The Heart Button
Cogs shoved his glasses back up. He hated looking at the floor. Looking at the floor made his glasses slip down. He hated when his glasses slipped down. In all truth there was a long list of things he hated.
"Skeptic" was a word in best use when describing Cogs. He was suspicious of everything. The other kids in Car Number Nine discovered much glee in making fun of him. "Conspiracy Theorist," they called him, "crazy," "four-eyes," "superstitious." With this, Cogs retreated from social life and back into the dark tunnels of his own brain. He wasn't insane, oh no. He knew exactly what he was doing. And one day he would show them all.
Cogs was also the only member of the Steelpunk Express' little community who knew how to access the roof of the train. The roof was dangerous. It made no difference. Plenty of things he did were less than safe. Sodium-fueled explosions weren't safe. Neither was attempting to mutate small animals. Safety was for cowards.
At least, he was one of two who could get onto the roof. The other was Lugnut the Puppet Master, a girl from car Eight. Cogs didn't understand her. She was just as weird as he was, but somehow she managed to have precious few friends. They both had mutual feelings of complete disinterest in one another. That was fine. Cogs didn't need friends.
Plus, he discovered the roof first. Only he deserved to be up there. Lugnut's presence irked him, but he was certainly able to stand her. She never bothered him. Mostly, she just sat with her oversized top hat and weird little puppet friend and stared at the sky. The two often sat at opposite ends of the roof of Car Eight, Lugnut silent as Cogs pounded on his typewriter.
But today, the master of puppetry was not on the roof. Finally, Cogs was alone.
Also, it was the only time he had absolutely no ideas for a story. He needed a story. The newspaper would never accept him if he didn't have one submitted at the end of the month. And yet, the entire month had been completely devoid of anything worth writing about.Cogs collapsed over his beloved typewriter with an exasperated sigh. He wanted something to happen. Anything. He didn't even care if somebody fell off the train, he needed something to write about. He stared out over the surrounding small mountains. It looked like maybe it would rain soon.
The irritatingly familiar sound of feet on the microladder lifted his head off the rattling metal train roof.
"Lugnut, go do something horrible. I need a story." Cogs shouted above the wind. Lugnut didn't reply. Her black top hat didn't appear at the edge of the car.
He wrinkled his nose, pushing his glasses up once more. "Lugnut?"
The young person who climbed over onto the roof was not Lugnut. It was a boy, seemingly Cogs' age. A smug and knowing grin flashed across the stranger's face as he saw Cogs. His spiky black hair flicked around in the wind.
"Who are you?" Cogs snapped, lifting up his typewriter and strapping it to his scrawny back.
"Who are YOU?" The boy replied. Cogs' eyes narrowed. This kid wasn't from Steelpunk. He had black hair. Normal people didn't have black hair. Everybody on Steelpunk was some form of blonde. And he didn't look familiar. Cogs knew everybody on the train and he had never seen this boy before.
Well, almost everyone.
This could only mean one thing; this kid was from a different train.
"Tell me what your name is!" Cogs yelled. The black-haired boy squinted, a clear sign that the scream of the air had drowned Cogs' words. He tried again.
"Who are you?"
"My name's Gears." The stranger finally replied. Cogs' eyes narrowed.
Wobbling rather dangerously, Cogs made his way closer to Gears, who stood with a suspicious lack of poor balance as the train clacked down its eternal course.
"Where are you from?" Cogs inquired.
"Car..." Gears hesitated, eyes flicking to the left, "Eight."
Car Eight. Lugnut lived there. He would asks her if she had seen him.
Or, he would continue to grill the stranger right on the roof.
"How did you figure out how to get onto the roof?"
Gears appeared extremely irritated, "Why is it any of your business? It isn't your roof."
"Listen, Gears," Cogs said, "I don't know where you came from. Your name probably isn't Gears and its highly possible that you aren't even from this train. Tell me, why haven't I ever seen you?"
"Maybe you... Didn't get around to it!" With that, Gears swung down off the roof and disappeared into Car Eight.
•••••••••
"Lugnut!"
