We'll need to chop your clock off

[sovay]

Although I suppose the blame lies ultimately with telophase, I maintain it is all thistleingrey's fault that I am not yet asleep, because she introduced me to the random steampunk generator. It is a piece of genius. That is not throwaway praise. Most random generators create momentary hilarity: many of these would be functional story prompts.

It begins with a champion in the Khyber Pass. This person meets a mercenary and together they encounter automated giant squid and gears. The story winds up in an opium den and features role reversal. The overall narrative is about what happens after the revolution.

Your story begins with a beloved enemy. The villain is a fool who is not as foolish as others believe who also has a hat with a feather. Plot elements include the changing of the seasons and war.

The text starts as a samurai encounters a fan used as a weapon while in Shangri-La. The overall narrative is a comedy of manners.

This one, for that matter, is nearly flash fiction unto itself:

It begins in an airship hangar. There is epic friendship and a lady who meets a misguided genius. It ends with teleportation.

But this, I believe, is the true piece of cake:

A team of adventurers consisting of a daring airship captain, a criminal, an itinerant clock-mender, a man with spectacles, and a reclusive genius inventor discover a clockwork acrobat and Talos, the man made of bronze, in a bakery.

watermelontail? rushthatspeaks? greygirlbeast? Somebody help me out here—I want to read that story!

Comments

[weirdquark]

I think my favorite of the ones I've gotten is:

Your story is a romance between a poet and a mad scientist. The lovers experience primitive robots driven by Babbage-style programing cards and automated whales while in a boardwalk during winter.

Because a) I can see watching automated whales from a boardwalk during winter being really pretty, and b) I have glimmerings of a teleportation story where there's a pair of lovers, one who is one of the scientists working on the teleporter and the other her lover, who is a poet who would be writing complicated poems about how teleportation will divide the soul from the body and her lover will be dead if I could write poetry.

[sovay]

Because a) I can see watching automated whales from a boardwalk during winter being really pretty, and b) I have glimmerings of a teleportation story where there's a pair of lovers, one who is one of the scientists working on the teleporter and the other her lover, who is a poet who would be writing complicated poems about how teleportation will divide the soul from the body and her lover will be dead if I could write poetry.

If you can write Puck in iambic pentameter, you can write poetry . . .