Concerning a Brief History of Recent Motivations

It began, if such a thing can be said, on the day the representative from Trevelyn-Smythe Holdings Ltd. walked into Westin Importers in Holbern. He was slim, dapper, a raven three-piece suit and bowler matching the satchel he carried, and the rain was drizzling in the patient way of a bored god.
The contract was simple, bordering on routine – a flight to be made into the Kunluns, with their almost untapped trading potential, retrieve a cargo to be dropped at Katmandu and exchanged for something the company really wanted. The attaché would not say what – and quite frankly, with Trevelyn-Smythe’s money, he wouldn’t have to.
Unspecified cargo is something Westin approaches like a lit fuse – in our business you can only safely trust yourself, and if we had known unprocessed opium was involved matters might have become even less tenable. But equally troubling was our approach in the first place; Trevelyn-Smythe can and does afford to employ their own merchant ships and quite competent captains. He admitted that they did, indeed, initially assign their own ship on this venture with Captain Toulouse aboard, a man I knew well from our small community. But the Sopwith vanished three weeks ago without a word of contact since. They could only assume the new airship went down in the malcontent weather of the mountains.
We took the job, with our own contractual loophole built in. The way I prefer.

But then, whatever is really said, perhaps it all actually began a few weeks earlier than even this encounter, when the first bodies showed up on the streets of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, and the mysterious residue in the footprints surrounding it.