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The Last Passage of the HMS Perseverance233 views

Staff

Posts: 27

2026-08-14 23:40:21 UTC#1

Prologue

The year is 1896. This story follows those who survived the collapse of the old world, and secured a berth aboard one of the last known Crown commissioned liners departing Liverpool.

The HMS Perseverance, upon inspection, was already a ghost of herself. Stripped bare by a dozen previous voyages, having carried the fortunate and influential toward whatever refuge remained in the Arctic territories.

Her manifest for this final crossing reflected the changing priorities of a dying Empire: lesser gentry spending what capital they had left to secure passage, soldiers conscripted to maintain order, and civilians selected by lottery or taken by press gang. The Crown had an obligation to its subjects, certainly. But a dying world had a way of reducing obligations to their most practical terms; the architects of humanity's survival needed manpower.

The journey lasted nearly a fortnight, with passengers confined to the inside of the ship due to the savage weather, and most everyone welcomed that shelter. For many aboard, it was also the first opportunity in some time to exchange news and word from beyond their dwindling circumstances in Great Britain:

What everyone aboard knew, was that they were heading toward something prepared. A settlement established to support what remained of the Empire's population through the foreseeable reality of unending winter. That was what the passage had been advertised as.

The official account of the “Why go North?” was rather simple: these regions had once been little more than frozen wilderness, but the frost had inverted their fortunes entirely. Where the ecosystems of the temperate world had collapsed beneath the cold, the Arctic had simply continued on. Its flora and fauna had spent millennia adapting to conditions that most of humanity was only beginning to reckon with. In its own bleak fashion, the North had become one of the last places on Earth where nature still functioned as intended.

Beyond that, certainty grew scarce. What little came through official channels was vague by design: the settlements, most agreed, were warmed by volcanic activity in a marvel of engineering. Why the Crown had kept such sites secret required no great imagination. A population already starving and half-mad with cold would have overrun any harbour rumoured to hold such warmth, and a location known to enough desperate mouths was a location known to Prussian scouts soon after. This was the explanation most readily accepted among the better informed of the upper decks, sensible, discreet, and befitting the age of reason they once knew, an age many in First Class still mourned, buried beneath the snow back home.

The further below deck one ventured, the stranger the stories became. Some claimed it was no accident of geology at all, but that the wealthy and the powerful had made their arrangements with the Devil himself, trading what remained of God's favour for the fires of Hell pumped up from below to ride out this Apocolypse. The rest, the story went, hadn't been brought along to be saved, but to serve them in exchange for scraps of warmth. Some things never changed, it seemed, not even at the end of the world. But better to bargain with the devil you know than starve for a God who never showed.

Others believed the frost was no catastrophe at all, but an older reckoning, that mankind had taken too much from the earth and that something ancient had finally stirred to collect what was owed. Even London had not escaped such whispers. For nearly everyone carried an anecdotal story from their months surviving the collapse, the cold and the desperation having drawn darker things from ordinary people. Things that did not entirely support the theory that humanity was the most dangerous creature in the equation.

Above deck, the crew had little time for speculation. They had a ship to keep alive in waters that had changed considerably for the worse. The watches grew longer. Their faces grew more drawn. The storms seemed endless. Until one morning, the engines stopped.

When the passengers emerged, they found the Perseverance locked in pack ice off an unfamiliar coast. Sometime during the night, the ship had been taken well off course, and with it the captain and the entire night watch. The crew who remained had simply woken to find their posts unattended, their watches never relieved. They were simply gone. The ice was already tightening around the hull, and there was no time to look for them. Every hand was needed to pull what they could before the Perseverance went under.

Now, those who remain of the Perseverance find themselves in a makeshift camp upon an unfamiliar shore, sheltered by a rocky overhang. An intact marine boiler was recovered before the haul gave way, where it may provide warmth once made operational. Among the survivors is a regiment of British Expeditionary reinforcements. A small mercy, for beyond the snow and ice, Prussian patrols have already been sighted crossing the frozen plains...

Archin

Staff

Posts: 27

2026-08-15 00:03:28 UTC#2

Part I: Adrift

A week had passed, and what had been a huddle of shipwrecked survivors under a rock was starting to look more like a proper base of operations. The salvage dragged to shore had been sorted and repurposed into essential structures and tools. The boiler, now operational, was circulating steam through pipes snaking through the camp, holding the worst of the weather at bay. Even the wilderness beyond the cliffs had proven generous, untouched as it was by the collapse that had gutted the rest of the world, kept most bellies reasonably full. Perhaps, despite the setbacks, the journey had been the right one to make.