She looked up and blinked. Cogs only ever spoke to her on the roof; she didn't even know he knew her name.
"Cogs? What do you want?" Lugnut said, pulling the last pin out of her puppet's newly repaired leg.
"I just needed to - what are you doing to your horrible doll?"
The puppet, who answered to the name of Quirk, only answering to Lugnut, frowned and folded his arms, quite a feat given their comical stubbiness.
"He isn't a doll." She announced matter-of-factly, "He's a puppet. A marionette, to be exact." For emphasis, the puppet shook the limp strings attached to his stubby arms, "And he ripped his leg and I just finished patching him up."
"Oh. Well." Cogs wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, "Fine, then. I needed to ask if you've ever met somebody named Gears?"
Lugnut wrinkled her nose. "Who?"
Aha. Maybe she hadn't. Cogs detected a foothold in his story idea. "Gears? Black hair, says he lives on Eight?"
Lugnut blinked her fluorescent green eyes and stared absently at Cogs' face. Quirk stared absently at Cogs' face as well, or maybe just in that general direction, and maybe the way he was staring wasn't absent at all. Having blue buttons for eyes certainly makes things difficult for those trying to figure out the manner and direction in which he was staring.
"No? You don't know him?" Cogs repeated.
"Black hair?" Lugnut said, the vacancy in her eyes invading her voice.
"Yes. Lugnut. Black hair." He forced out each word, silently willing himself not to explode with anger, lest Quirk attack him.
"There aren't any black-haired people on this train, Cogs."
She snapped back into focus and retracted another pin from the gray fabric of the arm of Quirk, who stuck his felt tongue out at Cogs.
"Why was there a pin in his arm if-"
"He steals them sometimes." She interrupted.
"You are so weird." He thought aloud.
Lugnut laughed like a little bell. "Welcome to Steelpunk. Everyone here is weird."
"You especially." Cogs muttered, deciding it was a fine time to leave. And he did.
Shoving his hands into his pockets after fixing his combed light-brown hair, he crossed into Car Nine. He stopped walking about a fourth of the way into the polished gold and red train when a wadded up piece of paper bounced off the back of his head.
Gears stood on the other end of the car, whistling and diverting eye contact. In one hand was another paper-ball, in the other was a large black bag full of something undoubtedly villainous.
But for the time being, he suppressed his suspicions so he could hurry back to his own compartment.
Until he passed by the black-haired, dark-eyed menace and glanced at the bag. There, in white, faded letters were the words "Flickline Express: Gunpowder" marring the bag's bumpy surface.
For a moment, Cogs didn't know if he should scream with the joy that he was right or scream in terror and run to the place where he was least likely to be blown up. He didn't notice that Gears had seen his eyes widen at the sight of the letters, and the latter jerked the bag away and hurried toward Car Eight.
The laughs and jeers from the kids in Car Nine broke Cogs' state of shock and he exited the car before the other children started throwing things at him. He needed to get to his compartment and devise some way to spy on the spy.
His brain spun. Flickline Express, a real other train?! He could barely fathom it. Yet here it was, right in front of him. A black-haired person from a different train.
He grabbed his typewriter and made for the roof.
••••••
Cogs punched his plan into the keys so quickly his fingers hurt, his paper filling with tiny black letters. His focus was so keen that his glasses managed to slip all the way down his nose until they nearly fell off. The wind grew colder as the sky grew dark, but Cogs, under the glow of his headlamp, remained on the slick metal roof.
"I should have known you would be up here."
That voice. Cogs froze mid-word and slowly looked up. Gears had returned, and had two more mysterious black sacks strapped to his arms and back.
Cogs shot to his feet. "You're not from this train, Gears!" He spat, "Everybody else may be blind to your evil plan, but I know the truth! You're building a bomb and you're going to crash this train!"
For a moment, Gears didn't appear as though he would respond to the accusation. But then he began to laugh. Quietly, at first, until it eventually built up to a full-scale, side-splitting guffaw. His gloved hands clutched at his stomach as he dropped to his bony knees, tears rolling down his cheeks.
