Kalamari

Disclaimer: a lot of the fable characters, and therefore the characters in Brink, are nonbinary or otherwise don’t fully conform to one gender, and while Brink takes some liberties with historical accuracy so these characters can live openly as they are, I’m still going to sometimes refer to the clothing as “men’s clothing” and “women’s clothing” because that’s how it was categorized in the period. 

“On the Brink of Scientific Discovery”(by ConnorsNotHere on Ao3) is a Victorian gothic/cosmic horror AU of FableSMP that takes place in 1889. Brink and its sequels do a decent amount of globe-traveling, but most of the characters are from and live in England. However, a lot of them have connections to or are from places like France, the US, etc. By this time in history there’s(very generally) not drastic differences between the fashions of America and western Europe, so while I’m gonna try to find things as accurate as possible to what I think the characters would wear, I’m also not going to be overly picky about if say, a specific suit is from England or America.

What were the clothes like then?

In 1889 we are coming off of the second bustle period, so skirts still had a lot of fullness in the back, however, they were starting to transition into the more “trumpet shaped” skirts of the 1890s. Bodices and sleeves were both still very fitted, and sleeves are starting to get a little bit of a puff on top, rather than the smoother, more rounded styles of previous decades. In the 1880s more tailored, menswear-inspired clothing also started to gain popularity for women, so you’ll start to see jackets and bodices that resemble menswear more than in previous decades.

Year to year men’s clothing doesn’t change a drastic amount, but there are still a lot of things characteristic of the 1880s. Suit jackets were often buttoned very high up, sometimes to the point where you were barely able to see the shirt and tie. When the jackets were left open, it was actually quite fashionable to have bolder, more colorful waistcoats, which were often beautifully patterned.

However, not every person dresses like the latest fashion plates, and this photo is a good example of people who are still fashionable, but also just normal people and not wearing anything overly fancy. The entirety of the Fable Society has a decent amount of wealth, so they would be able to afford fashionable, good quality clothing, however, they still wouldn’t be dressing in their best, fanciest clothes every day, especially if it’s not practical for their job.

This is a photo of some teenage boys from 1889. This gives a really good idea of what characters like Athena, Easton, and Jamie would be wearing when they’re not wearing more casual or practical things.(side note, I really like the suit on the left I would 100% wear that)

Individual Characters

I’m not going to go into detail about *every single one* of the characters in Brink, as that would get repetitive and excessively long after a while, but I wanted to talk about a lot of them still.

Momboo

I want to start with Momboo cause in my opinion she would probably be the most fashionable(to the period's standards) of the Fable Society, and I had a lot of fun looking for things I think she would wear. Lots of pretty trims, ruffles, and florals were very popular at the time so there was a lot to choose from. While I can see her enjoying fancier clothing a lot of the time, she also loves to garden and care for the plants on her estate, so obviously she would wear different clothes for that, something with darker colors and less elaborate decorations so it would be easier to wash when it got dirty. There honestly isn’t much super unique going on with her clothing, it’s just very pretty so I wanted to talk about it first.

(That green and pink dress on the right is one of my favorites that I found the entire time I was researching for this, it’s so pretty) (also these 2 fashion plates give me such world sisters vibes, I like them a lot)

More pretty pink dresses :Athenafire:

Sherbert

In the 1880s there wasn’t yet standardized protection or uniform for chemists and people working with more dangerous compounds, and in pictures I’ve seen they just seem to be wearing normal(if slightly more casual) clothes with maybe an apron over them. In Brink neither Sherbert nor Easton wear any protection in their lab out of pure “well nothing bad has happened yet”(which I’m sure will be great for their health and will never have any adverse effects later in life /s) which is actually pretty accurate to chemists of the time.

(I had a really hard time dating this photo, it’s probably closer to the 1870s but still gives really good examples of protection used by chemists in their labs)

It was pretty difficult to find pictures of chemists in the clothing they would wear while working, but I did find a lot of really cool pictures of chemistry labs that are really interesting to look at.

A really fun detail that I realized when I was researching things for Sherbert(that was probably accidental but I still like it) is that Sherbert’s jacket is often described as being very long and having a large collar that is often turned up. This actually wasn’t a very common style for overcoats in the last couple years of the 1880s, *however* it was a lot more common just a couple years beforehand, so I like to think of Sherbert’s jacket in Brink as being something they’ve held onto for a while either out of practicality or just because they like it.

