Doctor Belasco

Emergence

The band was quite good. They had been competently reeling off numbers that fell easily on the ears. It had taken Sebastian about half an hour to work out which genre they actually belonged to before noticing that they were just a jazz band without any odious trace of jazz. Still, there was something a bit off. The notes were there and the timing was impeccable. The singer had that plum tone stolen from old swing, but there was no real feeling or emotion. It could have been a modern sound system with a playlist. Sebastian walked right up to the band and waved at them each in turn. Glassy eyes looked right through him, and he couldn't help but chuckle as he recognised a couple of them from the university campus. It seemed quite unsporting to bewitch local kids, but, he supposed, they had had to acquire a band from somewhere. Needs must.

Still, the party was glorious, in true Anderson style. The ballroom, rarely used nowadays, was an extraordinary piece of architecture – mock Victorian, the ceiling formed from great arches, with the chandeliers (disappointingly electric) reflected along with everything else on the mirror-like wooden floor. He scooched forward on one foot slightly and felt it slide gently and yet he still felt as though he had perfect traction. Dimly, he remembered somebody requesting some special polish from him with those properties; it was a nice coincidence that the Andersons would be the end users. Gloria, presumably, had just hired some people to sort it out without asking questions, and that would explain the band. He rubbed the floorboards with the sole of his shoe, slightly more academically this time. It always paid to be critical of one's own creations, but, he couldn't find anything to criticise. It was like standing on wooden glass. Perfect for dancing, he thought, before dimly noticing that he was deep in conversation with somebody that he was vaguely aware was called Beauregard. The foggy realisation that followed was that he had been speaking with the man for possibly as long as twenty minutes, since before he'd even inspected the band - what had they been talking about? He suspected, with that cold shudder of retrospective embarrassment, that he had probably been talking at great length and with insurmountable passion about the floor and that this Beauregard had kindly humoured him until he had the chance to leave. He finished his champagne, and looked at the glass. Perhaps he'd already had a little bit too much to drink without lining his stomach. His heart-rate was certainly a little elevated, and he was sweating a little more than he'd like to be. At least it couldn't be seen through his jacket.

He had always been told never to mix business with pleasure, but the ball also factored his social life into the mix. The whole witching community had been invited (with a few notable exceptions); among them were his family, friends, customers, charges (and their parents), and a rival or two – and that wasn't even factoring in the implicit tribal disputes and alliances that came with being associated with, well, anybody. As it happened, he was grateful that it was the Andersons that had become his family upon his arrival. At least they didn't have any official enemies. Even within families there were personal disputes and enmities that one could see would spill blood sooner or later – he politely waved, from the other side of the room, to Graham Bishop, as they caught one another's eye for a moment.

Sebastian sauntered over to the buffet, a grotesquely fat, bow-legged table running almost the length of the room, draped in a thick white cloth, and laden with silver platters of, mostly, meat. The waiters with their white sleeves were easily identified, marching to and from the kitchen like ants to replenish the food as quickly as it disappeared, or milling with the guests as breathing champagne stands. With a little smirk, Sebastian noticed the same vacant expressions and mechanical motions as the band. Whoever had sourced the staff for the ball hadn't even had to stray off campus but whatever method they had used had an unfortunate side-effect. He had assumed that the band, sweating profusely, were simply experiencing the natural biological result of physical exertion, but most of the waiters' white shirts already had unsightly creeping damp patches around their armpits. The human body tended to fight off bewitchments somehow (rarely effectively) and apparently the resistance du jour, against whatever breed of magic it was, was violent sweating. Extended periods of time under powerful spells could put one under physical strain, and he couldn't help but wonder if all the waiters would survive the evening. He helped himself to a truffle. One or two people did tend to die and at least this wouldn't be deliberate. It was only natural, and every witch in the room was, almost by definition, not innocent of murder.

Except one. Just down from himself was the Flamel boy; Pazel. The unaware one. Sebastian had never worked out what the arrangement was, but, apparently, telling the kid about magic was a big no-no. The kid had no idea who he was, or, he supposed, where he was or with whom. Quite how or why the secret was being held was nobody's business. Then again, probably nobody associated him with magic anyway. The other witches at the university might have seen him around, sure, but why would he be a witch? While the Andersons had insisted that Pazel benefit from the same pastoral care that Sebastian gave all the other little poppets, it remained firmly on his education and integration into university life. Obviously there was an element of reporting back how the kid was progressing, but there had never been anything to report. He was an ordinary kid, to all intents and purposes, and one who looked frankly baffled to be there. He put his university personal tutor professional hat on, and sidled over to him.

