The Mysterious is not merely a train—it is a moving contradiction.
She glides between two cities that should never touch:
one drowned in rain, shadow, and whispered favors; the other roaring with pistons, furnaces, and honest labor. Where their values clash, the Mysterious endures, polished brass cutting through soot and night alike.
Official maps list her path as “direct.”
Unofficially, the Mysterious takes detours no other engine dares—industrial dead zones, abandoned switching yards, pressure corridors deemed unsafe decades ago. These dubious routes keep ticket prices inexplicably low, locking her cabins into economic-class fares despite luxury-class construction.
Those who ride her learn quickly:
comfort is free; certainty is not.
Velvet lounges glow beside iron bulkheads.
Crystal lamps hum over reinforced deck plating.
Private cabins are soundproofed—not for rest, but for discretion.
The Mysterious was engineered for the elite, yet filled with everyone else:
clerks fleeing audits, workers chasing opportunity, fixers riding between deals, investigators pretending they aren’t looking for something. The result is inevitable—crime blooms where anonymity and access meet.
Throughout her long service, the Mysterious has hosted:
Disappearances that never reached a destination
Murders ruled “industrial accidents”
Sabotage written off as mechanical failure
Confessions given between stations and never repeated
Every compartment remembers.
Every corridor has heard something it shouldn’t have.
Technologically, the Mysterious is unmatched:
Adaptive pressure-balancing across all decks
Modular steam-leg locomotion allowing traversal where rails fail
Signal systems that rewrite themselves mid-route
Compartmentalized automation capable of sealing, rerouting, or erasing sections entirely
She can survive what would destroy lesser engines.
Sometimes, she does so by sacrificing parts of herself.
Among the public, the Mysterious is called:
The Bargain Miracle
The Velvet Coffin
The Engine That Knows
Authorities tolerate her because she works.
Corporations use her because she forgets.
Investigators board her because she never truly lets anything go.
Those who serve aboard the Mysterious understand one unspoken truth:
The train doesn’t cause the crimes.
It simply provides the perfect place for them to happen.
And once you ride her…
part of your story stays onboard.