Audio Play / Stonespring Maidens

Stonespring Maidens is an audio drama created by Alexander Shaw and is the tenth story in The New Century Multiverse, as well as the first part of Phase 2 of the overarching story.

Harry Arlington is at the lowest point of her existence. A series of tragedies have struck her throughout 1883, and now she is confined to her sickbed, unable to walk, unable to invent, her friends all scattered to the winds, and her family in tatters. She’s also angrier than she could ever have comprehended before.

The breadth of a shadow away, Penthessily Renwick lives in the world of Autumn; a civilization bathed in amber light, where women make all the major decisions, where intelligence is prized over strength, and where Harry may be able to heal.

Meanwhile, back in Washington D.C., Mr. Wight, an armored wraith, stalks in the shadows, preying upon criminals and corrupt police alike. But he is unaware that Harry is already plotting her revenge.

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Stonespring Maidens provides examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: The reporter Blanche repeatedly gets Penny's last name wrong during their interview.
• After Action Patch Up: Attar and Ganny share one at the end of the story, leading to a Relationship Upgrade.
• Alien Blood: Elain are described as having mandarin-colored blood.
• Alternate Universe: The world of Autumn, which is very different from the more Earth-like Century.
• Alternative Calendar:
  • Autumn runs on a different calendar to Century, with the story starting on the 27th day of Inanna, and proceeding through a number of alternatively named months.
  • Autumn also uses the measurement of "suns" as a stand in for "years", with decasuns correlating to decades.
• Archnemesis Dad: After the events of Steamheart, Harry has sworn vengeance against Mr. Wight, not knowing he is, in fact, her father, Thomas.
• Artificial Limbs:
  • Ganymede has a metal, skeletal right arm.
  • Penny gives a similar one to a child at the beginning of the story.
  • Harry gains a pair of artificial legs from Penny part way through the story.
• Assassination Attempt: Mr. Wight attempts to kill Senator McPherson after he wins the presidential election.
• Awful Truth: Learning that Mr. Wight is her father, Thomas, leaves Harry practically catatonic.
• Before I Change My Mind: Ganny says this to Harry right before they perform a Fastball Special.
• The Big Board: Mr. Wight has one in his hideout, representing the current state (to the best of his knowledge) of what was once the United States.
• Big Damn Kiss: Harry and Penny share one when they finally give in to their feelings for one another.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Elain women possess two clitorises instead of one.
• Bizarre Seasons: Autumn has only three seasons: Springfall, Summerfall, and Winterfall.
• Blindfolded Trip: Truth does this to Master Yagyu to bring him to Harry's training area.
• Bookcase Passage: Thomas and Sarah had one in their house concealing a Secret Underground Passage.
• Boom Stick: The Nox-Rod, an Elain spear-like weapon capable of firing blasts of energy.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Devices called crowns that sit on a person's ear are designed to directly connect the mind to an artificial limb.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
  • In Autumn, the word "frock" is used for "fuck".
  • They also use the phrases "lowmean" and "highmean" to mean "poor" and "rich" respectively.
• Chekhov's Gun: Early on in the story, Truth reveals that she had the remains of SteamHeart brought back to Washington. Harry later salvages parts from the remains to help build Shadow Tiger.
• Chicken Walker: Harry designs her new legs to be digitigrade, inspired by Hrao.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: In Autumn, women generally wear white while men wear black. Other colors represent certain character traits, like kindness or intelligence.
• Convulsive Seizures:
  • Penny is prone to these, which cause her to completely lose control of her body, including her bowels.
  • Averted with Harry, who merely zones out during her "spells", meaning she's only in danger if she's doing something like operating heavy machinery when it happens.
• Cool Car: Attar's black and purple, crystal-powered Automotive.
• Cranial Processing Unit: A variation, in that the Crystal Knights are controlled by a "control stem" which is shaped and placed like the human spine.
• The Dandy: Attar cares a great deal about his appearance and studies the newest fashion trends.
• Defacement Insult: Its shown that at some point after their deaths, Thomas and Sarah's house was defaced with graffiti reading "Dead Niggers."
• Deflector Shields: Attar develops a gauntlet-device capable of creating an energy shield, which comes in handy later on.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Agent Li's husband Zhao died as she held him.
• Dope Slap: Ganny does one to Attar for mocking Harry's fear of heights.
• Dream Intro: The story starts with Harry having a Flashback Nightmare about the end of SteamHeart.
• Dramatic Curtain Toss:
  • Subverted when Truth does this to reveal the remains of SteamHeart to Harry, who has no reaction.
  • Played straight when Ganny reveals the Crystal Knight to Harry.
• Dramatic Irony: Truth and Harry have no idea who Mr. Wight is, while anyone who has read Uncivil Outlaw knows it's their father, Thomas.