Caspian

One of my favorite details about Caspian’s clothing in Brink is that even when he’s given new clothing from the other characters after he’s rescued, he still wears his old blue jacket from when he was traveling around the world in the mid/late 1810s, looking for a way to bring back the lady of the world. To me It’s a really cool detail, and if Brink was in a visual medium rather than written, it would be such a cool way to show the audience that Caspian doesn’t quite belong, and has been in the End for a lot longer than the characters think.

During and slightly before the regency period(1811-1820), men’s fashion went through a massive shift from the elaborately embroidered and patterned fashions of the 1700s to a more toned down and subtle style(and contrary to popular belief, Beau Brummell was not the sole reason this change happened, he just became the face of popular trends that were already happening, but that could be its own whole rant). The most common type of men’s coat in this era was called a dress coat or a tailcoat, which was cut high in the front with long “tails” in the back, and large high collars.

I’m not sure if I really like this style of coat personally, but I think it’s really interesting that the men’s coats from this era are so different from what all the other characters would be wearing in the story.

(Don’t pay attention to why his hand is in his pants here, I have no idea why but a lot of men in fashion plates from this era are posed like this)

Rae

Rae’s research comes before most things in his life, including staying up to date with the latest fashions. However, in fable, Rae really likes fancier clothing so I think it’d be fun to have Brink!Rae also really like good clothes. Rae also does a lot of traveling and working outside at archeological sites, and so most of the time would be wearing more practical things.(though in the 1800s this still means he would often wear a full suit, just one made of different materials and not as fancy)

I really like this painting and I can definitely see brink Rae wearing something like this when at his home(or at least when not traveling or working in the field), I like the super dark blue/almost black of the suit and whatever he’s wearing on his neck is really pretty(I can’t actually tell what that is specifically but I like it)

Haley

I can see Haley wearing pretty fashionable clothing, but probably more subtle and practical designs than Momboo, and she would wear things in more subtle colors, but she would still have an overall pretty feminine style.

I wish I could have found more purple or gray dresses to use as examples for her, but I don’t think those colors were very common, at least in the fashion plates I was looking at. I was able to find some really pretty darker navy dresses though, which I think fits really well too. I don’t have a ton to say with her either but pretty dresses>>>

Jamie

Connor has talked about Jamie’s clothes in Brink before so I’ll keep this one shorter, but Jamie is the only person in the main Brink cast who regularly wears sweaters, which was a deliberate choice. At the time sweaters were associated with college students, working class people, and people who had very physical jobs, such as sailors. Sweaters were considered extremely casual and people outside of those groups didn’t really wear them often, but as Jamie is an orphan who was later adopted onto a very large farm, it makes sense that they would wear one often and feel more comfortable in one.

Ocie

I think Ocie is the character I’m taking the most liberties with when it comes to historical accuracy, mostly cause she is described in some scenes as wearing a naval jacket, and as it was only men wearing those, I couldn’t find anything completely accurate to what she was wearing. I can definitely picture how her jacket would look though. I picture it as being mostly in the men’s style, just cut more like a woman’s jacket of the time. 

During the 1880s some popular styles of women’s fashion started to become more tailored and more resemble menswear, especially in jackets and some bodices, so it was pretty easy to find menswear inspired women’s jackets that I think fit pretty well.

Riding habits(outfits for horse riding) have also been very inspired by menswear for hundreds of years, and I can see ocie wearing something similar as her jacket.

this image is very crunchy and slightly too early for brink (1886), but give a good idea of menswear inspired womenswear from the late 1880s

Other than her jacket I actually found some blue dresses I think fit Ocie really well.

The blue dress on the right is probably more fancy than Brink!Ocie would realistically be wearing, but it fits her so well I had to put it in, and I just think it’s really pretty.

And this is what actual navy captain’s uniforms like around the 1880s(it was really hard to reliably date these but they’re from approximately then) 

Galahad

Contrary to the popular image of the brave lone wolf cowboy who lived a life of courageous freedom, a majority of old west cowboys were actually very poor and rarely owned even the horse they were riding, which usually belonged to the man who owned the cattle they were herding. Obviously there were exceptions to this, including Galahad in Brink, but I think it’s interesting to see how much the fantasy of the old west has changed the image of the cowboy in America.(I highly recommend checking out Kaz Rowe’s video on YouTube, “Exploring the Queer History of the Old West… Yehaw”, its a really fascinating video on the old west as a whole, and honestly just check out Kaz Rowe’s channel in general, it’s so good)

There was no one uniform way cowboys looked, as they had to adapt to a ton of different climates depending on where they were working. Galahad travels often but he stays in the southwest, which makes their wide brimmed hat very practical, and he also wears a serape, a type of colorful wool shawl that’s draped around your shoulders. A serape isn’t the same as a poncho because a poncho has a hole for your head in the middle, while a serape doesn’t.

