May I ask about your fictional city’s infrastructure?

Absolutely, oh my god~ Thank you so much~

I’m weirdly nervous answering because I don’t have anything written about Ellenville’s infrastructure. But this gives me a place to start putting things on paper. <3 The first paragraphs are history-esque, I guess, and the following paragraphs are my vision of what that history looks like when translated to infrastructure.

Ellenville, the namesake of the world, is a little mining town/city in the mountains, while Marena is the big city in the foreland basin. Marena has a few rivers running through it; I imagine it as a fertile, farming-based settlement that sprung up where the river clears enough to boat to the sea. They eventually became the nation’s capital, and progressed steadily through the advents of early industrialism and gained a lively textile industry.

(I picture Marena's rivers bricked and industrialized for weaving south of the city. Springs tend to occur on fault zones and the mountains form a rainshadow, so farms would fight for the northern end, and the city center is between the two. Houses/farms are scattered, and the city is accessible, but large.)

Ellenville is an industrial town, built because one prospector out-prospected his competitors for an iron vein. ((I’m not entirely sure which commodities I want them to be mining; coal and early iron mining are based on particular layers of rock which aren’t interesting to me, and don’t provide the chemistry background I want in the story, but they’re more historically accurate. Maybe I’ll include tin mining or copper mining for steampunk flavor.)) Either way, Ellenville is fairly desolate, all citizens know each other, and most people work for the mines. Class inequality is blatant throughout the town, although at the end of the day, rich or not, everyone has a mountain accent that separates them from the lowlanders.

(I picture Ellenville as a little town in the valley between two mountains. The new train station to carry textiles and food into the city and carry processed minerals out, runs along the edge of town, past the mine crusher, up to the massive smelter-stack that sits on the hill. (They tried to put it out of the way so the smoke wouldn’t blow into the valley. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.) The nicer houses sit in the center of town by the shops that run down the old main street. The shoddier ones sit closest to the mines. Older families who’ve worked for generations usually buy property toward the middle of the valley. Running water is a recent installation. The new boarding house for the mine’s temporary workers just got it installed, and the price went up accordingly, but because it’s so new, people are excited to stay there. There’s one doctor who lives on the main street, but his assistants keep leaving every few years. They usually take one of the town girls with them.)

The inciting incident of the story, is that <Unnamed Element>, which we’ll call Elum, was found in Marena, which wouldn’t be a big deal, except it’s directly underneath the prosperous city center and the richest people’s houses. Elum is an exciting new gaseous-liquid [thingy] that can be processed to be woven and can also be used as a weapon. It’s still mined though, so it turns into a very large legal battle between the mines based in Ellenville, the rich people of Ellenville, the weavers, the researchers who found the deposit, the rich people who live in Marena, the working class who live in Marena, and the capital aristocracy who are happy they just found a new weapon to use on their neighbors.

(I imagine the deposit ending up as an underground mine, with the entrance far from the capital. A new weaving center is set up that isn’t on the river to process the new material and house the workers, and that gains its own city center that’s relatively “new” and more futuresque-steampunk; I imagine the processing plant underneath a zeppelin-space, since it runs off a byproduct of the Elum. Taller apartment complexes because pumping power has improved. I don’t want ‘modern-esque’ cars in this space, so I have to think of an alternative and perhaps the factory for those is also in the newer area.)

But behind all of that, I want Marena to develop enough that the average person forgets how the mining and weaving are done. Physically, I want it out of sight, out of mind. So the living spaces and communal spaces will reflect that.

Ellenville materials are in high demand, but the city itself struggles to stay relevant. Resorts, often run by the generational families with property, spring up outside of the town. Tourism clashes with industry, old materials with the exciting/popular Elum, and that's my basis for the later infrastructure of Ellenville itself.