Universe · adventurous, foggy, wondrous with an edge
The Gaslight Reach
A fog-bound sprawl of port-cities where rare "curios" are traded, coveted, and stolen — and a genteel syndicate wants them all.
The Reach is a hundred cities strung along one long, cold coast and the rivers behind it — soot and brass and gaslight, funiculars climbing the fog, pneumatic tubes hissing under the streets, paddle-steamers and night-mail trains stitching the whole thing together. It is almost our world, tilted half a degree toward the marvelous.
That half-degree is the curios: objects that do one small impossible thing and no more. A compass that points not north but home. A key that fits any lock it has been told a secret about. A pocket-watch that runs slow when you are happy. Nobody knows where they come from — dredged from old wrecks, turned up in attics, handed down in families who never quite believed the stories. Most are worthless novelties. A few are worth a city block. And where there is worth, there are people who take.
Ground rules
- Curios are rare, minor, and rule-bound. Each does exactly one modest, strange thing — never magic-you-can-fight-with, never a superpower. The wonder is small and specific; the drama is human. Restraint keeps them charming instead of silly.
- It is a world of capers, not carnage. Danger here is chases, cons, locked rooms, double- crosses, ruthless rivals — entertaining peril, not gore. Villains are clever and cold, not gruesome.
- The Reach is huge and old. Books can sit in any city and any decade of it; the fog and the gaslight are the constants.
Recurring forces
- The Ordinal — a genteel, ruthless syndicate that believes rare things belong in careful hands (theirs). They don’t smash; they acquire. The great antagonist-web of the Reach.
- Finders — freelancers who locate and lift curios for clients, the Ordinal, or themselves. Charming, broke, and one bad job from the bottom of the river. Our protagonists tend to be these.
- The Assay Houses — where a curio’s worth (and truth) is judged. Half bank, half oracle.
Texture
Wet cobbles and gas-flare. The smell of coal-smoke and river. Auction paddles, forged provenance, a whistle three streets away that might be the watch or might be worse. Wit in the face of trouble.
Canon & latitude
Fixed: curios are small, singular, rule-bound; the Ordinal wants them; the tone is adventurous-not-grim. Free: which city, which decade, which curio, which finder, which caper.
Seeds
- A finder hired to steal a curio that turns out to already be hers.
- An Ordinal auction where two rival finders must cooperate to walk out alive.
- A curio that only works once, and the night three people need it to.
Books in this universe
- The Cinderwick Job novelette
Characters
- Juno Vale Finder — locates and lifts curios, mostly for other people, occasionally for herself
- Magister Crane The Ordinal's fixer in Cinderwick — genteel, patient, and the most dangerous man on the hill