean, you’re coming with me, right?” Alfred blinked at him completely guilelessly behind his glasses, and Matthew sighed, making the third one in as many minutes. That was the thing about Alfred; he didn’t stop to consider that people might not be as enthusiastic about something as he was, but he was so completely innocent while doing it that Matthew always felt bad when he tried to turn him down. He liked his brother, he really did, but sometimes…
“I don’t know, Al…” he said slowly, biting his lip as he glanced at the flier again. The good messers. Selby and Johnstone went on in detail to describe the various adventures the Neath could bring, how this “once-great capital of the British Empire” was now “no less great, a raw and untested hub of activity and intrigue on the tip of a New World, blending both magic and scientific thought”, how what “in previous years was merely the province of the well-connected or the local” was now a possibility for any who wished to experience a taste of the supernatural for themselves, rounding the entire thing off with an invitation for all those interested to make their way to the brand new dirigible port in New York city. They’d certainly done their best to make the trip sound attractive, in a dangerous, mysterious sort of way. But even so, there was something about it that made Matthew uneasy. After all, a lot of the stories that came out of the city weren’t exactly friendly. Every city had its problems, and even before the Fall of London (as the more sensational accounts put it), London had had all of the problems that came with being a sprawling metropolis. Being a mile underground only seemed to add more of them, becoming more mysterious and dangerous the more stories you listened to about them.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of it,” he said finally, trying to inject a note of reason into the situation. “We hardly know anything about what’s down there, nobody does. It doesn’t feel right.”
“But that’s the point!” Alfred declared, brushing Matthew’s words aside like flies. “No one really knows what’s down there, so we can go down, take a look, and come back up and tell people what really goes on! It’d be like something from the Age of Discovery all over again!” Matthew’s heart sank. That’s it, he thought to himself gloomily. With Alfred in a mood like this, there was absolutely no reasoning with him anymore.
He tried anyway. “It could be dangerous! What if you go down there and get hurt?”
“It can’t be that bad, Mattie! People still live there, right?” Matthew had to admit that his brother had a point, but before he could open his mouth, either to say so or to try to talk Alfred out of it before it was too late, his brother spoke again. “Besides, it’s not like we can’t defend ourselves, right?” He pointed at himself with a thumb, a cocky grin on his face. “Best shot in town, remember? You’re worrying too much. You’ll see, we’ll get there, have a look around and we’ll be back at home within six months. I already got all the money together, I’ve got just enough saved to cover it. It’ll be fine.”
“Alfred, I’m really not sure –“ he tried again, knowing that it would be useless.
“Aw, c’mon, Mattie, please? It wouldn’t be the same if I went without ya!”
Darn him, he had to pull that card, didn’t he? And the thing was, it worked every time. Matthew looked at him doubtfully and lifted his glasses to rub at his eyes, feeling a headache coming on. He ought to say no. He ought to tell Alfred to handle things on his own if he wasn’t going to listen to his advice for once. He really ought to. But – Alfred was too prone to getting in trouble for his own good, whether he went jumping right into it or not, and what if something happened to him? Someone had to look out for him, and it wasn’t as if Matthew could let him go alone into somewhere like that…
“Fine,” he sighed, feeling as exhausted as if he’d run five miles as opposed to just trying to reason with his twin. “You win, Al. Just tell me when it is we’re going and I’ll get packed.” Alfred’s beaming grin stretched even more impossibly wide as he sprang forward and hugged his brother (“Awesome, I knew you’d agree in the end, you won’t regret this, promise!”) before dashing off to make a list of the things they would need.
Poor Matthew didn’t know it, but that agreement might as well have gone down in history in the great cosmic ledger of famous last words.
He had no idea what he and his brother had just got themselves into.
✎ ✎ ✎
The dirigibles used by the company that Messers Selby and Johnstone ran were only a recent invention, and one that probably would not have even been conceived had it not been for the Fall of London some twenty six years before. Although no longer part of the British Empire or even the country of England itself since its “translation” to the darkness of the Neath, trade and diplomacy with the fallen city and the world above had gradually been re-established. By the present time, those countries that still had ties with the city treated the place as its own city-state, just as viable as any of those that had once operated and thrived within Italy. And just as with any state, the resources available in the Neath had also spread; not only the raw export materials such as Glim and the mysterious Nevercold Brass Silver, but also technologies such as the secret of mass-produced flight.
How exactly the dirigibles stayed airborne remained a carefully guarded secret and a mystery despite the constant and wild speculation of the surface press and the common masses; while similar in appearance to the hot air balloon, they appeared for all intents and purposes to be propelled for the main part by a variant of the steam power more commonly used on the railways that had sprung up in the most industrialized and forward-thinking nations throughout the past century. And these same industrialized and forward-thinking nations had concluded that a technology such as this was worth investing in. Viable flight! Faster travel between continents made possible! The voyages were still only barely comfortable and the technology itself still in its infant stages, but as more dirigible companies were established and more skyports were built to house the machines and crew and to provide a convenient starting point for commercial voyages, the trend was fast picking up both notability. The New York Times had even gone as far to say in print that the new-fangled contraptions were the symbol of the future and of the march of progress, likely to replace ships as the main mode of international travel in a matter of decades.
