Synopsis: Circus of Thieves

A band of unlikely thieves go up against education, necromancy, gypsies, and precipitation in a fantasy world coping with corrupt class structures and encroaching mechanization.

Neurotic and charming Fyuari works in a high class bordello until a customer tries to stab her--and she stabs back. Her actions lead her to lose customers, until she is no longer worth the room she lives in. With her only options being to sell her body or sell her soul, Fyuari turns to pick-pocketing.

Fyuari soon meets two unlikely thieves, the child leaders of a street gang called the Sweeps. Hinri and Inupta are runaways, dropouts from a nearby boarding school, who train a group of younger street children to steal from the houses whose chimneys they sweep.

Around this time, Fyuari also meets a foreign man who claims to be a farmer, but looks and fights like a Warrior of the Holy Remnant. Fyuari agrees to help him find a new life, even knowing that a fugitive member of the Remant may not have much life left.

Soon Fyuari cons herself a circus tent, as an act of revenge on a former client of hers. The four use the circus tent as their cover when they leave the city to become The World's First Traveling Thieves Guild. On the road, they soon find that their meager talents in the performing arts turn their circus guise into little more than a bad camping experience, particularly after they manage to capture an animal exhibit, one of the fearsome wild ursalopes, the unfortunate result of an old experiment to breed a bear with a jackalope. Things start to look up when they are joined by an old acrobat, his granddaughter, and the mysterious machine they carry with them. What no one realizes is that Fyuari still isn't off the hook for stabbing her client--and that she isn't the only reason he has for going after the circus.