Current mood:	productive
Current music:	Metallica - The Judas Kiss

The Hellfire Consortium (Part Two of Three)

Here's the second part of my Steampunk extravaganza entitled "The Hellfire Consortium".  If you missed the first part last week, it's the tale of a group of sinister scientists led by an ex-minister who's turned his back on God and is searching for the secret of eternal life.  His "family" is completed by the beautiful but deadly Madame Twila Moreau, schooled at the world famous Verne institute in Paris and their adopted daughter, the woman known only as "Wrench".  Found starving as an orphaned child, it wasn’t long before Wrench displayed a talent for all things mechanical and earned her position as the Consortium’s chief engineer.

I'll introduce you to the heroines of the piece in our final instalment next week but if you're like me, it's always going to be the baddies you root for anyway! 

Images: davecharsley
Models: demondaz as the Reverend Jacob Brimstone, giselle_bour as Lady Constance Blackmore, belle_fille1982 as Amelia Braveheart, thevioletraven as "Wrench" and enlyyl as " Madame Twila Moreau
Words: budgie_uk
Props: Paul Smith
Jewellery: enlyyl 

Waiting was the worst part. While her lover seemed to enjoy the moments of peace and quietude. Madame Twila Moreau hated them, loathed them, detested them. Almost as much as she detested other people. They were her playthings, nothing more and nothing less. Her experience and command over the realm of psycho-physicality  merely enhanced her latent misanthropy.

Madame walked through the door as if she owned the place, which – she acknowledged without a smile – she may well have actually did. Her memories before the Reverend had first taken her to be his were surprisingly vacant in some areas.

She could see the two women staring at each other, friendliness suffused with a mild suspicion as to their presence. She could almost feel the strangeness of the evening.

She made herself known, and took pleasure in the sudden change that came over them. Oh, if they only knew...

She was tempted; both women knew, and yet for her to take that next step, to change her opinion and view of life so radically, a sacrifice would have to be made.

And was she prepared to make it? The other woman considered, deeply, and wondered about her own fate.



She screamed. She shouted the place down. The dead, if not awoken, then surely must have stirred.

But of course, they didn’t. Not a sound had come out of her mouth, and in a small, rapidly vanishing part of her consciousness, Amelia Braveheart stared at the impossible: Brimstone could not be a machine. She knew machines too well, and Her Ladyship would not have been fooled either.

Therefore... as unconsciousness took her, she realised it was too late – Twila Morau was right!



She was not one for praying, nor for any form of supplication, but as she thought of the fate awaiting herself and Her Ladyship, one word constantly seemed appropriate: Help.

Though whether it was help she was seeking, or help she was about to deliver, only time would tell.



The change had happened, she recalled, when she had first seen Amelia and Constance. Only in her thoughts did she refer to them as such. It was the first time she had seen people with anything other than contempt in their eyes for other people.

And she loathed that about them.

Loathed it, and envied it, in roughly equal proportions.

She was not sure what she saw in her own eyes; thankfully, she never saw it objectively.