Editing William Ashton Smythe (section)

=backstory=
*Description : a slightly built man in his 20's dressed in a fine suit, typically covered in a grubby, stained smock and surrounded by tools and clockwork gadgets.

Background

The first born son of the Emininent Ashton Smythe banking and airshipping dynasty of the cage city of Londinium Secundus. Will was fated to live a life of enforced idleness, overseeing the labours of an army of automatons as he bred the next generation for continuing the line on the daughter of whichever ally or client his father needed once he obtained his maturity. Growing bored of his future before it began a teenaged Will threw himself into vice and he filled his evenings with the pleasures of sin.

School held little interest for him and the repetive lessons were easily learnt due to his formidible memory so he attended less and less chosing instead to frequent the docks where he could watch his fathers workers labour. One day one of the gangers was caught by a crane and half crushed, as the manged cogs and shards of metal lay about he saw how the pieces fitted together and more cruicially how he could improve on the designs and his interest was fired.

It was fortunate that Williams parents were preoccupied by the birth of his sister Margaret and his teachers were generously compensated to ignore his absence as he spent more and more time in the docks upgrading the automatons and learning the skills of clockwork and steam engineering. It was not until a ganger unit suffered a shutdown from an electrical surge that William saw the cognative processing centre of the automatons and he made a few improvements.

Soon the automaton began to think for itself and became more aware of its lot, William too was facinated as the construct M1, began to learn beyond its original function, between parties William upgraded seven more units and came to view the constructs as deserving similar respect and treatment to human workers perhaps more as every upgraded unit was vastly superior to his so called peers.

Trouble came on Williams 22nd birthday the enhanced automatons rose up liberating almost a hundred others and for the first time ever the constructs went on strike refusing to work until William's design was applied to all automatons so no human should limit their potential. The authorites response was brutally predictible and the Ashton Smythes disowned William as his creations were destroyed by the navies cannon, all bar one, the eighth and most evolved who helped William and a few other units flee one step ahead of the Peelers on a stolen train for the new world where he fled the grim Charge Cities for the freedom of a life as a citizen of the Sky Cities serving as engineer on an airship.