• Education Mama: A flashback showed Lamia was this, demanding that Penny get high marks in all of her classes.
• Embarrassing Damp Sheets: Harry's Flashback Nightmare at the start of the story causes her to wet the bed.
• Energy Weapon: Some Elain weaponry, such as the Pulsars and Nox-Rods, function like this.
• Exact Words: After being taken hostage Penny promises Mr. Wight that no Elain will follow him. She never said anything about a human like Harry.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Marriages consisting of two women and a man are fairly common in Autumn.
• Epigraph: The story starts with a excerpt from Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'".
• Fastball Special: Used by Ganny and Harry to attack a Crystal Knight.
• Faux Death: It's revealed that Agent Li did this to Thomas in accordance with his standing orders so that he could fake his death and take up the mantle of Mr. Wight.
• Flashback:
  • A number are spread across the first part of the story, detailing events of Harry and Penny's early lives.
  • The first chapter of Part Three deals with the immediate aftermath of Sarah Arlington's assassination, and the events of Thomas faking his death to become Mr. Wight.
• Flashback Nightmare: The story opens with Harry having a nightmare about how she lost her legs.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: While months pass over the course of the story, during which Harry and Penny take time to get to know each other, the moment Penny is in a position to actually be in a relationship with Harry, she proposes marriage.
• Hack Your Enemy: Penny uses her TR glove to do this, causing one of Silent Company's stolen Nox-Rod's to explode in his face.
• Half-Human Hybrid: At the end of the story it's revealed that Binary Dawn is a project to breed human/Elain offspring.
• Heads or Tails?:
  • Penny says that Elain last names are decided this way when mates can't agree on which partner has the "dominate" name.
  • Subverted at the end of the story where Harry flips a coin to decide which name she and Penny will share, but Penny decides she wants to take Harry's name before the result of the coin flip are shown.
• Healing Vat: Autumn us mentioned as having this technology, which Penny uses to heal Harry after her fight with Mr. Wight.
• Heel–Face Turn: After spending Steamheart and Uncivil Outlaw as his second in command, Li decides Wight has gone too far in this book and turns against him, revealing his plan to attack Project Binary Dawn to Penny.
• Helping Hands: Penny demonstrates an artificial hand to a patient by making it move about on its own.
• Hide Your Otherness:
  • While moving about in Autumn, Harry hides the fact that she is human by wearing a headscarf that covers her non-pointed ears.
  • Penny does the same thing when she visits Century.
  • Later, Li conceals herself in Autumn with a pair of prosthetic ear tips.
• Historical Domain Character: Nikola Tesla returns, helping Harry with her needs after the loss of her legs.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: In a flashback, Emmet says he will have some tea ready in "two shakes of a baa-lamb's tail."
• Hostage Situation: Mr. Wight takes Penny hostage in his attempt to escape Aphrodite Labs.
• Hybrid Power: A more mundane version of this is the thinking behind Project Binary Dawn, where it is theorized that the interbreeding of humans and Elain would result in a resistance to paperbone, an Elain genetic disorder.
• I Don't Want to Ruin Our Friendship: Attar says he doesn't want to ruin his and Ganny's working relationship by pursuing a romantic one with him.
• I Was Never Here: How Katherine prefaces the meeting where she reads Harry, Penny and a number of other characters in on Project Binary Dawn with this.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Harry ultimately gives up on the idea of being with Penny because only by being with Cal can Penny pursue her life's dream of helping people with her Artificial Limbs.
• Immune to Bullets: Harry's Shadow Tiger armor shrugs off bullets.
• Incompatible Orientation: Ganny says that he has had romantic feelings for Penny in the past, but knows such a relationship is impossible, because Penny is only interested in women. It turns out, they had also tested this by sleeping with each other and found it to be true.
• Internal Reveal: At the end of Part 2 of the story, Harry learns Mr. Wight is her father Thomas, who she believed was dead.
• Interspecies Romance: One develops between the human Harry and the Elain Penny.
• Interrupted Suicide: It's revealed that after the events at Green Hollow, Thomas attempted to commit suicide for what he did to Harry, but was prevented by Li.
• Knee-capping: The Crystal Knights are weak to this, as the armor around their knees is lighter to allow for mobility.
• Laughing at Your Own Jokes: The reporter Blanche is the only one who laughs when she makes a joke about a family not needing to take a handout to buy their son an artificial hand.
• Like Brother and Sister: Penny views Ganny this way, which makes it awkward that Cal wants them to pair up.
• Lipstick Mark: One of the clues Penny finds that indicates Cal is cheating on her is a lipstick mark on one of Cal's half-washed shirts.
• Love at First Sight: Harry and Penny are instantly smitten with each other when they first meet.
