The shimmering airship positively purred as it landed in the grounds of Steampunk-Shrunk Towers. 
Charles and Henry – the resident tinkers – were almost tripping over one another to reach it first and see it at close quarters.
With a faint hiss of air from a piston somewhere, a ladder descended and a young lady who (Henry later remarked) shimmered almost as beautifully as her ship, climbed down.
She laughed at their expressions and said, “Well, I reckon y’all must be Mister Charles and Mister Henry, from what I’ve heard.”
The brothers looked – if possible – even more astonished. It was Charles who remembered his manners first.
“Charles Fortescue at your service, Madame,” he said, “And may I introduce my brother Henry? To what do we owe this honour?”
“Delighted to meet you both, I’m sure,” the pilot smiled. “My name is Leticia. We have a mutual friend, gentlemen – a charming young man called Jasper Coggleford. He told me that if I flew Bluejay here it would be you who came out to take a closer look.”
“Little Jasper?” spluttered Henry. “Jeremiah’s boy? But how…?”
“Jasper and his father have recently moved to my neighbourhood,” Leticia explained. “We struck up a conversation and when I mentioned that I was about to fly across to the West of England, Jasper was most insistent that I should come and make your acquaintance. He said your eyes would pop out of your heads when you saw Bluejay! Oh, and he also asked me to hand deliver this letter to you.”
To be honest, the Fortescues were so enchanted with both the airship and its pilot, that it was only several hours after Leticia had finally declined any more tea and biscuits and reluctantly headed off to her appointment in Bristol that Charles remembered Jasper’s envelope. With a pang of guilt, they sat down to read his letter.
Dear Mister Charles and Mister Henry,
I hope you like Miss Leticia and her airship. I bet you will!
Me and Pa are nicely settled in at our new home in America. So are Mr Augustus and Mr Bjørn. The people here are real nice, as they say around here.
There is one problem, though. It seems part of our work over here involves battling with a Kraken or two. Pa is being ever so brave, but I can tell he’s nervous and I am terrified. I mean, we have some woodworking tools, but what we need are proper weapons. I don’t know anyone as good as you gents at inventing and tinkering, so I thought maybe you could have a try at making some monster-maiming gizmos.
Miss Leticia is coming back at the end of the month, so if you had anything prepared by then, I know she’d be happy to pick it up.
I know you won’t let us down.
Please say hi to everyone there.
Kindest regards,
Jasper Coggleford
“Hi?” muttered Charles. “The boy is certainly settling in over there.”
“Yes, yes, but the weapons!” exclaimed Henry. “They need our help. Let’s make a start at once!”
There was a marked reluctance on Charles’ part, Henry noticed. He’d rummaged around and found some swords in an attic, so had set about making armoured leather scabbards. However he spent rather too long admiring himself in the mirror, whilst brandishing one sword after another and shouting things like, “Have at ye!” and “Take that, vile sea dog!”
“Swords!” grumbled Henry. “You might slice off a leg or two, but the mouth will still be coming at you. We need something more, ah, mechanical. Something to blow the creatures to kingdom come.”
He stood for most of the first day surrounded by what you or I might think of as junk, carefully trying out different combinations and attachments. By the end of the third day there was a veritable arsenal surrounding him.
“Is that one of Mrs S’s Christmas tree baubles?” asked Charles, suspiciously eyeing the end of one of the largest guns.
“That’s tinkering for you,” was all Henry would reply.
“And that thing with the rotary saw -”
“The Sawful. Yes, isn’t she a beauty?”
“Try walking around with that dangling from your shoulder and you’ll slice your own leg off!” Charles snorted. “Hand it over – carefully, man. I’ll make it a protective carrying case.”
“Then they’ll need small pistols,” mused Henry. “They won’t be able to carry these things about all the time. Young Jasper probably couldn’t even lift one.”
Charles didn’t speak.
Henry looked long and hard at his brother. “You don’t like weapons much, do you, old boy?”
Charles shrugged. “Not a great fan, if I’m honest,” he said quietly. “I mean the swords are fine, man-to-man combat, fair enough. But blasting some dumb creature out of existence with one of those – things… Hardly cricket, is it?”
Henry grinned. He clapped his brother gently on the back and nodded. “I do see your point. The thing is, I don’t think monsters play by MCC Laws. How would we feel if we heard little Jasper had had his head torn off by some ravaging beast? We need to give the poor lad a sporting chance. Suppose you work on making some belts and holsters, if I work out how to make the pistols?”
“Thanks, old chap. Appreciate it,” nodded Charles and he headed off to find some more leather.
And when everything was finished and safely packaged, ready for its long journey over the ocean, Charles had one final item prepared – a peacock blue pistol with matching holster as a gift for the pilot of the Bluejay, because, as Charles explained, you just never know when you might need to protect yourself against an attack from some dreadful creature of the skies.
I, Silvester Bawdrip, would like to offer a very warm welcome to my new premises, which open today, October 5th 2019.
I have to confess, I had some difficulty explaining the situation to my intended, Mistress Ectophemia Fleabane, when she discovered this photography of Lady Steamington in my drawer.
The ones I can clean up and get working are either sold as they are to automaton makers or turned into pretty clockwork twittering birds that sell as fast as I can make them. The ones that have seized up completely are taken to pieces, the parts being upcycled into our miniature gizmos and contraptions.
I hunted in an old box of bracelet charms and found a few dragonflies, a butterfly and a bee. These were painted in jewel colours and most were stuck to the casing. Another was threaded on to a length of copper wire and fixed to the wheel in the centre.
Constructing a pair of arms and hands from epoxy putty was relatively easy. One held the net and was molded to the flailing metal arm. The other held a diminutive magnifying glass, cobbled together with a few bits from the stash. It fitted neatly into the now empty housing from the bird whistle. A pair of small black sleeves and cuffs dressed the arms in a suitably formal fashion. My entomologist might lack all other body parts, but those he had were at least well attired.
The mechanism was housed in a small cardboard box, decorated with an assemblage of suitable images. A few coffee stirrers were sawn up to make a cover for the spring, so that the sharp, snapped steel edges would be safely covered.
It all started when I allowed Molly to set up her own miniature book emporium on the Steampunk-Shrunk stalls. That, of course, has been a great success. People seem to enjoy perusing her little shop’s booklist and I have fun extracting the volumes they want with my tweezers.
I have mixed feelings about the cures and potions, although I have to confess, they do sell rather well.
So let me make it quite clear, here and now, that although this is probably the world’s smallest dispensing apothecary’s shop, and although the bottles look very attractive, are reasonably priced, and the bottom shelf has an ongoing buy-one-get-one-free promotion, they simply DO NOT WORK.
His lordship started violently at that. (
It was, not surprisingly, young Molly who found the book first. She’d read her way through everything in the Steampunk-Shrunk library – even the Suffragette newspapers – and had been on the lookout for something new.
“Good lord!” Barnaby Balsover exclaimed, “There’s a chap there having his shoes polished by a clockwork automaton! Quite remarkable!”
When Algernon returned from a successful raid on a troublesome bunch of sky pirates who had been terrorising the airways above Penge, he was met by a mass of pleading faces.
After several months, Algernon Cholmondeley, Lord Admiral of the High Fleet, was finally re-united with his dear wife Josephine. He had been captured by Sky Pirates before he could take his friends on the planned trip to Brasston. Josephine was so relieved to see him again. But they had been communicating by means of the steam telegraph while he was captive.
Steampunk - Shrunk! 