LONDON, 1870

London is the largest city the world has ever known. It has grown faster than its laws, its streets torn open by railways and sewers, its skyline darkened by smoke and ambition. Time is regulated, labour measured, lives priced. Progress arrives daily, whether wanted or not.

Above the city hangs the Flying Fortress an East India Company steel warship of gargantuan scale, bristling with propellers, permanently aloft over London. Vast, armed, and immovable, it maintains its station as if the city itself were a possession under inspection. The Company offers practical explanations security, communications, protection of trade and no one in authority officially contradicts them.

In the last thirty years the East India Company has grown into something unprecedented: a corporate power with its own military, intelligence networks, research divisions, and political leverage. It is not the Crown. It is not Parliament. Yet it shapes policy, suppresses inquiry, and funds innovation on a scale no government department can match.

London lives beneath its shadow, literally and otherwise.

THE YEAR OF LOST CHILDREN

In 1848, children began to disappear.

New born infants vanished from their cots and were replaced by others... alive, breathing, unmistakably not human. Sometimes the change was subtle. Often it was not: goat legs, hooves, horns, wings, blue skin, tails.

At first it was treated as an oddity. Then a scandal. Then a crisis.

No security prevented the exchange. No witness ever saw it happen. Scotland Yard’s new detectives failed entirely. By the end of 1848 it was accepted, quietly, grimly, that any child born would be replaced within its first months of life.

The infants left behind were eventually categorised. Physicians, scholars, and occultists assigned names drawn from folklore and convenience:

Sidhe. Satyrs. Pixies. Centaurs. Blues. Mer. Dryads. Imps.

What they represent remains unresolved. Whether children were stolen, changed, or exchanged is still debated. What is certain is that they are not human and yet they are not strangers to humanity either.

By 1870, they account for nearly ten percent of the population. Their numbers continue to grow. The first generation of fae is reaching adulthood, and the world is watching closely.

THE SUPERNATURAL

By 1870, the supernatural is no longer dismissed but it is not accepted either.

Spiritualists, once rare and circumspect, are now publicly acknowledged, even the Queen is said to employ one. Their message is consistent: the dead do not rest easily.

Some fae display abilities that defy mechanical or medical explanation. None of this is celebrated. Instead, it is regulated, denied, and quietly exploited, much like disease, poverty, or crime.

There are rumours of older, deeper magics newly stirring but they remain rumours, and London prefers it that way.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF WONDERS

The last twenty years have altered London more profoundly than the previous two centuries.

Steam power is no longer confined to mills and locomotives. It now replaces flesh, augments labour, and intrudes into daily life in ways that would once have seemed grotesque. Men return from factories and wars with limbs of brass and iron. Clockwork prostheses restore function, sometimes exceeding it, at the cost of constant maintenance and quiet social unease.

Carriages can move without horses. Some run on steam, others on mechanisms whose workings are not fully explained. They are loud, unreliable, and prone to spectacular failure, but they exist and that is enough to change expectations forever.

Above the streets, experimental flying machines have appeared. Most are crude, short-lived, and occasionally fatal to their operators. A few persist. Balloons, powered craft, and hybrid designs are tested under licence or private patronage, watched closely by the military and the East India Company alike. Flight is no longer impossible, merely challenging.

Electricity hums through the city in hidden ways. Telegraph wires lace London together, carrying words faster than any horse or train. Batteries power bells, laboratories, and devices sold as medical marvels or spiritual aids. Arc lights blaze briefly over exhibitions and worksites, harsh and unnatural, hinting at futures not yet ready to arrive.

Medicine advances with similar brutality. Surgery is cleaner, faster, and more invasive than ever before. Bodies are repaired, altered, and studied with a confidence that outpaces understanding. Survival rates improve. Ethics lag behind.

Not all innovation is public. Much is experimental, proprietary, or quietly abandoned after catastrophic results. The law struggles to keep pace, drawing distinctions between invention and heresy, engineering and sorcery distinctions that are often political rather than technical.

This is an age of wonders, but not comfort.

THE ADVERTISEMENT

Across London, a notice has appeared:

GOAT & SONS

on behalf of discreet clients

Persons Extraordinary Required

Discretion essential.
Unusual experience considered an advantage.
Work of a sensitive and unconventional character.
A tolerance for risk and consequence expected.

Applications accepted from persons of any background or circumstance.
Enquiries to be made in person or by letter at our Fleet Street or Elephant & Castle offices during the month of January, 1870.