“Hey, Pazel,” he said, removing his glasses, and offering his hand to shake, “Good to see you here. I had no idea you'd been invited! I recommend the truffles. Well, I recommend everything. Gloria always puts on a tremendous spread."

[Steampunk] When the Smoke Clears 2.0

It's really not that authentic xD

But it's a pretty good series.

Edit:

Hey, so I've been struggling with getting an IC post up. I'm still trying to write something, but I'm finding it tricky. Unless you simply want to boot me now as an unreliable player (understandable), I'll kick around until I either get my shit together or kick myself out.

Know Your Tenses 101

Glad you got something out of it. :)

I'd like to go into more detail about how it's sometimes possible to use different tenses within the same time frame even when you wouldn't have expected to but I basically just wanted to draw attention to the idea of time frames and tenses and the importance for thinking about it and hopefully native English speakers at least will let their instinct fix it.

Emergence

All three?

Either way, I'll be disappointed if we don't get to wreck a lovely house.

[Steampunk] When the Smoke Clears 2.0

Sorry about the wait.

Name: Dr. Edward Fisher (Eduard Visman)
Age: 34
Profession/vocation: Paid doctor to the criminal and free doctor to the poor
Affiliation:

• Church of the Maker


• One particular to-be-named criminal gang in Kingstone

Skills:

• Medical skills; basic medical competences; access to and understanding of medicines, including extremely rare and little-known ones extracted from Pan-Dessian flora and fauna; and competences in biothaumaturgy


• Combat skills: basic gunmanship; basic swordsmanship; an ingenious attitude to medical magic and what other applications it might have


• Bilinguial: speaks both the primary language of the Union and that of his home country in Eronia

Traits:

• Brash


• Misanthropic


• Lascivious


• Guilty

Personality: Edward is not a particularly nice man to talk to. He is gruff, permanently irritable and acts with barely-concealed disdain for those around him, including his patients. He is almost famously ill-tempered and impatient. Unsurprisingly, he has no friends that know him on pure social terms, though he does, of course, have contacts through his work with whom he is on simply stand-offish terms, rather than active resentment. Beneath the surface, he is still hugely contemptuous, but there is slightly more depth to him; he is wracked with guilt for his actions in colonial Pan-Dessia and feels morally obliged by a higher power to make up for them through the administration of medicine among the poor. He is, however, morally and ambiguous, and is happy to pick and choose those things he feels are moral or not. He has more or less given up on people and his 'good work' is more of an internal penance rather than trying to make the world a better place – which he will frankly admit to those close to him (provided he is not jealously seeking the higher moral ground). While he likes to behave as though he is above the physical, he is frankly not. He is sleezy, frequently gluttonous, and more than a little interested in saving his own skin. When push comes to shove, morality be damned.
Biography: Edward is not a national of the Union. He was born in _______ in central Eronia, where he grew up as the second son of a middle class family. With the middle classes, too, in Eronia, came education, where Edward excelled in both the humanities and natural philosophy (read: sciences). It was inevitable, if slightly disappointing for his rather more practical family, who wanted another lawyer in the family to take over the family business, that he would go on to university, and continue to develop his increasing fascination in the living body; especially those of humans. It was at the university that his potential as a Biothaumaturge began to exhibit itself. Of course, the applications were few outside that of the military as ownership of the fuels for Biothaumaturgy were few and far between. It was, therefore, as an employee of the government that he grew his skills in Biothaumaturgy, in a Punishment factory just outside the city he grew up in. This both paid for a roof over his head and gave him the experience needed for his education, and, frankly, they were criminals, weren't they? It was only when one (somehow) broke out of its labour and beseeched him for help that he was shaken. That night, he simply ran away.
His flight brought him to the Union where he sought employment as a doctor, but without (great) language skills or (recognised) credentials as a medic, he was forced to turn to His Majesty's Royal Navy, where he trained as a military doctor and joined the main colonial fleet seeking to discover (and conquer) the unknown world. Five years he remained a stationed doctor in Richmond, caring for the men stationed with him. With indignant natives and Eastern fevers flying around, he more than earned his stripes. He also took it upon himself to explore the local area and its fauna and flora, and privately discovered many potential medical applications for their constituent parts. No doubt these medicines were already commonplace among the natives and would be exported en masse to the West within a few years, but Edward was one of the first to get his hands on them.
His career with the navy ended abruptly in his injury; a native woman came to him with her child, whose leg was showing all the signs of gangrine, and begged him to heal him. Obviously, this wasn't something Edward could do within his physical capacity as a doctor and knew that he could not use the navy's medical supply of whale oil for a native. He agreed to help nontheless, and agreed that the Other Side could take from him whatever it wanted. He fully expected to die, and attributes his survival to the prayers of the native woman and feels to this day that he was in some way touched by god. He did, nevertheless, grow ill enough to be discharged and, in his months of recovery, returned to the Union.
Here he decided to dedicate himself to humanitarian work. In order to pay the bills and to acquire the fuels required to enable him to heal the people beyond the reach of physical medicine, he is paid by a big, local gang to heal them without asking questions when they get into scrapes, and is also sponsored by the Church of the Maker, under whose name he begrudgingly performs his 'miracles'.