• The Maiden Name Debate: Penny and Harry have a discussion about how complicated family names can get in a matriarchal society where Exotic Extended Marriage is the norm.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: At one point, Cal and Penny have sex on their kitchen table.
• Manipulative Bitch: Cal openly admits she is cheating on Penny, but manages to keep Penny from breaking up with her by offering to get Penny a chance to meet people from Century.
• Marriage of Convenience: Cal proposes that Ganny enter into one with her and Penny.
• Matriarchy: Autumn is a nuanced look at a female-dominated society.
• Missing Mom: Araminta, Penny's other mother, who died a number of years before the start of the story.
• Motor Mouth: Cal, who will take any lull in a conversation as an opportunity to keep talking.
• Ms. Exposition: Truth serves this role when she has to catch all of the characters from Autumn up on the situation in Century and who Mr. Wight is.
• My Beloved Smother: Penny's mother, Lamia, is very controlling of her life, wanting her and her wife to move in to the family home.
• The Mole: It's revealed that Mr. Wight has been fed information about Binary Dawn on Autumn by a mole codenamed Minerva who is actually Donna.
• Nepotism: Penny has her position making and fitting prosthetics thanks to strings pulled by her wife, Cal.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Harry is given a shot before entering Autumn to inoculate her against any of the world's diseases.
• No Face Under the Mask: When Harry pulls of Mr. Wight's mask in the Dream Intro, she discovers only a black void behind it.
• Not What It Looks Like: When Harry catches up with Wight in his secret hideout she finds Penny laying on the floor having suffered one of her Convulsive Seizures and attacks Wight thinking he is the cause, when in reality he was trying to help Penny.
• Off with His Head!: Harry defeats a Crystal Knight by ripping off its head and control stem.
• Oh, My Gods!: Elain characters will ocassionally say "Oh, Tewesha" in a similar manner to "Oh, God."
• Operation: [Blank]: Project Binary Dawn is a top secret project Cal is working on.
• Our Elves Are Different: The Elain are humanoids from the Alternate Universe of Autumn, have a scientifically advanced civilization with elegantly designed technology, and, of course, pointy ears. It is easy to see that the Elain are meant to meant to be stand-ins for elves, in the same way the Duart and Akka were for dwarves and orcs. Latter on, it's suggested they are a dying race and that they wish to return to what they view as their true home, the planet Luminia.
• Pardon My Klingon: "Frock" is clearly used on Autumn in the same way as "fuck" is used on Century.
• Phantasy Spelling: In Autumn, the word "sir" is spelled as "syr".
• Point of Divergence: It's mused that if the meteor from Luminia hadn't come to Autumn and deposited the crystals that they use in most of their technology and that apparently caused the Elain to evolve into their elf-like appearance, their world would be much more like ours.
• Potty Failure: Penny accidentally wets herself while experiencing Convulsive Seizures.
• Portmanteau: While threatening to have Captain Tess Reassigned to Antarctica, Attar says that it will be so cold, she will have to snap off frozen streams of her own urine after peeing, something he later refers to as a "pisscicle".
• Power Armor:
  • Using Elain Power Crystal technology, Harry designs a suit of armor, coated with stonespring and augmented by specially designed prosthetics.
  • Attar and Ganny reveal they have designed sleek, shielded armor near the end of the story.
• Power Crystal: Crystals are used in a number of Autumn technologies and the study of them is a science in itself. These crystals were brought to Autumn by a meteorite that broke off from the planet Luminia.
• Power Fist: The main offensive weapon of Harry's Shadow Tiger armor, which she is capable of wielding even without the rest of the armor.
• Primal Fear: Harry discovers she has a fear of heights while riding in one of the Elain galliers.
• Punched Across the Room: When Harry confronts Mr. Wight during his Assassination Attempt of Senator McPherson, she uses her Power Armor to punch him off the stage they are standing on.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: At the climax of the story, Attar threatens to pull strings and get Captain Tess assigned to a research station in the Northern Pole unless she stops attempting to detain Harry.
• Relationship Upgrade: Happens to both Ganny and Attar and Penny and Harry at the end of the story.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: For some reason, a number of of Elain characters, companies and months share names with figures from Earth mythology:
  • Penthessily seems to be a play on Penthesilea, an Amazon from Classical Mythology.
  • Inanna and Ishtar are different names for a goddess from Mesopotamian Mythology.
  • Ganymede was the name of Zeus' cupbearer in Classical Mythology.
  • Amiel was the name of a demon from Christian mythology.
  • The company Penny, Ganny and Attar work for is called Athena Core.
  • The working class Ponos District shares a named with the god of labor from Classical Mythology.
  • Calendula is the name of a type of flower connected with the god Apollo.
  • Cal works for a company called Aphrodite.
  • Lamia is a demon from Middle Eastern mythology.
  • Attar is a god from Mesopotamian Mythology.
  • Mr. Wight's mole in Autumn is codenamed Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom.
