Rupert Ghastly-Greene and the missing goose!

There are places in Albion where the world seems to have forgotten progress, where the soot from Mumchester’s mills drifts only faintly on the wind, and the loudest sound of an evening is the low chuntering of frogs along the River Murmur. Idle Halt is one such place — a sleepy hamlet of slate-roofed cottages, a single inn, and a railway station far grander than anyone quite deserves. Here the dwarves of the Buttercup Line send their quaint little trains puffing through the meadows, powered by domesticated firedrakes that whistle and sneeze as they go. Children wave, dogs bark, and occasionally a passenger of such unsuitably important bearing disembarks that the entire village gossips for a week.

The church, modest but proud, is dedicated to Saint Tabitha, patron of cats and cookery, and Saint Giles, guardian of farmers, cider, and the brutal village sport of scrumball. Its twin vicars, Tuppence O’Malley and Roderick Strongarm, maintain a feud of such ecclesiastical ferocity that only divine intervention—or the annual bake sale—can bring a day’s peace. Across the murmuring river stands the Merry Goose Inn, where Pippin Cox, the famous halfling consulting detective, is known to hold court over a pint of cloudy perry while speculating on who stole whose trousers from the washing line. The Goose’s garden overlooks the old stone bridge, where lovers, anglers, and philosophers congregate in roughly equal numbers, often to the detriment of the fishing.

Above the village rises Turquine Tower, the residence of the dashing and somewhat ridiculous Tobias Ghastly-Green, estranged heir to Sir Rupert Ghastly-Green of Castle Peridor. Tobias may no longer dine at his father’s table, but he does roar happily along the lanes jammed absurdly into his tiny dwarven steam chariot, accompanied by Honker, a warning goose of considerable lung capacity. His favourite fishing spot, purely by coincidence, lies beside the cottage of Miss Rose Auburnlocks, the schoolmistress, who blushes becomingly whenever Tobias stalls his engine outside her gate. The constabulary of Idle Halt is composed of Constable Borley, a retired barbarian whose idea of a quiet word involves lifting the offender by the scruff, and his gnomish superior Sergeant Wicksy, a man who believes paperwork is the highest form of civilisation. Between them, they keep the peace with a degree of success measurable mostly in tea consumed.

Then there is Doctor Reginald Loopy, a reformed werewolf who insists that Finegan’s Patent Lycanthrope Syrup has rendered him “almost entirely safe for public practice.” As the village’s physician and a third-level cleric of Saint Hippo, he dispenses healing, sermons, and the occasional bark with equal enthusiasm. Rumours he was forced to leave Mumchester after he ate half a dozen patients are clearly scurrilous gossip.

The folk of Idle Halt are hardy, peculiar, and mostly content, though the Buttercup trains sometimes arrive without passengers, and the River Murmur has lately taken to whispering names no one recognises. Cats gather on the church roof to stare east, and twice last week the windmill turned though no wind was blowing. Still, such things happen from time to time in Albion, and the locals see no reason for alarm— not yet.