But in this new world, optimism can be directly measured in one's supply of coal, and like the warmth it bought, tracked on a temperature chart, slowly ticking down. The boiler ran hot, but the coal to feed it did not replenish itself. By all estimates the camp had less than a month in its stockpiles. And even still, as the storms grew harsher, it may not be enough to keep the cold at bay for long. As lethal winds battered their canvas walls, they now surveyed a different kind of darkness gathering on their horizon.

Their best source of coal was a nearby seam, likely prospected in the war's early days to fuel their machines. By rights, it should have put them square in the Prussians' path, yet no assault had come. Of course, the frozen wasteland in between held thick with vagrant bands of raiders and scavengers already. So it could be as simple as one camp being passed over among a dozen other troubles, never directly connected to the Prussians' own losses. Or, as it was theorized in the dark of the smuggler kens, there were always men for whom chaos was but a means to profit. Stranger still, the Prussians had made no move on the abandoned outpost to the east, sirens and all, sitting there for the taking. Not after all this time.

Then there was the matter of the missing crew, and the captain lost with them. The seamen had folded into camp life, taking up posts close to their old ones out of habit. Most offered little more than a solemn shake of the head when asked; a crew drafted into service wasn't always bound by loyalty or tradition, some press-ganged, others simply after a new start. Each had his own read on what had happened. None of it was actionable. The Acting Captain, for his part, wanted none of the role that had fallen to him. Those who spoke with him, sequestered in the officers' tent, came away certain of one thing: he had never wanted the command, and the weight of the missing sat heavy on his conscience.

With all these uncertainties mounting, an All Hands meeting was called. The lack of order was made plain: everyone had questions, but no one had leads, and no order meant no consensus. Any hope that the crew had been withholding information on their position or destination was quickly dashed, and the matter of a month's fuel remaining was met with what polite circles might call a bout of spirited deliberation.

Proposals rose and fell in turns, each one a small bid for the rooms attentions: an expedition to the tower, fortifications, a greenhouse, an envoy sent to treat with the enemy, or, someone offered, perhaps no envoy at all, only steel. None of it held. Every thread was was pulled back eventually to the same question: how to reach consensus.

One voice finally cut through it the noise, proposing that the ship's officers seat the council's first members, and let those members decide, fairly, how to choose whoever came after. The Acting Captain agreed, and set terms for three passengers seats. But when the suggestion that a seat be reserved for First Class was floated from the crowd split the room in two: the old language of qualification and experience set against the harder currency of the wreck itself, of who was actually here, doing the work, wanting their say.

In the aftermath of the meeting, as the dust settled and the Purser made her rounds, the shape of the council began to take form. The Colour Sergeant, at the insistence of decorum, was already put forth for the Army's faction. The ex-crew of the Perseverance, at the behest of the First Mate, elected the Quartermaster to fill their seat.

And the following names were put forward for nomination for the camps consideration to fill the remaining three seats, with a vote to be held within the week:

Archibald Kennethson, Arthur Sterling, Catherine Cendrebourg, Deirdre O'Donnell, Derek Kelp, Lilian von Onatopp, and Vivienne Delaunay.

Archin

Staff

Posts: 27

2026-08-26 01:23:15 UTC#3

Part II: The Vote

The Quartermaster navigated the frozen ruts of the beach encampment, avoiding the duckboards frozen slick with snowmelt, keeping near the steam pipes as long as he could manage before the path bent away toward the rocky overhang, the sharp edge of the metal lockbox under his arm cutting into his bony ribcage through his threadbare coat.

He'd much rather have counted votes from the warmth of the officers' tent. While the overhang cut the worst of the wind, it did nothing for the damp. Still, his stationery and effects were kept here, managed by dockhands on the days he could not attend to them himself. He turned the complaint over in his mind as he settled in and began his tallies against the strips of paper pulled from the box:

The field was in all honesty, extremely close, but it was Lilian von Onatopp who broke ahead of the pack enough to cinch a seat. A German, no less. The Quartermaster mused it was perhaps a good thing the camp didn't hold a grudge.

Archibald Kennethson followed close behind, the seasoned legislator, and the Quartermaster allowed himself some relief at that. Some of the camp, at least, still wanted experience and stability at the tiller.

Though the other half, it seemed, had something else in mind entirely, whatever that was, given who led by a wide margin;

Derek Kelp, the agitator who'd said a great many bold things at the first meeting. It had apparently made such an impression that he hadn't needed to bother making a second appeal for the camp.

He looked over the leading names again, making his final tallies.

"Well, aren't we metropolitan," he said dryly as he set the tally aside, and reached for a fresh sheet of paper to draft a flyer with the news.