What would happen, if the sixth was New York, as opposed to Paris? What, if it fell in the 1920s? What if your characters would live there now? How would they change? What would change? Would new criminals rise to power? New factions? Would the prohibition exist here? And what to do with those new inventions? Time to see how you react.[li]
After New York fell, Maria’s response was… mixed. Her house, crushed. Money, possibly worth nothing. At least, she thought right, that automobiles WERE the future. Now she just needed a New Job… the brass embassy still existed. Why not rob it? And then, she could start Praga Motors.
The rumours were right.
The Inescapable Professor was on her steamer, far on the zee when the Sixth City fell. She had done her best to get her beloved students out of London, redirecting them to a new school in Port Carnelian. Still, there were enough friends and innocent souls left in the Fifth City to make the new fall incredibly heart-wrenching to her. It took her days to have the heart to go check the new city.
She landed on the old Wolfstack Docks (now something different, she thought, almost going back to zee to grief a little more). It didn’t take her much perusual to understand - it was New York, an American city. She frowned. She visited the place once, back on her Surface Days, and wasn’t impressed by it. To rub salt on her wounds, she still remembered a Surface detective from New York that, on a trip to the Neath, called her scientific method "old-fashioned". Apparently, being a detective in New York meant being broken and brooding, doing stupid decisions over a beautiful woman, getting in fights with mobsters and solving crimes with a mix of blind luck and opportunism. Definitely not her cup of tea.
(Even more insulting was being called old-fashioned, when the methods developed by her masters - and a bit by her, why not? - were now the standard police procedures. She wasn’t old-fashioned, she was a pioneer. Stupid New Yorker detective.)
She felt incredible out of place in the new atmosphere. Maybe she could adapt to there if she wanted to, but, for the moment, it was the zee for her. Her children were waiting for her in Port Carnelian, and she was willing to see if there was any truth in the claims that people wanted to build a new university there. Maybe she could help with that.
She waved the Bazaar a final goodbye (it seemed rude not to, the thing was alive, after all) and left the Sixth City to its devices. Good luck to the people there.