That didn’t mean that Matthew had felt comfortable about travelling across an ocean in one. The flying contraption – with its great swathes of ballooning silk canvas above the deck, slowly inflating to a state where they made the craft strain at the ropes that held her tethered to the ground, the colossal pipes at either side of the stern ready to pump out steam and the gaseous waste from the engine room, and the crowds of people preparing to take their tiny pre-paid bunks for the duration of the voyage – hadn’t done much to make him feel completely at ease about flying over a giant body of water inside of it. He was all for new technologies, but the Atlantic Ocean was big.
Still, he had to admit, he’d been glad to have Alfred with him when they’d reached the skyport, their traveling coats and bags slung over their backs in the warm September day. Alfred’s enthusiasm was always infectious, and if there was one thing Al was more enthusiastic about than almost anything else, it was the idea of flying. His eyes lit up just at the idea of it. Matthew had a sneaking suspicion that Alfred would probably find some way to get himself hired on a dirigible as part of the crew once their trip was over, if he could help it. He’d eagerly chattered away in Matthew’s ear as they’d waited to hand over their tickets and find their small lodgings for the next month, and Matthew had been almost surprised at how much Alfred knew about the theory and construction of the machine that was towering above them. That pipe there? That one was for the steam so that it didn’t overheat down there, the one just above it – no, the other one – was for the smoke that whatever fuel they used made, if you looked carefully you could just make out the steering wheel that was modeled after the old sailing ships – Alfred pointed it all out with a smile, and Matthew had found himself smiling too. Somehow, knowing more about how the airship operated had made the anxiety about the voyage settle slightly. He even felt he could relax a little and enjoy it all.
After all, it hadn’t been as if there was nothing to enjoy. The initial ascent into the empty expanse of the skies had been surprisingly smooth, only relying on the hot air caught in the silk canopy above to lift them. And it had been after the good-sized craft had risen quite far into the cold, wide blue sky that it had really been breathtaking. The town and countryside below had seemed to shrink, becoming smaller and smaller until they were just patches of colour on an endless canvas below – green for fields, a golden yellow for ripening grain, smudges of brown and grey for settlements, the towns and cities. And eventually, blue – a great wide expanse of it, glittering below the shadow of the airship like a great carpet spread out below them.
The sight had taken both of their breaths clear out of their throats, and even Alfred, leaning almost dangerously far over the side to watch the earth far below them, had been lost for words. Finally, he’d breathed softly, in a very un-Alfred-like tone, “Awesome.” Matthew had glanced at him, and the two had grinned at each other. For once, Matthew could agree with his brother; the sight of all of that so far below them couldn’t be anything but awesome. It would have been impossible to describe it as anything else.
The initial excitement of being underway, however, had slowly begun to wear off as the slow monotonous reality of day-to-day life on a long-distance voyage began to settle in. Matthew hadn’t minded it too much; although it was tedious at times, he’d struck up a few friendships with members of the crew and other passengers. Which had been just as well, considering that as the weeks had worn on, Alfred had grown increasingly restless. Matthew couldn’t really blame him; the long days of ocean, ocean, and more ocean beneath them every morning was tiresome, and for someone who loved to be right at the centre of the action like Alfred, it must have seemed like some sort of cruel and unusual torture. He’d tapped his fingers on the side of the hull, taken to going for strolls around the deck when he could, and eventually had even begun to talk about finding a way to make the dirigible go faster. Thankfully, Matthew had managed to talk him out of this mad scheme, and the airship and its human cargo had reached its destination without incident.
The two brothers were now standing a little way away from the dirigible’s disembarking ramp in one of the busiest skyports they had ever seen. There were people swarming everywhere with accents of every sort, English, Irish, American, Chinese, and many others Matthew couldn’t even begin to try and name. Urchins scurried about picking up dropped coins or neglected bags, or calling out in high shrill voices to sell people flowers. People bartered with small shopkeepers or dragged cargo down from holds, all under the shadow of more dirigibles than Matthew had ever seen together in one room. He supposed it made sense, though; this skyport was the closest to where London had once stood, after all. Windsor Skyport stood roughly 25 miles from the spot where the old city had once stood on the surface. And where the city had once stood, there was…
Well, if you believed the stories, there was a great deal of nothing. Eye-witnesses said that even the Thames itself had been stolen by the mysterious force that had dragged London proverbially kicking and screaming a mile underground twenty years ago. Upriver of where it had once entered the foggy, smoky streets of London, of course, it still flowed just as it ever had; but where it had once entered London, it simply stopped; vanished into thin air, said some. The water that once flowed all the way across the southern part of England and into the North Sea had simply ceased to be. It was something that anyone who hadn’t seen it dismissed as fanciful, the stuff of fairy stories or nightmares; but considering that all the stories were consistent, it was a fanciful tale that was very difficult to disprove. In essence, when one went to stand in the spot where the bustling human sprawl had once stood, it was as if the great city had simply never been.
