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Mortal Engines

1240 statements
243 feature instances
97 referencing feature instances

Mortal Engines	type	TVTItem
Mortal Engines	label	Mortal Engines
Mortal Engines	page	MortalEngines
Mortal Engines	comment	The Mortal Engines Quartet is an award-winning, critically acclaimed series of novels by the English author Philip Reeve. It was initially marketed (somewhat ridiculously) as The Hungry City Chronicles in America. (This possibly happened because of the Stanisław Lem collection that was released as Mortal Engines in the US.) Four books were written in chronological order: Mortal Engines (2001), Predator's Gold (2003), Infernal Devices (2005), and A Darkling Plain (2006). A prequel series has come out set long before the first book, made up of Fever Crumb (2009), A Web of Air (2010) and Scrivener's Moon (2011). The short fiction collection Night Flights (2018) takes place relatively soon before the first book and features the secondary character Anna Fang, while a companion book, The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, was published in the same year. More will come... eventually.Mortal Engines takes place in a post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic future. Nations no longer exist, except in the lands of the Anti-Traction League. Traction Cities — entire cities mounted on caterpillar tracks for mobility — are fiercely independent city-states, using giant jaws to devour one another for resources in a horribly unsustainable city-eat-city environment known as Municipal Darwinism: large cities eat small cities, small cities eat towns, towns eat suburbs, and everyone eats non-moving or "static" settlements. Trade is mostly accomplished by airship, though sometimes cities of roughly equal size (unable to devour each other) will stop to trade. Much of the Applied Phlebotinum involves Old-Tech, ancient remains of lost civilisations ranging from statues of Mickey Mouse ("animal-headed gods of lost America") to Lost Superweapons.Traction Cities' military and ideological counterpart, the Anti-Traction League, is a vast Eastern coalition of static settlements, who aim to remove the abomination of Traction Cities from the world, though some of their methods may be no worse or better than the very Traction Cities they oppose.Something worth mentioning, given the amount of back-and-forth editing in the page history, is that the most prominent Stalker is named Shrike in most editions and Grike in the North American ones. For Theme Naming reasons made clear in Fever Crumb — that is, all the Stalkers in his "batch" were named after birds — 'Shrike' (a small predatory bird) makes considerably more sense than 'Grike' (a feature of limestone pavements).Peter Jackson and WETA Digital worked on a film adaptation of the first book, Mortal Engines, which was released in December 2018.
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Mortal Engines	parsed	2023-10-22T23:01:33Z
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Mortal Engines / int_1045c71a	type	Dying Town
Mortal Engines / int_1045c71a	comment	Dying Town: Anchorage is barely clinging to life at the start of Predator's Gold, due to a plague that decimated its population and caused most of the remainder to abandon the city; almost everyone left is too full up with grief to do much, and the city's only chugging along due to large amounts of Old Tech and Scabious' expertise. By the time of Infernal Devices, it's out of danger and at least somewhat thriving.
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Mortal Engines / int_116a941b	type	Applied Phlebotinum
Mortal Engines / int_116a941b	comment	Applied Phlebotinum: Old-Tech can be jewellery, can be useless but shiny rubbish, can be city-melting superweapons, and can make cities fly. Almost nobody can tell the difference.
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Mortal Engines / int_15d6b534	type	Standard Sci-Fi Fleet
Mortal Engines / int_15d6b534	comment	Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: The air fleets of the Green Storm and the cities they fight fit the conventions of this trope quite well — except that they fight in the air, rather than in space, of course. Airships are separated into classes ranging from small fighters (not fighter planes, but small, armed lighter-than-air ships) to corvettes, destroyers, and even dreadnoughts depending on their size, armament, and general level of danger they pose to any characters that happen to get in their way.
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Mortal Engines / int_16720859	type	More Predators Than Prey
Mortal Engines / int_16720859	comment	The issues and implications of such things are also given focus — northern Eurasia is reduced to a field of churned mud and gnawed-on mountains by the constantly moving, resource-hungry cities, and the fact that this system is all predators and no prey also makes it unstable, as it has no actual input of energy or material, and ultimately doomed. Even at the start of the series, the traction cities are growing very low on resources and desperate for "food".
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Mortal Engines / int_18d15922	type	Title Drop
Mortal Engines / int_18d15922	comment	Title Drop: Done several times in Predator's Gold. The term refers to the money earned by selling the location of a city to a predator city so the predator can hunt it down. Similarly done several times during Scrivener's Moon. The titular moon provides the signal for the Nomad alliance to march southward and take on London; later, Fever comments on its rising to Cluny as they escape London.
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Mortal Engines / int_19fe3478	type	Daddy's Girl
Mortal Engines / int_19fe3478	comment	Daddy's Girl: Wren is close with her father, Tom. The same can't be said for her mother.
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Mortal Engines / int_1aa30797	type	Single Woman Seeks Good Man
Mortal Engines / int_1aa30797	comment	Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Already there in the first book but especially apparent in the following ones, where Hester is head over heels for the nice Non-Action Guy Tom Natsworthy.
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Mortal Engines / int_1b8c7503	type	The Exile
Mortal Engines / int_1b8c7503	comment	The Exile: Stilton Kael was banished from Arkangel for aiding a slave escape. This eventually led him to become Uncle, the leader of the Lost Boys.
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Mortal Engines / int_1b901025	type	The Fagin
Mortal Engines / int_1b901025	comment	The Fagin: Uncle kidnaps children from various ice cities and raft towns, then trains them to become his "Lost Boys" - essentially thieves who bring him plunder and information from various towns.
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Mortal Engines / int_1badfb3a	type	The Heart
Mortal Engines / int_1badfb3a	comment	The Heart: Tom and Wren Natsworthy, probably the only main characters who aren't happy with theft, violence and casual murder. In the first book, Katherine Valentine and Bevis Pod, in contrast to most of the Londoners. In the second and third, Freya Rasmussen, in contrast to Hester.
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Mortal Engines / int_1badfbbb	type	The Heavy
Mortal Engines / int_1badfbbb	comment	Magnus Chrome for the first book, as it is his decision to send Shrike after Tom and Hester and re-activate MEDUSA.
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Mortal Engines / int_1c398324	type	Death from Above
Mortal Engines / int_1c398324	comment	The Stalker Fang attempts a Class 3a in A Darkling Plain. The plan would involve using ODIN to trigger a string of volcanoes across the globe, with the resulting eruptions and nuclear winter eradicating humanity but allowing plants to survive. They would then reclaim the earth, creating "A world made green again".
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Mortal Engines / int_1c4e308e	type	The Spock
Mortal Engines / int_1c4e308e	comment	The Spock: The engineers in Fever Crumb; thinking emotion and pleasure interfere with the ability to reason, they try and cut themselves off from both. Fever herself starts off as this and slowly becomes The Kirk over the course of the series, representative of her Character Development. Dr. Crumb goes in the opposite direction throughout Scrivener's Moon, particularly after Wavey dies and Fever seemingly dies.
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Mortal Engines / int_1c5002bc	type	The Stoic
Mortal Engines / int_1c5002bc	comment	The Stoic: Nabisco Shkin barely ever shows emotion of any kind, vocal or physical; raising his eyebrow one-quarter of an inch is his way of showing utter shock. Subverted when he's left stuck in an airship with a flock of Stalker-Birds, as he "screamed all the way down."
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Mortal Engines / int_1d52b714	type	Self-Parody
Mortal Engines / int_1d52b714	comment	Self-Parody: Professor Pennyroyal's books make use of common adventuring tropes in an exaggerated and often humorous way. Particularly notable is his book, Predator's Gold, which he writes during the events of Predator's Gold (the real-life book) and which basically presents Pennyroyal's own skewed, exaggerated version of the same (he was just trying to improve the pacing, honest!) Amongst other things, he turns himself into a stereotypical action hero, and gives Hester a sort of Hollywood Make-over (prompting her to exclaim, "is that supposed to be me?").
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Mortal Engines / int_1e584efa	type	Cruel and Unusual Death
Mortal Engines / int_1e584efa	comment	Cruel and Unusual Death: A punishment for Lost Boys who really piss Uncle off involves Hanging Around a docking crane, with the rope just loose enough to let them breathe a little. He notes one unfortunate Lost Boy lasted nearly a week strung up like that, and tries to do the same to Caul after the Rogues Roost debacle. Nabisco Shkin winds up being stuck inside a falling airship's gondola with a huge flock of Stalker-birds. The results are unseen, beyond the fact he was screaming all the way down.
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Mortal Engines / int_1f6983f7	type	Ambiguous Situation
Mortal Engines / int_1f6983f7	comment	Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear whether Wolf Kobold really was dead when he fell under Harrowbarrow's tracks, or whether (as Wren fears) he lived to be crushed by the tracks. Did Anna Fang actually reciprocate Stilton Kael's feelings for her, or was she just using him all along? Uncle (A.K.A.: Stilton Kael) seems to think that it was the latter, but one of the things the Stalker Fang's "Anna" Split Personality whispers while being repaired is an apology to him, saying that she didn't want to hurt him but viewed it as "the only way" to escape her slavery.
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Mortal Engines / int_1f7c89f6	type	Nigh-Invulnerability
Mortal Engines / int_1f7c89f6	comment	Stalkers are Nigh Invulnerable undead cyborgs capable of enduring huge amounts of damage. However, they're extremely vulnerable to EMP effects and massive electrical shocks, which the Movement and other Nomad Empires use to destroy rogue Stalkers. Some models also have vulnerable, exposed necks that present a prime target to their enemies, as Shrike's utter massacre of the Green Storm Stalkers in Infernal Devices demonstrates.
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Mortal Engines / int_20a14df0	type	Wrong Genre Savvy
Mortal Engines / int_20a14df0	comment	Wrong Genre Savvy: In Infernal Devices, Boo-Boo Pennyroyal has watched too many romantic tragedies at the opera, and is convinced that her slaves and servants are at constant risk of falling into doomed love affairs and running away or killing themselves out of grief and heartbreak. She tries to discourage this, but is also secretly eager to play the role of the kindly, understanding mistress and matchmaker. She ends up being kind towards Wren and Theo as a result, even though they're actually in a Dieselpunk adventure story, romance is far from their top priority, and they end up being rather annoyed with Boo-Boo ("She Is Not My Girlfriend" being very much in effect).
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Mortal Engines / int_21d70919	type	Crapsack World
Mortal Engines / int_21d70919	comment	Crapsack World: Downplayed. Traction cities run the social gamut from relatively egalitarian to barbaric pirates but they are all under near-constant risk of being attacked and devoured by a larger city or running out of fuel and starving - especially now that prey is scarce and times hard. Static settlements have the worst of it, being at the bottom of the food chain. The Anti-Traction league is doing relatively well in Asia by hiding behind the shield wall and a powerful airship fleet, but it's steadily losing ground (and cities) in Africa. And then it gets taken over by the Green Storm who launch a war against the Traction Cities.
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Mortal Engines / int_22cf536c	type	Chekhov's Gun
Mortal Engines / int_22cf536c	comment	Chekhov's Gun: Mortal Engines: The seedy, which Tom finds at the very beginning of the book and later uses as a payment to be accepted aboard a town. Early in the book, Katherine mentions that her father's copilot during his expedition to America was a woman, which enables her to figure out the link between her father, Pandora Rae, and Hester Shaw much later. The Tin Book of Anchorage in Infernal Devices. Early in the book, it's mentioned as having some kind of American machine code in it that no-one can read. It turns out to be the codes to ODIN, which the Stalker Fang uses to end the Green Storm War by crippling both sides. In A Darkling Plain, Wolf Kobold pays Tom and Wren so they fly him to London. At the very end of the book, Wren remembers the money and uses it to buy her own airship.
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Mortal Engines / int_22f6000b	type	Everybody's Dead, Dave
Mortal Engines / int_22f6000b	comment	Everybody's Dead, Dave: What it looks like at the end of the first book - London's destruction seemingly takes everyone aboard with it, while both Valentines, Chrome, Anna Fang, and Bevis are all confirmed dead. Zig-zagged later, as A Darkling Plain confirms that several named members of the Historians' Guild and multiple other Londoners survived the disaster, hiding in the ruins ever since.
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Mortal Engines / int_230d64	type	Screw the Rules, I Have Money!
Mortal Engines / int_230d64	comment	Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: The Huntsmen of Arkangel will happily pay rewards to anyone who gives them co-ordinates for Traction Cities they can hunt, but Tom considers this practice a betrayal of Municipal Darwinist principles.
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Mortal Engines / int_234bd900	type	For Science!
Mortal Engines / int_234bd900	comment	For Science!: The Engineers in Fever Crumb. They're still some of the most ethical characters in the entire book. Despite, ironically, trying to avoid emotions and other "irrational" things.
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Mortal Engines / int_25bc8511	type	Generation Xerox
Mortal Engines / int_25bc8511	comment	Generation Xerox: Just like her mother in Predator's Gold, Wren considers betraying an otherwise innocent town (New London) to a fierce, unscrupulous predator (Harrowbarrow) for personal reasons during A Darkling Plain. Unlike Hester, she doesn't go through with it (beyond some minor waffling) and more or less plans on betraying the predator to begin with.
