#whaddya know it's newport AGAIN

[engineer-gunzelpunk]

Its been a bit of a while since I put some fiction up. I'm gonna introduce another character while I am at it, because why not.

Here I introduce "Puffing Billy" or as his human name is, William Vauclain the 1st. Esq. or Victorian Railways NA-class 2-6-2 T 2A, one of a pair of original Baldwin Works locomotives sent to Australia; one of many "Puffing Billies" that chuff along the Narrow Gauge Belgrave to Gembrook line in the Dandenong Ranges.

(Baldwin Works of Philadelphia in the early days of the Victorian Railways produced a lot of locomotives for them, the so called "Yankee" locomotives; to my limited knowledge, a Baldwin D3 is preserved at the Newport Railway Museum, all the rest have been scrapped including 1A and 2A; but 2A lives on has my fictional char...)

All the remaining NAs, including the ones that chuff around the Puffing Billy railway today, were built at Newport Workshops.

Here he meets Heavy Harry in for the first time, in the midst of the Scrappings...

The Man In Black

Preamble

Sometime in the late 60's

“You call me ‘cute’ again, and I will break your kneecaps! I might be short, but your knees and shins are perfectly in reach, you great galoot!”

The tiny, short, potbellied narrow gauge engine in human form stares with unblinking hostility at the black clad titan and his slighter red-haired companion. The big Man In Black merely stares back with an inscrutable expression.

He is only 5ft’’, 1’, but he is very round, squat and powerful. He is clad in an old-timey American engineers outfit, complete with striped hat and thick gloves. The only tell of his locomotive being is the lamp affixed to his hat.

He kept this affectation long after he got humanised, no matter how much the humans that ran the joint discouraged him from doing so. It amused him to tease and vex railfans by wearing such an out-of-place set of clothing on an Australian preservation railway.

He is not at all impressed by the pair of tall timbers in front of him dressed like delinquents.

Yobbos.

He had been in the country long enough to know what a ''yobbo'' was, if they played the fool on his railway he’d chase them off.

Others he’d cut to pieces with dour humor if they ever even so much as smirked at his get up.

The Man in Black takes a puff of the cigarette.

“Stroppy little bastard, aren’t you?”

“I’d be ‘stroppy’ if some so-called 'King of the Railways' came over to my abode and started throwing their weight around! I haven’t seen you in the entire time we’ve existed, and now that the VR has destroyed your railway, you show up to mine!

Whaddya want?!”

“I never said I was the king of anything. No Gods, No Masters…”, said the Man In Black, the red-head shaking his head from side to side.

“Nae, not a word of it!” said the red head.

“Then why are you even here, all the way in the Dandenongs? Don’t you have a heritage railway of your own to puff around on?”, the little tank engine stood proud, chomping on his cigar.

“You have no idea who I am and why I have come, haven’t you?”

“All I know is that there’s this guy, this Big Harold fellow, who you seem to be, who’s some kind of king of the VR locomotives… well, you aren’t my king!”

“Well, then it’s a good thing I’m not looking for subjects then…” said the Man In Black.

“Then why have you come all the way over here, surely its tiring for your big self to be walking around like this…”

Silence for a few moments. A nerve had been struck.

“I’ve heard you are a stroppy bastard, Puffing Billy… It just so happens I really, really like stroppy bastards...”

Puffing Billy is suspicious, narrowing his eyes to slits. “What do you want from me…”,

“First, I want to know who built you…””

Puffing Billy is taken aback… “You came over all the way from where you live just to ask me that?

‘If it’s that important, its Baldwin Works, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America to you!”, he gesticulates, pointing sassily at the Man In Black.

“Hmmmm, Billy from Philadelphia… shall I call you ‘Billy From Philly’ to distinguish you from the other Puffing Billies here?"

Puffing Billy laughed for the first time since meeting the Man In Black, “’Billy From Philly’!?, Ha! Only took about a half a century for someone to come up with it, but I like it!

But I presume there's something more to this…”

“Yes. There was nothing arbitrary with what I said about me liking ‘stroppy bastards’. I heard you are the stroppiest of all in this state…”

“Uh huh…”

“You and your humans have managed to stave off the scrappers during the Lokodammerung, haven’t you? And Operation Phoenix?”

The little engine scratches his head.

“I can’t lie, big fella, it was a very tough going for a while. We did close a while, but we opened up because the humans wanted us operating, and managed to wrangle control of the railway ever so slowly from VR to the Preservation Society. We won a huge battle and we’re damn proud of it!

‘But we can’t just physically fight the scrapping, Big Harold! Its impossible!”

The Man In Black only smiled his ironic half-smile.

“Oh yes we can… but not as an end in of itself, we aren’t martyrs. We do that, we lose.

‘We can’t simply fight them, we need to make things easier for our human allies and ourselves and to make things more difficult for them… we need to buy some time for our kin and an opportunity for our human brethren to rescue them...”

‘This is what I need you, your cussedness and your gift with machinery for…”

“I’m listening…” said the newly minted Billy From Philly.

[tortoisesshells]

wait ok just saw your post about rewatching Downton so I'm sending two more mashup prompts lol. Sybil x Tom, mutual pining + arranged marriage (just to flip canon on its head). AND Thomas x happiness (could include whoever he ends up with in the movie, which I didn't watch), detective AU + noir AU. (noir was not one of the prompts but it should have been!)