The variety of clothing cowboys wore in the old west is really fascinating to me, because even though fashion and style was pretty low on the priority list compared to things like their work and getting their next meal, these people still valued what they wore and took pride in it, and the variation of it is so cool to see in photos.

Athena

Throughout Brink, Athena wears both suits and dresses depending on their environment and what they are doing at the time, but I want to use this section to talk a lot about Victorian mourning wear, cause that’s what Athena is wearing for the end of Brink and a large portion of On the Edge of Worlds Unknown.

In the Victorian era, mourning was a very serious practice with many many rules that depended on gender, class, time period, and closeness to the deceased. While Victorian mourning clothes existed and were widely worn before the death of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert in 1861, the fact that she wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life skyrocketed their popularity and made mourning wear a social requirement. 

Depending on how you knew the deceased you could be in mourning anywhere from a few months to several years, and some(usually widows) chose to be in mourning for the rest of their lives. The exact time you should be in mourning varied greatly, and was often a source of anxiety for the mourners as coming out of mourning “too soon” could be a social death sentence for some.

As mourning practices became longer and more complex, different stages of mourning started to become common. During full mourning, you would wear only black, dresses were usually less ornamented, and close family of the deceased would very rarely take visitors or go in public. During half mourning, black was still the predominant color but some purple, white, or gray was also allowed, and the close family of the deceased was allowed to venture out in public a little more.

As dress styles and silhouettes started to change more rapidly starting in the 1870s, It became more impractical to buy or make a new fashionable mourning dress every year just in case someone died, and extravagant mourning practices started to become less common, though mourning dress was still a requirement for a few decades afterwards.

WWI was the final thing that ended mourning wear as a common practice, as so many people lost loved ones that practically everyone would have been in mourning if it was still a social requirement, and many people who’d lost sons or husbands simply wore a black armband to symbolize their mourning.

The one plate that started this whole thing

The one fashion plate that started me down this entire research rabbit hole was this plate from 1851 that I think just works so so well for Brink!Isla, and it lines up with the timeline too, cause as long as Brink keeps the timeline relatively the same for the Morningstar family, 1851 would be right before all of the god drama starts happening with her. I wanted to include her as a kind of honorable mention to the rest of the character breakdowns, cause that blue dress it so pretty and fits so well for her, and it’s what started me down the path of “what would all the other brink characters be wearing?”

If I got any details or information wrong please let me know and I’ll correct it! 

If ya’ll have made it this far in the post, thanks so much for reading. This has been a project for me since like July for a while now, and I’m so glad I finally got it finished and out here! It was so cool doing all the research for this, and turning all of my semi-coherent bullet points into something that would actually be comprehensible was a lot harder than I thought, my hat goes off to anyone who writes things ever.

It didn't.

Now he knew how accurate the comparison was.

Drowning in- everything, problems, things that needed to be fixed, things that couldn't, things that might actually- hurt people.

Rae- somehow, had been lucky, before, though he had spent many nights sleepless trying to figure out how to open the purgatory portal, before it opened, had been- calm? Almost.

This reset- it had had its ups and downs, but it been- calmer.

There wasn't a threat, not really, not for Rae at least, there was the constant worry and fear dredging into mind, the worry about resets- how would he know if one was coming, haley had been the one to warn them last time, the world falling apart at the seams as they ran to the town hall.

For a time, the most worrying thing Rae stressed over was Wolf’s health, and then, shortly behind, Centross. And there were other things- others that consumed Rae with worry, but they were less urgent, Rae ust needed to get Fable out- needed Fable's help with- so much.

But- somehow, it was easier.

And now Fable was out, a million different problems with him, and it was- hard.

And Rae can’t- he couldn't fix all of it.

He doesn't know how. Rae had grown used to being left in the deep end, unable to swim, but now everything-

He was sinking.

Sink or float.

And he was sinking, unable to think, unable to breathe, chest tight as he stressed about anything and everything because Rae had to- fix it.

Rae had to fix it.

