[all very victorian, 'steampunk' if you will, with a distinct suggestion of magic as well. names are placeholders]

"He's just jealous," laughed the engineer in goggles and lead apron as he turned the too-young student over to Esoterica and Wilde, "he hasn't learned the twelve principles before we have." They stood in the void which was to become the hull, knee deep in trans fluid, all walls marked and measured in grid and every intersection numbered, intersections too in the void within, supported by no earthly force.

'what they dont' realize is that this is the death of the twentieth century, the death of the millenium, not the birth of the new, it has lingered'

They milled about on the bridge, the men in their tuxedos and collars, standing about and smoking and discussing the affairs before them as the boy sat and scrawled his words as though just thinking, hissing them into the pitted brass and concrete with a ball-writer for lack of paper in the breezy, misty night. The men smoked and laughd about what the evening held as in the distance the thunder of battle cracked faintly and wounded the night horizon with light. The heavy Zondervan flowed beneath, unaffected, down past the lower houses and then into the city, beyond this scene. The wind danced in their mustaches, dispersed smoke into the heavy black sky.

'before anything may go onward we must have the death of the old, the death and then the long waiting, the wake.'

What was taken but a moment or two ago to be the settling of mist upon one's sleeve made itself known to be pattering of pitch and spent embers, the falling of myriad tiny spheres of shot not unlike the ball in the tip of the boy's hurried scribing tool. Even this was a bit of jocose amusement to the great men as they looked up into the black, clouded misting sky for a sign, and it was at this moment that the missiles began to fall, cracking the sky like a near and energetic burst of thunder. Nothing fell in their midst but it was clear battle had come to them, and even as battle grasped for them the gentlemen made their way from the bridge to their motor-carriages with a civil, all-confident calm, secure in their knowledge that greatness will not be touched by anything so coarse.