Gearhaven
Gearhaven never sleeps and never quite breathes clean. Above the smog the tycoon spires drink champagne; below it the undercity coughs coal-dust and counts its dead. Everything in the city is powered by the Heart, a cathedral-sized steam-engine whose pulse sets the rhythm of every shift-whistle and every funeral. Now the automatons that tend the machines have begun to want things — names, wages, freedom — and somewhere in the canals an anarchist with a satchel of black powder is deciding the Heart has beaten long enough.
Rules of Reality
The City Runs on the Heart
Every lamp, lift, loom and locked door in Gearhaven draws pressure from the great engine at the city's core. When the Heart stutters the whole city stutters with it — lights gutter, doors seize, and for a few seconds even the airships hang dead in the smog.
The Sparked
An automaton that runs long enough on the Heart's pressure sometimes wakes — gains a voice, a name, a stubborn opinion. The Tinkers call it a malfunction, the tycoons call it theft of property, and the Sparked themselves call it being born.
The Smog Ceiling
A permanent shelf of industrial smog divides the city into bright above and choking below, and your lungs, your law, and your luck all change with which side you're breathing. Cross it openly and the Brass Constabulary will want to know exactly why.
Pressure Is Currency
Gearhaven's coin is the steam-mark, a sealed phial of pressurised Heart-vapour that powers a worker's tools for a day. To be paid is to breathe; to be docked is to go cold and dark, and the coal barons set the rate.
Guild Marks Bind
A guild brand on your forearm is licence, lineage and leash all at once — it opens doors, sets your wage, and lets the guild call its debts home. Forging a mark is the one crime even the anarchists won't shelter you from.
Species & Powers
Humans
Gearhaven's native humans, soot in their lungs and grease under their nails, bred to the rhythm of the shift-whistle. Whether spire-born or gutter-born, they measure their lives in steam-marks and missing fingers.
Automatons (the Sparked)
Clockwork labourers that ran on the Heart until something woke behind their glass eyes. Each is unique in voice and grudge, legally classed as property, and increasingly unwilling to keep pretending they aren't there.
Beastwrought
Engineered beast-folk — dogs, ravens, badgers given hands and speech in the guild laboratories of a crueller generation. They do the work too dangerous for humans and too delicate for automatons, and they forget nothing about who made them.
Mole-Folk
Pale, broad-handed dwellers of the flooded foundations beneath the undercity, who tend the city's oldest pipes and remember its original blueprints. Sunlight blinds them; the dark of the deep tunnels is their cathedral.
Key Locations
The Heart
The cathedral-sized steam-engine in the city's bedrock core, whose pulse sets the rhythm of every life in Gearhaven. Its needle now climbs daily into the red, and the Tinkers who tend it have stopped sleeping.
The Tycoon Spires
The gleaming upper city above the smog ceiling, where the coal barons drink in glass towers and the air is, by law and by money, clean. Every spire is wired straight to the Heart, and every window looks down on a city it does not see.
The Undercity
The choking warren beneath the smog ceiling, all soup-kitchens, sweatshops and the constant cough of the shift-whistle. It is where the Free Cog Collective organises, where the Cinder Hand recruits, and where the city's real population lives and dies.
The Brassworks Quarter
A district of roaring foundries and ticking workshops where the Tinkers' Guild keeps its halls and the city's clockwork is born and repaired. Walk it and you'll see a Sparked automaton on every corner deciding whether it is a tool or a person.
The Aetheria Skydocks
A forest of mooring-masts above the smog where the Sky-Nomad fleets load contraband, news and anyone wealthy enough to leave. It is the one place in Gearhaven where the city's laws thin out into open wind.
The Canal District
A maze of oily waterways and iron drawbridges between the works and the undercity, where barges run coal by day and the Cinder Hand runs black powder by night. The Constabulary patrols it heavily and catches almost nothing.
The Sunken Foundations
The flooded original streets beneath the undercity, claimed by the mole-folk who keep the city's first pipes and oldest secrets. The blueprints down here predate the Heart, and they show a city that was never meant to need one.
Quill's Eyrie
The founder's old observatory-spire, highest above the smog, where Ambrose Quill's heirs keep the master schematics of the Heart under armed guard. Whoever holds the Eyrie holds the only plans for stopping — or restarting — the engine.
History
The Kindling Age
Year 1 of Pressure
The Heart Is Lit — The engineer-founder Ambrose Quill fired the great engine in the bedrock cavern, and for the first time a whole city moved to a single mechanical pulse. Within a decade Gearhaven had outgrown three valleys and forgotten how to live without the Heart's beat.
The Guild Charters
The Brass Compact — The trades carved the new city between them, branding their members and binding the guild marks into law. The Tinkers took the Heart, the Barons took the coal, and the bargain that has strangled Gearhaven ever since was sealed in handshakes and hot iron.
The Sooted Century
The Rising Ceiling
The Smog Divides the City — As the foundries multiplied, the smog thickened into a permanent ceiling, and overnight the city had an upstairs and a downstairs with very different laws. The spires rose to find the clean air; the undercity learned to cough in time with the whistle.
The First Spark
Tik Speaks — A loader-automaton in the dock-yards set down its crate, looked at its foreman, and asked to be called Tik. The foreman had it melted; the dock-yard remembered, and the question Tik asked has never gone back into the machine.
The Pressure Strike
The Whistle Falls Silent — When the Barons doubled the steam-mark rate, the undercity simply stopped, and for one terrifying day the Heart beat for no one. The Constabulary broke the strike in blood, but the city had felt how it would feel to stop — and so, quietly, had the Cinder Hand.
The Overpressure
The Collective Forms
The Free Cog Manifesto — Dozens of Sparked automatons signed the first manifesto of the Free Cog Collective — in oil, since they were not permitted ink. Half the Tinkers' Guild hailed them as kin and half moved to have them recalled, and the Guild has been at war with itself ever since.
The Present Pressure
The Heart Runs Hot — The engine is straining as never before, its gauges climbing into the red while the Barons refuse to slow production. The Tinkers whisper of an overpressure that could level the city, the Cinder Hand calls it the perfect moment, and everyone is watching the needle.