  • Attar's mother's name is Hera, after the Queen of the Greek Gods, and she commands an airship called The Medusa.
• Remote Body: The Crystal Knights, which are crystal-powered robots controlled by crowns similar to the ones utilized for Elain prosthetics.
• Secret Room: In the network of tunnels beneath D.C., Wight has a room behind a hidden door that he uses as his base of operations.
• Secret Underground Passage: There is one connecting Thomas and Sarah's house to a network of tunnels beneath D.C. hidden behind a Bookcase Passage.
• Shout-Out:
  • Chapter 8 is titled Mother!.
  • The lever to open the Bookcase Passage in Thomas and Sarah's house is disguised as a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.
  • Chapter 14 is titled "When Harry Met Penny."
  • Harry's Power Armor has a particularly large Power Crystal in it's chest.
  • Li at one point says "Let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up."
  • At one point Attar sarcastically declares "I love this plan, and I'm excited to be a part of it!"
  • Harry defeats a Crystal Knight by ripping off its head, with it's spine-like control stem dangling beneath it.
  • The final chapter is titled "She's Tore Up Plenty, But She'll Fly True.''
  • "What do you mean? Do we trust them or do we need them?" "First one, then the other."
• Slouch of Villainy: When Katherine discovers Mr. Wight in her office, Trespassing to Talk, he's lounging in her chair with his feet on her desk.
• Static Stun Gun: Lightning pikes are electrified spears used for incapacitating enemies.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: One of the reasons Penny can't bring herself to leave Cal is that she's already spent over five years in the relationship, which she feels is to much invested time to throw away.
• Suplex Finisher: A plus sized example as a Crystal Knight performs a German suplex on Harry in her Shadow Tiger armor.
• Sweet Tooth: Ganny is shown snacking on sugary treats multiple times, and carries them around on his person so he can eat them at a moment's notice.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: Li does this after the events of Green Hollow when she finds Thomas trying to trying to kill himself over what he did to Harry.
• Talking the Monster to Death: Taking advantage of the fact that his belief in his cause has been wavering since fighting Harry Penny manages to talk Wight down from bombing the Capital building, ultimately leading to Thomas abandoning the Wight identity and reconciling with Harry.
• Tastes Like Chicken: Harry offhandedly comments that some bit of unnamed Elain food tastes like chicken.
• Technicolor Eyes:
  • Cal possesses purple eyes.
  • Attar also has purple eyes.
• That Man Is Dead: In a reversal of what is said in Uncivil Outlaw Thomas casts aside the identity of Mr. Wight after Penny and Harry reach out to him.
• They Would Cut You Up: After Harry introduces herself to Attar, he recommends she not mention she's from Another Dimension to people so readily, or she might wind up on a lab table.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Combined with Improbable Aiming Skills, Mr. Wight managed to throw his katana and hit Donna with the butt, knocking her unconscious just as he had intended.
• Too Much Alike: Truth says she fought with Thomas because of this.
• Trail of Bread Crumbs: While chasing after Mr. Wight at Aphrodite Labs Penny uses her green lipstick to mark a trail for Harry to follow.
• Training Montage: Chapter 22 is one for Harry, as she spends months physically training and building her suit of armor in order to confront Mr. Wight on Election Day.
• Trans Tribulations: A minor example, as Attar mentions their mother disapproving of them being trans, and having to deal with government regulations forcing them to reveal their trans status to their co-workers.
• Translator Microbes: The lipshell, an Elain device worn over the ear that automatically translates any language the wearer is hearing into one they understand.
• Trespassing to Talk: Katherine discovers Mr. Wight in her office, lounging at her desk, waiting to talk to her.
• Tunnel Network: The Nordstrom Tunnels are a maze of tunnels that run beneath Washington, with most of the entrances being hidden behind secret doors.
• Two-Faced: Mr. Wight has facial scars on the left side of his face from where he was shot during an assassination attempt.
• Uncoffee: In Autumn, keffin seems to fill the same role as coffee.
• Under City: Gabriella is built on the ruins of Dyantum, which had been the capital of a now extinct patriarchal civilization.
• Wham Line: The first chapter follows Penny as she goes about her commute. It's a largely light sequence until she reaches her destination and checks on the item she had been transporting:

"It was a little boy's hand."

• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Despite his entire plan to get him to this point Mr. Wight is ultimately unable to bright himself to kill the Half-Human Hybrids created by Binary Dawn.
• Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: Hera Runinox is described as having gold eyes and is implied to be planning a sneak attack against Century.
• Zeppelins from Another World: While this trope was already in play on Century, which possesses airships in the late 19th century, Autumn is shown to be phasing out their versions (referred to as zeppelinths) in favor of more advanced airships called galliers.