About an hour after I started my journey, I began to pick up a new set of sounds. The raucous caw of seagulls was the most obvious, but they wouldn’t gather without a good reason, and that reason was the town of Shellpin. Set inside Shellpin Bay and the reason for my passenger’s trip, the town was a bustling center of activity. Larger ships were heading to and from the docks, their sails snapping in the wind and their crew eager to say hello to the reclusive wizard come to visit.

“Got tired of rowing yourself, Mr. Wizard?”

“Make way for a real ship!”

“Back for more ale already?”

“You make quite the sailor, Lirillin!”

As rude as some of the comments were, my passenger, Lirillin, seemed to take them with good humor. “Knowing your memory, Dunby, if I was any later you’d have forgotten about that drink you owe me."

With another round of jeers the other crew parted ways. I could feel my oars begin to slow, before all of a sudden the enchantment moving them came to an end. Before I could experiment with my newfound freedom the oars began to move again, propelled not by the enchantment or my will but by all the muscle power Lirillin could bring to bear. He was definitely a better spellcaster than he was a rower, and compared to the steady powerful strokes that the [Automation] enchantment used his efforts were erratic and lacking. I could hear some muttered swearing from him as well, nothing loud or clear enough to make out for certain what he was saying, but the emotions he was feeling were conveyed nevertheless.

A couple minutes later I heard the reassuring thump of wood on wood as Lirillin managed to bring the rowboat up next to a dock. With a bit of help from the harbormaster I was soon tied up, and Lirillin was given a hand up and out.

“Dock fee is two pennies, as usual. You don’t look as tired as you usually do, Lirill. Did you manage to get it working?” The apparent harbormaster questioned Lirillin, Lirill to his friends I suppose.

“It’s not perfect yet, but I was able to repurpose an older spell to provide the motive spirit. Burns mana like a pyro spell though, so it still has some kinks I’ll need to work out, but it made for a pleasant ride into town for once. You’ve got the pieces for me in your office, I suppose?” Lirillin was more than happy to talk about his craft, his voice audibly raising in pitch as he spoke.

The other participant in the conversation wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. “Rush jobs are on my desk, and I’ve got some lower priority ones in the chest to the left of the desk that you can take back with you, now that you don’t have to rely on those spindly elven arms to get you home. I know you don’t need the money, but it will buy you some goodwill with the town and give you something to occupy yourself with now that your current project is coming to a close.”

There was a pause as Lirillin thought it over. “I don’t think I’ll have all that much free time just yet, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take some jobs back with me. Just don’t expect to see them for a month or two. I wasn’t kidding when I said I still had more work to do on my boat.”

“Fair enough.” There was a creak of motion, as the two men shuffled around on the dock for a moment. “A couple of months is better than never, which is what it would have been before you moved into town. By the way, have you named her yet? Wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it before, but now that she’s working…”

“Named who?” Lirillin sounds genuinely confused, and I can feel a headache of my own coming on. I understand that there are sound cultural reasons to have boats be female, I had just held out hope that this new world might have formed some different traditions. But it seemed like my luck was poor. The harbormaster sounded like he was invested enough in this particular question that he probably wouldn’t let it go, even if it didn’t matter much or at all to Lirillin.

“Your boat, of course! She’s up and running, and you’ve even completed her maiden voyage. Of course she needs a name. Especially since she's one of a kind. The first automagical”

“Autonomous”

“Autonomous rowboat!” The harbormaster finished with barely a stutter at the interruption. “She’ll be a piece of history someday. Of course she deserves a proper name. I have a couple of suggestions, if nothing comes to your mind.”

Lirillin sighed. “Sure. You can name the damn boat, Walter. Tell me what you have in mind, and I’ll let you know what sounds good. But can we get moving already? The sooner I get to work, the sooner I can go over to the tavern and get a drink.” I listened as the pair walked off, their vices quickly fading into the background as they were covered up by the waves and the repeated clunking of the boat against a nearby wooden post.

For a brief moment I had been happy about the mess that was English, as the name on my sheet had switched to ‘Walter’. Poor phrasing or not, my real name or not, it was something I could live with. But not long after that the name changed once more, cycling very few seconds as the real Walter and Lirillin tried out some different choices. “Diligence, Zephyr, Sally 4th, Sea Sister, Mayfly, Pipsqueak, Betty, Faith, Elementia, and so many more. I got the feeling that the more common names were suggestions from Walter, while Lirillin threw in his own off the wall ideas every now and again just to keep the other man off balance. Eventually they settled on a name, and my status screen remained stationary once again.

