Lucy gets warped to a different place and time in the Fallen London universe
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She locates the Transit Relay and examines it to see if she can see how it works. 

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The Correspondence on the twelve large stones are suggestive but not conclusive - Treading a path created by another. The dark space under reality made briefly passable. Shortening the duration of a danger. Acceleration to the limit of an artifice's endurance.

If she watches for long enough she can see exactly how it plays out as it activates. An hour-loom weaves crystallized time over the locomotive, and the sigils spin on a mechanism and power up in just the right order with a loud whirring of machinery, until it culminates in a rush of steam and smoke and the locomotive vanishes elsewhere despite not having moved.

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...Huh. 

Is there any indication where each one is going?

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The 'path' is a tunnel with one entrance and one exit, a shortcut created by some high-Chain being, forgotten and left behind. There is only one possible destination - Albion.

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Huh. Okay. She quietly attaches herself to the next locomotive to go through. 

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She will spend about two hours clinging to a locomotive that is surrounded by unnerving nothingness, a bit more thorough than ordinary darkness would create.

And then she will find herself attached to the side of a locomotive in a place where the light is different. Cleaner, clearer, purer, and yet more distorted by smoke. The sounds of titanic engines of industry echo through the sky here.

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She lets go and examines her surroundings. 

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Rusty, ruddy smoke coiling around enormous metal constructions and mountains of barren stone.

-There, a horribly ugly tangle of piping and industrial equipment and smog, levels stacked upon levels until the whole thing is practically a cube of metal and the inner sections must be filthy and dark, with a faint purple glimmer of time around it. At the peak, a locomotive dockyard and a narrow bridge between a complex of nice-looking buildings with lawns and the presumably-a-Workworld.

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Tch. 

She zooms in that direction, examining it to see if she can see where the apparatus keeping it sped up is. 

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It doesn't really seem to be coming from anywhere? Whatever is keeping the Workworld moving faster, it is large and slow and potent and possibly not even here. The Overseers need their own devices to make it back out in time for tea. (They also run tours for insufferable rich people with the same things.)

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Mhm. Is there any traffic in and out at the moment?

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No human traffic. There looks to be only one major entry/exit point. But huge containers of iron ore and raw wood and coal and rough cotton and linen and foul-smelling chemicals and so on go into a colossal loading area at a fairly steady pace, not literally constantly but certainly often, replaced with smaller amounts of manufactured goods on the way out.

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Hrm. 

She makes her way to the entry-exit, not actually attaching herself to anything but trying to stay out of sight, and keeping alert for when gravity kicks in. 

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Gravity kicks in pretty far away - a couple miles out and above. The haze of Time is thicker this close. Humans probably can't see it.

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Can she see where it's coming from?

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It seems to be coming from west-ish and far away? Maybe?

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Hmm, good enough. Do any of the buildings like vaguely administrative-y?

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One of the nice buildings looks like an administrative center!

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She heads there, then. 

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Past the deserted neatly manicured lawn. Past charming little shrubberies and benches.

...Closed for the night. A clock declares that it's 2:23 AM.

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Fine for her immediate purposes. She goes in anyway; if the door is locked she can hiss a word of Correspondence to open it. 

What files can she find first?

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Dry logistical tables and production charts. Transport scheduling. Maintenance estimates. Quality control reports. Income and expenses.

...If she keeps looking, there is half of a wing devoted to records of the 'residents'. Name and number, debts owed, skills and assignment, health and fitness, time spent on the Workworld, merits and demerits and extra fees (lots of those), some of them have notes like suspected agitator/organizer or ongoing dispute with brother #432526, separate or rare skills - confuse and keep at all possible.

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Tch. 

Anything about living conditions?

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Going by the figures of population and the amount of food and amenities shipped in, probably pretty bad. Not quite intolerable, but bad.

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Mmhm. Now, how does this place...work. The factories and so on. Points of failure.

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