Silver Swan Automaton… no motors, built in 1773 and still working perfectly. The Silver Swan is powered entirely by mainsprings and brass clockwork gears. Why did we stop creating such elegant engineering and beautiful pieces of art… timeless and built to last?
Joseph Merlin also invented the roller skate 1760. To show them off, he skated into a fancy London ballroom while playing the violin. He sped out of control and crashed straight into a massive, mirror, destroying the violin and injuring himself.
Headless chickens. Bruce Wayne and his children were running around like headless chickens over the gala. So annoying.
"Steph, you'd better not have taken my good corsage!" Barbara yelled. You sighed and retreated to your workspace. Just a little more of this racket and you could work on your new cloak in peace. It was a wonderful silvery colour, and all it needed was the interior fabric for comfort and warmth and the matching exterior feathers for aesthetic. You felt so fun and so mysterious just looking at it.
What should the inner lining be, though? Velvet? Cotton? Silk? Absent-mindedly, you grabbed some silver thread and wandered around with it, weighing up your options.
"Watch where you're going, idiot!" Damian scolded, knocking into you. It hurt, but you couldn't tell whether or not it was on purpose or not. "Why are you even here? You aren't preparing for anything."
He was right; you weren't. No gala invitations came in the mail for you, after all. You were always left out, for some reason.
"I wanted to stretch my legs," you said, cheerily.
"Well, you'll have to wait until we're gone. You won't get in the way like that, and we see you less." His lip curled up into a smirk.
"OK. I'll just wait until you're all gone. I'll go back to my room until then." You rushed back to your bedroom, eyes burning with tears.
Why was it never you?
You'd never been invited to a charity dinner once since joining the Wayne family. Was it because of your parentage? You had been the result of a hookup between your mother, a high-end tailor, and the prince of Gotham, Bruce Wayne himself. Maybe your origin was considered embarrassing for Gotham high society. You were nothing like Damian, who boasted of Al Ghul and Wayne ancestry, or Tim Drake, teenage CEO. You were ordinary.
And for a Wayne, ordinary was embarrassing.
You listened to Alfred drive off with them the same way you always did. Alfred would be back soon, but the rest of the family would be gone until morning.
All the better to work on your cloak.
You got out your sewing machine and worked away, opting to go with the velvet. Your dress would be a matching silver colour, and down to the ankles. Shoes would have to have thick soles so that the hems of your cloak and dress wouldn't touch the floor.
"There have to be some books about fashion around here," you mutter, as you pull books out of the shelves by the spine, dislodging them and putting them back when you had determined that this tome would be of no use to you. As you went for a book about a timeline of high fashion, sheafs of paper fell out and landed next to your feet.
You debated whether or not to look at them. Nobody was in the house, so nobody would know that you had done it so long as you put them back where you had found them. Curiously, you picked one up at random and read it.
It had your name on it. You picked up another. That one had your name on it, too. They all did, actually. What really differed were the events highlighted.
Winter Gala.
Charity Ball.
Annual Dinner.
Your innards twisted. You really had been invited to these events, same as everyone else. Someone in the house had repeatedly and systematically hidden your letter of invitation so you wouldn't accompany them. It was your family's doing that had left you weeping bitter tears in a home that hated you.
