For our setting today, we came upon a Renaissance age setting that had discovered cold fusion technology that is deep into a Classic Noir setting.
In 1490, a man named Alphonso Buccelli had been working with Leonardo Da Vinci in Rome and he made some discoveries about the fundamental laws of the Universe itself and had discovered a way to create Cold Fusion. He kept this secret largely to himself, sharing it only with fellow genius, Da Vinci. Being both deeply religious and having a profound respect for the power of the Church, he kept his invention quiet, referring to it as his Engine of the Angels. However, almost three years to the day after his discovery, it had not only been made public, but had transformed the way of life on the European continent. In those three years, Buccelli had been busy and had developed an arc light that gave off a profound amount of light and his Engine could supply all the energy they needed to do so.
In the just-over-five months that Columbus was gone from the Old World, Buccelli’s Engine of the Angels had taken it by storm. Major cities across Europe and Eurasia had all bought copies of Buccelli’s engine. They were using it to power Buccelli’s lights which transformed life across the continent. No longer was work restricted to being done only at night. No longer were streets unsafe after the sun went down. Works of art could be appreciated in museums without them accumulating soot from candles and lamps.
The world was changed.
However, as it would soon be discovered in the world of natural laws, it was being discovered in cities: for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The arc lights didn’t make all streets safe, just the ones they were put on. The lights didn’t change the way workers were treated, they just enabled employers and guilds to make people work longer hours because their day had become unbound from the restrictions of the sun or expensive artificial light. While the world prospered, the shadows grew deeper and more condensed, giving rise to a new form of employment: private investigation. The oldest forms of employment, especially espionage, saw a huge increase as well, making the investigators almost a necessity for those who had been impacted by spies, infidelity, and schemes of a much larger nature.
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