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Mortal Engines / int_26f41623	type	Kill Sat
Mortal Engines / int_26f41623	comment	Kill Sat: ODIN (Orbital Defense Initiative), an armoured satellite that can fire incredibly powerful beams of energy. The Stalker Fang uses it to obliterate cities and make volcanoes erupt.
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Mortal Engines / int_2756af0	type	Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome
Mortal Engines / int_2756af0	comment	Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome: Tom and Hester and Katherine and Bevis. It really doesn't end well...
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Mortal Engines / int_27690f66	type	Literary Allusion Title
Mortal Engines / int_27690f66	comment	Literary Allusion Title: Mortal Engines comes from Othello. A Darkling Plain comes from Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach. A Web of Air comes from Charlotte Brontë's poem Retrospection.
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Mortal Engines / int_27b83210	type	Hufflepuff House
Mortal Engines / int_27b83210	comment	Hufflepuff House: Nuevo Maya and Australia are mentioned to be players in the world politics, but they are never explored. Word of God states that he intends to avert this by giving them A Day in the Limelight in a future book, and The Illustrated World went into a bit more detail about them.
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Mortal Engines / int_2848e7d2	type	Oblivious to Love
Mortal Engines / int_2848e7d2	comment	Oblivious to Love: Is Cluny the only one who hasn't worked out that Fever's in love with her?
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Mortal Engines / int_28a5213a	type	Small Name, Big Ego
Mortal Engines / int_28a5213a	comment	Small Name, Big Ego: Nimrod Pennyroyal.
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Mortal Engines / int_28d73447	type	Regional Redecoration
Mortal Engines / int_28d73447	comment	Regional Redecoration: During the Sixty Minute War, the Earth's geography was forever changed. South China was flooded, Antarctica de-frosted, seas moved around, pretty much everything north of New York City froze solid, and Central America ceased to exist.
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Mortal Engines / int_294ed981	type	Bilingual Bonus
Mortal Engines / int_294ed981	comment	Bilingual Bonus: Lots of these in German, French and Chinese, in particular some of the city names.
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Mortal Engines / int_2d364c81	type	Tomboy and Girly Girl
Mortal Engines / int_2d364c81	comment	Tomboy and Girly Girl: Philip Reeves likes to contrast Hester with a much more feminine character in each book: Katherine Valentine in the first, Freya Rasmussen in the second and the third, and even Hester's daughter Wren in the third and the fourth.
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Mortal Engines / int_2dc3e97c	type	Ghost Town
Mortal Engines / int_2dc3e97c	comment	Ghost Town: Motoropolis, a sixteen-tier city seen in Mortal Engines as an still, rusting wreck. The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines explains it ran out of fuel due to mismanagement and an ill-conceived final chase, with the population subsequently abandoning the city. Arkangel becomes one at the end of Predator's Gold; with its Gut flooded and the city stuck on a plain of weak sea-ice, the population either flees by airship or take to the ice until it's left as an empty shell out on the Greenland plains.
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Mortal Engines / int_31da1e24	type	Shipper on Deck
Mortal Engines / int_31da1e24	comment	Shipper on Deck: Tom likes to tease his daughter about her relationship with Theo Ngoni. Anna Fang likes to tease Hester about her relationship with Tom. Disturbingly, Stalker Fang does the same while trying to destroy the world in the final novel.
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Mortal Engines / int_3318a1cb	type	Distant Finale
Mortal Engines / int_3318a1cb	comment	In the Distant Finale, Shrike awakens to see that human civilization has become a peaceful, agrarian society living in simple dwellings amid the ruins of the old traction cities...with gravity-defying hovercraft floating around thanks to New London's tech.
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Mortal Engines / int_334b7f3a	type	Cryptic Background Reference
Mortal Engines / int_334b7f3a	comment	Downplayed. The Green Storm War is shown in detail on-screen in the third and fourth books; however a great number of battles are fought offscreen prior to this, with both Dr. Zero and General Naga making oblique references to conflicts fought before the present day that shaped the current stalemate.
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Mortal Engines / int_334e48a1	type	After the End
Mortal Engines / int_334e48a1	comment	After the End: The Apocalypse is here known as the Sixty Minute War, and was by all accounts an hour to remember: the North American continent gets glassed, Central America is completely wiped off the map, geological instability causes new chains of volcanoes to spring up all over the place, and humanity is thrown into centuries of anarchy and barbarism.
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Mortal Engines / int_33981caf	type	Street Urchin
Mortal Engines / int_33981caf	comment	Street Urchin: The Lost Boys are half Oliver Twist, a quarter Jack the Ripper and a quarter Stingray, living in a submerged city and looked after by "Uncle", a delusional Fagin-esque techno-wizard in pink bunny slippers with steel toecaps. They're really not very nice people at all.
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Mortal Engines / int_341cdc31	type	Worshipped for Great Deeds
Mortal Engines / int_341cdc31	comment	Worshipped for Great Deeds: Nikola Quercus, the Movement Land-Admiral who turned London into the first traction city. By the time of Mortal Engines, he's been deified by London and a few other cities under the name of "Quirke."
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Mortal Engines / int_3517000d	type	Mad Scientist
Mortal Engines / int_3517000d	comment	Mad Scientist: Dr Popjoy, a former member of London's K Division, who is directly responsible for creating most of the marks of Stalker that the Green Storm uses. When [Fishcake and the Stalker Fang reach his house in A Darkling Plain, the former notes numerous strange stalkerized constructs, like a dog with the head of a dead girl; the Green Storm officer investigating his murder ominously remarks that his house was full of "horrible things". ** Dr. Vambrace, the Engineers' security head. He's openly excited over seeing the effects of MEDUSA on Panzerstadt-Beyreuth's population; later he shows downright sadistic pleasure over condemning Bevis to the Deep Gut, and over the prospect of sending the Historians to follow him.
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Mortal Engines / int_370aad9	type	Split Personality
Mortal Engines / int_370aad9	comment	Split Personality: After being heavily damaged, the Stalker Fang begins switching between her usual violent self and her pre-resurrection self, Anna Fang.
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Mortal Engines / int_372bc105	type	Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism
Mortal Engines / int_372bc105	comment	Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Way, way over towards the "cynicism" end. The very, very few optimistic characters (Tom, Wren, possibly Oenone Zero) are shown again and again to be completely out of their depth, while the pessimists, nihilists, slave-dealers, compulsive liars, juvenile delinquents, mechanical horrors and violently depraved psychopaths are in their element. And somehow, it WORKS.
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Mortal Engines / int_3bc88a7f	type	Foregone Conclusion
Mortal Engines / int_3bc88a7f	comment	Foregone Conclusion: The London Underground in Scrivener's Moon aren't going to stop the reconstruction of London as the first Traction City. From what we know of air technology in Mortal Engines, Arlo isn't going to complete his aeroplane but then he does. It just gets destroyed and the technology banned by religion, making this a bit of a "Shaggy Dog" Story. Some of his comments on 'bird roads' and such do indicate that he has an impact on flight though.
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Mortal Engines / int_3c5ae1a1	type	Schizo Tech
Mortal Engines / int_3c5ae1a1	comment	Schizo Tech: Heavier than air flight is considered a lost art until it's re-discovered three-quarters of the way through the series. It's primitive and unreliable, whereas drive systems that can move entire cities at motorway speeds across uneven and often constantly shifting terrain are universal. Hot air balloons are reinvented in Fever Crumb, though they only get one use. In Web Of Air The City Of London adopts a policy of killing off anyone researching flight and later an ongoing policy of creating religious prohibitions against it, because it represented a clear danger to the new traction city. The Green Storm. Expect to see massive air-destroyers with tech modern humans won't develop today, dropping kamikaze Tumblers and firing more guns than a fleet of AC-130s, providing backup to cavalry armed with machine guns and Killer Zombie Robots while they're being strafed with armed Wright Flyers, which are in turn coming under attack from undead birds and fighter airships. Yes, seriously. Like an F-16 in airship form. In the Distant Finale, Shrike awakens to see that human civilization has become a peaceful, agrarian society living in simple dwellings amid the ruins of the old traction cities...with gravity-defying hovercraft floating around thanks to New London's tech.
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Mortal Engines / int_3d59c9a0	type	Powered Armor
Mortal Engines / int_3d59c9a0	comment	General Naga lost one of his arms and the use of his legs during the Green Storm's war; the only reason he's even able to move is because the Resurrection Corps built him a set of Powered Armor.
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Mortal Engines / int_3df2a9d6	type	Renamed the Same
Mortal Engines / int_3df2a9d6	comment	Renamed the Same: Quercus either changed his name to fit in with London's population or had it anglicised somewhere down the line, going from "Nikola Quercus" to "Nicolas Quirke."
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Mortal Engines / int_3f11ef74	type	Parental Substitute
Mortal Engines / int_3f11ef74	comment	Parental Substitute: Anna Fang is hinted to be seen as this by Tom and Hester: in the first book, a conversation with Anna reminds Tom of his late mother, and in the second, Tom and Hester put a picture of Anna in an alcove aboard the Jenny meant for pictures of parents...though this is partially due to neither of them having any pictures of their own. Shrike wants to be this for Hester and often refers to her as "his daughter". Dr. Crumb to Fever. This is what Crumb tells Fever, at least. It turns out he's her real father.
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Mortal Engines / int_40cbee83	type	Wretched Hive
Mortal Engines / int_40cbee83	comment	Wretched Hive: Brighton after the Lost Boys take over is described as this, with many buildings either turned into fortresses or in decay, rampant crime, and frequent clashes between Lost Boy factions.
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Mortal Engines / int_40cc0c7e	type	Bittersweet Ending
Mortal Engines / int_40cc0c7e	comment	Bittersweet Ending: The Traction War has cost untold numbers of lives, Tom and Hester are dead and Shrike is left bereft...but New London heralds the rise of a type of moving city that will no longer damage the world, Wren and Theo go on to make new lives for themselves, and the war is finally at an end for good. Shrike, after hibernating for hundreds of years, wakes up to find the world green again and settles into his new role — and family — as a remembering machine.
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Mortal Engines / int_42c9f1ec	type	Downplayed Trope
Mortal Engines / int_42c9f1ec	comment	To a lesser extent, the London Engineers and their white rubber lab coats; while they're noted to make them look like novelty erasers, they're also smart enough to rediscover the otherwise lost science of Stalker creation and restore an ancient Old-Tech superweapon.
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Mortal Engines / int_43a045de	type	Dropped a Bridge on Him
Mortal Engines / int_43a045de	comment	Dropped An Airship On Him Bevis dies near the end of Mortal Engines as the 13th Floor Elevator's wreckage crashes into Top Tier, pushing Katharine to safety moments before a loose engine smashes into him. Shrike gets run over by a pair of suburbs, but he gets better. He gains a bit of respect for Tom for tricking him.
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Mortal Engines / int_46290b93	type	Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Mortal Engines / int_46290b93	comment	Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Subverted. At the beginning of the first book, Tom dreams of being pulled from his dull life into a wild adventure possibly involving a pretty girl. He does, but the girl is far from pretty and the adventure will leave him more homesick than ever.
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Mortal Engines / int_469e3e2f	type	In-Universe
Mortal Engines / int_469e3e2f	comment	The limpet Naglfar was a ship in Norse mythology made of the toenails of the dead; an abridged, child-friendly version of myth is even told by Caul In-Universe as it's prepped for departure.
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Mortal Engines / int_4781adbb	type	Jerk with a Heart of Gold
Mortal Engines / int_4781adbb	comment	Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Hester in the first book. In the following ones, she's still this, but only with the people she cares for.
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Mortal Engines / int_479d4e5a	type	Would Hurt a Child
Mortal Engines / int_479d4e5a	comment	Nabisco Shkin's perfectly polite manners do little to hide his nature as a ruthless slave trader who's willing to enslave children and sell them off for Gladiator Games in Nuevo Maya. Best exemplified during his meeting with Tom, where he remains perfectly polite even as he calmly lays out how he's sold his daughter into slavery, enslaves him, and then uses this to blackmail the former into a highly risky mission.
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Mortal Engines / int_48ca7c29	type	Broken Ace
Mortal Engines / int_48ca7c29	comment	Broken Ace: Thaddeus Valentine. Turns out he started off as a penniless Out-Country scavenger who was only accepted into London after bringing the Old-Tech superweapon MEDUSA there, having murdered his lover to get his hands on it; he's still rather guilty about this decades on, and eventually beings to question his loyalty to Chrome after understanding just how deranged the latter's plans truly are.
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Mortal Engines / int_4960ec4f	type	Minored in Ass-Kicking
Mortal Engines / int_4960ec4f	comment	Minored In Ass Kicking: The Engineers in Fever Crumb don't let a complete lack of combat skills stop them from showing just how effective they are in a crisis. See Crowning Moment of Awesome.
