July 25th, 2024

An adaptation of the 2018 “Mortal Engines” film.

Set more than a thousand years in the future following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of mankind regroup and form mobile cities, called "Traction Cities". Under a philosophy known as "Municipal Darwinism", larger "predator" cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the "Great Hunting Ground", which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the "Anti-Traction League" have developed an alternative civilization consisting of "static settlements" (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the "Shield Wall". Relics of 21st-century technology such as toasters, computers and smartphones and are valued by historians as "Old-Tech."

The city of London captures a small Bavarian mining town called Salzhaken, absorbing its population and resources, under orders of Lord Mayor Execk (TOME). Steven Universe, an apprentice historian, arrives at London's "Gut" to collect Salzhaken's Old-Tech for London's Museum. Connie Maheswaran, a masked teenage girl among the Salzhakens, attempts to assassinate King Dedede, Head of the Guild of Historians, but Steven intervenes, pursuing Connie to a chute. Connie escapes but not before telling him that Dedede murdered her mother and scarred her face. When Steven informs Dedede of this, he pushes Steven down the chute. Steven and Connie are forced to work together to traverse the Hunting Ground, surviving Southies, Scavs on a night hunt, and finding refuge in a vehicle called Scuttlebug, but the owners lock them in a cell, intending to sell them as slaves.

Connie confides that Dedede killed her archaeologist mother Priyanka after stealing a piece of Old-Tech she found in a dig in the Dead Continent of the Americas, while the younger Connie escaped with a necklace her mother gave her. Meanwhile, Dedede frees Big Mac, a reanimated cyborg known as a "Stalker", from the offshore walking prison Sharkmoor, to find and kill Connie. At the slave market of Rustwater in the Outlands, Steven and Connie are rescued by Anti-Traction League agent Danielle “Dani” Yu. During the chaos they are pursued by Big Mac, whom Connie reveals she knows. Connie explains that Big Mac had found and raised her after escaping Dedede, and Connie promised to let him turn her into a Stalker like himself but she left after discovering that London had entered the Great Hunting Ground which gave her a chance to kill Dedede.