Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Baba Yaga’s Hut, a mouthful of a name for an airship,was her second, an incarnation that built in the temporal transitioning circuitry, into an elongated icosahedron–essentially a twenty-sided geometric shape, twenty triangles of brass beams, stretched out around the envelopes and gondola of the craft, enclosing the lot of it. (For this reason the cargo lift was triangular in shape–so that it could drop below the brass of the geometric cage.)
The recent bird shot–as she saw it–approach of the corporate pirates of this day, had left BYH broken and humbled, her friend and captain dead and her too friends, her best friends, if she had to admit it, severely maimed. She hoped very much that the medical arts had developed beyond the brutality of her day over the last three centuries.
What of Pool? He looked much the same as he did when she had met him (she really only had a rough estimate of his age–32, 35). The Pool they had rescued from the beach looked very much like her Pool. He had the same waxed mustache, pouty lips and slightly bulging, limpid eyes. At his heart he was a good man, despite his must and poor taste in art. (that was another story.)
Was he dead? Had he always been a simulacrum? If he had always been a simulacrum–from the moment he came to her door, into her house, in 1883 [? ]–then how did she not know at that time or in the years since?
On the other hand, if he had been replaced, who had done it, and why?
In either case, who had created mechanical Pool? The island probably had something to do with it. NIla would know. She was there. Unfortunately…
Etelka was jarred from her thoughts by a heavy metal grinding. The truck, or whoever was actually piloting the beast, had cut too close to a corner of some ancient morterred concrete blocks and tipped 30 degrees to the outside of the bend. Luc and two of his hirelings, leapt to keep Nila from sliding off the ad hoc table as the monstrous wagon regained its level, and with effort rounded the corner.
“Get Tropos to open the door, then call Dr Daytime.” Luc’s voice.
Could Dr Daytime be a real name?
The articulated, ribbon door, the kind that rolls up into horizontal plates on a spool like a rolltop writing desk did as it was designed to do. The dismal, subterranean alley passage, opened to an even darker cavernous black.
What she didn’t know at the time was that the crew of Luc’s clumsy truck were all either wearing lowlight goggles, or had implants in their very eyeballs; they could see the route and destination, while for at least a half hour, as she clung to Nila’s bier–so it seemed at the time–Etelka lurched this way and that in the dark, unnerved by the sewer smell and foeted damp air. She imagined that she was making a voyage to the underworld to visit the old ghosts reenacting their lives for eternity.
With an electric click, as the door rolled down, the lights came on. Etelka was startled and jerked to alertness.
Luc was right in front of her, looking concerned behind the plastic and metal spikes coming from his lower face. His mask, his breather, was small compared to hers, it was small compared to all of his people’s masks. It was little more than a mouthguard–the kind sucked on by rugby players, but with jutting small pipes, and similar nostril plugs, bound together and secured by a strap around the head.
Ion Fyr 