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Mortal Engines / int_497734be	type	Mocking the Mourner
Mortal Engines / int_497734be	comment	Mocking the Mourner: When Melliphant tries and fails to impress Clytie Potts and notices she seems more interested in Tom Natsworthy, he decides to wind Tom up by discussing the accident that killed Tom's parents with Clytie while Tom's in earshot. It gets him punched in the face by Tom, much to Clytie's amusement.
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Mortal Engines / int_49cf2258	type	Hanging Around
Mortal Engines / int_49cf2258	comment	A punishment for Lost Boys who really piss Uncle off involves Hanging Around a docking crane, with the rope just loose enough to let them breathe a little. He notes one unfortunate Lost Boy lasted nearly a week strung up like that, and tries to do the same to Caul after the Rogues Roost debacle.
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Mortal Engines / int_49fb5ccb	type	Combat Pragmatist
Mortal Engines / int_49fb5ccb	comment	Combat Pragmatist: Hester uses basically anything she can find as a weapon, including crossbows, BFGs, knives, swords and a typewriter(!).
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Mortal Engines / int_4c27e0e8	type	Temporary Love Interest
Mortal Engines / int_4c27e0e8	comment	Temporary Love Interest: Kate Valentine, who gets accidentally and brutally killed by her own father and Freya Rasmussen for Tom. Also, Wolf Kobold for Wren.
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Mortal Engines / int_4cf04991	type	SocialDarwinist
Mortal Engines / int_4cf04991	comment	Social Darwinist: As in Municipal Darwinist. Survival of the fittest city.
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Mortal Engines / int_4eb5691c	type	Squashed Flat
Mortal Engines / int_4eb5691c	comment	Squashed Flat: Ted Swiney ends up being "ironed flat as a paper boy" when he fails to dodge a giant, rolling beer keg that he originally intended to crush Quercus with during their fight for London. An unfortunate New Londoner ends up right in front of Harrowbarrow as it emerges from the ground. He's promptly squashed by the several-storey high tracks and wheels. Wolf Kobold ironically ends up going out the same way, being crushed under his suburb's tracks after Wren fatally wounds him.
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Mortal Engines / int_4efc4fae	type	Good Scars, Evil Scars
Mortal Engines / int_4efc4fae	comment	Good Scars, Evil Scars: Played with. Hester has some truly hideous scarring on her face and is... complicated. Her extreme moral ambiguity really stems from her scarring and the event that caused it.
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Mortal Engines / int_5020cc4a	type	Blank Slate
Mortal Engines / int_5020cc4a	comment	Blank Slate: Newly-created Stalkers have no memories, no personality, and no experience, as their memories aren't preserved after death. Shrike and the Stalker Fang are subversions, as their unique Stalker-brains let them retain or recall some of their pre-Resurrection memories.
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Mortal Engines / int_50b9282e	type	Blind Weaponmaster
Mortal Engines / int_50b9282e	comment	Blind Weaponmaster: The Stalker Fang is blind for the first half of A Darkling Plain, but can still fight people and even stalkers.
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Mortal Engines / int_50f66629	type	Crazy-Prepared
Mortal Engines / int_50f66629	comment	Crazy-Prepared: Cynthia Twite. Not only did she have a time bomb under the ship should her assassination fail (And it did), but she also already forged the suicide note for that guy she killed using her poison-tipped hairpin which she had for such an occasion.
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Mortal Engines / int_52f74379	type	Riding the Bomb
Mortal Engines / int_52f74379	comment	Riding the Bomb: More like "piloting the bomb". The fanatical Green Storm employ Tumblers, piloted heavy ordnance dropped from airships.
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Mortal Engines / int_53136954	type	Book Dumb
Mortal Engines / int_53136954	comment	Book Dumb: Hester, especially compared to Tom.
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Mortal Engines / int_5313c266	type	Bookends
Mortal Engines / int_5313c266	comment	Book Ends: The first line of the first book becomes Shrike retelling the story hundreds of years later at the end of the fourth book.
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Mortal Engines / int_537dd8fe	type	Affably Evil
Mortal Engines / int_537dd8fe	comment	Affably Evil: Downplayed and later subverted. Wolf Kobold's more of a Lovable Rogue during the early stages of A Darkling Plain, and even remains as such during the opening stages of Harrowbarrow's advance on New London. He drops it after Wren's betrayal.
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Mortal Engines / int_562abd51	type	Let's Get Dangerous!
Mortal Engines / int_562abd51	comment	Let's Get Dangerous!: The Guild of Historians of all people, at the end of the first book, mounting a defence against the Guild of Engineers and their Stalker forces with various articles of ancient weaponry. A Darkling Plain reveals they actually managed to give them a pretty bad bloody nose before MEDUSA failed, even though it cost them many of their number.
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Mortal Engines / int_57b80b45	type	Fantastic Racism
Mortal Engines / int_57b80b45	comment	Fantastic Racism: Between the Scriven and humans. The former shun the latter for lacking their advanced technology and inherent synesthesia, derisively calling them "monkeys" and forcing them into the state of second-class citizens, while the latter hate the former for their tyrannical rule over London, referring to them as "Patchskins" and "Dapplejacks". Tractionists and Anti-Tractionists both view the other as barbarians and express open hatred toward one another. This is particularly evident in the last two books, where it's mentioned that neither side sees many problems about enslaving members of the other and several Airhaven buildings are shown forbidding entrance to "Mossies."
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Mortal Engines / int_57efd4c4	type	Growing Up Sucks
Mortal Engines / int_57efd4c4	comment	Growing Up Sucks: Hester, Tom, Wren, Theo, and every single last one of the Lost Boys. Arlo Thursday to a lesser extent.
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Mortal Engines / int_5c99b642	type	War for Fun and Profit
Mortal Engines / int_5c99b642	comment	War for Fun and Profit: Implied to be part of Adlai Browne's reason for restarting the Green Storm War - Kriegsmarshal Von Kobold remarks that the Traktionstadtsgesellshaft have paid him and his city a fortune for all the guns and ammunition he's sent them, derisively commenting that it's "no wonder [Browne] is scared at the thought of peace." Later on it's shown that he holds Manchester back until the Storm's defences are well and truly smashed, upon which he has it swoop back in to eat everything in its path.
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Mortal Engines / int_5deb34da	type	Ace Pilot
Mortal Engines / int_5deb34da	comment	Tom can be seen wearing one on the second book cover, and is something of a Ace Pilot to the Jenny Hanniver.
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Mortal Engines / int_5fcb9ad1	type	Time Skip
Mortal Engines / int_5fcb9ad1	comment	Time Skip: There's one between each book, but the most significant is the 15 year one between Predator's Gold and Infernal Devices. During this skip the teen protagonists grow into adults and end up with their own teenage daughter, the Green Storm takes over the Anti-Traction League, and the traction/anti-traction conflict escalates into an all out war.
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Mortal Engines / int_6114a875	type	Lost Technology
Mortal Engines / int_6114a875	comment	Lost Technology: Dovetails neatly with the above Kill Sat and Black Box. Also plays a big role in the setting otherwise: "Old Tech", barely understood technology left over from our own civilization (and several others that followed, and collapsed in turn) is a constant source of headaches for our heroes. Stalker brains are an interesting triple subversion: during Fever Crumb they're on the way out as everyone's forgotten how to make them beyond recycling them from Stalker to Stalker; by the time of the main series a thousand years later they've been re-discovered, albeit in a crude form that renders Stalkers Dumb Muscle. Then A Darkling Plain and Scrivener's Moon reveal the Movement-era Stalker-brains are themselves the result of another, still lost bit of tech, which was essentially a more advanced Stalker-brain designed to preserve memories rather than merely reanimate the dead.
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Mortal Engines / int_617f0563	type	Heelâ€“Face Turn
Mortal Engines / int_617f0563	comment	If Hester hadn't abandoned Fishcake, half of A Darkling Plain wouldn't have happened as he would never have found and rebuilt the Stalker Fang and quite possibly consummated his Heel–Face Turn.
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Mortal Engines / int_620475f4	type	Tastes Like Purple
Mortal Engines / int_620475f4	comment	Tastes Like Purple: Fever, like all Scriven, is a synesthetic, meaning she can see scents.
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Mortal Engines / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
Mortal Engines / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: Katherine Valentine in the first book, Taking The Stab for her half-sister Hester Shaw. Shortly before that, Bevis Pod dies pushing Katharine out of the way of a flying piece of debris from the 13th Floor Elevator General Naga sacrifices himself during Harrowbarrow's attack on New London, flying his airship into the harvester-suburb's jaws in a kamikaze-style attack.
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Mortal Engines / int_659ef759	type	Implacable Man
Mortal Engines / int_659ef759	comment	Implacable Man: All Stalkers, but especially Shrike, who gets; hit by multiple times an emplacement-weapon grade Tesla cannon, buried for centuries, torn apart, shot (ineffectively), stabbed multiple times by many different people and other Stalkers (likewise, though Tom manages to put him into a sort of hibernation for fifteen years by ramming a sword into his damaged chest), Battle Frisbee-d (makes sense in context) blown up, run over by a mobile town, dropped out of an airship into a frozen lake, and and is still alive in the Distant Finale, where he tells the story.
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Mortal Engines / int_6654b17b	type	Facial Horror
Mortal Engines / int_6654b17b	comment	Wren notes that one of the easiest ways to tell if a young man in Murnau served in the Abwehrtruppe is if he's missing an arm, a leg, or half his face.
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Mortal Engines / int_6b4f4350	type	Zeppelins from Another World
Mortal Engines / int_6b4f4350	comment	Zeppelins From A Post-Apocalyptic Future: Heavier-than-air flight has all but died out and been replaced by airships. However: Ornithopters and gyrothopters have just been reinvented in A Darkling Plain, used effectively by the Flying Ferrets. In A Web of Air, heavier-than-air flight is achieved by Arlo Thursday and then promptly crushed to prevent it being used against the newly-created traction cities.
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Mortal Engines / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
Mortal Engines / int_6bda9a30	comment	Meaningful Name: Anna Fang may be from the German "anfang", meaning "beginning." Some characters' and vehicles' names may be meaningful (such as the airships Jenny Haniver and Shadow Aspect, or the steam powered-ram ship Supercolider), but others are just as often meaningless (there's a minor character called Lurpak. Yes, really. And his first name is Cat.) Tom Natsworthy, probably because he starts out as a mere good-for-nothing apprentice. In Greek mythology, the medusa was a half-woman half-monster creature who would turn anyone into stone if they looked directly at her. The MEDUSA from Mortal Engines does do this after a sort (it's mentioned that there are carbonised statues of people on the lower levels of Panzerstath-Bayreuth, the city London fries with MEDUSA, that were flash-cooked by its intense heat), but it mostly just kills everything in it's path. In Norse mythology, Odin was the one-eyed All-Father, known for hurling lightning as his signature weapon. The Orbital Defence INitiative has an eye-like barrel, from which it fires huge superheated laser beams. One character in Mortal Engines is named Dr. Vambrace. A vambrace is a formal term for the forearm guards in plate armour, befitting his status as the Engineers' security head.
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Mortal Engines / int_6d332aea	type	Driven to Suicide
Mortal Engines / int_6d332aea	comment	Driven to Suicide: Hester stabs herself in the heart rather than live without Tom. Valentine chooses to stay with Katharine's body and burn with the rest of London, encouraging Hester and Tom to go before he does.
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Mortal Engines / int_6fb5cb83	type	I Gave My Word
Mortal Engines / int_6fb5cb83	comment	I Gave My Word: Once Crome and his people have learned all they can from Shrike, Crome could very well have had him dismantled, but he chooses to let Shrike go, and Shrike has faith that the Engineer will give him his "heart's desire" — which is to have Hester Resurrected into a Stalker.
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Mortal Engines / int_703ab38d	type	Base on Wheels
Mortal Engines / int_703ab38d	comment	Base on Wheels: A Web of Air features funicular houses, which only move up and down on rails.
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Mortal Engines / int_703b3699	type	Came Back Strong
Mortal Engines / int_703b3699	comment	Came Back Strong: The typical purpose of Stalkers is to resurrect someone as a super strong warrior.
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Mortal Engines / int_711714da	type	Opposites Attract
Mortal Engines / int_711714da	comment	Opposites Attract: Non-Action Guy Tom Natsworthy and Dark Action Girl Hester Shaw.
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Mortal Engines / int_7335ffa9	type	Grey-and-Gray Morality
Mortal Engines / int_7335ffa9	comment	Grey-and-Gray Morality: Both well-played on both sides, and deconstructed in that some people act out of selfish reasons. Surprisingly enough, there are a few Jerkass characters who are simply in it for themselves.
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Mortal Engines / int_74e9a5b1	type	Scavenger World
Mortal Engines / int_74e9a5b1	comment	Scavenger World: Huge amounts of technology in the books are scavenged from the Ancients' ruins, jury-rigged, or otherwise recycled. For instance, the Lost Boys' limpets are built more or less out of whatever odds and ends Uncle could find, and Anchorage's systems are jury-rigged to ensure they run as long as possible even with most of the population gone. Municipal Darwinism only makes this even more pronounced, as the only way for cities to gain new resources is to eat or scavenge from other towns and cities.
