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52. Eliza, you keep correcting this to “Syrillar”, but I swear there are 2 “r”s? (No, Floyd, just the one. No Pirates here. ES)
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53. In the old days you’d need a hired Wizard to do the necessary magic, making this an expensive proposition. With the advent of cheap canned spells following the Bison King’s nationalisation of the Gollimmar spellforges, however, this is now achievable on a reasonable budget.
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CHAPTER TWO: EROICA CITY
1. Before we get any further: it’s ‘Eroica City’, as in the Greek for Hero, not ‘Erotica City’, as in, y’know, boning. This is not a ‘sex place’. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe the number of lascivious sods who book tickets based on what they assume is a typo.
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2. I mean, you have an editor who advised you not to actively support the near-openly fascist Bison King, but clearly that wasn’t what you were looking for. – ES
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3. Who will ever forget the iconic duo that was Honkus and the Highland Soother?
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4. From everything I’ve seen, ‘Good’ looks a hell of a lot like ‘shareholder value’. – ES
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5. As far as I can tell, it would just mean less property destruction and a more reasonable distribution of wealth? – ES
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6. If they can’t find any criminals, they take on their secondary role as brand ambassadors and just sort of … sell to people. Loudly. It can be a bit disconcerting, but it makes sense – they’ve got to earn their keep when they’re not fighting, after all.
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7. Interestingly, for accounting purposes, paid Heroes are counted as intellectual property assets, due to the linking of character design and branding. As such, even speaking a sentence to a Hero from another company counts as use of a copyrighted brand and is expressly forbidden.
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8. Floyd, they distribute it to the third of the city’s population living in abysmal poverty. You know that, right? – ES
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9. And sends hundreds back to the tenements when they prove not to be that powerful, but that’s not on the prospectuses, is it? – ES
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10. As a power, this isn’t in the same league as flight or energy blasts, but Skeleton Key is a creative man, and you’d be amazed by how many crises he solved with wiggly fingers.
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11. There’s a reason construction companies make such a fortune here.
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12. Which in Eroica can mean anything up to and including high-calibre bullet wounds.
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13. I did – until some psychotic Adonis in tinned-soup livery descended on rocket boots and opened up with a flamethrower. As he bathed the alley in flames, he muttered some grim one-liner about standing the heat and getting out of the kitchen, but everyone was too busy screaming and fleeing to listen. – ES
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14. Indeed, many Baddies make their costumes as easily copiable as possible, and it’s not unusual to find whole gangs of youths on poorer blocks wearing the mask of their favoured Baddie. Classified by the city as terrorist ‘antiheroes’, but calling themselves Henchfolk (or so Eliza tells me), these deluded kids will carry out astonishingly bold infrastructure raids in the name of their idols.
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15. ‘Marvels’, they call them.
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CHAPTER THREE: SPUME
1. Even if the ‘theft’ of a vessel is temporary and agreed with its owners in exchange for a reasonable donation, it works. I even heard of someone dodging the fare for a steamer on Chugholme and causing the whole shebang to end up on Spume because they felt too excited about getting away with it.
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2. I should know. On my first visit I assumed an ‘anything goes’ mentality, and immediately shot a man in the leg for garnishing my drink incorrectly at Hardtack Mulligan’s Bar & Grill. Over the following month in a rat-clogged brig, while Eliza explained my misunderstanding to the Council of Free Captains (CFC), I learned otherwise. I have to say, they were terribly reasonable about the whole thing in the end, freeing me in exchange for agreeing to … certain terms.
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3. They’re really boring.
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4. They had to politicise it, didn’t they?
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5. Controversially, some captains are now only allowing their crews to use foam cutlasses when there are tourists aboard, with rumours that this will soon be mandated by the Council of Free Captains. Critics are calling this a classic case of Pirate’s Code Gone Mad, but I for one can see the sense in it.
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6. Best one I saw was by Captain Liz Blacktooth, who tattooed the map to her loot on the arse of her long-term rival’s pet ape. They had the map right under their noses for years, but never saw it until the ape got the shits and they had to shave its rear end, revealing a dotted line and an ‘x’ marking the spot.
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7. Eagle-eyed travellers will note that there are, in fact, only five seas. But this is just not polite to point out to the Pirates, who are adamant about there being seven.
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8. Don’t underestimate these Spume kids, though – the little bastards can put it away. I got in a drinking contest with a nine-year-old and the little git utterly bladdered me.
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9. I must admit, I hadn’t heard much about Doldrum until someone told me all about it on my way to a wedding – I have to say he was an odd bloke, but he really sold it well.
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10. Not in the good way, either. It may sound like the stuff of cheap romance novels, but more often than not it involves a vast amount of deck maintenance and very little in the way of teaching twinkly-eyed
