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joezworld · 2 years

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Electric Evil

Traintober Day 12 - Poltergeist

So, for context here, I stole took inspiration for most of this from the Extended Railway Series on the Sodor Island Forums (not for the first time and not for the last), and as usual, I've put some tweaks on it to make it better. #humble

Here I based a lot of this on ERS Novel 2 - The Peel Godred Railway, and while I recommend reading that, it's not required for this.

Summary - The DC Electric Line dies a violent death, and something rises out of it. Godred keeps it off his mountain.

1 - Nature

Those who believed in such things thought the very Valley was having its revenge on the rails.

It was not an entirely unreasonable belief. The Valley had not been consulted, nor did it want, the input of Man on how to conduct itself, and yet Man imposed his viewpoint anyway.

The first rails to reach the fortified Peel of King Godred was a small one, coming from the western coast. They were not of issue to the Valley.

Their small line worked with nature, inching along tight cliffs, running around mountains, and poking through gaps in the rock. Their service was first-rate, and the Valley’s People could soon move both themselves and their goods to markets far away. The Valley might have even enjoyed this - if one were to put stock in those sorts of beliefs - and caused no trouble for the second railway.

The second railway only touched the Valley on its edges. Its rails ascended The Mountain, reaching for the heavens. It courted the mountain, edged along it, never daring to defile it. The Valley paid it no notice, even as The Mountain slowly but surely became One with the rails.

The third railway, however, did not please The Valley. Its rails charged northwards, up to the base of The Mountain and then beyond, caring more for the River than it did for the Valley. This was a slight, but one that the Valley was willing to overlook.

What the railway brought with it, however, was an abomination. A massive blight on its natural order. A huge, noisy, dirty, stinking industrial plant that took ores from outside the Valley and processed them into Refined Aluminium, leaving equally huge piles of filthy, dirty, stinking refuse as a waste product.

The Valley disliked waste. It disliked aluminium, and by extent, it disliked the railway that served it. Its dislike grew as the first railway suffered and died as a result - their careful and meandering path to the sea was too small and too slow, and they lost even the most loyal passengers, slowly siphoned away by the bigger rails.

If the Valley disliked the railway, then the River was furious. The construction of the plant required massive amounts of Electricity, a new and unwanted evil that required nothing short of total damnation of everything around it, as a sacrifice.

Up and up the dam went, towering into the air until it seemed like it might touch the sky. The River raged, furious at having its path disrupted. The Valley seethed at the itching feeling of the huge structure.

During all of this, the Mountain was ambivalent. Man had lived here for hundreds of years - it was them who had ascribed life to the Valley and the River, and had built the Mountain Railway. To live in Harmony with them would be better for all involved, it soothed.

The Valley ignored the Mountain, and the River flooded its banks in displeasure.

Then Man fully damned them both. The huge concrete and earth structure was complete, and the River was soon fed into it.

And into it

Until there was no longer a River and a Valley behind the concrete, but a massive lake, made purely for man’s needs - a total damnation of nature, as a sacrifice at the demonic altar of Electricity.

The railway that ran up the mountain was powered by Electricity. Now tied together in both circumstances and rage, the River tried to flood it, and the Valley tried to collapse the land around it.

Man was multitudinous, and whenever they tried, a hundred men, or a thousand, would arrive, and right their wrongs.

The Mountain chastised them. Are they not Of This Land? It asked as the two cursed the railway, the plant, and the Men who worked on them. Are they not worthy of our care?

No. Responded the Valley And The River. They tried again, but Man stopped them.

And again.

Man simply persevered, expanding His mind through the concepts of “reinforcement”, “retaining walls”, “flood prevention”, and “embankments.” By the end of the first decade, the River was in check, and the Valley was unable to continue its crusade.

While the Mountain watched with concern, River and Valley waited for a time to strike.

They needn't have bothered; the denizens of the rails retaliated against themselves.

2 - Steel

The Valley Railway has had two lives - the second is still being lived, but the first died a long and unhappy death, done so by its own buffers.

Man was inexperienced in the ways of Electricity - they knew not how such technology would apply to the field of steel wheel to steel rail. They brought in a set of locomotives three - one of each power type, and named them for the Lakes around the Mountain that fed the River.

Loey Machan - The strongest and largest. An express locomotive with delusions of grandeur, his line had sold him after the line he was to lord over was cancelled. Instead of a fresh start, he thought the Railway to be an exile - banishment from his own personal Kingdom of Heaven, thrown instead to the wolves and the sheep and the peasantry - who were altogether worse than the beasts.