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Mortal Engines / int_79ba6777	type	Pocket Protector
Mortal Engines / int_79ba6777	comment	Pocket Protector: Pennyroyal survives being shot (albeit with a couple broken ribs) because the bullet is stopped by a book he had on him. Of course, the book in question is the Tin Book, a book with pages made out of metal.
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Mortal Engines / int_7a265daa	type	Eagleland
Mortal Engines / int_7a265daa	comment	Eagleland: Type II in the backstory. One historian notes that "the old American Empire was quite mad towards the end," coming up with crazy Energy Weapons that drew power from places outside the physical universe. One of them, MEDUSA, is central to the plot of the first novel.
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Mortal Engines / int_7a9f921d	type	Extinct in the Future
Mortal Engines / int_7a9f921d	comment	Extinct in the Future: The first chapter of Mortal Engines mentions that blue whales have been extinct for thousands of years, likely because of the world's oceans drying up or relocating because of the apocalypse.
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Mortal Engines / int_7ae75216	type	Franken-vehicle
Mortal Engines / int_7ae75216	comment	Franken-vehicle: Anna Fang's airship, the Jenny Haniver, was built from what Tom dismissively calls "junk" and Anna proudly describes as "bits of the finest airships that ever flew".
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Mortal Engines / int_7aeb0635	type	Arms Dealer
Mortal Engines / int_7aeb0635	comment	Arms Dealer: Manchester and its mayor, Adlai Browne, are noted to have made a fortune selling arms to the Traktionstadtsgesellshaft down the years. Kriegsmarshal Von Kobold suspects one of the reasons he's scared at the thought of peace is the potential loss of this revenue.
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Mortal Engines / int_7b4cb802	type	Bodyguard Betrayal
Mortal Engines / int_7b4cb802	comment	Bodyguard Betrayal: Shrike attacks and destroys the Stalker Fang at the climax of Infernal Devices.
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Mortal Engines / int_7b7182fe	type	Closet Key
Mortal Engines / int_7b7182fe	comment	Closet Key: Cluny causes Fever to realize that she's bisexual.
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Mortal Engines / int_7fbb2a3	type	Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!
Mortal Engines / int_7fbb2a3	comment	Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If Hester hadn't abandoned Fishcake, half of A Darkling Plain wouldn't have happened as he would never have found and rebuilt the Stalker Fang and quite possibly consummated his Heel–Face Turn. In the Fever Crumb series, Fever saves Charley from drowning outside Nonesuch House. He shoots her "dead" immediately afterwards (she's saved by the mechanimalculae Godshawk injected in her blood), sets her up in the third book (to not much success) and later becomes hands-down London's most incompetent Lord Mayor.
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Mortal Engines / int_8344209e	type	BFG
Mortal Engines / int_8344209e	comment	BFG: Hester gets a huge armour-piercing jezail in A Darkling Plain, which also features lightning guns and anti-city artillery. MEDUSA (a giant laser weapon) and ODIN (a KillSat). The former is big enough to take up most of St. Paul's Cathedral while the latter's size is unspecified, though it's able to casually one-shot entire cities.
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Mortal Engines / int_83cef301	type	Right for the Wrong Reasons
Mortal Engines / int_83cef301	comment	Right for the Wrong Reasons: Some of Professor Pennyroyal's crazy theories turn out to have a grain of truth to them — There are no savages or bears in America, but there are green, habitable areas; there are no "parasite cities", but there are the Limpets and the Lost Boys — no thanks to any particular efforts on his part, however...
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Mortal Engines / int_8414865	type	Aroused by Their Voice
Mortal Engines / int_8414865	comment	Aroused by Their Voice: Fever with Cluny's Trrrilling Rrrs.
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Mortal Engines / int_868409c	type	Broken Pedestal
Mortal Engines / int_868409c	comment	Broken Pedestal: Thaddeus Valentine to Tom, after his more sinister side is revealed.
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Mortal Engines / int_87ede6fc	type	That Man Is Dead
Mortal Engines / int_87ede6fc	comment	That Man Is Dead: "I am not Anna Fang. We are wasting time. I wish to destroy cities." (Admittedly in this case the character did literally die.) After being disowned, stripped of everything, and banished from Arkangel for unwittingly aiding a slave escape, Stilton Kael renamed himself "Uncle" and started up the Lost Boys.
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Mortal Engines / int_88359b23	type	Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy
Mortal Engines / int_88359b23	comment	Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Hester and Tom, complete with romantic tension, and especially in the first half or so of Mortal Engines. Tom is a sensitive, emotional, often naive Non-Action Guy, while Hester is a badass Action Girl who doesn't talk much and suppresses her feelings. Tom is constantly shocked by the rough world beyond London, while Hester is the one who's seen it all before, has a tough skin, and gets irritated by Tom's difficulty coping until he starts to adjust. As a bonus, Tom is handsome and conventionally attractive, while Hester has a huge disfiguring scar. This trope is still in effect further into the book series, though sometimes Hester breaks down and acts in a very emotional way, and Tom toughens up as a result of his adventures, and gets some action-heroics of his own here and there. There are still scenes where they very neatly reverse typical gender-stereotyped roles — like near the climax of Predator's Gold, where Hester intentionally leaves Tom out of harm's way in order to protect him while she goes off to do violent and badass things to the villains.
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Mortal Engines / int_88574a	type	Narrator All Along
Mortal Engines / int_88574a	comment	Narrator All Along: The last lines of the epilogue of A Darkling Plain are the same as the opening lines of Mortal Engines, spoken as Shrike settles down to tell the story to some people he meets.
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Mortal Engines / int_8967e17f	type	Back from the Dead
Mortal Engines / int_8967e17f	comment	Back from the Dead: Subverted. Even Stalker technology combined with Old-Tech designed to seek out the memory centres can't truly bring someone back from the dead. Popjoy more or less spells this out in the last book, explaining to the Stalker Fang that she's not Anna Fang as much as she is a very advanced Stalker whose intelligence stems from possessing some of Anna's drives and memories. Shrike has this happen to him twice: once when he (as Kit Solent) is resurrected as a Stalker and once after he's "killed" (more accurately "deactivated") by Tom on the Black Isle. Unlike most Stalkers he actually retains some fragmentary memories of his human life, albeit without any context.
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Mortal Engines / int_898ff050	type	Villain Protagonist
Mortal Engines / int_898ff050	comment	Villain Protagonist: Hester Shaw, though it all depends on how you see the Anti-Traction League as opposed to London. By the end of the book she's definitely not a villain in any sense. In later books, she sort of slides back down toward the villain side of things.
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Mortal Engines / int_8b568cb7	type	Posthumous Character
Mortal Engines / int_8b568cb7	comment	Posthumous Character: Auric Godshawk is an important character in Fever Crumb, despite being dead. He's learnt about through flashbacks, other characters' comments and his own memories which were implanted in Fever.
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Mortal Engines / int_8b68d9a7	type	Stalker with a Crush
Mortal Engines / int_8b68d9a7	comment	Stalker with a Crush: Yes, Shrike wanted Hester as a daughter, but it's close enough (and the Incredibly Lame Pun writes itself).
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Mortal Engines / int_8b6de1eb	type	Airborne Aircraft Carrier
Mortal Engines / int_8b6de1eb	comment	Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Airhaven is an entire floating town, complete with docking for more conventional airships, so it counts. More conventionally, several of the larger military airships probably count.
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Mortal Engines / int_8c96ae78	type	No One Could Survive That!
Mortal Engines / int_8c96ae78	comment	No One Could Survive That!: Over the course of the series Shrike is (among other things) run over by two towns, dropped out of an airship several thousand feet above the ground, left stuck on a collapsing floating palace, and left to rust for hundreds of years in a cave. He survives all of it, which he even lampshades during his thoughts in Mortal Engines. Also Anna Fang. Double Subverted in that she actually dies, and is brought back as a Stalker.
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Mortal Engines / int_8e4a0f15	type	Dumb Blonde
Mortal Engines / int_8e4a0f15	comment	Dumb Blonde: Cynthia Twite's a ditzy, air-headed girl who thinks of nothing but gossip and fashion, and blonde to match. Then spectacularly subverted as it turns out she's actually one of the Stalker Fang's elite intelligence agents, a highly trained assassin and spy who actively pretends to be stupid to throw off suspicion.
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Mortal Engines / int_90e31482	type	Laser-Guided Karma
Mortal Engines / int_90e31482	comment	Laser-Guided Karma: Wavey Godshawk is the one who turned Kit Solent into the Stalker Shrike. Years later, Shrike kills her by cutting her in half. Zigzagged somewhat in that she genuinely saw what she did as a high honor rather than horrifying.
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Mortal Engines / int_91697559	type	Half the Man He Used to Be
Mortal Engines / int_91697559	comment	Wavey Godshawk gets cut in half by a Stalker and their remains burned on a pyre by the killers, rendering it clear they're definitely dead.
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Mortal Engines / int_91e894b4	type	Apocalypse How
Mortal Engines / int_91e894b4	comment	Apocalypse How: Though humanity's back on its feet (15,000 or so years will do that for a civilization) the Sixty Minute War had such massive environmental effects and dumped so many nukes that south China was flooded, Antarctica de-frosted, seas moved around, pretty much everything north of New York City froze solid, Australia seems to have vanished (though Word of God says he just never got around to writing anything about it) and Panama ceased to exist. Not flooded, severed and destroyed. Scrivener's Moon reveals that it was wiped out in a series of directed asteroid strikes. Class 2, verging on a class 3a. The Stalker Fang attempts a Class 3a in A Darkling Plain. The plan would involve using ODIN to trigger a string of volcanoes across the globe, with the resulting eruptions and nuclear winter eradicating humanity but allowing plants to survive. They would then reclaim the earth, creating "A world made green again".
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Mortal Engines / int_91e8ab37	type	Apocalypse Not
Mortal Engines / int_91e8ab37	comment	Apocalypse Not: Hits hard in the third and fourth books as more and more cities are depicted and the lands of the Anti-Tractionists are revealed to cover swaths of Asia and Africa, sort of turned back on itself as the previously unmentioned wider human civilisations are in the process of annihilating each other in a stalemate war.
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Mortal Engines / int_92286f7f	type	Precursors
Mortal Engines / int_92286f7f	comment	Precursors: The Ancients, a group of human civilizations indicates to include futuristic version of America and China. They're completely extinct by the present day, aside from bits of their Old-Tech, some relics of their pop-culture, and the occasional Lost Superweapon.
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Mortal Engines / int_93cb1605	type	Mega-Maw Maneuver
Mortal Engines / int_93cb1605	comment	Mega-Maw Maneuver: How the cities hunt each other - they chase after each other at high speed until once gets close enough to close its "jaws" on the prey, upon which the (usually smaller) city is dragged inside the predator.
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Mortal Engines / int_94e4c8ab	type	Betty and Veronica
Mortal Engines / int_94e4c8ab	comment	Betty and Veronica: Although they don't meet until the very end of the book, Katherine Valentine and Hester Shaw can be seen as this. The second book plays the trope straight with Freya Rasmussen and Hester Shaw.
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Mortal Engines / int_9591377d	type	Heel Realization
Mortal Engines / int_9591377d	comment	Oenone Zero went from a supporter of the Green Storm and its war after a Heel Realization in the trenches, turning aginst tem in secret and planning to destroy the Stalker Fang to stop the war.
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Mortal Engines / int_95b7c400	type	Faux Affably Evil
Mortal Engines / int_95b7c400	comment	Faux Affably Evil: Nabisco Shkin's perfectly polite manners do little to hide his nature as a ruthless slave trader who's willing to enslave children and sell them off for Gladiator Games in Nuevo Maya. Best exemplified during his meeting with Tom, where he remains perfectly polite even as he calmly lays out how he's sold his daughter into slavery, enslaves him, and then uses this to blackmail the former into a highly risky mission. Wolf Kobold is a bit of a Lovable Rogue who Wren even finds rather charming; he's also an unscrupulous soldier willing to enslave innocent people, hunt other towns despite the non-aggression pact among the Traktionstadts, and swears to Wren and Theo that he'll "nail their carcasses up in the slave-holds and string [their] bowels off the roof like paper chains" after they try to stop Harrowbarrow eating New London.
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Mortal Engines / int_970c790a	type	Big Bad
Mortal Engines / int_970c790a	comment	Magnus Chrome. While he's ruthless and the Big Bad of the first book, everything he did was out of love for London and a desperate desire to keep his beloved city in motion as long as possible. His Villainous Breakdown at the end of Mortal Engines more or less spells this out, with Chrome desperately pleading that he only wanted to make London strong and breaking down in tears as MEDUSA's back-blast destroys the city.
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Mortal Engines / int_987be393	type	Gambit Roulette
Mortal Engines / int_987be393	comment	Gambit Roulette: Used a couple of times; it seems just about everything is helping Anna Fang, resurrected as a cyborg Stalker get the control codes to the superweapon.
