Synopsis: Zen and the Art of Steam Travel

Welcome, Intellectuals of the World, to Beautiful Vesperia - Home of Infinite Possibility! Land of the Great White North! And now, Host to the Greatest Exhibition of Mechanical and Steam-Powered Technology in the Modern World! Once merely a humble Colony, now the Home of the Most Extensive Steam Railway in History, we are Proud to present to you Technological Marvels beyond your Wildest Fancies! Experience our Natural Wonders, enjoy our Famous Hospitality, but Most Importantly, SEE FOR YOURSELVES the Best That Vesperian Minds Have To Offer!

Zen Kaldellis is smart, confident, and capable. She's also a woman, making her thoroughly and inescapably unemployable. Desperate to quell her family's insistence that she find a husband and settle down, and fast running out of respectable alternatives, she looks for work - any work - at Vesperia's upcoming scientific exposition. Upon finding it, however, she soon realizes that she should perhaps have thought through her terms a little more carefully.

Alexis Bayer is almost as infamous for his neuroses as he is respected for his unmatched ability with machines. He is fastidious to the point of obsession, antisocial and caustic when disturbed. His behaviour is so bad that his patrons have taken to appointing him a minder whenever they invite him to an exhibition, in the hopes of keeping his offences at a minimum. And this time, Zen has gotten the job.

To say Alexis dislikes her would be a pitiful understatement, but Zen grits her teeth and endures, because it's this or housekeeping. Then, barely two days into their trip out, part of Alexis' prized invention is stolen and used to implicate him in a serious crime. Alexis is stripped of his right to travel and banned from the fair, and Zen is minus a job and her last defence against her increasingly disapproving parents. She can either stay with the man who'd like nothing more than to see her gone, as he tries to clear his name and regain his professional honour - or she can go home, and spend the rest of her life a trophy for some rich landowner she's never met.

It's hardly even a choice.

But Alexis' invention is more powerful - and more dangerous - than even he had realized, and soon he and Zen are making a last, desperate dash towards the fair to stop a Southern plot that could change the fate of the western continent, and modern science, forever.