"Well, there's the prophouse where I just came from - they were doing sculpting in warm amber, and I know they use beaverboard in their set dioramas, so it's possible they could teach you something. Or at least know someone on the crafting side who'd be able to teach you."

"If you don't mind going somewhere you've just been that could be interesting. It's mostly whim, I admit."

"I'm the type to indulge my girlfriend's whims! I won't even charge you a kiss. This time."

"Ha. You'll probably get one sooner or later anyway~"

At the prophouse, 'George' is gone and a few other people have joined Sergo. They are trying to figure out what kind of effects they can do for a mad scientist's weapons. Transformations by clever outfits with pull-tabs? Sudden frost and snow using some chemical melange? Multicolored beams with suspended dust and stained-glass spotlights?

One of them will show Lenora the basics of whittling with a chunk of scrap pine lying around for a couple of her shillings, but proper woodwork is really not the kind of thing you learn in a day. She has fun listening.

She has such a hard time not suggesting things from the range of exotic weaponry she knows, as it doesn't have much bearing on the problem and in any case doesn't exist on this world. And these people probably would take the idea of a tasp too far. 

She sits and watches and plays with her amber and tries not to dwell too much on how attractive her girlfriend looks with a knife in hand whittling. She fails.

Lenora does a little flourish with the blade and winks at one point, then looks a bit sheepish when her tutor gently chides her.

Eventually she wants to go get dinner. And hold Thorn's hand on the way.

She would definitely like that. She is on a date on Titania with her hot girlfriend and everything is right with the world. 

Her hot girlfriend keeps flirting with her... And has found a room. And has slept in until almost noon due to the shift schedule.

Wandering the gardens after midnight with Thorn, by gaslight and starlight, is fun. They're almost ethereal and unreal this way. After that she goes back to the rented room to sleep for real - and after a lovely if slightly shorter than ideal sleep, back to the locomotive for their journey to continue.

The gardens at night are wonderful, as are other things that happen to be in them. 

The next morning, Thorn thinks: That day was better than anything in my memories. 

She laughs to herself, and makes sure she's on the engine in good time. It's a shame to leave it all behind, but maybe next time.

The engine's crew have accepted her into their routines, more or less. Chat in the engine room today is about Magdalene's - do they really have fancy treatments for sky-madness? This guy went in once and it all seemed like utter farce, just people pretending to be someone important to the 'patient'. It was pretty and relaxing, though.

Boy do these people ever need memory crystals.

"If it helps, then it helps," she says. "I think it's fine to get a little solace from escapism every now and then."

She keeps to the routine.

On the way to Magdalene's, they encounter a Dreadnought and two Tackety scouts fighting. The fight is somewhere between the slow dance of naval combat and the frenetic pace of duelists. The captain judges it... Safe-ish to just go right past them and hope none of the three decide to get distracted.

A couple hours later, though, one of the Tackety scouts is gaining on them. The captain sends for Thorn.

"You say you're a good shot with that pistol, and Lenora says it too. Think you can snipe a headlight at a few hundred yards? We're being followed, and I think that'd be sufficient discouragement."

"Might take me a bit of ammo, but I think I could land a shot. Is there a convenient place I can stand to shoot, or will I have to get kitted up and go outside?"

"You'll have to lean out, or stand on the boot plate just behind the deflector if the wind is a problem. We'll keep the train as steady as possible and you'll have two lines tied to you either way. It's up to you if you want goggles or a thermal suit."

"I need a proper shooting posture for maximum accuracy. I'll take the bootplate and freeze, the suit could make me clumsy and I'd rather get it right the first time. Same argument against goggles."

Captain DeVries nods seriously.

They kit her up with two redundant safety lines, both solid and thick rope with thorough knots around her waist, tied down to two different points on the engine. They go into a long, shallow left turn, displacing the steam at the rear of the engine just enough to see the Tackety pursuer about five hundred yards away - approaching accurate cannon range and slowly closing.

Five hundred yards. 

She takes a deep breath of the icy air. 

She loads with enchanted ammunition. 

She takes her shooting posture, and keys in the runes on her arms for maximum accuracy. 

She flips off the safety. 

She exhales. 

She fires. 

The shot shatters the headlamp of the oncoming train.

In the Tackety engine, annoyance and anticipation turns to shock as a single shot with a pistol, at that range, smashes their headlight and makes a sound like it hit a lot harder than any pistol should hit. Some kind of special ammo. No need to fight that. Scowling and her blood suddenly running cold, the captain calls off her chase.

The Tackety engine continues unchanged for a few seconds, then with a hiss of steam out the side, begins a shuddering turn, falling away from the trader engine. When she comes back inside, people are whooping and loudly congratulate her, and tell her that 'impossible shot' is most definitely going to be a sky-story shared around bars. Even the dour captain claps a bit and lets the excited chatter roll on for a time, before calming things down and getting most of the crew back to work.

She laughs, raises a fist in the air; then she gets back to work. She's seen people killed by premature celebrations before, and being a good shot mostly makes her better at killing things, which she hates. Though it's good to show Lenora exactly what she's capable of. 

Lenora is among the cheerers!

Magdalene's seems to be one enormous structure of arched steel and stained glass, dotted with balconies and alcoves. More muted, somehow, than Titania - these are designed to give the mind space and relax, not to intrigue and interest. A mock village in a wide courtyard rests before it, where skyfarers stroll and drink and relax. Captain DeVries declares that their stopover will be brief - 2 hours. He has a package to deliver, and that's all.

Thorn says near the train, but she's very interested to talk to the passersby if they'll listen. What's Magdalene's like? What are the fees? What are the goals of treatment? 

And quietly, in the back of her mind: Is this another place where memory crystal could be transformative?

She can talk to an off-duty attendant as well as some of the patients. It's designed as a calm, relaxing place. The fees are varied and eclectic, but money will usually do if you don't have the weirder stuff they want. Sometimes someone doesn't want to leave. The goals of treatment are to reduce the terror of the sky and rid the mind of nightmares and the subtle insanity too much starlight can cause. The mood in the locomotive has been getting a bit more tense as time passes, right? If you encounter enough horrible, terrifying, stressful things it wears on you and makes the influence of starlight worse. They have ways of warding off all that, mostly by simulating social situations in careful detail, though they're not entirely sure why they work.

She nods. That makes sense. If it's something about live performance, then perhaps memory crystals wouldn't work. If only the science was further advanced... But she has an engine to catch.

The two day journey to Port Prosper is uneventful.

Except, the night before they're slated to arrive, Thorn has a... Vivid nightmare, of the monstrous limbs unexpressive face of a scrive-spinster peeling open the engine and letting the cold and light in, and then peeling her open while speaking-but-not-speaking about 'a new variant in the species'.

She wakes up in a cold sweat, then takes a deep breath and steadies herself. It was only a nightmare. She's had those before, with shadowlings and worse. 

...it's not like she's been pushed beyond her limits, though. She ought not to be this vulnerable. 

The starlight gets into you. 

She goes back through her halfhearted journalling and swears to herself that she didn't take the risk seriously enough. It's hard to track, but there's something more here. Her necklace is no help; there's far too much memory to sort through quickly without the help of the Thousand Stars. 

Maybe she can still find it, if she thinks on it hard enough.