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Mortal Engines / int_9bfb2f41	type	Dead Guy on Display
Mortal Engines / int_9bfb2f41	comment	Dead Guy on Display: In Fever Crumb, where the flayed skins of London's former Scriven masters are put on display following the Skinners' Riots. Bagman Creech himself indicates the Skinners viewed it as partly Type 2 and Type 3 In-Universe; by displaying the Scriven's skins, they showed them and the ordinary citizens that the Scriven died just like everyone else, while also intimidating any of the "Patchskins" still around.
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Mortal Engines / int_9c1d1e31	type	Black Box
Mortal Engines / int_9c1d1e31	comment	Black Box: Most Old-Tech functions like this - for example, the Nomad Empires understand how to wire a Stalker-brain into a corpse to create a Stalker, but they don't understand how the Stalker-brain itself reanimates the body, let alone how to make new ones.
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Mortal Engines / int_9ce6492a	type	Taking the Bullet
Mortal Engines / int_9ce6492a	comment	Katherine Valentine in the first book, Taking The Stab for her half-sister Hester Shaw. Shortly before that, Bevis Pod dies pushing Katharine out of the way of a flying piece of debris from the 13th Floor Elevator
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Mortal Engines / int_9d12bbc1	type	Foreshadowing
Mortal Engines / int_9d12bbc1	comment	Foreshadowing: A beautiful example in A Web Of Air. In the narration Thirza Jago is described as very beautiful, with thick curly dark red hair. Then Fever 'felt a splinter of Godshawk stir deep down in her mind'. It is then revealed that Godshawk himself was bisexual. Fever's love interest in then next book? A girl with thick, dark red, curly hair, and Fever is revealed as bisexual. When Wavey Godshawk meets Fever, she talks about how the Stalker-brains Godshawk used as part of his Body Backup Drive experiments were very old ones generally found in the frozen north; later, as she constructs a new Stalker from Kit Solent's corpse, she remarks the brain being used was brought from a trader who found it upon the High Ice. This later results in Shrike regaining a few of his memories and starting to develop a personality of his own, implicitly due to the memory-seeking components of the brain interacting with his.
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Mortal Engines / int_9d17b859	type	Made of Iron
Mortal Engines / int_9d17b859	comment	Made of Iron: Shrike, who survives being run through with a sword, falling into a ravine, and being run over by a city, among many many other things. In fact, he's actually older than the Traction Era itself, and has lived through it all. Somewhat justified by his being a cyborg, and specifically designed to be hard to kill for good. General Naga notes this to be a common trait of harvester-suburbs; blowing off their tracks and disabling their engines won't put them down as it will with regular traction cities, instead simply causing them to bring spares online and keep fighting on.
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Mortal Engines / int_9e4ed124	type	Mundanger
Mortal Engines / int_9e4ed124	comment	Mundanger: Hester Shaw is a Badass Action Girl who regularly comes out of combat unscathed. At one point she gets incapacitated by books falling on her head.
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Mortal Engines / int_a18fda9c	type	Dumb Muscle
Mortal Engines / int_a18fda9c	comment	Stalker brains are an interesting triple subversion: during Fever Crumb they're on the way out as everyone's forgotten how to make them beyond recycling them from Stalker to Stalker; by the time of the main series a thousand years later they've been re-discovered, albeit in a crude form that renders Stalkers Dumb Muscle. Then A Darkling Plain and Scrivener's Moon reveal the Movement-era Stalker-brains are themselves the result of another, still lost bit of tech, which was essentially a more advanced Stalker-brain designed to preserve memories rather than merely reanimate the dead.
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Mortal Engines / int_a1c5e0cc	type	Trigger Phrase
Mortal Engines / int_a1c5e0cc	comment	Trigger Phrase: Shrike's Manchurian Agent programming is triggered when Dr. Zero tells him "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration".
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Mortal Engines / int_a1dfb30e	type	Lost Superweapon
Mortal Engines / int_a1dfb30e	comment	The two Lost Superweapons that play critical roles in the quartet are named MEDUSA and ODIN, after the most well known of the Gorgons and the head of the Norse pantheon respectively.
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Mortal Engines / int_a3f6fcb0	type	Action Mom
Mortal Engines / int_a3f6fcb0	comment	Action Mom: Hester in the later half of the series. She's good at the action part, but not so great with the mom part.
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Mortal Engines / int_a6c69bd	type	MacGuffin
Mortal Engines / int_a6c69bd	comment	MacGuffin: The Tin Book is seemingly one of these for some time.
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Mortal Engines / int_a70223	type	Karma Houdini
Mortal Engines / int_a70223	comment	Karma Houdini: Downplayed with Pennyroyal: he never paid for shooting Tom and stealing the Jenny Haniver but at the end of the last book, his reputation is ruined and he spends a fair amount of time in prison. Though he does get released and married eventually, nobody ever trusted him enough to publish the one truthful book he wrote, not even his wealthy wife.
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Mortal Engines / int_a7aef9ff	type	Obfuscating Stupidity
Mortal Engines / int_a7aef9ff	comment	Obfuscating Stupidity: Cynthia Twite (a.k.a Agent 28) poses as a girly, air-headed ditz who thinks only of gossip and fashion, while in truth she's a hand-picked member of the Stalker Fang's elite intelligence network and a stone-cold killer besides.
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Mortal Engines / int_a8076bdf	type	War Elephants
Mortal Engines / int_a8076bdf	comment	War Mammoths: The Arkhangelsk use these in Scrivener's Moon.
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Mortal Engines / int_a8559a9f	type	RealLife
Mortal Engines / int_a8559a9f	comment	There are other, smaller examples. In one scene in Predator's Gold, for example, a character rides around on a tiny personal airship the size of a couch, kept aloft by a tiny gas-bag. It's small enough to be suitable for indoor flight. In Real Life, even the smallest lighter-than-air craft still need comparatively huge gas bags to work — compare this video of a tiny Real Life airship. (Airships actually get more efficient when it comes to lifting power as they get larger, which is why Real Life zeppelins were so massive).
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Mortal Engines / int_a8a04f6f	type	And I Must Scream
Mortal Engines / int_a8a04f6f	comment	And I Must Scream: Aspects of this in stalker technology. Individuals do not find rest in death, i.e. Anna Fang / Kit Solent, but instead are nightmarishly brought back to life through creepy old-tech (there are some gruesome descriptions of how this happens). What makes it eligible for this trope is they often remember who they were, and quite possibly are unable to destroy themselves for various reasons — such as due to tinkering done to their brains. They must endure as half-preserved, monstrous killing-machines.
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Mortal Engines / int_a8cbf649	type	I Should Write a Book About This
Mortal Engines / int_a8cbf649	comment	I Should Write a Book About This: The final scene of the last book ends with Shrike reciting the first chapter of the first book to a captive audience.
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Mortal Engines / int_a8e5bc60	type	All Hail the Great God Mickey!
Mortal Engines / int_a8e5bc60	comment	All Hail the Great God Mickey!: Literally — the first book has Tom running past statues of "...Mickey and Pluto, the animal-headed gods of lost America."
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Mortal Engines / int_aa0ff084	type	Fastest Thing Alive
Mortal Engines / int_aa0ff084	comment	Fastest Thing Alive: Cittamotore, described as the fastest traction city ever built. With 90% of its mass taken up by engines and a speed great enough it couldn't participate in Municipal Darwinism if it tried, it's not hard to see why. Ironically, The Illustrated World states it was eaten by London after running out of fuel.
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Mortal Engines / int_ac0f4761	type	Future Imperfect
Mortal Engines / int_ac0f4761	comment	Future Imperfect: Plastic idols of Mickey and Pluto, "animal-headed gods of lost America." America, incidentally, was first discovered in 1924 by Christopher Columbo, the notable detective and explorer. In a play, "Niall Strong-Arm" is sent by "Mad King Elvis of America" to the Moon, where the Moon Goddess, (Princess?) Diana falls in love with him. A Darkling Plain features a throwaway line about old London's boogeymen and folktales; one of them is "[the] awful, salvage-stealing Wombles". Reeve is just fond of this trope in general — "blog" is adopted as profanity in Fever Crumb. And, of course, in the same book, the "Hari Potter" cult throw away gag. The Traction Codex reveals there to be confusion In-Universe about several characters' historical fatesnote For instance Shrike is cited by "Stalkerologists" as having varyingly entered Chrome's service, died for good on the Black Isle, or fought for the Green Storm - all of which are actually true, and even references Mortal Engines as a "passably accurate but somewhat sensationalised" account of London's historic push eastward.
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Mortal Engines / int_acf43080	type	Wicked Pretentious
Mortal Engines / int_acf43080	comment	Wicked Pretentious: Chrysler Peavy is a pirate leader who began having delusions of being a respectable mayor after seizing control of the suburb Tunbridge Wheels and now plans to turn it into the world's first respectable pirate suburb... a task which he utterly fails at since none of his crew share any of his ambitions, and he himself is still a ruthless pirate at heart.
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Mortal Engines / int_ae6adc36	type	Religious and Mythological Theme Naming
Mortal Engines / int_ae6adc36	comment	Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The two Lost Superweapons that play critical roles in the quartet are named MEDUSA and ODIN, after the most well known of the Gorgons and the head of the Norse pantheon respectively. Captain Khora's air-destroyer is named Mokele Mbembe after a mythological spirit said to inhabit the Congo River Basin. The unit of Stalkers Shrike originally belonged to was named the Lazarus Brigade, after the man Jesus famously raised from the dead.
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Mortal Engines / int_af3ea0e3	type	Faceâ€“Heel Turn
Mortal Engines / int_af3ea0e3	comment	Face–Heel Turn: Wolf Kobold goes from a somewhat coarse and ally of the protagonists to the Big Bad of the New London arc in A Darkling Plain after figuring out what its mag-lev technology could do for Harrowbarrow.
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Mortal Engines / int_b0a91b69	type	Convection, Schmonvection
Mortal Engines / int_b0a91b69	comment	Convection, Schmonvection: Zig-zagged with ODIN's beam. Orla Twombley was badly burnt despite being miles away from it, while Naga was right next to it and wasn't harmed. The latter is especially strange, considering that the heat from convection set everything else in the room on fire and reduced Cynthia Twite to burning cinders in moments.
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Mortal Engines / int_b1619b3c	type	Omnicidal Maniac
Mortal Engines / int_b1619b3c	comment	Omnicidal Maniac: Stalker Fang's ultimate plan is to trigger volcanic eruptons all across the globe, wiping out humanity and allowing "a world made green again".
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Mortal Engines / int_b17f6a27	type	I Did What I Had to Do
Mortal Engines / int_b17f6a27	comment	I Did What I Had to Do: Magnus Crome in particular, but also Hester, Thaddeus Valentine, Oenone Zero, Shrike, Anna Fang, Wolfram von Kobold... Usually just makes things worse for everyone.
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Mortal Engines / int_b1a7cd14	type	Tap on the Head
Mortal Engines / int_b1a7cd14	comment	Tap on the Head: Name-dropped by Pennyroyal after he drops a suitcase on Cynthia Twite's head, knocking her out. While it doesn't permanently injure her, it does knock her out and the last we see of her until A Darkling Plain is her being stretchered off to an airship by Green Storm troops. During a fight in A Darkling Plain, Hester has several books dropped on her head along with a collapsing shelf; she's left with a bleeding scalp and an implied concussion, requiring help to even walk. By the time she gets to an airship, Dr. Zero notes Hester needs immediate treatment for the injury.
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Mortal Engines / int_b1bf5c9b	type	Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain
Mortal Engines / int_b1bf5c9b	comment	Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Downplayed. Stalkers can be killed or disabled by overwhelming physical force; even Shrike goes into a death-like state of dormancy after he takes enough damage. However, outright decapitation or frying their Stalker-brain with a massive blast of electricity are shown to be near-instant kills.
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Mortal Engines / int_b3eecaae	type	Colony Drop
Mortal Engines / int_b3eecaae	comment	Colony Drop: Slow Bombs are remote-controlled asteroids, taking about 5-10 years to reach their destination. A barrage of these is what severed the isthmus between North and South America during the Sixty Minute War.
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Mortal Engines / int_b4a6ae4c	type	Everyone Has Standards
Mortal Engines / int_b4a6ae4c	comment	Shrike became this for a time during his pre-Strole life, killing the enemies of a city's mayor for rewards. He stopped when the mayor ordered him to murder an opponent's children and killed the Mayor instead.
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Mortal Engines / int_b4eff8a8	type	Epic Fail
Mortal Engines / int_b4eff8a8	comment	Epic Fail: The Traction Codex reveals there was once a town that tried to move around using giant springs instead of tracks or wheels. It got about 200 feet on its maiden voyage before toppling over, breaking down, and being eaten by Xanne-Sandansky.
