Just wake her up

No need to mess around with the watch just yet. His sister would always be by his side, he'd have ample opportunities to mess about with her.

Gently shaking her shoulder Walter pulled his sister from her dreams.

“Come, sister mine. Time to wake up; our destination draws near.” Charlotte rose to a sitting position and stretched in a very un-ladylike way. Were Walter his mother, he would have berated the girl. As it was though, he just thought it cute. Almost cat-like. Walter did quite enjoy cats, much more than dogs. Though on the other hand, wolves were more his animal than cats were. Deciding to leave his thoughts on the merits of cats, dogs, and wolves for later, the young man turned his attention to the view from their window.

“Beautiful,” his sister whispered, and Walter could not disagree.

Before them, in the midnight darkness, London shone with a radiance that Walter had never seen a match for and doubted he ever would again. It was, he thought, as if someone had carved out a piece of Heaven and placed it on earth. A city lit not by gas, as all others were, but rather lit by the power of the storms. Lightning, distilled and tamed so as to be used for the betterment of humanity in the form of electricity. To be sure, Walter had seen electricity before, and even used it. But not on this scale.

His father had, on a whim, bought up a box of lightbulbs and the required power generator. They had to be powered by a hand crank, and quickly burned out. Just as quickly as the light bulbs burnt out, Walter’s father had lost interest. Walter had taken the remaining light bulbs and rigged up his own little system with it. He had automated the crank using the small stream that Mother had set up outside his window. His mother had, at first, taken offense to the ugly waterwheel that he had set in her pristine rock garden, but she had relented after Walter had made it fit in more by making it look like a miniature farmhouse.

It gathered and stored electricity throughout the day, the storage a result of a month of the study of batteries, and allowed Walter to see while he tinkered at night. It was a massive improvement over the a candle, as there was very little chance of him setting his room on fire, like he had that one time when he was twelve. Fortunately for him, his mother had been visiting her sister’s wedding at the time and thus he did not get a stern lecture on why fire was dangerous.

It did however set Jane's clothes on fire, and he was treated to quite the nice view of her as she stomped out of a nearby pond, her clothes burnt off of her. Soaking wet and in just her undergarments, it hadn't been particularly frightening when she swore bloody vengeance against Walter. He had, for his part, simply locked her out of the house and not let her back inside until his parents drew close to home and she frantically promised not to tell his mother or to punish him for what was, as both parties understood, an accident. Being mad at him for an accident was certainly not worth the humiliation of being found locked out of the house naked.

Not that Walter's parents hadn't seen Jane in all states of dress before. Beyond the fact that she was particularly inclined to embarrassing mishaps, they had practically raised the girl since she was a child. Really, Jane was more or less part of the family, an older sister of sorts to Charlotte and Walter. Though, that actually might make it more embarrassing, thinking about it now. After all, what child wanted their parents to see them in such a humiliating state? Especially as a grown woman. That said, Jane had been all to happy that Walter began to use electric lights rather than candles so that such a situation would not happen again.

But really, Walter’s little electrical light was nothing compared to London's lights! He could not even begin to imagine how much power it took to operate the city. And soon enough he would be able to find out. The Royal Library was for students of Atlas Academy only, so to Atlas he would go. And he desperately needed more detailed information.

There was, after all, only so much you could figure out and then build with books and what few resources made their way to their village, a smallish thing halfway between Plymouth and Penzance. With lacking knowledge and inferior parts, his batteries were unoptimized, loosing charge rapidly. An entire day’s worth of charging his batteries using the watermill only afforded Walter an hour or so of minimal power.

But in London, neither resources nor knowledge were limited, if one had the money to pay for it. And so he had left for London, to learn the art of the machine. After all, you could not spend your entire life in a little country village. And his sister had managed to argue her way on the journey with him as well. Though Walter suspected it had something to do with the fact that his mother was getting somewhat tired of attempting to turn his dear younger sister into a proper woman; something that his sister fought her on at every possible turn. Perhaps she was hoping that cousin Marianna’s family would help civilize the girl?

“Come, brother mine! You have lost yourself in your thoughts again, and so are missing the view! You can see the Tower from here!” Charlotte’s voice tore Walter from his thinking.

He glanced out the window that his sister was peering from and he was awestruck. If London was like a shard of Heaven, this was as if someone had pulled the Tower of Babel straight from the Bible.

It rose, in all its glory, spearing the skies with its point, the top of which Walter could hardly see. It shone with a heavenly bronze, a testament to the prowess of the British Imperium. It was human ingenuity at its finest, a wonder without equal. On its face, staring out to the four winds were the great clocks which gave the tower its name.

“The Clockwork Tower,” Walter breathed. He had seen pictures, true, but no mere picture could do it justice. It was a beacon of hope, a bastion of learning, home to Atlas Academy, set in the heart of the London Imperium. On each floor a thousand of the finest scholars studied. There were one thousand and one floors in the Clocktower.

A knock on the locked compartment door shook Walter from his wonder. Though slightly annoyed at first, he decided that there would be time enough to admire the Tower. He was going to be in London for some time, after all. The young man walked over to the door, leaving his sister to continue to stare out the window in awe, and unlocked it. The door opened to reveal one of the train’s stewards, an effeminate looking young man with short brown hair who looked to be a few years older than Walter. The man could almost have been a woman, for all his feminine features, but Walter was fairly sure that the Clockwork railways didn’t employ women.