Of course, that was only if that was as far as you were willing to look, as a friendly small-time dirigible operator with a rough accent was telling them as they counted out money for the flight down into the darkness of the earth.
“The ones up top, the big republic rulers and the scientists and that, they don’t want too many of us common folk looking too close, you see?” he said with a good-natured smile, squinting at both sides of the coins they were handing him. “Don’t want us all running off down into the Neath to investigate or try and get rich quick, you get me? But it’s simple enough to see as long as you’ve got eyes in your head. There’s a good-size shaft leading right down into the Neath, all the way a mile underground! Only safe way to get down there is by flying, see, and that’s,” he flashed them a proud look, puffing himself up, “that’s where I come in.”
“But what exactly is the Neath?” Matthew asked in puzzlement, hefting his bag onto his back once more.
“A giant lot of nothing, for the most part,” the burly man said with a laugh, walking the two of them up the sturdy plank that led to the seating area of his ship. “Just a great big hole in the earth, with what used to be old London town right in the middle of it! Lord only knows how long that’s been there without anyone up top noticing, and that’s odd enough as it is, a great big hole like that just sitting there right underneath us like that.”
“It sure is spooky,” Alfred agreed, although he looked more fascinated than scared. “Kinda like something out of a ghost story.”
“Lad, if half the stories that come out of that place are true, then that place is a bloody ghost story come to life.”
There wasn’t much conversation after that last blunt pronouncement, as the pilot turned to his instruments in the makeshift steering area of the craft and the other passengers – a thin-lipped, well-dressed woman, alone, a man in rough working clothes, and a young couple with a small bag of possessions between them – took their seats around the sides of the small airship. Whistling tunelessly, the burly operator stoked the engine into life, and the dirigible lifted off, gliding into the air above.
It didn’t take them long to reach the spot where London had been only a matter of thirty years ago, and Matthew couldn’t hide a gasp when he saw it. The eyewitness accounts were right; it really was just a great expanse of nothing, just a wasteland that stretched in a roughly circular shape where there should have been buildings, noisy, narrow streets, and bustling markets. Compared to what Matthew was used to seeing, it was completely alien; the first solid confirmation that they were dealing, however flirtatiously, with something supernatural. Something that wasn’t meant to cross over so freely with normal life. Even Alfred looked a little uneasy, a small frown line appearing above his blue eyes as he gazed down at the sight.
“Steady as she goes,” the dirigible pilot said, completely unfazed by both the sight itself and the discomfort evident among some of his passengers. “It’s a long way down from here.”
Their guide was right: it was a long way down. The large, cave-like entrance to the downward passage was marked by dimly glowing gas lamps, and the dark, damp passage itself was lined with more of the same, attached to the wall by brackets every few feet down. The silence as they descended was almost deafening; the woman, the man and the young couple were all silent, and Matthew felt no inclination to talk either. It was as if the darkness and the emptiness of the shaft demanded that there be silence; even Alfred, after glancing around and opening his mouth as if to speak, shut it again and went back to gazing at the lights that were slowly passing by, marking their descent further and further down into the bowels of the earth. Even the sound of the dirigible’s engine seemed muffled, although that might have just been fanciful thinking on Matthew’s part. But it was a strange sort of quiet – it almost felt as if you could reach out and touch it. Perhaps it was something to do with the air; somehow, it felt very, very close down here. Or perhaps that was only the knowledge that they were all but surrounded by solid rock.
That wasn’t a pleasant thought to have. But before Matthew could let any more flights of uncomfortable thinking undermine his ability to think rationally, the pilot finally spoke up again.
“Hold on, ladies and gents, you’re about to get your first glimpse of the Fifth City.” Matthew and Alfred exchanged glances; the Fifth City? What on Earth was that supposed to mean? And why hadn’t they ever heard that term before? But for the moment, the eagerness to finally see anything that wasn’t a circling enclosure of rock and dim gas light outweighed the need to ask questions, and the twins craned their necks to see over the side of the dirigible into the long, long drop below. The rocky walls of the tunnel, already decently wide, widened further now the deeper they went, until finally, they were out into a wide, cavernous space.
Matthew’s first thought was that it would have been like coming outside after a long trek in a cave, if it weren’t for the fact that it was still as dark as the blackest night. Faint glimmers in the roof of the large space above them – almost like stars, if they had been on the surface – glowed with a faint light that shone down into the space as a token gesture towards replacing the light of the sun above. But it was far below, hundreds upon hundreds of feet down beneath the false star-glimmers that the real sights lay. As Matthew squinted, his eyes adjusting to seeing more in the dark than just the nooks and crannies of the rock face that had surrounded the aircraft only a few minutes before, he could begin to make out details. First, directly below them, was a large, wide sea, as dark as everything else inside the false twilight. The glimmering points of the ceiling’s stars could be seen, faintly reflected, in the still, murky waters. And, the myriad glow of gaslights and candles drawing his eye along, Matthew could see that beyond the eerily still ocean sprawled a vast urban metropolis.
London.