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Mortal Engines / int_b5171e10	type	Tragic Villain
Mortal Engines / int_b5171e10	comment	Thaddeus Valentine is a murderer and a ruthless secret agent for London. He's also a Tragic Villain who is deeply devoted to his daughter Katharine and legitimately affable besides; during his Motive Rant to Katharine he more or less confirms everything he did was to ensure she could have a life that wasn't as hard as his early one.
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Mortal Engines / int_b59bbb0c	type	Moving Buildings
Mortal Engines / int_b59bbb0c	comment	Moving Buildings: The Mortal Engines series is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which entire cities, mounted on tank treads, wander the landscape eating each other. They call it "Municipal Darwinism." In his prequel series, which documents the rise of Municipal Darwinism, various smaller-scale variations on the theme can be seen. In A Web Of Air we see the funicular houses of Mayda, which rise and fall on diagonal tracks up and down the valley the city is set in. In the same book, the previously static city of London lumbers gradually to its, uh, wheels and tracks.
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Mortal Engines / int_b5c70c26	type	Tin Man
Mortal Engines / int_b5c70c26	comment	Tin Man: The Engineers are revealed to be this in Fever Crumb. Most of the time they're The Spock but when it matters they've got their sensitive side even if they don't really know how to deal with it. Hell compared to the cutthroats and ruffians that take up most of London's screentime they're practically The Heart.
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Mortal Engines / int_b6e1d40b	type	Acceptable Breaks from Reality
Mortal Engines / int_b6e1d40b	comment	The books probably could not exist without this. The premise of entire cities that roll around on giant wheels and tracks, reaching speeds of a hundred kilometres per hour or more, using technology for the most part inferior to what exists in Real Life today, poses quite a few engineering challenges. (What structural material is light, strong, and easy enough to mass-produce to allow this? How are the engines powerful enough? How do they get — or even store — enough fuel to run these engines continuously for days or weeks at a time? How is the weight of an entire city distributed amongst the wheels?) Of course, the answer is that the cities run on Rule of Cool — and they're certainly cool enough to make it all worth it.
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Mortal Engines / int_b7c53a22	type	Blood Knight
Mortal Engines / int_b7c53a22	comment	Blood Knight: Hester admits to Tom that she enjoys violence, though it's less about fighting and more about killing.
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Mortal Engines / int_b983a56b	type	Came Back Wrong
Mortal Engines / int_b983a56b	comment	Came Back Wrong: Stalkers remember little to nothing of their previous life. This doesn't stop people from trying to bring back their loved ones through these methods as with Sathya and Anna Fang. Popjoy's commentary in A Darkling Plain and the Scrivener Institute in Scrivener's Moon imply this to be because the Stalker brains are an imperfect copy of an older, now-Lost Technology that preserved the subject's memories (though not necessarily the personality).
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Mortal Engines / int_b9d334b2	type	Aerith and Bob
Mortal Engines / int_b9d334b2	comment	Aerith and Bob: Let's see. There's Freya... Shrike... Gargle... Smew... Fishcake... brothers Lego and Duplo... Oenone Zero... Nabisco Shkin...Tom... A lot of names in the series, given the distant-future nature, are well-known brands or companies to us, but whose meaning has been lost. Notably, names like Windolene and Napster. Also, Reeve admits to naming a handful of the characters in Mortal Engines after towns and locations around his home, hence names like Chudleigh and Miss Plym. Furthermore, the Lost Boys almost exclusively get named phenomena related to aquatic life, water, or fish, like Gargle, Remora and Fishcake. And yes, there are more 'normal' names like Hester, Tom, Thaddeus, Katherine and Anna.
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Mortal Engines / int_bb01ad0e	type	Cool Boat
Mortal Engines / int_bb01ad0e	comment	Cool Boat: The Limpets used by the Lost Boys, amphibious spider-legged walkers that double as submarines.
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Mortal Engines / int_bbd8d3f4	type	Adventurer Archaeologist
Mortal Engines / int_bbd8d3f4	comment	Adventurer Archaeologist: Played straight with Thaddeus Valentine, subverted by Nimrod Pennyroyal.
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Mortal Engines / int_bf4fb49b	type	Aerial Canyon Chase
Mortal Engines / int_bf4fb49b	comment	Aerial Canyon Chase: In Predator's Gold, Tom flies an airship at street level through a moving city to lose the pursuit. One of the airships chasing him does crash.
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Mortal Engines / int_bf74d357	type	Ugly Guy, Hot Wife
Mortal Engines / int_bf74d357	comment	Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Fat Jago and Thirza. Thirza is attractive, and Fat Jago... Well, they don't call him that for nothing. General Naga and Oenone Zero. Naga's a badly scarred triplegic who's missing an arm, can't use his legs, and has numerous facial scars from the battles he's been though; contrastingly, Oenone's noted by several characters to be fairly pretty.
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Mortal Engines / int_bf8ae149	type	Layered Metropolis
Mortal Engines / int_bf8ae149	comment	Goes hand-in-hand with the widespread use of the Layered Metropolis trope. In the first book, Tom being from Tier Two defined him as a respectable citizen of London (at least, in the eyes of people from smaller towns); the lower of London's seven Tiers were populated by progressively poorer workers. Every Traction City is segregated in this way, however many layers it may have (some only two, some a dozen). The topmost Tier will be occupied by mansions, landmarks, and the Mayor's residence; the next one below may have respectable businesses and offices; below that — working class residences. On the meaner cities, the lowest tiers may house slaves; on the nicer ones, some literal social climbing may be possible. Because the lowest tiers also house the giant engines that move Traction Cities; these are usually very unpleasant places to work and live, and of course only the top Tier gets full sunlight and fresh air.
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Mortal Engines / int_c132c0c5	type	I Have No Son!
Mortal Engines / int_c132c0c5	comment	I Have No Mother: Wren pretty much cuts off all ties to Hester at the end of the third book, and never sees her again.
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Mortal Engines / int_c145f69b	type	Subverted Trope
Mortal Engines / int_c145f69b	comment	Pomeroy lists off several other superweapons during A Darkling Plain, but notes that they're most likely destroyed or completely lost.
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Mortal Engines / int_c1832fcb	type	Feet of Clay
Mortal Engines / int_c1832fcb	comment	Feet of Clay: Both of Tom's heroes. Nimrod Pennyroyal is the slightly nicer. Relatively: he shoots Tom in the heart, eventually causing his death, Small Name, Big Ego version. Thaddeus Valentine is the nasty, nasty kind. However, Valentine is the more likeable character, almost a Tragic Villain, while Pennyroyal is as despicable as Gilderoy Lockhart characters tend to be.
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Mortal Engines / int_c2393191	type	Show Within a Show
Mortal Engines / int_c2393191	comment	Show Within a Show: In Predator's Gold the historian Pennyroyal writes a book, also called Predator's Gold, which covers pretty much the same events as the Real Life book — only from Pennyroyal's own, ah, unique perspective. This has both dramatic and comical consequences. Amongst other things, it's used to parody common adventuring tropes, and much is made of the Historical Beauty Update / Hollywood Homely treatment he gives his version of Hester. Pennyroyal becomes a recurring character, and his books generally play a not insignificant part in the plot of the series.
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Mortal Engines / int_c5249b29	type	Nice Guy
Mortal Engines / int_c5249b29	comment	Nice Guy: Tom embodies this trope. It's for this reason that 'everybody likes Tom', which is mentioned at least once in every book that features him.
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Mortal Engines / int_c601fc37	type	Professional Killer
Mortal Engines / int_c601fc37	comment	Professional Killer: Hester has this role at the start of A Darkling Plain. Shrike became this for a time during his pre-Strole life, killing the enemies of a city's mayor for rewards. He stopped when the mayor ordered him to murder an opponent's children and killed the Mayor instead.
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Mortal Engines / int_c75df49a	type	Shout-Out
Mortal Engines / int_c75df49a	comment	Many cities are Shout Outs: London is based on the real London, complete with St Pauls and a vertical transport parodying the Underground. Brighton is likewise full of references to Reeve's hometown. And not very flattering references. Reeve has mentioned that his later-created city of Mayda is in part a reflection of the nicer side of Brighton. Wolverinehampton, an ugly place with huge jaws, is a predator city named after Wolverhampton. Tunbridge Wells has become an amphibious town known as Tunbridge Wheels. Grimsby is thought lost, deep under the ocean. Many German cities have their original names with titles like "Traktionstadt" (traction city), "Jagdstadt" (hunter city) and "Panzerstadt" (literally "armoured city", recalls Panzer, German for tank) added, such as Panzerstadt-Weimar. Bilingual Bonus.
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Mortal Engines / int_caf89e54	type	Taking You with Me
Mortal Engines / int_caf89e54	comment	Taking You with Me: General Naga. And HOW. To allow New London time to escape and redeem himself after his earlier actions, he pilots an airship in a Suicide Attack against Harrowbarrow; despite being badly wounded, he manages to fire several missiles into its open jaws then rams into its Gut, causing an explosion that blows himself and half of the predator apart.
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Mortal Engines / int_cbf07961	type	Body Backup Drive
Mortal Engines / int_cbf07961	comment	When Wavey Godshawk meets Fever, she talks about how the Stalker-brains Godshawk used as part of his Body Backup Drive experiments were very old ones generally found in the frozen north; later, as she constructs a new Stalker from Kit Solent's corpse, she remarks the brain being used was brought from a trader who found it upon the High Ice. This later results in Shrike regaining a few of his memories and starting to develop a personality of his own, implicitly due to the memory-seeking components of the brain interacting with his.
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Mortal Engines / int_cc1bd54d	type	Non-Action Guy
Mortal Engines / int_cc1bd54d	comment	Non-Action Guy: Tom Natsworthy. He's nowhere near as much of a fighter as Hester and it shows, with him often ending up in need of rescue by her. This is particularly pronounced after Predator's Gold, where his heart condition makes strenuous efforts (such as fighting) potentially fatal.
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Mortal Engines / int_cc7fae30	type	Outside-Context Problem
Mortal Engines / int_cc7fae30	comment	Outside-Context Problem: Harrowbarrow proves one to the Storm in A Darkling Plain; not only does their intelligence wing know it purely from rumours, but its unique burrowing capabilities give it the drop on the Storm almost every time they battle.
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Mortal Engines / int_cd8ca67a	type	DoubleSubverted
Mortal Engines / int_cd8ca67a	comment	Also Anna Fang. Double Subverted in that she actually dies, and is brought back as a Stalker.
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Mortal Engines / int_cda501da	type	Killed Off for Real
Mortal Engines / int_cda501da	comment	Killed Off for Real: Employed liberally; a great number of major and minor characters get the chop, usually quickly and horribly. In the first book alone, Shrike, Anna Fang, Thaddeus Valentine, Kate Valentine, Bevis Pod, Magnus Crome, and pretty much the entire city of London die. Partly subverted as in the course of the second, third and fourth books, some of these characters turn out to have survived or have been Stalker-ized, but then at the end of the fourth book (before the Distant Finale) Pomeroy, Naga, Stalker Fang and - last but not least - Tom and Hester all die. Wavey Godshawk gets cut in half by a Stalker and their remains burned on a pyre by the killers, rendering it clear they're definitely dead.
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Mortal Engines / int_cdfe12c3	type	Nothing Is Scarier
Mortal Engines / int_cdfe12c3	comment	Dr Popjoy, a former member of London's K Division, who is directly responsible for creating most of the marks of Stalker that the Green Storm uses. When [Fishcake and the Stalker Fang reach his house in A Darkling Plain, the former notes numerous strange stalkerized constructs, like a dog with the head of a dead girl; the Green Storm officer investigating his murder ominously remarks that his house was full of "horrible things".
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Mortal Engines / int_cf3b5436	type	Paper People
Mortal Engines / int_cf3b5436	comment	Ted Swiney ends up being "ironed flat as a paper boy" when he fails to dodge a giant, rolling beer keg that he originally intended to crush Quercus with during their fight for London.
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Mortal Engines / int_cf7bd78d	type	Steampunk
Mortal Engines / int_cf7bd78d	comment	Steampunk: Often lumped into this category though it really doesn't fit the Steampunk definition very well (its technologies more closely resemble Diesel Punk). Furthermore, Reeve dislikes the genre for its backward-looking-ness.
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Mortal Engines / int_d001c42c	type	Anti-Villain
Mortal Engines / int_d001c42c	comment	Thaddeus Valentine finally turns on the Big Bad at the climax of the first book, though it doesn't last for long before he's Killed Off for Real during London's destruction.
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Mortal Engines / int_d00e73dc	type	Badass Longcoat
Mortal Engines / int_d00e73dc	comment	Badass Long Coat: Anna Fang wears a long aviatrix's coat, and is capable of fighting Shrike one-on-one, on top of being one of the Anti-Traction League's greatest agents. Tom can be seen wearing one on the second book cover, and is something of a Ace Pilot to the Jenny Hanniver. To a lesser extent, the London Engineers and their white rubber lab coats; while they're noted to make them look like novelty erasers, they're also smart enough to rediscover the otherwise lost science of Stalker creation and restore an ancient Old-Tech superweapon.
