The letter is typed (apparently using a manual typewriter, because the letters vary in darkness and depth) on thin, lightweight paper. On the top is printed The Interworld Express #1 in black, with a golden steam locomotive underneath.

I've worked the Interworld rail system for forty years, women and child, and would hate to see it die. We've had the rails in the Celebration Cluster for almost a hundred years, and I would reckon that not a man or woman born here doesn't take those golden rails through the sky somewhere sometime in their life. But the railways are dying, because the trains are dying and no one really knows how fix them, and because various governments are taking down the rails for their gold plate and steel, saying that airships are the way of the future. Airships! As if any sensible person would trust anything so fragile when a solid train is available? What if there was a storm? A properly maintained locomotive laughs at storms -- not like an airship that likely as not will be knocked to pieces!

But as I said, the trains are wearing out, and the Builders of Yam have retreated to their golden world and tore up the rails that led there and wove a storm around it so no one can get there to bother them. No one knows why, either. They won't even respond to messages dropped on their world in whiskey bottles -- heck, as far as we can tell, they don't even drink the whiskey! How can you talk with someone like that? But the Builders are the ones who made the trains and rails in the first place and they're the only ones who know how to fix them. Oh, other people have tried, but the results weren't pretty.

What I'm hoping is that your pilgrims, with your ability to fly and all, can make it through the storm to Yam and talk the Builders into coming out again and fixing the trains and rails (and maybe teaching other folks how to fix them, too). I mean, you're pilgrims must be sturdier than those airships that can't get past the storm, mustn't they?

I'm going to send you this letter by way of the Lost Mail Car, since all its letters make their way sooner or later to the Flying Temple.

Yours truly,

Josephina Sherwood,
Chief Conductor,
The Interworld Express #1