The great mass of buildings didn’t seem to stand so much as squat in the cradle of the Neath, the Thames – so it really had been stolen with the city! – still snaking its slow steady way through the heart of the city into the still ocean Matthew had noticed before. The buildings ranged from great stone creations to more inexpensive wooden affairs, and it seemed that many of them were still under construction. If Matthew tried, he could pick out landmarks – that large building there might be a palace, that collection of boats and tavern-like buildings was clearly where the docks were located, and he was sure that he could spot what must be an observatory of some kind (what for, when there were no stars or moon to observe?) on a hill, tucked away from the rest of the city.
The sight was certainly awe-inspiring. But not for the same reasons that his last view from the air had been. What was most amazing about this, for Matthew at least, was that even from all the way up above, London appeared to be thriving. Thriving, even after the city had been so abruptly stolen and moved to so far underground; whatever else you might say about the city’s current state, that its people had managed to do that was impressive.
Matthew glanced at Alfred, wondering what he thought of it now that he could see the place with his own eyes. His brother looked back at him, that excited gleam back in his eyes. Matthew knew what he was probably thinking. For Alfred, this city, laid out below them like some odd patchwork quilt, was just one big adventure waiting to happen. Or probably several adventures, if Al had his way. Any mysterious dangers were just part and parcel of the whole affair for him.
“Well, we made it down here,” Alfred said to him confidently, flashing him a thumbs up and a grin. Matthew nodded, and couldn’t help offering a small smile of his own in return.
“Yeah, we did.”
It almost felt at that moment as if they’d already reached the end of their journey, as if the trip to Fallen London really was only that, a short trip and nothing more, just as Alfred had promised. But Alfred had been wrong.
Oh, how he had been wrong.
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia/Echo Bazaar
Characters: Every nation ever at one point or another. This part: Canada, America, and a few random extras.
Rating: PG for this chapter.
Summary: An Echo Bazaar crossover AU. Fallen London: once capital of the British Empire, now home of the Bazaar, a mile underground and a boat ride away from Hell itself. Deep. Dark. Expensive. Marvellous. Here you can find everything from immortality, to unnervingly good mushroom wine.
Or so the stories go.
But stories can rarely be trusted, and all the wildest stories in the world couldn’t have prepared Alfred and Matthew Jones for what they would find when they descended into the fallen city on a journey that would lead them right into the heart of a rebellion against the Masters of the Bazaar themselves…
Word Count: 5031, this part.
Notes: Holy hells, Fel is writing a chaptered fic, everyone run for the hills. Started as my NaNo project for this year (which I won, yaaaay), and… it’s gonna be a long haul, guys. The title is from an HP Lovecraft quote, “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” The EBZ people describe their ‘verse as “more comic horror than cosmic horror”, so it fits. :’D
Warnings: General warnings: A crossover with a (very addictive) online game, a lot of speculation and elaboration on my part on the universe of that game, human!AU, the occasional bit of 1800s sensibilities, and later on in the fic, a lot of OCs. :’> This chapter: not so much really, except for NaNo quality writing and a slow start.
Our mom always used to tell us something back when me and my brother Al were still just kids. “Don’t you go looking for trouble, boys, because trouble will inevitably find you.” Well, actually she didn’t say that in so many words, but the way that she did say it isn’t exactly fit for saying in polite company. She also said it in French. Maybe that’s part of the reason that it always stuck in my head, but Al… Al was another story.
Alfred and I are twins, two sides of the same coin. Or at least, that’s how people describe us. We definitely look alike, sure, but after that… that’s where the similarities end, really. Al’s always been loud (almost obnoxious), opinionated (rude) and enthusiastic (in everyone else’s faces), and me? I’m just quiet. People tend to mistake me for Alfred at least once a week.
Never the other way around.
It’d be nice if people did remember I exist every once in a while, but I’ve discovered that you can learn a surprising amount when you’re just stuck in the background. While Al goes around doing all the talking and the action, I watch people, and I notice things. And sometimes, they’re useful things. But I’ve never been good at getting people to listen to me. Maybe if I had been, me and Alfred would’ve never gotten into this mess.
… Sorry, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I guess this would start making more sense if I told you a little more about us first. I already told you my brother’s name, but mine is Mathieu, although most people tend to call me Matthew or even just Mattie. Alfred and I were born in the United States of America in the July of 1868, to an American father and a French-Canadian mother. The French ran strong in Mom, giving her both a fiery temper and a headstrong, independent disposition. I guess that’s where Alfred gets it from; you just can’t say no to either of them. I take more after our father, I guess, apart from the French. Alfred understands it, but he’s never really caught on to speaking in it the way I do, which is why he always ended up missing half of Mom’s advice.
What he did catch onto was Mom’s stories. Alfred’s always loved stories – adventure stories, magic stories, stories about pirates, you name it, Al’s probably willing to listen to it. The only thing Al’s ever loved more than a good story is the chance to go out there and try and have a story of his own worth telling. So when the stories about the Fifth City started making their way over the Atlantic, it wasn’t really that much of a surprise that Al just lapped them right up, even right into our teens. Glim, the Unterzee, the Bazaar, the Shuttered Palace – there wasn’t even all that much that made it across to our little town in New England, and I’ve since found out that most of them were exaggerated or just completely off. After all, I never thought that I’d ever actually be going there. It was across an ocean and a mile underground, which should have made even the idea of it impossible, right?