"What's so funny?!" Snapped Cogs. The other boy was trying to catch his breath, wiping his eyes and attempting to suppress the remains of his laughing fit.
"Well, um," he panted, finally pulling himself together, "is that all you have to say?"
Cogs suddenly felt completely caught off guard. "What?"
"Congratulations on figuring me out, Cogs!" He sneered, "But you're a little too late! I've already got everything I need to build a big enough firework to blow this smelly freight sky high! Right after I jump off safely, of course."
It was then that Cogs experienced an emotion all but foreign to him: fear. He didn't want to die. And Gears certainly seemed to know what he was doing.
And he had to be stopped.
Cogs lunged forward, knocking Gears off his feet. With a few sharp tugs he pulled the largest black bag off and threw it as hard as he could. That, given, wasn't very hard, but the container successfully toppled off the edge of the train into the never-ending, ever-changing land below. The horrified expression on Gears' face would remain ingrained into Cogs' retinas for the rest of his life.
"Fool!" Gears screamed, "Do you know what it took to get all that?!"
Cogs searched his brain for a witty retort, but his adrenaline was wearing off and he decided it was a better idea to retreat back into the warm interior of he train.
••••••
The weeks following were absolutely miserable for almost everybody. Both boys made it their single greatest life goal to outshoot and undo the other, mostly through embarrassing practical jokes and the like, because real fighting took too much effort for both of them. Cogs tried constantly and desperately to prove that Gears was a spy, but predictably no one listened to him. Gears continued his efforts to obtain the mysterious items he had lost, also with little to no success. Nobody liked either of them, and neither were helping their own cause.
Lugnut and Quirk helped as much as they were able, namely by making futile attempts to put an end to the rivalry.
"Lugnut!" Cogs scrambled onto the roof as gracefully as an insect flipped onto its back. Lugnut and her puppet were playing chess with nuts and bolts and bottle caps. "I need your help in plotting Gears' demise!"
She looked slowly up at him, an uncharacteristic weariness on her usually vaguely happy face. "Cogs, let it go." She sighed, "Gears doesn't know what he's doing. He's really no threat to this train."
Quirk hopped onto Cogs' boot and hugged his shin.
"We're getting worried about you." Lugnut went on, "You look so tired all the time and you're even more irritable than normal."
"Since when do you care?!" Cogs exclaimed, "You never even speak to anybody but your stupid puppet! You don't care about anybody, because if you did, you would be helping me stop Gears!"
The little gray puppet let go of him and scurried beneath the brim of Lugnut's oversized top hat.
"Um, Cogs?" She said, "I don't think you really care about the people on this train. It just seems like you want to shoot him down so you'll be important."
Cogs didn't speak. He couldn't find anything to say.
She continued. "We're all still little. None of us need to be important yet."
He found himself growing furious. Lugnut would never understand. "I don't get why you're so ignorant, Lugnut." He yelled, "Gears is going to destroy the whole train!"
"That's right."
Lugnut was looking quizzically over Cogs' shoulder. Quirk peeked out from her hat and hopped out onto her knee.
Cogs turned around at a snail's pace. Behind him stood Gears, yet not Gears. There was something wrong with him. His face was unusually sallow, his eyes sunken. He appeared to have been sweating a good deal, and from his reddened eyes streaked shiny trails that were most likely tears.
All of that stopped concerning Cogs when he saw the long iron spike gripped in his enemy's white-knuckled fist. Recognizing potential danger, Quirk ran in between the two of them.
"Gears? What's going on?" Lugnut asked, nervousness arising in her voice.
"I'm going to obliterate everyone on this train!" He spat forcedly. Quirk scuttled back to Lugnut at the snap of her small fingers.
"Starting with you." Gears lifted a finger to point shakily at the brown-haired boy opposite him.
"Why?" Lugnut asked, clearly stalling. Gears sniffed and readjusted the grip on his spike.
"Because maybe then my own train will let me back on."
