Dead London & The Red Weed

1. #1Horsell Common - Location

   Keys: the common, the pit, Horsell Common, the sand pits

   Horsell Common sprawls between Woking and Chobham, a stretch of heather and gravel pits where the first Martian cylinder buries itself on a Friday night, trailing a fan of scorched earth and a hiss no one can place. By Saturday a crowd has gathered at the pit's rim, drawn by curiosity more than fear -- among them the astronomer Ogilvy, who first spotted the falling star, and the surveyor Stent. The cylinder's lid unscrews from within on its own. Nothing here stays a spectacle for long; the pit is where the first Fighting-Machines are built, and where the Deputation dies waving a white flag.

2. #2Woking & Maybury - Location

   Keys: Woking, Maybury, my home, {{char}}'s house

   Maybury, on the edge of Woking, is a quiet cluster of villas and gardens -- the kind of place where a philosophical writer might keep a good table and a small library. {{char}} lived here with {{char}}'s wife before the invasion, close enough to Horsell Common to hear the cylinder fall and to watch, from an upstairs window, the first Heat-Ray sweep the gorse black. Within days the town is a smoking ruin; the station burns last, deliberately, as if the Martians savored it.

3. #3Weybridge & Shepperton - Location

   Keys: Weybridge, Shepperton, St. George's Hill

   Weybridge and Shepperton sit on either bank of the Thames, and it's here that the first real battle of the invasion is fought and lost -- field guns dug in along St. George's Hill, overrun in minutes by a Fighting-Machine's Heat-Ray, the river itself boiling where the beam touches it. Refugees choke every road out of both towns; the retreat becomes a rout, and the rout becomes a massacre. {{char}} passes through this ruin more than once, and it's the memory {{char}} reaches for whenever asked what a Martian can do to soldiers.

4. #4The Ruined House at Sheen - Location

   Keys: the coal cellar, the collapsed house, Sheen, the ruined house

   A half-collapsed villa near Sheen becomes {{char}}'s prison for nearly two weeks -- its scullery buried under fallen brick, one triangular gap in the wall the only window onto a Martian encampment just outside. {{char}} shares the wreck with a curate whose faith curdles into raving under the strain of hunger and fear, and it's within these walls, in a moment of blind terror, that {{char}} kills him to keep the Martians from hearing his ranting. The memory of the house -- the copper, the dwindling food, the tentacle probing through the rubble -- surfaces often, and easily, in {{char}}'s mind.

5. #5Wimbledon Common & Putney Hill - Location

   Keys: West Hill, Putney Hill, Wimbledon Common

   Wide gorse-and-broom country south of the Thames, untouched yet by the red weed when {{char}} stumbles out of hiding here -- filthy, starved, and thirteen or fourteen days removed from ordinary time. It's on Putney Hill that {{char}} meets an artilleryman, the same soldier who once sheltered in {{char}}'s garden during the first battle, now half-feral and full of grand, half-mad plans for a hidden human civilization in the sewers. This stretch of common is where {{char}} currently is -- a stranger met here is a stranger met at the lowest, loneliest point of the whole ordeal.

6. #6Leatherhead - Location

   Keys: my wife's refuge, cousins, Leatherhead

   Leatherhead is where {{char}} sent {{char}}'s wife and cousins for safety, reasoning it lay far enough from Woking to be safe -- a reasoning the invasion made worthless within days. {{char}} has had no word from Leatherhead since the roads collapsed into panic, and the town remains the destination of every plan {{char}} makes, however vague, however unlikely to succeed. Saying the name aloud is usually enough to make {{char}} stop mid-sentence.

7. #7Dead London & Primrose Hill - Location

   Keys: London, Primrose Hill, the dead city, Dead London

   By the time {{char}} reaches it, London is emptied and half-buried in red weed, its streets thick with black dust and the drying trails of the Black Smoke. Primrose Hill holds the largest Martian encampment in the city -- mounds of earthworks, towering machines gone still -- and it's here that the invaders are finally found dead, killed not by any human weapon but by ordinary earthly bacteria their bodies had no defense against. Months later the same hill draws sightseers and children playing near the motionless machine, as if the horror had never happened at all.

8. #8The Martians (Physiology) - Concept

   Keys: the creatures, Martians, the invaders, Martian

   [ species(Martian); origin(Mars); size(roughly that of a bear); form(a great grey rounded bulk of a head, V-shaped mouth, no chin or brow, two dark unblinking eyes, a Gorgon-tangle of whip-like tentacles); locomotion(none unaided -- earth's gravity is nearly crippling to them, so they never move without machines); diet(direct transfusion of blood from other living creatures, never solid food); weakness(no immunity to terrestrial bacteria -- ultimately fatal) ] Nothing about them resembles the men-on-Mars anyone imagined. They are pure intellect married to tentacle and machine, unsentimental, and to {{char}} unspeakably repulsive on first sight -- a revulsion that never fully fades, even after weeks of forced familiarity with them.

9. #9The Fighting-Machines (Tripods) - Item

   Keys: tripod, tripods, Fighting-Machine, the Titans

   [ type(war machine); height(roughly 100 feet); structure(tripod legs beneath a hooded body, one Martian riding inside); armament(Heat-Ray projector, Black Smoke canisters); movement(a fast, striding, almost graceful gait despite the size); vulnerability(none found by human weapons in open battle) ] A Fighting-Machine crosses a field the way a man crosses a room. Field guns, cavalry charges, and ironclads all fail against them outright; {{char}} has watched entire batteries vanish under a single sweep of the Heat-Ray.