Poll-ny-Chrink - The middle engine. Neither the smallest or the largest, she was the youngest of a family of coal haulers, sold off during unfavourable economic times. Hard work was in her very being, and she arrived fairly aglow at the prospect of more challenging duties.

Dubbyn Moar - The runt. Tiny even by the standards of the time, she was surplus to requirements - a third engine on a ¾ mile horseshoe of a line that did well with two. She knew her position and size acutely, and would’ve had self-consciousness issues on even the kindest railway.

This was not the kindest Railway. Tucked away in the valley, far from notice of Men with Hatts - obsessed with Steam as they were - they worked alone, in the long shadows of the Valley, their complaints silenced by the rushing roar of the River.

Left to his own devices, Loey Machan felt that he needed to re-establish his dominance by any means necessary. In the long shadows and loud silences, he turned himself from a fallen god into a tyrant king.

Slowly, with equal parts bad luck, stupidity, and sociopathic insidiousness, Loey ground down the cheer and stability of his fellow engines. He believed that by turning them against themselves, he could engineer some kind of fiefdom, where he ruled over his serfs with an iron will.

Instead, he created an emotional horror show, with himself at the center.

Dubbyn Moar, now known as Maude, was his first target. He exploited her weakness, her doubts, and her size. Convinced of her own uselessness, she became moody and withdrawn. The engines of Steam and of Mountain, who knew not of what was going on behind their turned backs, assumed she was but a misanthrope and labelled her “Miserable Maude.” It soon became a self-actualising name.

Poll-ny-Chrink, nicknamed Polly, found herself alone in the world. Gone from a family of loving 11 to a hateful group of 2 drove her to the edge. As Loey pushed Maude to new lows, Polly drew into her own shell, believing the whole world to be as cruel and miserable as Loey claimed it was.

Finally, there was the mad king himself. Loey Machan was too stupid to understand the danger he put himself in, and too cruel to contemplate it if he was. In his quest to be the leader of a line where he was already “E1”, he drove away any emotional stability, any meaningful relationships, any hope of having friends. When he finally declared himself “King”, one sleep-deprived night during the war - where a stray German bomb “nearly” demolished him, he was already gone. In declaring himself King, he believed his own bullshit: that the world was cold and cruel, and the strong must crush the weak.

Loey was at his peak in that moment, and although he didn’t realize it, it was lonely at the top; nobody arrives alone and remains sane.

Far away but yet so close, the Mountain watched with concern. It could do nothing to help the Railway, and so merely kept the engines on its Railway as far from Loey as it could.

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3 - Starstrider

Peace almost came to the Railway.

In the late days of the sixth decade of the twentieth century, an engine arrived on the Railway. He was strong, contemplative, quietly charismatic, and surplus to the mainland’s requirements. The Men In Hatts - different ones, still obsessed with Steam, but in a much more frantic way - recognized his ability to calm the demons that plagued the Line. They thought that there were three such problems, not realizing that exorcising Loey would purge the evil from the rails.

They named this new engines after one of the greatest warrior kings in the Island’s history - Orry, he of the famed Ogmudsaga. Said to bring peace and security to the Island†, the Men hoped that the engine could do the same. As he was prepared for his first train, they quoted a historical text. “Starstrider had arrived.”

And arrive he did.

Sure of mind, free of heart, and generous with patience, the great Starstrider worked hard to undo what had been done - he brought happy news of one of Maude’s sisters surviving into preservation, and helped Polly through the guilt of being the only one of her kind to live.

With each passing day, the Starstrider brought more joy, and banished more fear and hate. The silencing roar of the river no longer covered hissed insults and vague threats, but brash laughter and cheery jokes. Smiles were common for the first time in decades.

Loey was furious. He had become so high on his own supply that he had forgotten that his castle had been built atop sand. A king that rules through fear will inspire fealty and obedience. A king that rules through respect will inspire loyalty and love.

To borrow human expressions, Maude and Polly wouldn’t have pissed on Loey if he were on fire, but they would have triple-headed a train with Orry through the gates of hell.

Naturally, the Tyrant King of the Valley could not allow this to stand. His castle began to slip, the mortar cracking as the sand shifted underneath it, and he worked like mad to keep everything as it had been.

Orry matched him wheel-turn for wheel-turn, and it seemed like he would eventually besiege Loey’s castle and send it tumbling to the ground, freeing Polly and Maude once and for all.

Privately, the engine with a saint’s patience and a king’s heart even hoped that Loey himself could be brought kicking and screaming into the light some day.

But it was not to be.

