"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.

It's subtle, but... Perhaps she's gotten a bit too quick to notice annoying, negative things about her crewmates. How nosy that one stoker is. How infuriating the navigator's tendency to tap on the walls as a nervous tick is. And, she probably always wants to fly around at least a little bit, but has the wistfulness been that strong? She could just... Hop out the hatch. She'd be fine, she could get back in later. Maybe without even being seen.

... she has problems. Irritability, claustrophobia, nightmares. She's degrading. Losing integrity. The thought of that scares her more than all the rest of it which is probably mostly harmless. She thinks. She feels her crystal beneath her shirt, and scowls. 

Well, all she can do is try to stave off the degradation until she can tease it out with backmerges or similar. She takes to journalling much more seriously, now.

Once she notices, making a conscious effort to notice and resist the mental changes, they seem to weaken. Staying busy helps. Conversation helps. 

"You okay?" Lenora asks in the galley at dinner. (She's been getting a little more tense and twitchy, too.) "You seem troubled today."

"Had a bad dream. Got me to pay attention to my starlight exposure, and I'm drifting. Not much I can do about it except to try and stave it off; it's only another week or so to go, anyway."

"Oh, yeah. Noticed some things? I mean, it's near impossible to avoid it entirely. But it's not fun. I bet Titania helped, pleasant things help keep it at bay. This is why sailors take breaks, though."

"Irritability, claustrophobia. I'll be glad to get back to New Winchester."

"Me too, me too. After long enough I get all ready to fight something, somebody, anybody. And worry about... Stuff." Headshake. "We can relax back at New Winchester. Not too long now. And you're learning a lot, right?"

Port Prosper comes into view the next day. It's a sizable place, if smaller than New Winchester, split by a giant canyon, and even more densely industrial than the other city. The Captain announces his intent to leave the next morning.

"Yeah. Maybe things I didn't want to learn, but not everything can be sweetness and light, can it?" 

She goes and explores Port Prosper. What's on sale? Are there transit tables to London from here? Can she and Lenora get an inn room for the night, for a chance to unwind? 

The city seems to be suffering from a rather stark wealth divide, a poor east end and a rich west end. The urban decay is somehow even more severe here than the abandoned areas of New Winchester. There are signs of trouble on the street, too - People who seem like cutters and move like they have concealed guns surreptitiously guarding alleyways, a slightly excessive police presence in the 'nice' parts of town, sour and resentful expressions on the working class making their way to and from the factories and workshops. Homeless people trying to stay out of the way, and even an urchin-gang of teens and children that have taken over one of the abandoned alleyways and built scrap fortifications, standing guard with slings and runny noses and sheet metal and rubber 'uniforms'.

Lots of things are on sale, if in less staggering variety and bulk than in New Winchester. The output of the factories is all marked for shipment onward and not actually sold here, though. There's a transit office with rates and schedules for passenger and small package transit in Albion - even the nearest Albion destination, the Brabazon Workworld, runs 20 Sovereigns. A ticket to London from here is 32 Sovereigns. Good accommodations and a tighter scheduler are pricier. There are definitely inns around! Actually good ones if you're willing to pay premium rates!

She carries herself with the quiet assurance of a proper blood who knows it, and keeps a sharp eye out for pickpockets and worse. She notes down the travel prices and schedule, and then she investigates exactly how premium these rates on inns go. She is willing to put a decent amount of coin into having some alone time with Lenora and a decent-sized bed.

No trouble troubles her, though the streets continue to give off an air of being about to boil over in places.

They go all the way up to "literally rent a mansion for a night". Some of the mansion-owners are a bit strapped for cash, apparently. More reasonably, a room at one of the really fancy hotels in the nice part of town can be had for about six Sovereign, and there's a spread of cheap and in-between options too.

... she thinks she should ask, before blowing six sovereign on a single night. It might be taken as an imposition, getting something that fancy. 

She goes looking for Lenora.

Depending on where she looks, Lenora might be hard to find.

(She went off with a scarred fellow along the south-eastern edge of the bluff, acting like old buddies, their crewmates report.)

Ah. Drat. 

Well, she'll see if Lenora comes back anytime soon. For now she'll ask after... a library. That's where public charts might be stored, yes?