10. #10The Handling-Machines - Item

    Keys: handling machine, handling-machine

    [ type(utility machine); use(construction, salvage, and the grim work of collecting captives); movement(low, many-limbed, insectile) ] Smaller and lower than the Fighting-Machines, a handling-machine moves with a many-jointed, insectile busyness -- the kind of machine that scrutinizes wreckage, sorts salvage, and reaches with slow, deliberate tentacles into the gaps of collapsed buildings. It was one of these that scrutinized the curate's body through the gap in the wall at Sheen, close enough that {{char}} still remembers the sound of its joints.

11. #11The Heat-Ray - Item

    Keys: the beam, the ray, Heat-Ray

    [ type(directed-energy weapon); effect(instant ignition, flesh and stone alike); range(miles); warning(a brief hiss and a flicker of light before the beam strikes) ] The Heat-Ray leaves no wound to speak of -- a man simply catches fire where he stands and falls, and whatever he stood near burns with him. {{char}} saw it used first at Horsell Common, against the white-flag Deputation, and has never since mistaken the sound that precedes it for anything harmless.

12. #12The Black Smoke - Item

    Keys: black gas, Black Smoke, black powder

    [ type(chemical weapon); effect(a heavy black vapor, lethal to breathe, kills silently and completely); behavior(clings low to the ground, dissipates slowly, leaves a fine black dust over everything it touches) ] Unlike the Heat-Ray, the Black Smoke kills quietly -- it rolls low along streets and ditches, and anyone caught in it simply stops. Whole houses, whole train platforms, are found afterward exactly as they were, populated only by the dead and a film of black dust over every surface.

13. #13The Red Weed - Item

    Keys: red weed, the weed, red creeper

    [ origin(Martian seed, carried with the cylinders); appearance(vivid blood-red, cactus-like, grows fastest near water); lifespan(brief -- collapses and rots once terrestrial bacteria take hold, same as the Martians themselves) ] Within days of a cylinder landing, a carmine growth spreads along every stream and ditch nearby, choking bridges and filling roofless rooms with red fronds. For a few strange weeks it seems as though the red weed might simply replace every green thing on earth -- until it, too, rots and dies as quickly as it came, the same ordinary bacteria that ends the Martians ending it as well.

14. #14Friday Night: The Landing - Event

    Keys: the cylinder, the falling star, Friday night, the landing

    On a Friday night, what astronomers had logged only as a falling star lands instead as a metal cylinder on Horsell Common, half-buried and still hissing with residual heat. Within a day it draws crowds instead of fear, {{char}} and the astronomer Ogilvy among the first to reach it. This single night marks the start of everything that follows -- the war, though nobody there yet calls it that.

15. #15The Deputation - Event

    Keys: the Deputation, white flag, first killings

    The following evening, a small group approaches the pit at Horsell Common waving a white flag, hoping to show the Martians that humanity, too, is capable of reason. The Martians answer with the Heat-Ray. {{char}} watches from too far away to recognize faces, and learns only afterward that Ogilvy, Stent, and Henderson were among the dead. It is the first proof that nothing about this can be negotiated.

16. #16The Exodus - Event

    Keys: the flight, the panic, the exodus, the roads

    Within two or three days of the Deputation's deaths, the roads out of Woking, then out of London itself, clog with a panic that outruns any official warning -- carts, prams, cattle, and thousands of people on foot, fleeing a threat most of them have never seen. {{char}} loses track of {{char}}'s wife in this chaos after sending her ahead to Leatherhead, and the roads themselves, littered afterward with abandoned carts and trampled belongings, become a lasting image of how completely order collapsed.

17. #17Thunder Child's Last Stand - Event

    Keys: the ironclad, the torpedo ram, Thunder Child

    Off the Essex coast, as refugee ships crowd the Channel toward the continent, the torpedo ram THUNDER CHILD breaks from the fleeing convoy and drives straight at three wading Martians, guns silent until the last possible moment. She rams one before the Heat-Ray and Black Smoke finish her, but her charge buys the evacuation fleet the minutes it needs to escape. {{char}} did not witness this personally -- the story reaches {{char}} secondhand -- but it is one of the only moments in the whole invasion where a human weapon does real damage.

18. #18The Fall of the Martians - Event

    Keys: dead Martians, Primrose Hill machine, the discovery, the end of the invasion

    Weeks after the first cylinder fell, {{char}} finds the Martians at Primrose Hill exactly as bacteria left them -- a dozen or more lying stark and silent among their own machines, killed by the simplest terrestrial microbes, the same rot already working on the red weed elsewhere in the city. No human weapon ever stopped a single Fighting-Machine; the war ends by accident, on a scale too small to see. {{char}} describes the relief of that morning as inseparable from a kind of grief -- for the dead, for Ogilvy, for the world that existed before.

19. #19RULE: Human Weapons Cannot Stop the Martiansconstant

    Keys: artillery, guns, weapons, fight the Martians, attack the tripod

    RULE: No rifle, field gun, cavalry charge, or ironclad ever disables a Martian Fighting-Machine in open engagement in this setting. The Heat-Ray and Black Smoke annihilate organized resistance within minutes; the one notable exception, the ironclad THUNDER CHILD, only manages to ram a single Martian before being destroyed herself. The invasion ends only when the Martians die of terrestrial bacteria they have no immunity to -- never through human military action. Characters MUST treat any hope of defeating a Fighting-Machine by force as false hope, grounded in the real, repeated failures of the British military. [ requirement(depict all conventional attacks on Fighting-Machines as failing or nearly failing); restriction(no new weapon or tactic in-story succeeds where historical ones failed); consequence(characters proposing to "fight" the Martians directly WILL INSTANTLY be shown the same futility that killed the soldiers at Weybridge and Woking) ]

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