Rae- he didn't have a choice, sink or float.

..he was pretty sure it was supposed to be swim, sink or swim, but he didn't think he'd ever be able to swim, just float, desperately, but still above water, lungs clear enough.

He was sinking, but he couldn't-

Everyone needed him, he needed to fix it for them- his friends, his family, his partners. He couldn't let them be hurt because he couldn't figure it out.

Sink or float, but he didn't have a choice- and yet- he wasn't meeting the only choice he had.

He had to float, he couldn't not, couldn't stop going forward, couldn't stop reading, stop researching, stop learning, stop trying.

He couldn't sink, he couldn't.

And yet, as everything surrounded him in piles and piles on his desk- more even, left in the observatory when he ran out of space. When everything was so much, and he had no idea how to do any of it.

He was sinking, and he was trying- desperately to understand, for something to suddenly click that would make everything make sense so he could figure out how to fix it. He was trying desperately to claw his way up through the water, trying to ignore the water in his lungs.

Trying to ignore the way his eyes would get bleary from too much use in too little light in a way that always felt familiar no matter how many times he felt it.

Trying to ignore the way his hands shook as he paced, walking himself through something in particular- Trying to figure it out.

Trying to ignore the way he felt like he was drowning.

And yet.

He could ignore all the signs, all of the ways he felt like he was choking and disoriented. And he could ignore how familiar it felt.

But he couldn't ignore that he still felt like he was overcome with the water dragging him down, overwhelmed and drowning- worse than sinking, because he didn't know if he could claw his way up from how far he'd been dragged down, weighed with a thousand books and a million things that couldn't be recorded in them.

He was just stuck, in the middle of the water, so deep he could barely see the sky above him.

And he felt like he was being tugged- a rope around his arm and ankle, from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere, kept perfectly in the middle, perfectly unable to do- anything, still drowning, but unable to sink deeper, though his heart didn't get the memo often.

Unable to swim up.

Momboo, Arisanna, Fable, Enderian, Rae. Their memories, what they lost in purgatory, how to fix it all- 

How to get their mom back, how to make the woman he remembered but only through vague hazy memories, okay, how to remove the curse.

How to heal Momboo- fix Arisanna's- everything, how to- trust Fable, how to trust- believe Enderian, trust her word that she cared about him more than just a new favorite pawn.

How to fix him, how to stop the developing mind powers caused by the shards infecting his chest from hurting everyone- 

How to get everything back, or- the closest thing they could, the sensation of a necklace different than the one Wolf had given him, nipping at his mind. One more soft to his ink-stained fingers from being fiddled with for so long.

Purple.

And how to fix- 

A hundred other things, that could turn into a thousand at the slightest instant, the water forming a wave far above him just to mock him.

But less prevalent to his mind, just leaving so that when he took a step back, all he could see was the things behind the others, stacks and stacks of books, pages and pages of his field notes, the list going on for so long-

Pages and pages of things he needed to do, of things he didn't know how to.

Pages and pages of things that weren't optional, and yet he couldn't do them, drowning and suffocating in the expectations- 

Did they ever truly expect it from him? Or did he set them himself?

How- ..pitiful? would it be if he couldn't even meet his own expectations?

How could he- deal with it, if those he loved had to suffer because he couldn't meet them, because even if they would never force those upon him. He still failed.

Tasks unchecked.

Sink or float.

How would he be able to look at them- the loves of his life, in the eyes if he couldn't float.

He didn't have a choice, sink or float, he needed to float, that's what was needed, They needed their scientist, the Rae who could fix things, who could make it all better. Who could promise Athena it would get better- and then fulfill that promise.

The Rae that was good at it, who even if he had no idea how- or where to start, he figured it out, eventually.

But he wasn't feeling like that Rae.

He was sinking.

Sinking further, plummeting.

But nothing could pull him up- Rae- as ill-equipped as he was- he'd done it before.

Knew the song and the dance.

He'd fixed it- sometimes with glue and tape, ugly and inefficient, but it had worked, he knew- he was good at it, Rae had fixed- a lot before.

He'd figured it out before.

He was better equipped than anyone else, it was his responsibility.

He couldn't- not.

The water inflamed his lungs, angry and irritated, pushing out as much air as it could, but the tightness of his chest that never seemed to leave now-a-days not helping.

His skin was dry, his shirt not sticking to his scarred chest.

There was a filled pen in his hand, ink not diluted.

And yet.