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Mortal Engines / int_d013cd12	type	Lovable Rogue
Mortal Engines / int_d013cd12	comment	Wolf Kobold is a bit of a Lovable Rogue who Wren even finds rather charming; he's also an unscrupulous soldier willing to enslave innocent people, hunt other towns despite the non-aggression pact among the Traktionstadts, and swears to Wren and Theo that he'll "nail their carcasses up in the slave-holds and string [their] bowels off the roof like paper chains" after they try to stop Harrowbarrow eating New London.
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Mortal Engines / int_d028e0da	type	An Arm and a Leg
Mortal Engines / int_d028e0da	comment	An Arm and a Leg: General Naga lost one of his arms and the use of his legs during the Green Storm's war; the only reason he's even able to move is because the Resurrection Corps built him a set of Powered Armor. Wren notes that one of the easiest ways to tell if a young man in Murnau served in the Abwehrtruppe is if he's missing an arm, a leg, or half his face.
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Mortal Engines / int_d0447c7b	type	Lightning Gun
Mortal Engines / int_d0447c7b	comment	Lightning Gun: Some appear in A Darkling Plain, where they are used as anti-Stalker weapons (mainly Stalker birds).
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Mortal Engines / int_d08595d3	type	Broken Bird
Mortal Engines / int_d08595d3	comment	Broken Bird: Hester, so much. Losing your parents to murder at an early age and getting horribly scarred by your actual father, then being raised by a walking Cyborg-corpse before dedicating your entire life to hunting down your parent's murderer will do that to a person.
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Mortal Engines / int_d0b95b85	type	Used Future
Mortal Engines / int_d0b95b85	comment	Used Future: Played believably, once you accept the basic premise is cities eating each other.
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Mortal Engines / int_d37c028d	type	WorldHalfEmpty
Mortal Engines / int_d37c028d	comment	World Half Empty: The basic premise is living on a giant mobile city, eating cities smaller and slower than you and running away from bigger ones. If your city gets taken by a bigger and meaner one, it will be taken by force, completely looted, stripped down for raw materials and its population enslaved. In the third and fourth books, the antagonism between Traction Cities and the Anti-Traction League turns into a total war between the Traktionstadtgesellshaft, a union of militarised German cities and their allies, and the Green Storm, a band of militant extremists who overthrow the previously peaceful League leaders and turn it into a totalitarian state obsessed with the annihilation of cities. Aboard any Traction City, even non-militarised pleasure cities, you're liable to be blown apart by man-piloted heavy bombs, fleets of giant airships and psychotic undead cyborgs armed with finger-blades; fighting for the Green Storm, you're likely to be either piloting one of the bombs or attempting to fight conventional battles against war-rigged mobile cities, and if (when) you die on the battle lines, may have the bad luck to get your corpse turned into one of the aforementioned psychotic undead cyborgs and have to do the whole stupid thing again.
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Mortal Engines / int_d5b3df2d	type	Dark Action Girl
Mortal Engines / int_d5b3df2d	comment	Hester Shaw. Later a Dark Action Girl.
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Mortal Engines / int_d7639dba	type	Achilles' Heel
Mortal Engines / int_d7639dba	comment	Achilles' Heel: Stalkers are Nigh Invulnerable undead cyborgs capable of enduring huge amounts of damage. However, they're extremely vulnerable to EMP effects and massive electrical shocks, which the Movement and other Nomad Empires use to destroy rogue Stalkers. Some models also have vulnerable, exposed necks that present a prime target to their enemies, as Shrike's utter massacre of the Green Storm Stalkers in Infernal Devices demonstrates. The 13th Floor Elevator's gasbag is heavily armoured, nullifying a key weakness of most airships. However, the windows aren't, which Tom exploits to bring the airship down during the climatic battle over London in Mortal Engines.
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Mortal Engines / int_d881756c	type	Those Magnificent Flying Machines
Mortal Engines / int_d881756c	comment	Those Magnificent Flying Machines: Airships of all shapes and sizes play a major role in the setting, and air travel is heavily romanticized. Air merchants ply the "Bird Roads" in their little tramp ships, seeing the world and having glamorous adventures; nations go to war with fighter-airships and Airborne Aircraft Carriers; rich playboys may ride around their mansions in tiny couch-sized blimps. When the secrets of heavier-than-air flight are finally re-discovered later on in the series, all sorts of improbable ornithopters, autogyros, and other rickety flying machines are added into the mix.
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Mortal Engines / int_da12bcfb	type	You Can't Go Home Again
Mortal Engines / int_da12bcfb	comment	You Can't Go Home Again: London is reduced to a broken ruin with its population seemingly wiped out at the end of Mortal Engines, preventing Tom from going home. Later subverted in A Darkling Plain, where Tom is hired by Wolf Kobold to conduct an expedition into London's ruins, even finding a community of survivors in there. Oenone Zero's home - a Green Storm airbase somewhere in the Aleutians - was devoured by amphibious suburbs sometime during the war. Subverted by Theo Ngoni - A Darkling Plain opens with a scene of him at home in Zagwa, despite his fears in the previous book that he'd be disowned for joining the Green Storm against his family's wishes.
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Mortal Engines / int_da46a2c0	type	Hollywood Atheist
Mortal Engines / int_da46a2c0	comment	Hollywood Atheist: Fever has her moments.
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Mortal Engines / int_dae5c997	type	Action Girl
Mortal Engines / int_dae5c997	comment	Anna Fang in the first book. With an equally unclear distinction between Action Girl and Dark Action Girl.
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Mortal Engines / int_db6230b7	type	Lightning Bruiser
Mortal Engines / int_db6230b7	comment	Lightning Bruiser: Traction cities are very fast (London hits 100 kph in the first book), and when armed for war can pack insane amounts of firepower and armour. Stalkers are quite quick-moving, and capable of taking horrific damage before being brought down.
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Mortal Engines / int_dbf877ac	type	Sympathetic Slave Owner
Mortal Engines / int_dbf877ac	comment	Did Anna Fang actually reciprocate Stilton Kael's feelings for her, or was she just using him all along? Uncle (A.K.A.: Stilton Kael) seems to think that it was the latter, but one of the things the Stalker Fang's "Anna" Split Personality whispers while being repaired is an apology to him, saying that she didn't want to hurt him but viewed it as "the only way" to escape her slavery.
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Mortal Engines / int_dfbd69d5	type	Underwater Base
Mortal Engines / int_dfbd69d5	comment	Underwater Base: Grimsby; after it sank to pack ice during the Iron Winter, Stilton Kael (a.k.a Uncle) converted it into a base for the Lost Boys.
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Mortal Engines / int_e04ed269	type	Urban Segregation
Mortal Engines / int_e04ed269	comment	Urban Segregation: Goes hand-in-hand with the widespread use of the Layered Metropolis trope. In the first book, Tom being from Tier Two defined him as a respectable citizen of London (at least, in the eyes of people from smaller towns); the lower of London's seven Tiers were populated by progressively poorer workers. Every Traction City is segregated in this way, however many layers it may have (some only two, some a dozen). The topmost Tier will be occupied by mansions, landmarks, and the Mayor's residence; the next one below may have respectable businesses and offices; below that — working class residences. On the meaner cities, the lowest tiers may house slaves; on the nicer ones, some literal social climbing may be possible. Because the lowest tiers also house the giant engines that move Traction Cities; these are usually very unpleasant places to work and live, and of course only the top Tier gets full sunlight and fresh air. An alternate variant is seen in Predator's Gold in the case of the polar Traction City Arkangel. The less well-to-do of Arkangel live in the outer regions of the city where they are more exposed to the cold, while the city's elite live near the center where they can benefit from the warmth given off by the city's engines. Most of those aboard the towns it eats are straight-up enslaved for work in the outer districts.
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Mortal Engines / int_e070ebe6	type	Manchurian Agent
Mortal Engines / int_e070ebe6	comment	Manchurian Agent: Shrike in Infernal Devices. He's programmed to destroy the Stalker Fang if Oenone Zero utters the Trigger Phrase "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration."
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Mortal Engines / int_e13156e1	type	Mama Bear
Mortal Engines / int_e13156e1	comment	Mama Bear: Hester. Put her children in danger, and she will kill you.
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Mortal Engines / int_e1cee453	type	Hot Guy, Ugly Wife
Mortal Engines / int_e1cee453	comment	Hot Guy, Ugly Wife: Hester is horribly scarred and Tom is considered handsome.
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Mortal Engines / int_e35ab565	type	Indy Ploy
Mortal Engines / int_e35ab565	comment	Indy Ploy: Hester confronts Piotr Masgard after going back on a bargain she made with him. He's confused about her motivations.
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Mortal Engines / int_e567510d	type	Determinator
Mortal Engines / int_e567510d	comment	Determinator. Any Stalker, but Shrike in the extreme. A lot of the human characters too, particularly the frail Oenone Zero, also have an unexpected, somewhat terrifying determination to them.
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Mortal Engines / int_e5fd8bc2	type	Hate Sink
Mortal Engines / int_e5fd8bc2	comment	Hate Sink: Nabisco Shkin is a ruthless, borderline sociopathic slaver who makes a legal business out of abducting men, women, and even children before selling them into slavery; this includes both Tom and Wren, the latter of whom is publicly branded and caged like an animal. He views anyone under him socially as little more than goods to be brought or sold, and privately plans to enslave Vineland's population as a form of petty revenge on Wren for tricking him. His death at the end of Infernal Devices is very much intended to be a cathartic one, as he proves Not So Stoic when stuck in a falling airship with a flock of aggressive Stalker-birds.
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Mortal Engines / int_e602a3	type	The Kirk
Mortal Engines / int_e602a3	comment	Fever herself starts off as this and slowly becomes The Kirk over the course of the series, representative of her Character Development. Dr. Crumb goes in the opposite direction throughout Scrivener's Moon, particularly after Wavey dies and Fever seemingly dies.
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Mortal Engines / int_e6a901a3	type	Meaningful Rename
Mortal Engines / int_e6a901a3	comment	Meaningful Rename: The Traction Codex reveals that Thaddeus Valentine changed his name from "Tadeusz Wallenstein" when he settled in London and started working for the Historians Guild, symbolic of his shift from an Out-Country scavenger to a proper Londoner.
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Mortal Engines / int_e8a56ee7	type	Steven Ulysses Perhero
Mortal Engines / int_e8a56ee7	comment	Steven Ulysses Perhero: A girl named Oenone Zero grows up to be brilliant at building and programming Cyborgs. And yes, Oenone Zero is her actual birth name — though it's not uncommon for characters in this setting have names based on products or concepts from the 21st century (the civilization of the "Ancients," from their perspective). Ultimately subverted: Oenone's medical skills turn out to be just as relevant to the plot as her electronics skills. Also, despite her computer-themed name, which one would expect to be associated with cold, rational logic, she turns out to be one of the kindest and nicest characters in the books.
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Mortal Engines / int_e8dda3a2	type	Neglectful Precursors
Mortal Engines / int_e8dda3a2	comment	Neglectful Precursors: The Ancients, a.k.a. us, modern 21st-century humans. According to the books, sometime in the 21st century most of humanity wipes itself out in the 60 Minute War, leaving behind a few miserable survivors, a devastated planet, and a rich cache of malfunctioning death-rays, lethal bio-engineered plagues, and all sorts of other goodies that the humans of the Traction Era keep digging up and killing themselves with millennia later. Collectively called Old-Tech, these remnants of the Ancient civilization keep turning up in every book of the series, usually leading to nothing very good at all.
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Mortal Engines / int_e92841f	type	Talking the Monster to Death
Mortal Engines / int_e92841f	comment	Talking the Monster to Death: Tom stops the Stalker Fang from using ODIN by talking.
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Mortal Engines / int_e9d6eff8	type	Cool Airship
Mortal Engines / int_e9d6eff8	comment	Cool Airship: The Jenny Haniver. It's built of junk, but hey, so's the Millennium Falcon. A connection noted by Tom's "It's made of junk!" comment upon first seeing the Jenny.
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Mortal Engines / int_edcdddac	type	Disabled Deity
Mortal Engines / int_edcdddac	comment	Disabled Deity: Sooty Pete - described by characters as the god of engines and smoke-stacks - is typically depicted as a hunchback in his statues.
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Mortal Engines / int_edf8db61	type	Oh, My Gods!
Mortal Engines / int_edf8db61	comment	Oh, My Gods!: Various characters call on the names of their gods. Most notably, while Londoners tend to use Quirke's name in place of "God," others use curses such as "For Sooty Pete's sake!" "By the Thatcher!" and "Oh Poskitt!"
