The Challenge:

To write a Steampunk Story - suitable for children of up to ten years of age, from the first-person point of view of a toy.

As we approached the outer edge, the raft began to pivot and was whirling around, trapping us in a mind-numbing spiral. Whilst peaking over the shoulder of Little Marius, I'd read about ocean whirlpools like this in a story about a whale called Moby Dick, but this was something completely different whatever force was causing the sensation it most certainly wasn't gravity, with the beauty of hindsight I can see the effects were like those created by centrifugal force and one by one all the boys passed out.

I have no idea how I can remember this, but Marius says it's all in my mechanical mind which is playing tricks with my cog wheel memory. But but but, I repeatedly tell him how I watched a huge team of oddly dressed scientists touting spiky haircuts, wearing makeup, and wielding surprisingly agile steam-driven electronic notepads after we arrived in the new world.

He said I must have loose nuts and bolts caused by spinning around in the whirlpool, and if I seriously expected him to believe that I saw some people looking like robotic punk rockers moving around inside a series of transparent domes in a tick-tock fashion, I had another think coming. It made me feel sad when he laughed out loud at my foolish idea that they worked in a lab built around a mechanism that mirrored the insides of the old grandfather clock, where he hid me from the clerics. He thought I was mad for suggesting that they were strangely inhuman and spoke in an odd language, clucking away to each other like a coop full of mother hens. He did this even though I was able to describe in detail how they were discussing the specimens from a Realm called 042. It took a lot of hands and arm movements through the air to draw six imaginary domes each shaped like an egg and suspended from huge metal arches reminiscent of those that supported the roof of a Victorian Railway Station, and there was one specimen in each of the six domes of which he was one.

He nearly choked on his coke when I told him how I thought they kept the specimens underwater. I know it seems silly but when the Clackers, as I called them entered a dome, they wore what looked like an old-fashioned diving suit with a big round head with the dial of a clock instead of a facepiece. It was becoming difficult for him to take me seriously, but I persisted with my story and explained how they were rigorously decontaminated on their exit and were dragged through an odd mechanical car wash on a track by a steam engine dancing the Charleston. His eyes grew wide in fake alarm when I describe how the steam engine had bulging red eyes decorated with black and white make-up and how it had lots of dangly arms with metal hands holding brushes of various shapes and sizes to ensure no part of the suit went un-scrubbed.

He seemed a little angry when I told him how throughout the process, there was a lot of fizzing and tons of bubbles and that if he or the other boys had seen it they would have been terrified by the prospect of getting the soap and stuff in their eyes, and would have welcomed the detestable scrubbing they received every day from the over-attentive clerics.

His action spoke louder than his words and I knew he wasn't being serious when he stood with his hands on his hips and asked me with a wide grin on his face.

"Now why would they do such a thing?"

All that did was anger me because all I am to him is an obedient conversation he has with himself. Well, let's be honest have you ever met a toy steam engine that walked and talked? But as a figment of his imagination, I grow and grow becoming louder inside his head. I'm now able to forcefully explain how the ancient precautions these strange-looking people had resulted from an infection brought to their realm by the old man when he arrived as a snotty-nosed lad, with a head full of coughs and sneezes. The sickly lad was suffering from nothing more than a common cold but the impact it had was still being felt some sixty years later. For, here in what they call Realm 001, no one carries the antibodies that are needed to develop immunity and it's doubtful judging by the precautions taken that in this realm anyone knew of their existence, and it is also doubtful that they take the time to wash their hands after using the toilet.

My alter ego must have sensed my anger as he calmed down and began to tell me what he'd experienced on arrival. Telling me how he felt no sense of time passing and somehow found himself sitting crossed-legged in the aisle of a cathedral staring up at its ceiling, and noted it smelt of burning coal and steam just like the subterranean boiler room at the monastery. How moving his head from side to side he'd looked around anxiously for signs of his friends or the raft but disturbingly there were none, and just like the cathedral at home it was in pristine condition. Eventually, his gaze returned to the ceiling and after further examination realised it was identical to the one he'd stared at so often as a young choir boy, at the cathedral where the clerics had taught him and the other oblates, that if they we were good boys and learned to do as they were told and prayed hard several times a day it would prove to be their salvation and would emit a beam of light which would guide them to heaven.

I was impressed by his honesty and continued to listen without interruption.

In this place, he said he'd normally be holding and fumbling a crude wooden rosary, but on this occasion, he held a mechanised orb with lots of clockwork dials between his thumb and forefinger, now isn't this beginning to sound familiar? He described to me how it functioned in the same manner as a computer mouse when to his surprise found he could drag a little silver ball across the ceiling by navigating a matrix of little squares in much the same way as a cursor moves across the screen on a laptop. But instead of icons, these were scenes painted by ancient artists centuries before the development of computer-aided technology had entered the human imagination. Nevertheless, filled with fascination he began to play, and it wasn't long before he discovered that when the silver ball passed over a scene it became animated, and the characters gestured, beckoning him to join them and pass through what he could only describe as a doorway to heaven.

He got excited as he mimicked how moving the ball from scene to scene the animation paused leaving the images frozen, but if he clicked on the silver ball's left side with a twitch of his thumb on one of the dials it made a little hiss like a puff of steam and the scene remained animated as he moved on to the next. At this point he hadn't realised he was little more than a guinea pig in a cage, where he was strapped to a chair at the centre of a research lab straight from a Frankenstein movie.

He and the boys hadn't seen what I'd seen when they emerged from the mist, where they splashed into another ocean, adjacent to a huge oval-shaped naval airship that hovered over the water complete with three huge funnels billowing smoke and steam that was sucked back into the mist. It was clear to me that the airship was expecting our arrival and was well prepared, so it didn't take them long to gather up the flotsam and jetsam. The boys were unconscious and were quickly drugged, to ensure they stayed that way and transported to a Deep-Sea naval base which was situated in the middle of what was known as the Occipital Ocean. The base was a gigantic mechanical ball powered by molten lava seeping from the ocean floor which was used to fire its boilers. This was an incredible use of nature, a feat of engineering at which the boy's world would wonder, for it produced no unnatural emissions of carbon dioxide to damage the ozone layer.

From what I'd heard, before the arrival of a young boy some sixty years ago, all they'd ever found was odd bits of flotsam and jetsam which were a mystery and over the centuries became the subject of much philosophical and scientific speculation. This race of people loved an adventure and as a result, exploration teams were sent into the Cycloidal Vapours, but none of its members ever returned. Initially, the exploration teams were adventurers and scientists but became progressively military as concern grew that the teams were being captured or killed, but whatever the team's nature, military or scientific, the outcome was the same.

Infrequently hardware was recovered but never anything technologically advanced until a deep-sea exploration crew at the naval base came across some echo-electrics, a crude set of headphones that were not of their world's design. Although not highly mechanical and clockwork they were still functional and compatible with their steam-driven technology and under kinetic power could be used. When hearing of the equipment's survival, I finally understood how a toy could survive, unlike the raft I was mechanical, not biological. However, the military came to the same conclusion which led their scientists to believe that they could use mechanoids to navigate the mist.

Sometimes it was useful being a toy, discarded in the corner of a room I would frequently overhear conversations and this is how I became aware that there was great public concern over mechanoid development and its impact on the clucking people's well-being, so the military launched a secret design, development and deployment program which was strictly confined to the Occipital Ocean's Mechanical Deep-Sea Base.