The Grand Laboratory hummed with the comforting, rhythmic heartbeat of a dozen steam-driven pistons. Albert Whitelight stood at his primary workbench, his face unlined and his hands as steady as the day he had perfected the Elixir of Perpetual Restoration over a century ago. To the few who knew him back in his world, he was a ghost or a myth; to himself, he was simply a man with enough time to finally finish his work.
He was currently decanting a solution of silver nitrate, his eyes focused. Being immortal hadn't made him lazy; it had made him meticulous. When one has forever, there is no excuse for a messy experiment.
A sudden, sharp lurch rocked the palace.
The silver nitrate wobbled, but Albert's steady hand kept it from spilling. The floor groaned, a sound like a massive iron door hinge swinging shut, followed by a momentary pressure in his ears that made him blink.
"Seismic activity?" he murmured, checking a brass barometer on the wall. The needle spun wildly for a second before settling.
Albert sighed and set the beaker down. He checked the various gauges along the walls. The pressure in the main boilers was stable. The ticking of his master clock remained constant. Aside from the brief shudder, everything seemed... normal. He glanced out the high arched window. The forest was still there. The pines were thick, the shadows deep, and the mist clung to the forest floor just as it had an hour ago.
He turned back to his work, convinced it was a minor geological settling. He reached for his pipette, but a sound stopped him.
It wasn't the hiss of steam or the click of gears. It was a shriek.
It was a jagged, piercing sound—too high-pitched for a hawk, too guttural for a human. Albert paused, his brow furrowed. He walked to the window and adjusted the focus dial on his pince-nez.
Far above the canopy, a pack of beings emerged from a cliffside. Albert's breath hitched. They were flying, but they lacked the hollow-boned grace of birds. Through his magnified lenses, he saw the unmistakable anatomy of humanoid torsos joined to leathery, bat-like wings. They dived and circled, their movements erratic and predatory.
Harpies.
Albert stood frozen. His mind raced through every known phylum and genus in his world's biology. Non-existent. Anatomically improbable. Mythological.
He looked at the trees again. They weren't his pines. The bark was different—silver-white and bleeding a strange, amber sap. The constellation of the midday moon was in the wrong quadrant.
The realization hit him like a physical blow, but it wasn't fear that took hold. It was a savage, intellectual hunger. The "quake" hadn't been a tremor; it had been a bridge. He wasn't in his forest anymore. He was in a living, breathing miracle.
"Astounding," he whispered, his voice trembling with a rare, youthful vigor. "Spontaneous dimensional displacement into a high-magic or high-mutation ecosystem."
The shock vanished, replaced by the cold efficiency of a man who had seen too much of the 'normal' world and was bored of it. He had been a scientist for over a hundred years, and he had just been given a new universe to dissect.
He moved with a speed that belied his calm demeanor. He donned his heavy leather duster, its pockets lined with lead-glass vials. He grabbed his "Negotiator"—a custom-built pneumatic rifle with a high-pressure brass tank—and headed for the garage.
Moments later, the heavy iron gates of the palace-lab ground open. The Steam Buggy roared to life, a polished beast of brass and black iron, venting a triumphant cloud of white steam into the strange, crisp air.
Albert shifted the gears, the cogs biting with a satisfying metallic clack. He didn't know where he was, and he didn't care. There were specimens in the sky, and Albert Whitelight intended to be the first man to put them under a microscope.
The buggy surged forward, its heavy tread-wheels tearing into the soil of the North as he drove headlong into the unknown wilderness.
******
The morning in the Unclaimed North began as it had for centuries. A scouting party of Aen Seidhe elves moved like ghosts through the silver-barked pines. They were tracking a wild bull, their eyes flicking between the tracks in the mud and the Harpies circling above. To the elves, the shrieking hybrids were a natural, if dangerous, part of the ecosystem. They waited for the hunt to begin.
Then, the silence of the ancient forest was shattered by a guttural, rhythmic thrumming.
From the dense thicket, a Steam Buggy—a hulking carriage of brass plating and iron—roared into the clearing, venting plumes of white exhaust. The elves froze, their jaws dropping as the heavy door hissed open.
Albert Whitelight stepped out.
His Metal Boots hit the loam with a bone-shaking thud, the internal hydraulics wheezing as they stabilized his weight. He was encased in Machined Plate Armor, a suit of articulated steel that groaned with the tension of pressurized steam. On his head, a Goggled Helmet flickered with internal light, its lenses zooming with a series of mechanical clicks.
The Harpies, sensing an intruder, shrieked and dived. Albert didn't flinch.
He raised his Machined Gauntlet. As the lead Harpy lunged with talons meant to rip through oak, Albert's fingers—driven by high-pressure pistons—clamped shut mid-air. With a cold, metallic clank-whir, the Machined Gauntlet's hydraulic force snapped the creature's leg like a dry twig.
"Structural integrity: insufficient," Albert muttered, his voice amplified and clinical through his helmet.
He reached for the Charged Accelerator Gun strapped to his back. It wasn't a bow or a staff; it was a heavy, long-barreled Rifle humming with the vibration of a spinning internal flywheel.
CRACK-BOOM.
The high-caliber round broke the sound barrier, punching a hole through a second Harpy and sending a spray of ichor across the silver trees. There was no fire, no spell—just the raw, kinetic violence of science.
Albert marched forward, his Metal Boots crushing the undergrowth with a heavy, unstoppable rhythm. He stood over the twitching specimen and pulled out a set of steel calipers.
"You," Albert's voice boomed, turning his brass-domed head toward the thicket where the elves were hidden. His thermal sensors had already locked onto them. "The heat signatures in the brush. Is the nervous system of this species decentralized, or did I simply miss the primary lobe during the kinetic impact?"
The elves remained paralyzed. They had come to hunt a bull, but they were witnessing a man who had brought a factory's lethality to a world of myth.