Wrong. I made a stupid mistake when I thought that; I forgot to factor in Alfred. After all, Al might have had a tendency to run into things without looking first, but even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to actually make it to Fallen London, right?
Right…?
Matthew Jones didn’t ask for much. Really, he didn’t. He was happy with his life; helping his mother out around the house, helping his father out with his work as a carpenter, popping down to the local tavern with his friends when he had time to spare. But if he could have one wish right now, it was that his brother – his loud, brash twin brother who liked to forget that Matthew even existed half the time except when it was convenient for him – would stop waving a flimsy piece of paper in his face while Matthew was trying to read.
“Mattie, have you seen this?” he demanded, breathless and red-faced from where he’d just rushed into the house. Oh God. Alfred had that tone in his voice. The excited, enthusiastic one. The one that said ‘I am about to suggest something extraordinarily stupid and reckless and there is nothing that you can do or say to stop me from doing it or from dragging you along.’ The one that usually meant that in the ensuing mad adventure, some sort of disaster would only narrowly be averted and Matthew would have to avoid being seen in public for the following two weeks in case people mistook him for Alfred and started causing trouble for him. The one that, last time it had seen the light of day, had eventually resulted in the near-destruction of half the neighbourhood’s clothing after a stray bullet from a mistimed shot had broken the lock on Mr. Hanks’s goatpen, sending the beast roaming through the town and eating everything that dared to be foolish enough to lie in its path. Alfred didn’t mean to cause trouble; once you got past the obnoxious ego, he was actually quite well-intentioned. But boy did he have a knack for creating chaos.
“I’d be able to see it better if you didn’t keep on waving it in my face, Al,” Matthew sighed, pushing his glasses up his face and wondering what crazy idea his twin would be dragging him into this time. Alfred beamed at him – albeit a little sheepishly – and stepped back a little, handing him the paper with an almost palpable aura of excitement. No, in fact, his brother was practically vibrating as he waited for Matthew to read the flier. Matthew sighed – inwardly, this time – and looked down at the paper in his hand. It was weathered, and a little tattered at the edges, and looked like it had been ripped off the side of a building. Actually, considering Alfred’s track record, it probably had been ripped off the side of a building, hadn’t it…
“Messers. Selby and Johnstone, esquire, providers of voyages both exciting and convenient, proudly present a NEVERBEFORESEEN OPPORTUNITY for the DISCERNING and ADVENTUROUS Gentleman or Lady. For a LIMITED TIME ONLY, join us on a THRILLING adventure on one of our newly-commissioned fleet of airborne dirigibles to descend to the DEEP and MYSTERIOUS place of their invention, the heart of FALLEN LONDON, a mile underground and sequestered in the CAVERNOUS space they call THE NEATH…”
Matthew looked up from the paper and back to his brother, his expression incredulous. “Fallen London? Al, that’s –”
“An awesome idea, right?” Alfred interrupted, grin widening until it practically stretched from ear to ear. There was a manic gleam in his blue eyes, and it suddenly dawned on Matthew that it was going to be a very, very long day. “Think about it, Mattie, when are we ever gonna get this opportunity again? We don’t have to just listen to all the stories, we can actually go and see what it’s like for ourselves!”
“We?” Matthew said cautiously. Yes, he had been right, his brother was going to try and drag him into this.
“Sure! I mean, you’re coming with me, right?” Alfred blinked at him completely guilelessly behind his glasses, and Matthew sighed, making the third one in as many minutes. That was the thing about Alfred; he didn’t stop to consider that people might not be as enthusiastic about something as he was, but he was so completely innocent while doing it that Matthew always felt bad when he tried to turn him down. He liked his brother, he really did, but sometimes…
“I don’t know, Al…” he said slowly, biting his lip as he glanced at the flier again. The good messers. Selby and Johnstone went on in detail to describe the various adventures the Neath could bring, how this “once-great capital of the British Empire” was now “no less great, a raw and untested hub of activity and intrigue on the tip of a New World, blending both magic and scientific thought”, how what “in previous years was merely the province of the well-connected or the local” was now a possibility for any who wished to experience a taste of the supernatural for themselves, rounding the entire thing off with an invitation for all those interested to make their way to the brand new dirigible port in New York city. They’d certainly done their best to make the trip sound attractive, in a dangerous, mysterious sort of way. But even so, there was something about it that made Matthew uneasy. After all, a lot of the stories that came out of the city weren’t exactly friendly. Every city had its problems, and even before the Fall of London (as the more sensational accounts put it), London had had all of the problems that came with being a sprawling metropolis. Being a mile underground only seemed to add more of them, becoming more mysterious and dangerous the more stories you listened to about them.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of it,” he said finally, trying to inject a note of reason into the situation. “We hardly know anything about what’s down there, nobody does. It doesn’t feel right.”
