By: Cynthia, on 2 May 2026

Meteor City was the biggest of boomtowns: an ugly, sprawling expanse, built in haste on the prairie wastes. The place was littered with skyships, docking towers, lodging houses, and most especially bordellos, built in every color of timber and bracketed in brightly painted signs.

Mara Bloom reckoned that there were forests with less wood than Meteor City.

But lumber shipments were hard to get across the mountains these days. For those cases there were tents. Big ones. The striped affair sitting on the end of this dusty street was near as big as the Lanva Royale, and it still had a line coming out of it that stretched all the way around the block, ending in front of a building covered in scandalously shapely masculine silhouettes.

The large woman made a note to visit when she was done. Assuming she got the recruitment bounty, anyway. She still wasn’t sure that she’d talk her way through that; she wasn’t even sure she’d talk herself into staying long enough to try. The line was long, noisy, and dense enough to be humid despite the dry galeren sun, and she didn’t have any interest in being a rebel for its own sake.

The latter was an opinion she knew better than to utter as she waited here in hymnhouse finery. The ladies and gentlemen behind and before her were raring to join the fight in Boshoke, and abuzz with righteous indignation – about the Glorinton Massacre, about the fall of Fairwinds, about the servile, slavish manner that had supposedly gripped the Venchtian commoner in the modern era and made the Verwaltung of today a pale imitation of her metamothers in centuries past.

And there were the chants. She could hear Platinum Barnes down the block leading another one.

Mara liked a good chant; there was energy and togetherness in sharing words with a crowd, a bone-deep sense that you weren’t alone, that you were part of the great ocean of life. It helped you grieve, and there was a lot of tragedy to grieve lately. And it was true that Duvencht fiscal policy had turned almost punitive, after the Marches escaped the worst of the plague.

However, this stuff from the Barnes & Company mascot was jingoistic, opportunistic tripe. The Glorinton Massacre was a great atrocity, but the people who yelped about it most weren’t the poor. They were either plantation lords or nouveau riche whose fortunes stood to gain outside the restrictions and regulations of the Imperial Kanzleis. B & C wouldn’t send their mascot here to bark like a dog if they didn’t smell a golden stream.

She had to laugh, though. It wasn’t like she was any better; with the farm gone, here she was, ready to commit treason to keep her mother fed and her sisters clothed.

The best-case scenario she was shooting for was that back in Venchtheim, the empire would see the level of fury their heavy hand had brought out in the imperial crown jewel. In the worst-case… well, if they lost, the empire probably couldn’t hang all of them.

The next hour passed painfully slowly, but for the occasional progress forward and the frequent – yet still far too few – gusts of dry wind. They were welcome blessings from Saint Ellemeaux, what with the prairie sun and the funk of sweat.

Lost in her thoughts as she was, the heavyset woman was taken aback when she finally found herself at the mouth of the tent. A swarthy, toned wythe with an unlit cigar and a set of dungarees looked Mara over, top to bottom.

“Boots, craft, or horse? Don’t look like you got a horse.” The doorwythe paused to brush something off her bib. “Don’t say wings. You’re too tall for wings.”

“Craft,” Mara answered. The word came out somewhat more annoyed than she expected, though she wasn’t quite surprised by it. “Alchemy.”

The woman lifted her cigar from her mouth and turned her head a bit, this way and that. She was conducting an inspection.

Mara had a plan to talk her way past the board, but she hadn’t expected the doorwythe to be a problem.

“If you want to see my credentials…” She reached into her vest pocket and pulled out a small, rigid card, carefully maintained. It said in big black letters: METEOR CITY — GUILD OF PRINTERS — MARA BLOOM, DEMOISELLE cert. 1861 R.A. — The Type is Yet Mightier Still.

As the doorwythe craned her head forward to look, Mara kept her thumb over the word “printers” and prayed to any saint that would hear her.

A moment of silence passed, and then the woman jabbed her cigar behind her without looking there. “All the way in the back, hang a left.”

“Thank you,” Mara said, offering a grateful smile. It was as much for her heavenly guardians as the woman before her.

The inside of the tent was far worse than the line had been – there was no amount of perfume that could handle all the heat and humidity there – but it helped to not be shuffling at less than a yard a minute. She rolled through the tent boldly – past where the physicians were stripping down and measuring the men, past the many filled desks, past the rows of the scrawny and meek being sized up for their flying death packs. The section that the cigar woman had pointed her towards was separated by a heavy yellow curtain.

She pushed on through and quickly got herself shepherded past two full tables to land at a third, opposite two women in short-sleeves and glasses. This was the real test.

“Credentials,” the one on the left asked.

“Of course.” She flashed her ruby lips in a ready smile as she handed the card over. The two women passed it between them, brows wrinkling.

They wouldn’t have been fooled for an instant, so she hadn’t begun to try. They were professionals, and the entire card was designed differently between guilds. This would prompt questions most certainly, but she was ready for them; she’d spent the last hour thinking about the matter just so. She knew the right mixtures of saltpeter and brimstone and phlogiston, their timings and varieties.

“I understand this is a bit unconventional, but if you could let me lead with the practicum–”

“Twelve hundred,” the right woman finally said.

“…Beg pardon?” Mara tilted her head to the side.

“I said, twelve hundred silberguldins. You start out at Journer, any promotions, we’ll see. That’s four months’ pay upfront. You going to take it or are you leaving our table?”

She found herself blinking quite suddenly, even though it was her ears she suspected of failure rather than her eyes. “…Aren’t you a little bit concerned that I–”

“Running that shit through hot printing presses is a health hazard. You don’t have any burns I can see, but you have printers’ credentials. We won’t have to teach you not to set yourself on fire. Good enough for me. Take it or leave my table.”

Twelve hundred. It wasn’t enough, but it was more than she’d really expected. If Keziah took a few extra jobs… yes, that might be enough to keep what was left of the land. With nothing to grow, they weren’t paying imperial tariffs anymore either way.

Mara made a little laugh – it wasn’t funny, exactly, but it was comedic. Perhaps tragicomic. “I guess I’ll take it, then.”

“Excellent. In the name of the Margrave Lanva, welcome to the LRA.”

Fermata.