Forgot while writing this that I didn't know any country names for Eronia. Was thinking mid-east of the continent, roughly equivalent to Austria.

Emergence

“Ugh,” said Elizabeth down the phone, “She's been at it all day.”
“Ha,” Sebastian said the word approximating to a laugh, but didn't actually laugh. He was only mostly listening, just about holding the phone to his ear with one hand while stirring the dubious-looking substance in the cast-iron cauldron in his garage with an icicle. His hand was freezing, but the ice was necessary. He had found that using wooden ladles or metal rods added parts of whatever their constituent materials were made of to the brew. While it wouldn't spoil a batch, the tainting remained factual. Ice, though, was just water, and water, he had found over the years, tended to be a neutral base, “She's been at it all her life.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Don't worry. She's just excited in her own way. Anyway, Elizabeth, I really have to go. I'll see you later. Tschau.”

He hung up, not before time. Where he had spare time, he was more than willing to devote some of it to the girl, but spare time was currently in short supply. Customers will still drifting in and out to collect his orders, Gloria was giving him grief as well, and, on top of that, as a brewer, he couldn't miss the opportunity the Emergence provided. A potion made under the full moon was a different beast to one made under a new moon; he could only imagine what a difference the appearance of the stars made, they whose light vanished for twenty years at a time. There were people (he thought vaguely of the Flamels) that could weave their own chemical magic like scientists. Sebastian was no scientist. What he did was an art.

The cauldron was jet black, and about the size of a reasonable arm-chair. Theoretically, one could climb in and bathe. Thinking about it, it did look something like a jacuzzi, with hot bubbles streaming to the top. Then again, jacuzzi bubbles weren't normally a sick-looking green colour. At least they, in a surprisingly turn of events, smelled vaguely of strawberries. To finish, he dropped the icicle altogether and gently rubbed his hands together to get the feeling back in them – even through the protective gloves, they got chilly, to say the least. He had long since learned not to warm his hands in the hot vapours of the cauldron. To say it would be a bad idea would be to do a disservice to the notion of stupidity.

When the feeling returned to his fingers, with the slight burning of nerve endings that sometimes comes with that sensation, he held his hands out in the direction of the small conifer he could see out of the window. His wrists together, he reached out to it, even fifteen metres away. He could feel it; not physically, perhaps, but its presence. There it was. He had tried to think of a term for the feeling that wasn't 'life force', but no such term existed in his vocabulary. Gently, he coaxed it toward him; the tree's very essence was flowing like water or a current of wind. Sebastian pulled at it gently and then pushed it past the brim of the cauldron and into the murky brew, where it remained. This was the trick. This was why the Jung brand (regardless of whether the nom de plume du jour was Stamm, Goethe, or Brecht) of potions was popular. They brimmed, quite literally, with life. He glanced again at the tree outside. Its forest-green pines had browned slightly. It would return to form in a couple of day. It always did.

Things to do. Things to do. He put the lid on the cauldron – it looked like an enormous saucepan, misplaced in an enormous garage connected through to the kitchen of Sebastian's little house. He would have lived with the Andersons, but for Gloria's rule about magic on the property. Something about being impartial. He lifted the safety goggles off his head and placed them with his gloves on a rickety shelf on the wall, which was there for exactly that purpose. His normal glasses would have replaced them, but he had barely removed them from the breast pocket of his coveralls and pushed them up the bridge of his nose before removing them to chew the ends. He thought of Elizabeth and Gloria. The ball to celebrate the emergent witches was tonight, of course. In theory, it didn't really affect him. Not really. As an honorary member of the Anderson family, he was no doubt expected to attend, but his only other task was to, as usual, check up on the young witches from the university, but that was basically the day job anyway. Of course, the little darlings would have emerged by now – hopefully. He dug his mobile phone out of his pocket and got to work.

