#ttte au

[thechaddyengine]

"Old habits never die out"

Even in the early years, Emily and James hated one another. They'd always start arguing and fighting, looks like things never change, huh?

[scattered-sense]

Welp, the first story under the knife is Mendicant, since I figured out what I wanted to do with it, only... two years late. Yay.

[rustedgolddust]

Journal Entry #6

I spent the better part of the twilight hours dragging my massive, unwieldy weight through the dense undergrowth of the old railway cutting, terrified out of what remains of my mind that someone—anyone—would see me. Moving with fourteen limbs is a chaotic, exhausting coordination of muscle and iron; my four heavy back legs kept trying to dig too deeply into the embankments, while the six crowded middle legs clicked and scraped against loose stones with a sound that felt loud enough to carry across the entire valley.

I had to freeze in the shadows multiple times, completely paralyzed by the terrifying thought of a distant lantern catching my silhouette or a late-night railwayman spotting me from a dark signal box. I pressed my heavy red boiler flat into the damp bracken, holding my breath until my internal valves groaned against the pressure, utterly terrified of what people would do if they saw the animal I am becoming.

I just wanted to get back to the safety of my house, to crawl into the dark of the old shed behind the property where I could hide from every human eye.

But as I finally neared the edge of the clearing, the wind shifted, and the stench hit me. It wasn't the smell of damp earth or hot engine grease; it was the thick, iron reek of the roe buck from this afternoon. In my desperate haste to hide, I hadn't realized the sheer, sickening extent of the mess I had made.

The bright moonlight filtered down through the pine canopy, illuminating my chassis with merciless clarity, and I choked back a sob at the sight. I am completely covered in it. The deep crimson blood of the deer has dried into a thick, tacky crust over my glossy red paint, utterly ruining the clean black lining of my casing.

All fourteen of my limbs, entirely covered in thick, coarse grey fur, are stiff and matted with dark, clotting gore, and chunks of dried flesh are still wedged deep between my fingers. Those fingers, covered in that exact same grey fur, look utterly monstrous, ending in nothing but sharp, black, claw-like nails.

I can’t go back to the house like this. The scent alone would draw every stray dog and curious neighbor for miles, and the thought of leaving a trail of butchered residue across my own clean floorboards makes my stomach turn.

I had to divert.

I turned my heavy, mutated frame away from the lane and began an agonizing crawl down toward the isolated northern bank of the forest lake.

The water was black and perfectly still when I finally broke through the reeds, reflecting the cold, pale sliver of the moon above. I slid my front limbs into the shallows first, the freezing temperature sending a sharp, agonizing shock straight through the raw, fused flesh where my caved-in spine meets the iron cab.

Slowly, deliberately, I dragged the rest of my heavy, multi-legged torso into the lake until the water rose up to my boiler plates. The sensation was horrifyingly vivid; as the cold water dissolved the caked gore, a massive, swirling cloud of dark, rusty crimson bloomed outward from my body, staining the pristine lake water into a murky, opaque shadow.

I used my grey, furry fingers, scraping with those black, claw-like nails, to frantically scrub at my side plates, listening to the wet, squelching sound of the matted fur on my legs loosening as the blood washed away. For a fleeting, desperate moment, the quiet lapping of the water against my wooden and iron frame felt almost peaceful, a tiny reprieve from the nightmare.

Then, the silence was violently ripped apart.

From where that damned tunnel and corpse from before was, a sound cut through the mist. It was an engine’s whistle. The moment the vibration hit my ears, a cold, suffocating dread locked my jaw completely shut.

I knew that sound instantly—the very one that had been trapped screaming in the dark, wailing against the brickwork until the air ran out.

But now, it was entirely, terribly worse.

And I could hear it getting closer...

I had to run.

NOW.

[lelesaur07]

Niaaaayayaaaya

[thechaddyengine]

Getting Along

Gingerbrave explaining how him and his friends ended up on Sodor, ofc Thomas wants to help his new cookie friends out to get back home.

But they don't know that a lot more cookies showed up on Sodor, especially Dark Enchantress.

[d-issent]

Dissent’s OG MSR trio! Y’know, the ones who caused all the trouble.

[rustedgolddust]

The great washdown sheds at Knapford yards were filled with the deafening, echoing roar of high-pressure fire hoses and suffocating clouds of chemical soap and steam.

Workmen in heavy rubber aprons and respirators labored tirelessly under the gray morning light, directing freezing torrents of water over the fleet of the North Western Railway to scrub away the thick, tacky layers of dark blood and dried viscera left over from the violent transformations.