He leapt at Cogs, who yelped in terror and jumped out of the way. Lugnut reached out and grabbed Gears' ankle, and he fell before given the chance to swing the spike again. He kicked back hard, sending the blonde girl rolling to the back of the car, where she stopped, one hand grasping the rung of he ladder and the other clutching her hat. Quirk, seeing his friend was alright, rushed to try and stop the battle.
Again, the crazed Gears turned to Cogs, who was on his back on the cold steel, "It's been a pleasure, Cogs." He snarled, voice breaking. He lifted the spike above his head and brought it down with every might of strength in his tiny body. Cogs grabbed his wrists and jerked to one side.
The spike drove into the roof under their combined weight, but not before plunging through a bundle of fleece and thread.
Lugnut shrieked, crawling back onto the roof. She scrambled across the metal toward them.
Cogs, hands still on the spike, stared in horror at where the weapon had landed. Gears swallowed audibly.
Lugnut seized the spike and wrenched it out of Quirk's tiny body, then gingerly lifted the little puppet up in both hands. "Quirk? Quirky, stop playing, that's not funny,"
When the puppet didn't stir, she reached into the cavity in his chest and drew out two pieces of red plastic. An expression of utter panic dominated her rapidly whitening face as she tried to put the pieces together. They, had they been intact, seemed to once have been a heart-shaped button.
Again, her attention turned back to Quirk's mangled body. He was as limp as a perfectly inanimate rag doll, his blue button eyes now devoid of sparkle. Fluffy, white stuffing was falling out of the hole in his belly. Lugnut stared at him in utter shock.
"Quirk?" She shook him slightly, "No," her voice simply dropped. It sounded like something caught in her throat and held it there. Cogs finally released his grip on the spike. A nagging fear sat at the back of his mind that Lugnut may explode if she caught him moving.
The Puppet Master slipped the fragments of the heart button into her pocket. "Quirk? I know you're still in there, maybe I could..." Fishing around in her pocket, she retrieved the button and shoved the pieces back into Quirk's belly. Lugnut drew a needle from her hat and started frantically sewing him up. He remained lifeless. "Come on, Quirk! You have both pieces of the heart button, if you could just try and..." She stopped sewing. Openly crying, her back slackened and she held the puppet to her chest.
The pause that followed almost drove Cogs to leap right off the train.
Lugnut removed her hat and laid Quirk inside it. Something in her had clearly broken. "Whose fault is it?" She asked quietly and tensely. Cogs looked at Gears, whose bottom lip was beginning to quiver. She went on.
"I asked whose fault it is. Tell me!" She was nearly screaming now, but her voice had dropped almost a whole octave, "You!" She pointed at Cogs, who scrambled back to escape. "You and your stupid paranoia. I didn't need to be dragged into your problems, Cogs! You think you're older than you are! You are not special! You can't save this train! You don't have the willpower, the bravery or the brains! You're crazier than I am!" She spun and turned on Gears, "And you are really going to crash the train? Do you think that's wise, Gears? Will people on your home train find you a hero for killing thousands of innocent people?! Who do you think you are?! No one cares how cunning or crafty you are if you aren't good enough to accomplish anything!"
Gears lifted his brown eyes to meet fearfully Lugnut's green ones, "I'm sorry..."
A laugh escaped her that rattled Cogs' very bones. It was cold, merciless, not her usual carefree jingle. It spoke of cruelty and complete madness. "You're sorry? Will your sorry-ness bring back the dead, Gears? No. You both deserve this fate. Quirk didn't."
Cogs forced sticky words out of himself. "If you're going to kill us please make it quick."
"I'm not going to kill you." She said, smiling hollowly, "I'm going to let you kill one another. Or maybe you're too cowardly to do even that. Maybe you'll sit and plot and wait for something to happen that destroys both of you. Or maybe you'll get into action. I don't care." She stared long and hard at Cogs, "Because I'm likely to get back and have the pleasure of bringing you both to your nightmarish doom."
Lugnut, her hat still in her hands, stepped toward the edge of the train, grinning horribly. "May the best killer win."
With that, and without hesitation, she jumped right off the train.
The boys scrambled to see how she landed. There she stood, fine and on her feet, her hat on her head and a dead puppet in her hands, only for a moment before she shrank into the distance.