One rainy night, on the front of a heavy double-headed train, Loey failed with a pop and a bang. Was it really an accident, or was it more? No one will ever know for certain. Polly was insistent, perhaps at Loey’s urging, or perhaps her natural stubbornness, and the heavy train set off with her alone leading it.

It would never make it to the bottom of the line.

Halfway down the Valley, the train overcame the brakevan on a steep hill that ended at a sharp curve. A double load of aluminum ingots ran wild, and the train ended in a mangled pile between the rails and River, with what was left of Polly at the bottom. According to the tear-stricken Men who told Orry, forty cars worth of ingots had come loose and acted like buckshot through an animal - there was truly nothing left, other than shredded metal.

For Orry and Maude, this was a loss the likes of which they had never felt before. Polly was theirs, in every way that could possibly matter, and sudden destruction like this… was pain indescribable.

Then there was Loey.

Somewhere, deep inside his faltering mind, two wires that had no business being near each other crossed and sparked. In a moment of soulless and cruelty-laden pseudo-genius, he took this as a positive - claiming with sociopathic bombastity that he was fated to have avoided the accident. That the accident would have happened regardless of who had been pulling, and his exclusion from Polly’s horrible demise was simple and undeniable proof of his betterness. He was invincible. He was eternal. He was a god! The proof is right here!

There was, for a brief moment, true and total consideration on Orry’s part of figuring out a way to kill him, but Maude’s already fractured emotional state shattered like glass before that could happen. As Starstrider worked to rebuild his promised peace and security, the Tyrant King was banished to the top shed, deep within the plant’s shunting yard, well away from everyone else. Inside there, his miniature Saint Helena, he planned and he plotted ways to escape, to make his triumphant return to His Kingdom.

Locked away, inside the little shed that was barely bigger than he was, kept busy with shunting work in a yard that was bright even in the darkest night, and isolated from the line by a tunnel connecting the plant and top station to the rest of the Line, Loey Machan went quite mad.

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4 - May Day

As Loey went mad, and Orry worked to fix what could never be, the Valley and the River plotted.

There were many lakes that fed the River. Over the years, Man had defiled and damned them like they had done to the River, mostly for sport fishing purposes. One of these reservoirs, known as Corloey, was directly in line with the largest of the many damnations - the one that powered the horrible stinking plant and the Railway.

It was a natural reservoir, and Man had done little more than reinforce what was already there, but they had done that nearly 60 years ago, if not more. The reinforcements were primitive, and had destabilized the layers of soil and clay that had held the hills together for millenia untold.

Working together, well out of the Mountain’s sight, the River and Valley worked together to weaken the bonds between clay and soil, until something eventually gave.

On the first of May of the seventy-ninth year, the clay and the soil separated. Thousands of tons of dirt, trees, grass, and soil crashed down into the water of the Corloey reservoir. Its banks burst almost instantly, and fifty feet of water roared along the cackling River, down the gleeful Valley, destroying all in its path.

The dam was strong - far stronger than it had any right to be - and as the water hit it, slightly weakened by its mad charge down the miles of Valley, it held.

But it was only so tall.

A blue wall surged over its top like the waterfall from hell, and erased everything in the Valley below from existence.

The Peel of King Godred was saved from the worst of it - the great King had built his keep at the top of a small hill, surrounded on all sides but one by steep Valley. It was in that Valley that the River ran, as did the Railway, which tunneled under the town rather than skirt the edges like the River. The Plant was there too, and the dam. When the water destroyed all but the dam, the city survived - the annual May Day fete meant that even the citizenry were in the town square, and they watched the water surge below them.

For a brief moment, Orry had given a sigh of total relief when the reports came in. Loey was not allowed around passengers, and with the May Day traffic biased towards people and not freight, the Tyrant King was likely gone - destroyed under unimaginable tonnes of water as his yard was erased by the hand of God.

Then the rescue train returned - a stranded passenger train behind it, powerless after the wires went dead. It was not Maude who was uncoupled, but instead the Tyrant himself.

She failed, He explained, his shock already wearing off, insanity already taking its place. I was beseeched to take her train for her. Last I saw of her, she was in the yard.

In the yard.

The deep emptiness that opened in Orry’s heart that day would never truly go away, and his indomitable spirit finally broke as he listened to Loey prattle on about divinity and invincibility. Words were shouted, threats of murder issued, and the two Kings were separated, each one foaming at the mouth. Orry declared himself done with Loey, and the Island in general. The Man in the Hatt granted his transfer to the line of his brothers, and Starstrider departed, his spirit broken.