The water running into the drainage grates was a sickening, swirling vortex of crimson and black engine oil. Lined up along the parallel tracks, the engines stood in a state of quiet, trembling shock. Their fever had entirely broken, and their eyes were no longer bloodshot or yellowed; instead, they stared out with wide, crystal-clear lucidity, completely aware of their rewritten anatomies.

Among them, Toby and Henrietta sat closely, their unchanged wooden cabins pressing tightly against one another. Beneath their frames, Toby's six heavy, fur-covered legs and Henrietta's four limbs were completely and desperately tangled together in the wet ballast, their skeletal fingers and sharp black claws locked in a ferocious, unyielding grip that no amount of soap or shouting from the cleaners could make them release.

They simply refused to let go of each other.

A heavy, anxious silence hung over the yards, punctuated only by the dripping of water and the occasional wet click of a claw against stone. The engines were deeply, fundamentally terrified, but it wasn't just the memory of the physical pain that haunted them.

It was a new, terrifyingly foreign sensation pulsing deep within their mechanical cores—a cold, hollow, and cavernous vacuum that gnawed at their inside workings, demanding a kind of fuel that had absolutely nothing to do with coal, water, or diesel.

They didn't have the words for this predatory hunger yet, but the confusion and shame of it radiated through the clear eyes of every engine present. They looked toward the center of the yard, their collective gaze filled with a desperate, unspoken question: how could they ever be Really Useful Engines again when this monstrous, ravenous ache was constantly clawing at their internals?

How could they pull passengers or shunt troublesome trucks when they felt like beasts waiting to strike in the dark?

Sir Bertram Topham Hatt climbed onto a heavy wooden packing crate at the head of the tracks, his top hat immaculate despite the damp air, though his face was drawn and pale with exhaustion. He looked out over his altered fleet, before his voice boomed across the yard, carrying a steady, unyielding authority that cut through the panic.

He told them that a railway was not defined by its blueprints, nor was an engine's worth measured by the number of wheels or legs beneath its frame. He looked at each of them in turn, promising that as long as he was the Controller, they would adapt, they would learn to manage this strange new internal ache together, and they would still run the lines with pride because their loyalty and their spirit had survived the rot completely untouched.

The heavy emotional weight of his speech was suddenly fractured by a loud, incredibly long, and thoroughly exhausted yawn that groaned from the back of the diesel sheds. Every engine and worker turned in absolute astonishment to look toward the dark siding where Dennis was resting.

Like the rest of the fleet, Dennis was fully and grotesquely altered; his boxy diesel housing sat high on a mass of thick, shifting muscle, and his heavy, fur-covered legs twitched lethargically in the wet dirt. Dennis had always been a notoriously lazy diesel, an engine who would create any ridiculous excuse to shirk his duties, constantly taking advantage of others and slacking off on a regular basis instead of making an effort to be really useful.

He blinked his heavy, droopy eyelids, looking utterly drained by the mere concept of the Controller's speech, and mumbled wearily that all this talk about adapting and hunting and managing new feelings just sounded like far too much effort to deal with.

He grumbled that growing extra limbs and moving around just seemed like entirely too much bloody work to bother with, his voice trailing off into a tired, fading sigh.

Then, before anyone could answer, his immense desire to do absolutely nothing triggered a bizarre, sudden reaction. With a series of wet, squelching clicks, his grotesque biological anatomy violently reversed itself purely to save energy.

His multiple legs snapped inward, the bones and muscle folding back up into his undercarriage with terrifying speed as the coarse, ash-grey fur melted away behind his closing steel side panels.

Within seconds, Dennis dropped heavily backward onto the rails, landing with a sharp mechanical clang onto his standard six steel wheels. He sat there looking almost entirely identical to his old, fully mechanical engine form, his boxy diesel chassis pristine and unburdened by extra limbs. The entire yard fell into a dead, terrified silence at the sheer impossibility of the display.

But as his heavy lids lifted one last time, everyone could see that a single row of newly grown, razor-sharp teeth glinted slickly inside his open mouth, and his unblinking irises were burning with a vibrant, unnatural shade of bright orange.

He hadn't cured the infection; his legendary, absolute laziness had just forced his body to reject the physical effort of being a monster and become similar to before.

Without another word, Dennis let out one final, quiet exhale of diesel exhaust, closed his orange-tinted eyes, and immediately drifted fast asleep, leaving the entire yard staring at him in utter disbelief.

Thomas, was the first to speak at the revelation, and in an almost clear sentence too, the vocal cords finally fully settled; "W...h...at the actual fuck?!"