East Wellsburg was always full of surprises. He made the rounds by phone. Normally, he would speak to the young witches in his care personally, but in the interest larger, inter-family events, it was usually a good sign to try to speak to somebody near the top of the hierarchy. Mostly he was met with something ranging from mild interest or mild lack thereof. The university's bespoke pastoral care, also known as Sebastian Jung, was considered, at best, only a mild help or, at worst, a mildly annoying busybody. Either way, each conversation, largely the same as the last ran for about a cool five minutes – except one, notable only by its absence. The Liggens, a family of, amusingly, just three were possibly his favourite to deal with. The young witch, Matthew, was a sweet kid. A bit wet, maybe, but a decent enough guy, and his grandparents (it was grandparents, wasn't it?) were charming enough, too. They were polite and they were interested – unlike the other families, with their back-biting and psychopaths to be – and were among the few groups to never have caused him undue administration. It was unusual, then, that they would be the ones to fail to answer the telephone; he got through to the answerphone, of course, and left a brief message;

Hello Mr and Mrs Friel, Sebastian Jung from the university here. I hope you're enjoying your Emergence – and Matthew, of course. Clearly you're quite busy this evening! Anyway, hopefully everything has gone okay, and hopefully I'll see you at the ball later this evening. It'll be a great opportunity for all the families to get to know one another and really integrate Matthew and his peers into our community. On behalf of the Andersons, I'd like to remind you that we prefer guests not to use magic on our premises in order to preserve the house's neutrality. I'm sure I'll see you later but if there's anything I can do to help in meantime, please give me a call – and, of course, the Andersons would also appreciate it if you could delete this message once you've listened to it. Prying ears and all that. Thanks, and see you later.

Know Your Tenses 101

What is a tense?

It will be easier to show what a tense is than to explain it.

I played tennis – past tense, event happened prior to narration

I am playing tennis – present tense, event happens at the same time as narration

I will play tennis – future tense, event will happen after the time of narration

The action word, or verb, in these sentences is a simple one (to play), but it's used in three different forms to give information about when or, in what timeframe the action is taking place. These forms are called tenses.

You use tenses all the time and you almost certainly know how to use them in your native language. The thing is, you may not be used to consciously thinking about them while writing, and I often see mistakes creep into people's writing, where their writing is otherwise great.

RP convention is that players write in third person (He or she, rather than I, played tennis) past tense. The past timeframe is common in fiction, as it gives a sense of authority and matter-of-factness. These events happened. The present timeframe is also quite common in (more modern) fiction, but it has a sense of immediacy and intimacy instead. The future timeframe is much rarer.

How does this affect me?

Verbs are the actions in our sentences, and so we tend to use a lot of them. They make up what our sentences actually mean and, every time one is used, it is in a different form. If you don't pay attention to the tenses of your verbs, you can end up giving the wrong information. At worst, this can cause confusion, because your sentence may not actually say what you want it to. However, it's more likely that mistakes in tense-usage will simply cause inconsistent time frames and be jarring for the reader. While being a complete tense master, if such a title exists, won't necessarily improve your writing that much, complete ignorance of tenses will make your writing unpleasant to read and incoherent in extreme cases.

Peter went into the kitchen. He searched through the shelves and cupboards to find some cornflakes, but there weren't any. There had to be some somewhere! He gets out his spoon in anticipation. Eventually, some turned up (hidden behind the milk) and he ate them happily.

One of the verbs in this passage is in the wrong tense. It doesn't fit in with the others. That verb is 'gets'. Here, the passage is all written in past tenses, to indicate that the events happened in the past, with the exception of 'gets', which is in the present tense – even though the getting happened in the same chronological sequence as the other events. In this sense, you could consider it like a simple typo; while the reader can still make sense out of what you have written, leaving these mistakes in your writing can feel amateurish and puts responsibility on the reader to mentally correct your grammar before being able to enjoy the story.

What can I do?

Honestly, if you're not sure that you're using tenses correctly, the simple and easiest thing for you to do is proofread your work. You should do that anyway. If you're writing in your first language, you already know this stuff! Your instinct should be able to guide you through – just find the verbs in your passages and ask yourself when does it say the action took place – before, at the same time, or after your narration?

If you're still not sure, feel free to send me a PM to spot-check your stuff and point out any mistakes you've made.

Disclaimer

A tense is a complex grammatical system, and there are lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them, and many of them don't translate properly into different languages, even in closely-related languages. Essentially, what I'm saying is that if you want a real expert in what tenses are and what they do, you will need to talk to a proper linguist. While I'm confident in my English to have instinct cover those parts of grammar I can't label and analyse and deconstruct and teach, I can't give you a beginner's crash course in tenses.

[Steampunk] When the Smoke Clears 2.0

I'm still with you. Sorry it's taking a while.

[Steampunk] When the Smoke Clears 2.0

I mean, these helpful resources for character portraits etc. God knows I had a nightmare looking for mine.

[Steampunk] When the Smoke Clears 2.0

Can we make these links public as stuff that would generally be helpful?

:))