?Year 931 of the Englidge Calendar.?

  The city sank into a pitch-black slumber. Above the night sky, massive Zeppelin airships drifted like whales, their one-eyed giant-like searchlights sweeping across the sleeping streets.

  Burton stood at a street corner, puffing on a cigarette. The tobacco was laced with stimulant herbs, keeping his mind sharp even late at night—or maybe it was just a faint buzz of excitement. Tapping his cane lightly against the ground in a half-remembered rhythm, he waited.

  He usually spent waiting time thinking—about anything, as long as his brain stayed busy. Tilting his head, he stared at the dim streetlamp, his thoughts wandering…

  By the theory of parallel universes, on a vast enough scale, every impossible thing becomes inevitable. In one world, light speed might be breakable. Jupiter’s rings could be a giant doughnut. Tesla might reign as a grand sorcerer commanding thunder, Hawking a bronze dragon manipulating time, and King Arthur truly a girl. So yeah, anything’s possible.

  Take a modern-ish world: humanity sparked the First Industrial Revolution. Steam engines rumbled, moving colossal steel constructs. Railways sprawled across every inhabited inch. Productivity exploded, economies boomed—a golden age fueled by steam.

  …That’s how it should have gone. But as with parallel universes, there are always exceptions. The Second Industrial Revolution followed, yet the world never entered the electrical age. It was like Newton rolling away just as the fateful apple fell—humanity briefly "lost" the law of gravity. Here, they obsessed over boiling water to power everything. The damned era veered off course. Electrical tech flickered briefly before drowning in steam. Bigger, bigger engines emerged, becoming city hubs, then global cores.

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  Burton lived in such an era—a world with a tech tree gone sideways.

  A sharp steam whistle snapped him back. White-hot vapor blasted from a nearby manhole, crystallizing into droplets in the cold night air before dissolving into a gray-white fog that blanketed the city.

  A damned era. A damned city.

  The Mechanical Institute’s lunatics had hollowed out the underground to build the largest steam engine in history. They dug kilometers of tunnels to divert the Thames into its iron furnace, burning day and night to power the city’s factories. The drainage system served as exhaust, spewing thousands of tons of steam daily into the streets, turning into endless drizzles.

  Sunlight? Forgotten.

  Burton checked his pocket watch. Time was up. Footsteps and ragged breathing echoed from the end of the street.

  His guest was punctual.

  He stashed his pipe, reached into his heavy coat, and pulled out his beloved Winchester. In this cursed era, as per parallel universe logic, there was a "Great Detective"—self-proclaimed, of course. No genius, just a second-rate sleuth who preferred strong-arming suspects over deduction. Those who knew him called him Burton Holmes.

  The footsteps grew closer. Grinning wildly, the detective leaped from the shadows.

  “Welcome to Old Dunling, my friend!”

  He laughed, pulled the trigger. The Winchester roared, muzzle flash lighting up the night. The figure froze mid-stride, then collapsed. Blood seeped between the cobblestones.

  By the time the gunfire faded, rifle-armed police swarmed the scene. Zeppelin searchlights turned night into day—but only a cold corpse remained.