"Thomas, language!"

Of course, there was the Skarloey, Arlesdale, Culdee Fell, and Estate Railways.

Not to mention the Sodor Construction Company.

Or the Sodor Roadways.

Really just any company on Sodor that used some type of machine...

[rustedgolddust]

Journal Entry #5

The ink on this page is practically illegible because my hand-legs are still shaking, slicked with a foul mixture of black grease and drying, tacky... crimson.

I am writing this because if I don’t force myself to look at these words, to acknowledge the sheer, stomach-churning depravity of what I did an hour ago, I will lose whatever shred of humanity I have left. The physical transformation was a nightmare, but what happened today was worse.

Today, the rot took my mind.

It started just after dawn. It wasn't a normal human hunger—it didn’t live in a stomach. It was a cold, cavernous, terrifying vacuum that began deep inside the heavy iron furnace of my chest and radiated outward into my fourteen limbs.

My throat, already coated in that thick layer of rust and scorched oil, began to secrete a heavy, pooling saliva that tasted overwhelmingly of old copper. The void inside me was screaming, demanding mass, demanding fuel to sustain the heavy red tank engine chassis caving in my spine. I was crouching in a dense thicket of overgrown pine, my massive iron weight sinking into the damp earth, when I saw it through the branches.

A fully grown roe deer, a buck, had stepped into the clearing to drink from a stagnant pool of rainwater. Four days ago, I would have watched it with quiet appreciation. An hour ago, my mind didn't see an animal; it saw a target.

The truly terrifying part—the thing that makes me want to scream until my hollow iron throat tears open—is how effortlessly my monstrous body adapted to the hunt. The human part of me didn't command a single muscle.

Feral, predatory instinct took the controls, and I watched my own anatomy react with a sickening, fluid synchronicity. My four heavy back legs anchored into the mud, gathering immense, terrifying leverage, while my six crowded middle legs shifted silently, perfectly distributing the tons of iron bolted to my frame so not a single twig snapped. At the same time, my four front legs stretched forward, the five skeletal fingers sprawling out onto the moss as their sharp black claws like nails slid into the dirt to muffle my advance.

Even my large grey tail trailed low behind me, twitching in perfect rhythm with my heavy, rasping breathing. I stalked it like a spider through the brush, a towering mass of iron and steel moving across that forest floor in absolute, suffocating silence.

When I lunged, the human consciousness I cling to was violently shoved behind a wall of black static, leaving me to remember the strike only in graphic, disjointed flashes. I remember the explosive, deafening force of my red frame bursting from the tree line.

I remember the absolute terror in the deer's eyes before my front limbs slammed down onto its back, crushing its ribcage into the earth with the weight of a steam engine. My five elongated fingers wrapped around its thrashing neck, and I watched my own black claws gouge straight through the fur and flesh, tearing the throat out before it could even scream.

And then, the eating took over in a savage, unhinged frenzy. My jaw unlocked with a dull, heavy click, and I tore into the carcass without chewing, pausing, or hesitating. I ripped apart muscle, tendon, and bone with a terrifying mechanical force, swallowing massive chunks of raw, hot meat whole.

The hot crimson fluid splattered violently across my glossy red boiler, running down the clean black lining of my casing and soaking into the tattered rags of my shirt that still cling to my rivets. It was a chaotic, sickening blur of snapping bones, tearing skin, and the metallic stench of viscera mixing with the scent of hot grease as I gorged myself until the bones were picked entirely clean, snapping the marrow out of them like twigs.

The predatory haze didn't clear until the screaming void in my chest was finally quieted. When my mind finally snapped back into control, the reality of what I had done hit me with the force of a physical blow. I was crouching in a red, splintered circle of trampled grass and scattered entrails, and I immediately vomited.

I threw up a horrific, steaming mixture of bile, raw meat, and black engine oil onto the forest floor, sobbing in that heavy, hollow, resonant voice that doesn't belong to me anymore. The pale skin and coarse grey fur on all fourteen of my legs are completely saturated in dark, thickening blood, and shreds of deer flesh are still caught beneath my black fingernails. Worse than the physical mess is the lingering taste—raw, coppery, and primal—and the sickening realization that deep down beneath the iron hull, the animal half of me satisfied a craving it has been begging for.

I am a monster. I didn't just lose my body to this island's rot; I am quickly losing my soul. The ink is running out, the sun is setting, and I am completely paralyzed by a new, definitive terror of what I will do when the hunger inevitably comes back.

Despite all of that, I can't help but slowly make my way back home, placing my journal and pencil in my new cab...