“But that’s the point!” Alfred declared, brushing Matthew’s words aside like flies. “No one really knows what’s down there, so we can go down, take a look, and come back up and tell people what really goes on! It’d be like something from the Age of Discovery all over again!” Matthew’s heart sank. That’s it, he thought to himself gloomily. With Alfred in a mood like this, there was absolutely no reasoning with him anymore.
He tried anyway. “It could be dangerous! What if you go down there and get hurt?”
“It can’t be that bad, Mattie! People still live there, right?” Matthew had to admit that his brother had a point, but before he could open his mouth, either to say so or to try to talk Alfred out of it before it was too late, his brother spoke again. “Besides, it’s not like we can’t defend ourselves, right?” He pointed at himself with a thumb, a cocky grin on his face. “Best shot in town, remember? You’re worrying too much. You’ll see, we’ll get there, have a look around and we’ll be back at home within six months. I already got all the money together, I’ve got just enough saved to cover it. It’ll be fine.”
“Alfred, I’m really not sure –“ he tried again, knowing that it would be useless.
“Aw, c’mon, Mattie, please? It wouldn’t be the same if I went without ya!”
Darn him, he had to pull that card, didn’t he? And the thing was, it worked every time. Matthew looked at him doubtfully and lifted his glasses to rub at his eyes, feeling a headache coming on. He ought to say no. He ought to tell Alfred to handle things on his own if he wasn’t going to listen to his advice for once. He really ought to. But – Alfred was too prone to getting in trouble for his own good, whether he went jumping right into it or not, and what if something happened to him? Someone had to look out for him, and it wasn’t as if Matthew could let him go alone into somewhere like that…
“Fine,” he sighed, feeling as exhausted as if he’d run five miles as opposed to just trying to reason with his twin. “You win, Al. Just tell me when it is we’re going and I’ll get packed.” Alfred’s beaming grin stretched even more impossibly wide as he sprang forward and hugged his brother (“Awesome, I knew you’d agree in the end, you won’t regret this, promise!”) before dashing off to make a list of the things they would need.
Poor Matthew didn’t know it, but that agreement might as well have gone down in history in the great cosmic ledger of famous last words.
He had no idea what he and his brother had just got themselves into.
The dirigibles used by the company that Messers Selby and Johnstone ran were only a recent invention, and one that probably would not have even been conceived had it not been for the Fall of London some twenty six years before. Although no longer part of the British Empire or even the country of England itself since its “translation” to the darkness of the Neath, trade and diplomacy with the fallen city and the world above had gradually been re-established. By the present time, those countries that still had ties with the city treated the place as its own city-state, just as viable as any of those that had once operated and thrived within Italy. And just as with any state, the resources available in the Neath had also spread; not only the raw export materials such as Glim and the mysterious Nevercold Brass Silver, but also technologies such as the secret of mass-produced flight.
How exactly the dirigibles stayed airborne remained a carefully guarded secret and a mystery despite the constant and wild speculation of the surface press and the common masses; while similar in appearance to the hot air balloon, they appeared for all intents and purposes to be propelled for the main part by a variant of the steam power more commonly used on the railways that had sprung up in the most industrialized and forward-thinking nations throughout the past century. And these same industrialized and forward-thinking nations had concluded that a technology such as this was worth investing in. Viable flight! Faster travel between continents made possible! The voyages were still only barely comfortable and the technology itself still in its infant stages, but as more dirigible companies were established and more skyports were built to house the machines and crew and to provide a convenient starting point for commercial voyages, the trend was fast picking up both notability. The New York Times had even gone as far to say in print that the new-fangled contraptions were the symbol of the future and of the march of progress, likely to replace ships as the main mode of international travel in a matter of decades.
That didn’t mean that Matthew had felt comfortable about travelling across an ocean in one. The flying contraption – with its great swathes of ballooning silk canvas above the deck, slowly inflating to a state where they made the craft strain at the ropes that held her tethered to the ground, the colossal pipes at either side of the stern ready to pump out steam and the gaseous waste from the engine room, and the crowds of people preparing to take their tiny pre-paid bunks for the duration of the voyage – hadn’t done much to make him feel completely at ease about flying over a giant body of water inside of it. He was all for new technologies, but the Atlantic Ocean was big.
Still, he had to admit, he’d been glad to have Alfred with him when they’d reached the skyport, their traveling coats and bags slung over their backs in the warm September day. Alfred’s enthusiasm was always infectious, and if there was one thing Al was more enthusiastic about than almost anything else, it was the idea of flying. His eyes lit up just at the idea of it. Matthew had a sneaking suspicion that Alfred would probably find some way to get himself hired on a dirigible as part of the crew once their trip was over, if he could help it. He’d eagerly chattered away in Matthew’s ear as they’d waited to hand over their tickets and find their small lodgings for the next month, and Matthew had been almost surprised at how much Alfred knew about the theory and construction of the machine that was towering above them. That pipe there? That one was for the steam so that it didn’t overheat down there, the one just above it – no, the other one – was for the smoke that whatever fuel they used made, if you looked carefully you could just make out the steering wheel that was modeled after the old sailing ships – Alfred pointed it all out with a smile, and Matthew had found himself smiling too. Somehow, knowing more about how the airship operated had made the anxiety about the voyage settle slightly. He even felt he could relax a little and enjoy it all.