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Mortal Engines / int_ee17f4d2	type	Mobile City
Mortal Engines / int_ee17f4d2	comment	Mobile City: A central conceit in the stories. The series focuses on the mobile "traction cities" that sprung up following an apocalyptic nuclear war, which rove endlessly over the plains of Eurasia on giant caterpillar treads and consume each other for the resources they need to keep themselves running. Traditional, static cities still exist, and those who live in mobile cities think of people living in them as barbaric and backward. After all, it's only natural for cities to move across the landscape eating smaller cities and towns to survive. The cities are typically built on stacked circular tiers, narrowing towards their tops, and social rank and wealth tend to determine where you live — the rich and powerful tend to be on the top, while poorer people get the lowest decks and the full brunt of the smoke, grime and noise from the cities' engines. Mobile cities in other parts of the world use different methods of travel than the usual wheels or treads, such as cities that slide across the polar ice caps on giant bladed runners, others that float on the oceans and even one that's airborne. The issues and implications of such things are also given focus — northern Eurasia is reduced to a field of churned mud and gnawed-on mountains by the constantly moving, resource-hungry cities, and the fact that this system is all predators and no prey also makes it unstable, as it has no actual input of energy or material, and ultimately doomed. Even at the start of the series, the traction cities are growing very low on resources and desperate for "food".
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Mortal Engines / int_ef878d58	type	Court Mage
Mortal Engines / int_ef878d58	comment	Court Mage: The Arkhangelsk nomads have Nintendo Tharp. He has powerful apps.
Mortal Engines / int_ef878d58	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_efd11fe3	type	A Dog Named "Dog"
Mortal Engines / int_efd11fe3	comment	A Dog Named "Dog": Despite actually being a wolf, Dog (Katharine Valentine's pet) was named this; according to Valentine, it was the only thing the very young Katharine could say at the time.
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Mortal Engines / int_f0089082	type	Early-Bird Cameo
Mortal Engines / int_f0089082	comment	Early-Bird Cameo: After a fashion. An aviatrix named Cruwys Morchard is mentioned in passing early in the second book; she's a significant player in the fourth and she's actually Clytie Potts from the first book, who everyone assumed died in the destruction of London.
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Mortal Engines / int_f07c1493	type	Enormous Engine
Mortal Engines / int_f07c1493	comment	Enormous Engine: How do you think a Traction City gets around? So much so that they have to eat other Traction Cities to fuel them.
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Mortal Engines / int_f13a0451	type	Suicide Attack
Mortal Engines / int_f13a0451	comment	Suicide Attack: Green Storm uses "Tumblers" in their battles - essentially large bombs with a cockpit and a fanatical Green Storm pilot at the controls, dropped from air-destroyers on a one-way trip to traction cities' upperworks during battles. Theo Ngoni used to pilot these, and survived only because of luck and a poor choice of target.
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Mortal Engines / int_f6624c30	type	Together in Death
Mortal Engines / int_f6624c30	comment	Together in Death: Invoked by Hester at the beginning of the second book; she wishes to die together with Tom, noting that the deity of death is said to favour those who do. Played straight at the end of the fourth.
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Mortal Engines / int_f6d623ca	type	Eco-Terrorist
Mortal Engines / int_f6d623ca	comment	Eco-Terrorist: In the first book, the Anti-Tractionist League attempt to end the environmentally destructive policy of Municipal Darwinism through acts of sabotage and the occasional assassination of prominent Tractionist leaders. In the later books they are deposed by the considerably more militant Green Storm, who wage all-out war against the Tractionist cities and deploy Cyborgs and Suicide Attacks as part of their war effort. The Storm's leader, Stalker Fang, eventually hatches a plot to fire a Kill Sat to trigger a chain of dormant volcanoes, hoping that humanity will die off but life itself will survive and return the planet to its natural state.
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Mortal Engines / int_f740a274	type	Historical Beauty Update
Mortal Engines / int_f740a274	comment	Historical Beauty Update: In-universe: Pennyroyal does this to Hester when writing about his adventures in Predator's Gold, prompting her to exclaim, "is that supposed to be me?" Her disfiguring scar becomes a small, cute scratch on her cheek, for starters.
Mortal Engines / int_f740a274	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_f9671119	type	Death Equals Redemption
Mortal Engines / int_f9671119	comment	Death Equals Redemption: Invoked by Hester near the end of Predator's Gold. She expects to die during the book's climax, and figures this will redeem her for selling Anchorage's course to Arkangel. She's actually disappointed when she survives.
Mortal Engines / int_f9671119	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_f9a85905	type	Planet Spaceship
Mortal Engines / int_f9a85905	comment	Planet Spaceship: Magnus Crome believes that this is the logical conclusion of Municipal Darwinism: Once London exhausts all of the Earth's resources, humanity will survive by turning Earth itself into a Traction Planet, and becoming a race of Planet Looters. His belief in this vision of the distant future is why he won't be swayed by arguments that Municipal Darwinism is unsustainable.
Mortal Engines / int_f9a85905	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_f9f2c33	type	Running Gag
Mortal Engines / int_f9f2c33	comment	Running Gag: In the first book, characters tend to mispronounce Tom's family name, including Anna Fang when they first meet. His encounter with Stalker Fang in the second book references this.
Mortal Engines / int_f9f2c33	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_fbb54ba6	type	Forever War
Mortal Engines / int_fbb54ba6	comment	Forever War: Oenone Zero fears the Traction War is turning into one of these, noting that neither the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft nor the Storm have really gained any advantage or even meaningfully changed their territory in nearly a decade by this point. Her entire aim is to stop the conflict from becoming one, and she ultimately succeeds in Reconciling The Bitter Foes at the very end of the fourth book.
Mortal Engines / int_fbb54ba6	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_fbba5e98	type	Gadgeteer Genius
Mortal Engines / int_fbba5e98	comment	Gadgeteer Genius: Dr. Popjoy for creating Stalker Fang and Dr. Zero for re-resurrecting and improving Shrike to kill the Stalker Fang.
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Mortal Engines / int_fccd06b6	type	Beware the Nice Ones
Mortal Engines / int_fccd06b6	comment	Beware the Nice Ones: Although Bevis Pod is genuinely nice, Katherine is still shocked to see how calmly he can kill.
Mortal Engines / int_fccd06b6	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_fd4f8299	type	Well-Intentioned Extremist
Mortal Engines / int_fd4f8299	comment	Well-Intentioned Extremist: Magnus Chrome. While he's ruthless and the Big Bad of the first book, everything he did was out of love for London and a desperate desire to keep his beloved city in motion as long as possible. His Villainous Breakdown at the end of Mortal Engines more or less spells this out, with Chrome desperately pleading that he only wanted to make London strong and breaking down in tears as MEDUSA's back-blast destroys the city. Thaddeus Valentine is a murderer and a ruthless secret agent for London. He's also a Tragic Villain who is deeply devoted to his daughter Katharine and legitimately affable besides; during his Motive Rant to Katharine he more or less confirms everything he did was to ensure she could have a life that wasn't as hard as his early one.
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Mortal Engines / int_fd76256a	type	Pervy Patdown
Mortal Engines / int_fd76256a	comment	Pervy Patdown: Wren boards Harrowbarrow with the intention of meeting Wolf Kobold, and one of his minions insists on searching her for weapons before the meeting takes place. Afterwards, she wonders to herself what sort of weapons he expected her to be concealing in her bra.
Mortal Engines / int_fd76256a	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_fd76df83	type	Artistic License â€“ Economics
Mortal Engines / int_fd76df83	comment	Artistic License – Economics: Municipal Darwinism doesn't really make much sense: You move a literally city-sized mass of people, buildings, and machinery around on wheels, burning gods know how much fuel per second, dealing with what must be staggering maintenance costs and trying to absorb unimaginable initial investments... All so you can steal some pitiful resources from smaller, less successful cities trying to do the same thing (a labour-intensive process that involves tearing apart lots of valuable infrastructure in the target city). Discussed Trope: In the first book, one character explicitly says that Municipal Darwinism is stupid — it arose at an earlier time, when constant disasters and cataclysms forced communities to be mobile, and continues on, despite making no sense, just because people are set in their ways. The Anti-Traction League certainly thinks that it makes for bad economics.
Mortal Engines / int_fd76df83	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_fd7a9d0	type	Removed Achilles' Heel
Mortal Engines / int_fd7a9d0	comment	The 13th Floor Elevator's gasbag is heavily armoured, nullifying a key weakness of most airships. However, the windows aren't, which Tom exploits to bring the airship down during the climatic battle over London in Mortal Engines.
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Mortal Engines / int_fd94c4ac	type	Theme Naming
Mortal Engines / int_fd94c4ac	comment	Theme Naming: During Fever Crumb, it's noted that the Lazarus Brigade's most recent recruits have all been named after birds, such as Corvus, Lammergeier, and Shrike. The majority of the Lost Boys are named after nautical or fish-related terms, such as Sonar, Wrasse, Remora, and Baitball.
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Mortal Engines / int_fe0330fb	type	Brick Joke
Mortal Engines / int_fe0330fb	comment	Brick Joke: At the end of the first book, Tom insists (not convinced himself) that someone must have survived the destruction of London. About halfway through the fourth, it turns out he was right. A small, but funny example is Wren's stylish haircut, first briefly mentioned at the start of A Darkling Plain, and then forgotten until a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment halfway through the book...
Mortal Engines / int_fe0330fb	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_fe614133	type	Beauty Is Never Tarnished
Mortal Engines / int_fe614133	comment	Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Deliberately avoided by Hester Shaw, who is horribly scarred and disfigured. As in missing an eye, most of her nose, and a good chunk of her mouth. Discussed trope: When Pennyroyal writes a book with a character based on Hester, he leaves out Hester's disfigurement, and instead gives the character a cute little scratch on her cheek. Hester, when hearing this, exclaims — "is that bimbo supposed to be me?" Possibly played straight in the movie, as the teaser shows Hester with both eyes and no scars on the top half of her face. She is masked from the nose down though, so we've yet to see if she has any of the other facial disfigurements. As shown in the second trailer, she does have a fairly substantial scar across her cheek and mouth, but still has her nose. Likely due at least partially to the difficulty (not to mention expense and time in the makeup chair) in portraying such extensive scarring.
Mortal Engines / int_fe614133	featureApplicability	1.0
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Mortal Engines / int_ff16efbf	type	Heroes Want Redheads
Mortal Engines / int_ff16efbf	comment	Heroes Want Redheads: Tom has had crushes on Katherine Valentine and Freya Rasmussen, but the only one he has ever loved is Hester. After falling for Arlo Thursday, who has black hair, in A Web of Air, Fever falls in love with Cluny Morvish, who has flowing dark-red locks, in Scrivener's Moon.
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Mortal Engines / int_ff5a74c8	type	Talking Is a Free Action
Mortal Engines / int_ff5a74c8	comment	Talking Is a Free Action: Tom manages to say "A Nuevo-Mayan Battle Frisbee!" while seeing one in flight. "Gasps" it, too.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Mortal Engines	hasFeature	A Dog Named "Cat" / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	A Taste of Their Own Medicine / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Adaptation Relationship Overhaul / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Adaptational Friendship / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Adventurer Archaeologist / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Aerial Canyon Chase / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Airborne Aircraft Carrier / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	All Hail the Great God Mickey! / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Apocalypse Not / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Approval of God / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Archaeological Arms Race / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Aroused by Their Voice / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Artificial Zombie / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Artistic License â€“ Economics / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Be My Valentine / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Betrayal by Offspring / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Bizarrchitecture / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Blind Weaponmaster / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Bodyguard Betrayal / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	But What About the Astronauts? / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Call a Human a "Meatbag" / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Career-Revealing Trait / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Cataclysm Backstory / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Colony Drop / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Crazy Survivalist / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Cybernetics Eat Your Soul / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Damaged Soul / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Diseased Name / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Distant Finale / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Eco-Terrorist / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	English Literature / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Enormous Engine / int_f8d75ff5
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Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Eyes Are Unbreakable / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Facial Horror / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Fake Ultimate Hero / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Fembot / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Franken-vehicle / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	From Cataclysm to Myth / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Future Imperfect / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Glowing Eyelights of Undeath / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Good Is Old-Fashioned / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Hit So Hard, the Calendar Felt It / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Hot Guy, Ugly Wife / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Hufflepuff House / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	I Should Write a Book About This / int_f8d75ff5
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Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Layered Metropolis / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Lost Superweapon / int_f8d75ff5
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Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Mobile City / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Mocking the Mourner / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	More Predators Than Prey / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Moving Buildings / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Narrator All Along / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Oh, My Gods! / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Pardon My Klingon / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Perpetual-Motion Monster / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Raised by Robots / int_f8d75ff5
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Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Riding the Bomb / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Scars are Forever / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Screw the Rules, I Have Money! / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Setting Update / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Smoldering Shoes / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Soulless Shell / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Suicide Attack / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Sympathetic Slave Owner / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Tannhäuser Gate / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Alleged Car / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Apunkalypse / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Last Thing You Ever See / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Outsider Befriends the Best / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Short War / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Social Darwinist / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	The Un-Smile / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Time-Passes Montage / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Time Skip / int_f8d75ff5
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Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Wicked Pretentious / int_f8d75ff5
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Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Zeppelins from Another World / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	America Takes Over the World / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Pervy Patdown / int_f8d75ff5
Mortal Engines	hasFeature	Those Magnificent Flying Machines / int_f8d75ff5

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