Cogs' glasses slipped off his nose, fell onto the roof and shattered.
He didn't bother to pick them up.
The End
This is so freaking cool!
1. This is probably nitpicky but, "writing about.Cogs collapsed", there is supposed to be a space after the period, you kind of forgot that.
2. "The irritatingly familiar", maybe it's just me but I like "irritating familiar" instead of "irritatingly familiar" better.
3. I love how Quirk is a little puppet that is like almost alive. It was so sad when he dies, R.I.P. Quirk.
4. Is there going to be anymore after this? You kind of left me hanging and I Quirky back!
5. I love the story line of this. It's very interesting and the characters are awesome.
6. I think you should have a little bit more detail in each scene. I want to know how the train looks, I want to be able to picture Cog's typewriter in my mind.
Overall I love it! This was amazing and could definitely develop into a book. Maybe at the end write 'The End...or is it?". I don't know, it's just my idea.
Happy Writing,
Cgirl
P.S. Are there anymore The Underchair Letters?
Greetings! DragonGirl11 at your service. I have to say, I adore this story. You really got me got me invested in the characters. Even Quirk, who seemed at the beginning to be a relatively normal marionette controlled by a very good puppeteer. You did a great job of revealing over time that he was quite a lot more than that.
Don'tcha mean "Lugnut's"? Maybe "Lug's" even?For the amount of description there actually was of the setting, I felt that it was very well developed. However, as much as I can tell that you know exactly where they are, I'd like you to tell us a little more about it. You mentioned that it was an ever-changing landscape, for example, but maybe somewhere you could tell us more about that. Even a sentence or two about what Cogs sees when he's sitting on the roof would help immensely.
I'd love to see some backstory, too. Why are they on this train? Why does it seem there are no adults? Where is the train going? Why don't they know there are other trains? However, as much as I'd love to know, I also understand that these are children and as such they probably don't have answers to most of my questions.
Now for a moment on the more technical side of things, I caught a couple of typos. At least, I think they're typos.
My first thought was, He can fit his head in his pockets!?! But then I figured it was probably a typo for hands.
The ending. Oh the ending. So much awesome. It was fast-paced and full of action and emotion and suspense and just... <3 (Forgive me for the lack of grammar in that sentence.)
Anyway, much love to you and I hope you keep writing awesome stories. God bless!
~DragonGirl11
Oh man, oh man oh man, I liked this
I love steampunk, and this is just so imaginative and entertaining! I like how the start of your story is reflected in the ending.It ties up the whole thing very nicely, and also shows the reader (rather than tells the reader 
) character development. I would like to say though that yes, I would like a better description of the surroundings, how they got on the train, why they are on the train etc. Or is this just a universe where everyone just lives on trains? If so, you should mention it, because it's a pretty cool idea 
keep writing!
Hey there!
I really liked your imagination here. The train concept and all. I didn't get it at first but I found it easier to understand later on.
[quote]Cogs shoved his glasses back up. He hated looking at the floor. Looking at the floor made his glasses slip down. He hated when his glasses slipped down. In all truth there was a long list of things he hated.[\quote]
I like your start.
however there are things I feel lost at. For instance you say Cogs does some really dangerous work? But later on Lugnut says they are "all still little". Maybe you can tell us more about what happens in the train or what the people in the train do. The description of the surroundings is kind of vague.
Another thing that confused me, if Gears really stood out in the train with his black hair and all, why is Cogs the only person to notice that and suspect him.
Honestly I didnt know Quirk could walk and talk. I just though he was a ordinary puppet.
I like the Heart Button concept.
Overall it was a really good read!
Well done!
Keep Writing!
I hope I helped.
-manisha
Hello! This was wonderful and I shall review your story.
Oh My GOODNESS! This was so amazing! I love how you made it steampunk and stuff, though I do think you should add more background and detail, but this is not necessary as it is fine the way it is. I think you should explain some more things about how they got on the train and why they are still there, but again, this is not necessary. Keep Working!
Welcome to YWS!
GrapeNerd