Meanwhile, the Tyrant King was jubilant. He’d driven off the interloper and reaffirmed his claim as King of this line. In his mind, power was all that mattered; The fact that he ruled over naught but dust never occurred to him.

They eventually reattached the wires to mains electricity, and the Tyrant King was allowed to roam his empty kingdom, shuttling trains of refuse from the reclamation site at the tunnel portal to the junction with the main line. By all accounts, these were the happiest days of his life.

Meanwhile, at the Mouth of the River Tid, the Man in the Hatt made a choice - the dam would be rebuilt, the plant as well; that much was out of his control. The dam owners had offered him a choice: keep the frequency of electricity that flowed through the Line now - one that was out of date and falling out of use on the mainland, or upgrade to the Standard Frequency of the Future?

If Loey had been the one reduced to scrap under the water, and it was Orry and Maude cleaning up the mess, the Man may have changed his mind - might have kept their Direct Current.

But all that was left was the Mad Tyrant King.

The order was placed, to a company in America, for Alternating Current equipment, the newest available.

Loey’s days were numbered.

His power was, quite literally, about to be turned off.

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5 - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Loey found out about his forced abdication, and reacted accordingly, frothing at the mouth and howling invectives at anyone and everyone. Men soon avoided him altogether, afraid of straying too close to his drooling maw - being eaten was a suddenly real fear.

Eventually, they turned the power off and left him on a siding - steam engines were infinitely better than an insane electric, and the final days of Loey’s life were spent hurling powerless insults at Scottish Twins who said worse to each other in loving jest.

Like Polly and Maude before him, Loey’s life ended violently and suddenly - the Ninth Engine was storming away from the rebuilding site, a heavy train of spoil and waste behind him, and a thick cloud of smoke and swears above him. There was a sudden snap, and the unbraked train parted at a broken coupling just behind the tender. Twenty-five cackling and screaming wagons roared down the grade leading towards the yard, the brakeman leaping for life. A quick thinking shunter threw a lever in panic, and the train was diverted away from the works site. Towards Loey.

The Mad Tyrant bellowed claims about his invulnerability until his last breath.

The railway sold what was left of him for scrap and used the proceeds to buy clothes for children who had lost theirs in the flood. It was the first time in years that he had been of any use to anyone.

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6 - Poltergeist

The Valley and The River felt the great evil snuff out. They had been infuriated by the failure of the flood. Clearly another means of revenge must be chosen. Pooling their great power carefully, they reached out, finding the faintest of threads connecting this world to the next, and they pulled.

The Mountain bellowed at them in horror, but they ignored it.

Slowly, but surely, an evil presence began to become known in the yard outside of Peel Godred.

It was an evil, machiavellian, scheming, plotting, altogether stupid presence. One that cared not for who you were or where you’d come from. All it wanted was to cause trouble, and re-establish itself as King of the Valley.

It wandered around, searching for lives to ruin.

First it tried the city, but as it approached the walls it began to feel pain - an unfamiliar sensation, and it turned and left. It was too idiotic and maddened to see the Norse Runes carved into the city walls glow with great power.

King Godred may be long dead, but his city he still protected.

Next he tried the rails that led up the mountain. His cloudy memories showed them to be stupid, and quiet, and purple.

He hated purple things.

He made it less than a wheel’s-turn onto the Mountain Railway, when the very ground shook.

Far away, in a university on the coast, a machine tuned for earthquakes started vibrating as a small earthquake rumbled out of the Valley.

He suddenly found himself flying through the air, as though He’d just been struck by a massive hand. He crashed into the far wall of the Valley, his incorporeal form bending and twisting in pain as he laid there, his infernal power drained in an instant as he tried to stay in this realm. He succeeded, but only just.

STAY OFF MY RAILWAY

The voice boomed in such a way that every hill, tree, and babbling brook for miles around could hear it. Elsewhere on the Island, other creatures that straddled the line between life and death jumped at the sudden sound.

The ground shook

The air shook

The very fabric of the veil between the two worlds shook

A sense of massive and untapped power emanated from the mountain, like a piece of heavy electrical equipment coming to life.

The Valley and the River suddenly knew great fear.

THIS ENDS HERE

The voice thundered down into the Valley and River. It promised great pain if they ever did so again.

Godred may have been long dead, but his railway he protected.

†Awdry, W., & Awdry, G. (1987). ORRY, KING*. In The Island of Sodor: Its people, history and railways (pp. 109–110). essay, Kaye & Ward.

#traintober #traintober2022 #traintober 2022 #ttte #sodor #fic #sentient vehicle headcanon #sentient vehicles #ttte godred #electric line #extended railway series #ghost trains

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