Furnace Ancona

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Furnace Ancona is the well-respected leader of the Tracklayer's Union.

An Advocate for the People

Courageous, charismatic, and compassionate, Furnace is equally adept at delivering fiery speeches and listening to the voices of her union constituents. As the leader of a broad coalition, she always ensures fairness and equality in her decisions, even when she does not agree with all parties involved.

She is the main representative of the Emancipationist ideology, and advocates for their goal of creating a city in the Hinterlands where union workers can live free of external pressure and govern their own affairs. She claims this as an extension of her down-to-earth attitude, though her plans for the city reveal her utopian leanings.

The Woman Behind the Helmet

Born Beatrice Ancona, she is of Italian descent, as her surname would indicate. She comes from a family of worker's rights activists; her grandfather belonged to a Friendly Society, and swore never to work for less than ten shillings a week.

Before founding the Tracklayer's Union, Ancona worked in one of Mr Fires' factories. One day, the Master demanded that workers no longer wear protective helmets, and she started to plan her revenge against such blatant worker cruelty. Mr Fires was warned that something would happen, but it did nothing, and one day Beatrice trapped it in one of the back rooms, where it remained for three days. As a consequence of this incident, all the workers in the factory lost their jobs; however, Ancona gained the nickname "Furnace" (because she could "contain fires") and became something of a legend among London's working population. After this incident, Ancona was hired to work on the Moloch Line, the railway commissioned by Hell to join it and London. She used her position to offer jobs to all her past colleagues from the factory.

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Furnace and Cornelius

It was around this time that Furnace became involved in the fledgling Tracklayer's Union; at the time, she shared leadership of the group with her colleague Cornelius. The construction of the line went well until the workers reached the Hurlers. A deviless sought to sabotage Cornelius, teasing him about not being able to read an inscription written in the Discordance, and smuggled him a dictionary. When Cornelius read the inscription, it wounded him grievously enough to send him to the Slow Boat, and granted both Cornelius and Furnace some startling physical consequences. Furnace now has a few extra faces, which she hides beneath her helmet, and which become apparent when she argues for multiple points of view at the same time.