“Twelve Essential Things …” in Wreathed in Steam
One of the stories in Wreathed in Steam has the longest title of my published pieces to date: “Twelve Essential Things Found in Commander Scarlett Archer’s Spacesuit Pockets (And Some Which Were Not)”. I normally shorten it to “Twelve Essential Things …” for obvious reasons.
The title pretty much tells you the plot of the story, which revolves around quantumly entangled pockets, allowing the plucky main character, who serves as the engineer on a steampunk spaceship, to access a wide variety of things from a lab on Earth so she doesn’t have to haul everything around with her all the time. It also makes use of at “Thing the First …” style of scene introductions, to identify the thing Commander Scarlett Archer is going to use for each task. A few of the things definitely didn’t work to be pulled out of a pocket (like tea), which is how the title got its parenthetical ending.
This story is one of the longer pieces in Wreathed in Steam, in addition to having the long title. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek at times, but let’s be honest here–if you could have pockets that allowed you access to what you needed, wouldn’t you add them to your spacesuit?
“Twelve Essential Things …” originally appeared in Runs Like Clockwork in January 2022, but you can also find it in Wreathed in Steam with my other steampunk and gaslamp fantasy stories and poetry!
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