Ash Breeze

Autonomous Intelligence

Component Weight 120/750 Durability 10/10 Enchantments 3 Mana Saturation 15/10 Hull - Wood Listening

Navigation Oars - Wood Automation

Ash Breeze. It was a pretty neutral name, all things considered, even if people would still be using female pronouns when talking about me. Wasn’t much I could do about it though. The rest of their conversation was useful, and I put my new name out of mind for the moment. I was apparently a testbed for Lirillin to work and experiment with, something that kept him busy most of the time when he wasn’t doing high priority jobs in town for the Harbormaster. From the sound of it he came to town once a week to take care of business, meaning the rest of the time I’d either be tied up next to the dock with nothing to do, or would have Lirillin actively working on me. Hopefully his main goal was simply to optimize my mana usage, but since my existence was apparently due to a poorly understood spell he copied from someone else I’d have to mentally prepare myself for the possibility that he’d also be tweaking how I worked. Or maybe not, since he wouldn’t have the personal experience with my spell structure needed to try and alter things. I had no way of knowing for certain, and any claims I might make on how magic worked would be me mostly talking out my ass. All I could do was mentally prepare myself for the worst and hope that Lirillin was the sort of person to talk to himself while he worked.

I spent the next few hours playing around with my oars, getting better at controlling them. When I wasn’t commanded to navigate to a specific location the oars were fully under my control, and I could move them freely in their anchors. The two problems I had were a lack of feedback from my actions and the need to hide my activities. The second part was easily solved by keeping the paddles fully submerged, so that any movement would just be attributed to a current or a fish moving the oars around. The lack of feedback was the main area I could work on improving. The oars felt like they were part of my body, which gave me a general sense of where they were, but trying to actually feel with them was impossible. They didn’t have nerves or skin to feel with. The most I could manage was a general sense of pressure, the understanding that the force I was pushing through the oars was being resisted, either by the water or by the wooden pole I was tied up to.

I also tried to keep an ear out for anything interesting, but my location wasn’t exactly a hotspot of activity. The dock was long enough that I couldn’t easily hear what was happening on the shore, and the one person who walked by me was a heavyset person more interested in getting into their own tiny boat and casting off than providing any sort of convenient exposition for my life. Just a gentle reminder that the world didn’t revolve around me, no matter how improbable or miraculous my reincarnation might be.

\I lost track of time for a while after that, after I managed to doze off for a little nap. It was good to have the confirmation that I could spend time sleeping to help boring parts of the day go faster, but it was even better to hear the sound of two people walking in my direction and talking as they went.

“So do you think you’ll hit level thirty this year?” Walter said as he set a heavy box down on the dock.

“Probably not.” Lirillin admitted casually. “Most of my experience for the moment is going towards new skills. It’s not like I need the extra levels to beat out the competition here, after all.”

“That’s fair. You do a good job as it is, so you won’t see me complaining. Just wouldn’t mind an excuse to throw a party, is all.”

“I think we drank enough tonight for it to count as a party.” Lirillin said drily, before clumsily clambering down into the boat. Once he was somewhat steady, Walter passed him the chest which was placed on one of my cross benches with a loud thunk. I had my status screen open at the moment, and was able to get confirmation that my weight statistic stayed constant throughout my loading, meaning the numbers likely represented my weight and displacement respectively. 120 pounds for a wooden boat seemed about right, and it would make sense if the system used a unit of weight I was familiar with. I could read the rest of it, after all.

Lirillin took a few seconds to shaft the chest around, trying to balance the weight distribution before finding an arrangement he was happy with.

“‘Til next week, Walter. Ash Breeze, take me to Lirillin’s Lighthouse.” With him sitting in me I could hear the slight slurring he had picked up after a night of drinking, but his order was clear enough to be understood and soon my oars surged into motion, pulling hard as they took me out of the bay and up the shoreline.

While we headed home I rolled over an interesting fact that I’d picked up from that short goodbye. Lirillin had a system, with classes and levels and skills and experience. Was mine different just because I was a boat, or was there something about this that I was missing. I was currently leaning towards the latter. Not only were there too many pieces of information missing from the boat screen, but Lirillin had changed the name of the boat. He hadn’t changed my name, though. I was still Robert Rowland, and while I was a boat, perhaps that wasn’t as straightforward as I had first thought.