After all, it hadn’t been as if there was nothing to enjoy. The initial ascent into the empty expanse of the skies had been surprisingly smooth, only relying on the hot air caught in the silk canopy above to lift them. And it had been after the good-sized craft had risen quite far into the cold, wide blue sky that it had really been breathtaking. The town and countryside below had seemed to shrink, becoming smaller and smaller until they were just patches of colour on an endless canvas below – green for fields, a golden yellow for ripening grain, smudges of brown and grey for settlements, the towns and cities. And eventually, blue – a great wide expanse of it, glittering below the shadow of the airship like a great carpet spread out below them.
The sight had taken both of their breaths clear out of their throats, and even Alfred, leaning almost dangerously far over the side to watch the earth far below them, had been lost for words. Finally, he’d breathed softly, in a very un-Alfred-like tone, “Awesome.” Matthew had glanced at him, and the two had grinned at each other. For once, Matthew could agree with his brother; the sight of all of that so far below them couldn’t be anything but awesome. It would have been impossible to describe it as anything else.
The initial excitement of being underway, however, had slowly begun to wear off as the slow monotonous reality of day-to-day life on a long-distance voyage began to settle in. Matthew hadn’t minded it too much; although it was tedious at times, he’d struck up a few friendships with members of the crew and other passengers. Which had been just as well, considering that as the weeks had worn on, Alfred had grown increasingly restless. Matthew couldn’t really blame him; the long days of ocean, ocean, and more ocean beneath them every morning was tiresome, and for someone who loved to be right at the centre of the action like Alfred, it must have seemed like some sort of cruel and unusual torture. He’d tapped his fingers on the side of the hull, taken to going for strolls around the deck when he could, and eventually had even begun to talk about finding a way to make the dirigible go faster. Thankfully, Matthew had managed to talk him out of this mad scheme, and the airship and its human cargo had reached its destination without incident.
The two brothers were now standing a little way away from the dirigible’s disembarking ramp in one of the busiest skyports they had ever seen. There were people swarming everywhere with accents of every sort, English, Irish, American, Chinese, and many others Matthew couldn’t even begin to try and name. Urchins scurried about picking up dropped coins or neglected bags, or calling out in high shrill voices to sell people flowers. People bartered with small shopkeepers or dragged cargo down from holds, all under the shadow of more dirigibles than Matthew had ever seen together in one room. He supposed it made sense, though; this skyport was the closest to where London had once stood, after all. Windsor Skyport stood roughly 25 miles from the spot where the old city had once stood on the surface. And where the city had once stood, there was…
Well, if you believed the stories, there was a great deal of nothing. Eye-witnesses said that even the Thames itself had been stolen by the mysterious force that had dragged London proverbially kicking and screaming a mile underground twenty years ago. Upriver of where it had once entered the foggy, smoky streets of London, of course, it still flowed just as it ever had; but where it had once entered London, it simply stopped; vanished into thin air, said some. The water that once flowed all the way across the southern part of England and into the North Sea had simply ceased to be. It was something that anyone who hadn’t seen it dismissed as fanciful, the stuff of fairy stories or nightmares; but considering that all the stories were consistent, it was a fanciful tale that was very difficult to disprove. In essence, when one went to stand in the spot where the bustling human sprawl had once stood, it was as if the great city had simply never been.
Of course, that was only if that was as far as you were willing to look, as a friendly small-time dirigible operator with a rough accent was telling them as they counted out money for the flight down into the darkness of the earth.
“The ones up top, the big republic rulers and the scientists and that, they don’t want too many of us common folk looking too close, you see?” he said with a good-natured smile, squinting at both sides of the coins they were handing him. “Don’t want us all running off down into the Neath to investigate or try and get rich quick, you get me? But it’s simple enough to see as long as you’ve got eyes in your head. There’s a good-size shaft leading right down into the Neath, all the way a mile underground! Only safe way to get down there is by flying, see, and that’s,” he flashed them a proud look, puffing himself up, “that’s where I come in.”
“But what exactly is the Neath?” Matthew asked in puzzlement, hefting his bag onto his back once more.
“A giant lot of nothing, for the most part,” the burly man said with a laugh, walking the two of them up the sturdy plank that led to the seating area of his ship. “Just a great big hole in the earth, with what used to be old London town right in the middle of it! Lord only knows how long that’s been there without anyone up top noticing, and that’s odd enough as it is, a great big hole like that just sitting there right underneath us like that.”
“It sure is spooky,” Alfred agreed, although he looked more fascinated than scared. “Kinda like something out of a ghost story.”
“Lad, if half the stories that come out of that place are true, then that place is a bloody ghost story come to life.”
There wasn’t much conversation after that last blunt pronouncement, as the pilot turned to his instruments in the makeshift steering area of the craft and the other passengers – a thin-lipped, well-dressed woman, alone, a man in rough working clothes, and a young couple with a small bag of possessions between them – took their seats around the sides of the small airship. Whistling tunelessly, the burly operator stoked the engine into life, and the dirigible lifted off, gliding into the air above.
