voice & action, 35th metal

[godsays]

[ voice ]

There are... a lot of people.

[ Zane sounds tense; this is his request for help. How does one navigate crowds like this, which he's never seen before, except in situations of violence? How does he take this? ]

[ action ]

[ He tends to lurk and watch, too hesitant to participate. At least someone's made him dress the part; he carries himself enough like a nobleman, still, that waistcoat and trousers look natural on him. He is a young, well-off man, in appearance; just, quiet, and more likely to watch than participate. ]

Comments

[heisrisen]

[He is super lucky u r the best ninja concubine <3 <3 <3]

Oh stars. You'll love them, Zane, you'd just - look, see, the wheels slide on steel rails, and the engine cars pull the pistons to turn them, and you can move tons of freight for a fraction of the energy - it's the first real mass land transit, railways transform a planet - oh, we should go see the real train station, you'll flip, you could probably fly to Saint Louis overnight if the barge let you -

[godsays]

[ He pulls back, frowning at a part of the exhibition that doesn't interest the Emperor. ]

They build metal roads?

Everywhere?

[heisrisen]

[He lets Zane linger, his own grin turning from the exhibition to watch Zane's expression.]

Coast to coast. Several thousand miles of it, by this time.

[godsays]

I could go so fast.

[heisrisen]

So you could.

Do you want to go see the real thing?

[godsays]

Yes.

[heisrisen]

This way, then.

[He ducks through the flow of the crowd, tugging Zane along once again, drags them both onto a cable car, like a baby locomotive on its on slender electrical tracks, bearing them through the thick of Chicago. Training wheels.]

[godsays]

[ He follows in stunned amazement, and won't stop staring at his surroundings. He's in a bit of overload: the people, the metals, everything. It's all so very different. ]

[heisrisen]

[The city dwellers take him for a corn-fed farmboy from the sticks, grin at his gaping and hurry on their ways. They arrive neatly at the very edge of Union Stockyard, and the Emperor makes up some story on the spot about - oh, no, it's not a surprise inspection, he's just here to glance in on things, he's sure it's all ship-shape, don't mind the new assistant, and he manages to mention the correct Vanderbilt for the era in the mild tones of an old friend. Soon they're back behind the gleaming facades and painted platforms, in the real, throbbing heart of America's shipping, the air thick with steam and coal and oil. The locomotives lurch in, massive low-slung monsters of steel on steel, shriek to slow, heavy halts, digorge boxes of wheat by the ton or hundreds of lowing live cows or even stranger things. And masses, masses of pigs, squealing and jostling and trundling out of the dark boxcars onto their deaths in the meat-packing district right beside them, thick with the smells of blood and salt. Meat by the crate and raw, stacked beams of processed steel and other industrial products load up in their place, thousands of workers hauling goods off and onto the trains in a mad, breakneck synchronicity, and then the trains howl and hiss and chug out to the nation again.]

This city was founded, with 200 people, sixty years ago this year. In one human lifetime, all of this.

[He doesn't stare. But he is, at heart, just as stunned, just as amazed.]

[godsays]

[ Disgusting - and incredible. It's on a scale, a scale of metal that Zane never imagined. He even burns steel and gives a nudge or two to the locomotive, just to feel the unyielding weight of it. ]

Sixty years.

[ This makes him stop dead, a kind of processing overload. In the lifetime of his father. In a fraction of the Final Empire. What people are capable of... ]

[heisrisen]

When progress isn't forbidden.

Admittedly, even in an era of change Chicago was exceptional.

[He steps close behind Zane, slips an arm around his waist. They are miniscule on the edge of the stockyard, irrelevant to the seething drive of industry. He murmurs in Zane's ear, crisp and warm and vital,]

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.