It is a truth universally accepted that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife –

Miss Austen was right about a lot of things, but a still truer statement could have started Pride and Prejudice: a single man without a fortune was even more in need of a wife. That’s why he’s here in Newport, isn’t it? Tom Branson, second son of an impoverished, eccentric Anglo-Irish baronet (and a good Catholic mother, thank you very much) was perfectly happy with piecing together his living as a writer and reporter in Dublin, reporting on Lady Gregory and the theater and, when he was lucky, the Irish Republican Brotherhood – until a series of unfortunate events (his father’s passing, his irritatingly Anglo brother taking the title, and kicking the wrong political hornet’s nest several times (and whacking it with a stick to boot)) got him packed off to America with Grandmother Boyle to find a rich American heiress – or just stay out of Sir John Branson’s thinning hair.

He’s pretty determined to do neither, but the United States provides distractions in spades: on the one hand, it’s a land of social unrest and economic upheaval; on the other hand, there’s Sybil Crawley – third daughter of a shipping-turned-railroad family (presumably– her poor cousin, Matthew, helpfully remarks – they own what the Vanderbilts and the Wideners and the Garretts don’t) who’s got ideas of her own – and whose parents would probably account it a blessing if the only unconventional thing she does is either take a degree at a women’s college or run off and work at a settlement house.

As luck would have it, Grandmother Boyle and Sybil’s grandmother, Mrs. Levinson, get along like the proverbial house fire. As luck would further have it, so do he and Sybil, swapping pamphlets and confidences in the interminable afternoons, between outings to Bailey’s Beach, endless rounds of croquet and tennis, and marveling at the fine-hulled Herreschoff yachts bobbing off Station Number 6 of the New York Yacht Club. But Sybil doesn’t want marriage, not right away – she wants her education, she wants to be of use, she doesn’t just want to help pass her Papa’s money from one generation to the next –

Not that her parents listen. After knowing Sybil for only a month, Tom is surprised to be approached by her mother, who wants her settled and is willing to overlook Tom’s empty pockets and Catholicism for his good pedigree; when he puts the question to Sybil, she defers – until the Crawleys lose everything nearly overnight, in the scandal of the decade. The money’s gone. Of course, she must marry; and, unlike others, Tom never cared about the inheritance in the first place. But the hasty marriage sets Sybil’s teeth on edge, and neither of them ever felt so alone as they did leaving the church as man and wife. Can they move past a marriage that both hoped for, but neither wanted in this particular way?

[Thomas AU under the cut]

Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Corporal Thomas Barrow wakes up hungover in a handsome stranger’s bed on VE Day, + 1, and takes stock: his hand’s not getting any better, his hair’s not getting any less gray, and – given that he’s not truly interested in staying in the Army any longer than he has to, and given that he’s not too keen on going back up to Yorkshire to play footman to the irritatingly unsinkable Crawleys – he’s definitely in the market for a new life. Why not London? Sure, half of it’s a smoking ruin, and sure, a lot of people in London are like people everywhere else, but London’s going to have to rebuild somehow, and there’ll be money in that, maybe even a life, too, if he’s clever – and Thomas Barrow’s always been clever before he was anything else.

Eventually he gets mustered out. Eventually, he makes his way back to London, and finds a place to rest his head at night. It’s pretty easy to find a way around postwar rationing, when you’re used to finding a way to hide more than half your life; and pretty soon, Thomas feels almost comfortable with his black-market trade and his tidy little flat and the discrete pubs and clubs – it’s much more space, much more safety than he’s ever had before.

So he really should have seen it coming, when a metaphorical doodlebug lands smack in the middle of his new life: Dr. Sybil Branson, black-sheep daughter of his one-time employer, standing red-eyed and silent on the landing outside his little flat: Gwen Dawson, maid turned secretary, now Sybil & Tom’s partner & flatmate, has gone missing after receiving a troubling letter about her cousin, Ethel, who was supposed to have been killed during the Blitz. Sybil promises she’d never have troubled him with this, only – only it’s got something to do with the black market and war-time malfeasance, and she and Tom have gone as far as they can go under their own power. He was always the cleverest soul in Downton - she’ll pay him for his trouble, of course – can he help?

Well, why not? How different is tracking down a person from a sack of sugar?

Pretty goddamn different, that’s for sure. For one: it’s not the black market in goods but an entirely different kind of back alley dealings that Ethel, an unmarried secretary who’d been suspiciously sick before the fateful raid, was involved in. For two: she’d made a complaint of assault in 1940, but the records seem to have vanished. For three: Ethel’s friend and long-ago neighbor, the one-time Sergeant Charlie Metcalf, is only too happy to help – something Thomas doesn’t mind so much, as he’s a Leyendecker illustration come to life, not to mention the sharpest barman at his favorite pub, but he’s quickly beginning to feel like this is all more than he – or Sybil and Tom, or Gwen – ever bargained for. Can Thomas find Gwen? Who sent the letter in the first place? Was it Ethel’s work as a government secretary that put her in danger, or the as-yet unnamed man who assaulted her? When the dust of all this settles, will Charlie still look at Thomas like he’s something fine and wonderful?