It didn’t take them long to reach the spot where London had been only a matter of thirty years ago, and Matthew couldn’t hide a gasp when he saw it. The eyewitness accounts were right; it really was just a great expanse of nothing, just a wasteland that stretched in a roughly circular shape where there should have been buildings, noisy, narrow streets, and bustling markets. Compared to what Matthew was used to seeing, it was completely alien; the first solid confirmation that they were dealing, however flirtatiously, with something supernatural. Something that wasn’t meant to cross over so freely with normal life. Even Alfred looked a little uneasy, a small frown line appearing above his blue eyes as he gazed down at the sight.
“Steady as she goes,” the dirigible pilot said, completely unfazed by both the sight itself and the discomfort evident among some of his passengers. “It’s a long way down from here.”
Their guide was right: it was a long way down. The large, cave-like entrance to the downward passage was marked by dimly glowing gas lamps, and the dark, damp passage itself was lined with more of the same, attached to the wall by brackets every few feet down. The silence as they descended was almost deafening; the woman, the man and the young couple were all silent, and Matthew felt no inclination to talk either. It was as if the darkness and the emptiness of the shaft demanded that there be silence; even Alfred, after glancing around and opening his mouth as if to speak, shut it again and went back to gazing at the lights that were slowly passing by, marking their descent further and further down into the bowels of the earth. Even the sound of the dirigible’s engine seemed muffled, although that might have just been fanciful thinking on Matthew’s part. But it was a strange sort of quiet – it almost felt as if you could reach out and touch it. Perhaps it was something to do with the air; somehow, it felt very, very close down here. Or perhaps that was only the knowledge that they were all but surrounded by solid rock.
That wasn’t a pleasant thought to have. But before Matthew could let any more flights of uncomfortable thinking undermine his ability to think rationally, the pilot finally spoke up again.
“Hold on, ladies and gents, you’re about to get your first glimpse of the Fifth City.” Matthew and Alfred exchanged glances; the Fifth City? What on Earth was that supposed to mean? And why hadn’t they ever heard that term before? But for the moment, the eagerness to finally see anything that wasn’t a circling enclosure of rock and dim gas light outweighed the need to ask questions, and the twins craned their necks to see over the side of the dirigible into the long, long drop below. The rocky walls of the tunnel, already decently wide, widened further now the deeper they went, until finally, they were out into a wide, cavernous space.
Matthew’s first thought was that it would have been like coming outside after a long trek in a cave, if it weren’t for the fact that it was still as dark as the blackest night. Faint glimmers in the roof of the large space above them – almost like stars, if they had been on the surface – glowed with a faint light that shone down into the space as a token gesture towards replacing the light of the sun above. But it was far below, hundreds upon hundreds of feet down beneath the false star-glimmers that the real sights lay. As Matthew squinted, his eyes adjusting to seeing more in the dark than just the nooks and crannies of the rock face that had surrounded the aircraft only a few minutes before, he could begin to make out details. First, directly below them, was a large, wide sea, as dark as everything else inside the false twilight. The glimmering points of the ceiling’s stars could be seen, faintly reflected, in the still, murky waters. And, the myriad glow of gaslights and candles drawing his eye along, Matthew could see that beyond the eerily still ocean sprawled a vast urban metropolis.
London.
The great mass of buildings didn’t seem to stand so much as squat in the cradle of the Neath, the Thames – so it really had been stolen with the city! – still snaking its slow steady way through the heart of the city into the still ocean Matthew had noticed before. The buildings ranged from great stone creations to more inexpensive wooden affairs, and it seemed that many of them were still under construction. If Matthew tried, he could pick out landmarks – that large building there might be a palace, that collection of boats and tavern-like buildings was clearly where the docks were located, and he was sure that he could spot what must be an observatory of some kind (what for, when there were no stars or moon to observe?) on a hill, tucked away from the rest of the city.
The sight was certainly awe-inspiring. But not for the same reasons that his last view from the air had been. What was most amazing about this, for Matthew at least, was that even from all the way up above, London appeared to be thriving. Thriving, even after the city had been so abruptly stolen and moved to so far underground; whatever else you might say about the city’s current state, that its people had managed to do that was impressive.
Matthew glanced at Alfred, wondering what he thought of it now that he could see the place with his own eyes. His brother looked back at him, that excited gleam back in his eyes. Matthew knew what he was probably thinking. For Alfred, this city, laid out below them like some odd patchwork quilt, was just one big adventure waiting to happen. Or probably several adventures, if Al had his way. Any mysterious dangers were just part and parcel of the whole affair for him.
“Well, we made it down here,” Alfred said to him confidently, flashing him a thumbs up and a grin. Matthew nodded, and couldn’t help offering a small smile of his own in return.
“Yeah, we did.”
It almost felt at that moment as if they’d already reached the end of their journey, as if the trip to Fallen London really was only that, a short trip and nothing more, just as Alfred had promised. But Alfred had been wrong.
Oh, how he had been wrong.
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