The Steampunk Boiler Room

Hi-ho, folks,

My NaNo project is a Steampunk tale, set in New York City, 1890. My MC is a police detective sergeant named Icarus Byrne, who is engaged to be married to an actress. He is walking her home from the theater on the night of the summer solstice, when a horribly mutilated murder victim appears from out of nowhere in the middle of Waverly Place. Her killer, who appears along with her, immediately flees the scene, knocking Byrne to the pavement as he goes. Byrne pursues and narrowly escapes becoming the killer's next victim.

The story spans six months, with a new murder on every New Moon. Byrne struggles to understand the pattern which emerges, so that he can try to prevent the next crime, but he is always either wrong in his assumptions, or comes to the solution too late.

In the course of his investigation, he encounters a mysterious individual with a Londoner accent and knees that bend the wrong way, who calls himself Spring-heeled Jack. He, too, is determined to catch the killer, whom the press has named "The Village Ripper". Jack can leap incredible distances, but the Ripper is possessed of seemingly super-human abilities as well. He tells Byrne that this is the same Ripper who haunted Whitechapel the previous year, and that there is a method to the Ripper's madness, that he has an ultimate goal that will imperil the entire city, and perhaps the world.

Faced with these powerful individuals, and a mystery that strains his credulity, Byrne is convinced he must do something to even the odds somewhat. He is a hobbyist, tinkering with machinery in his off-hours. He has been working on an invention that might fulfill a dream he has had his entire life: to fly. Wings... he has designed them and built a prototype, but he has lacked a single thing: a lightweight source of propulsion. However, Spring-heeled Jack might just have inadvertantly given him the solution...

Best regards,
CeruleanSon