Most journeys are composed of waiting for you to get to your destination while trying not to be bored out of your mind. This is even more apparent when one has a hyperactive ex-thief and now-tinkerer on board who was expecting a life of excitement on board a ship. Victor was currently inspecting the ship, making sure there weren’t any density imbalances that would lead to them tipping over and being tossed into the atmosphere until they splatted or suffocated in the increasingly-dense layers below. First, he checked on the rooms he helped build with his friends. The small kitchen had an acceptable amount of knives and silverware, with plates and some piece of lost technology he found in a junkyard to act as a stove. A simple obsidian slab with a crank on the side, it seems unremarkable at first. However, closer inspection by Victor revealed that it somehow worked on motion when the crank on the side was turned. All he had to do was hook it onto a propeller flap that got moved while the ship moved, and it would do the rest once you attached it to the spinning shaft. Victor had quickly snatched that up and exploited it to act as a stove, as it’s maximum capacity for heat was barely enough to start a fire. After inspecting the kitchen and testing that the thing worked, he moved on to the cabin room. It was a simple cabin room that had enough space to move a bit, with a small cat bed and 2 double-story bunks for the people to sleep on. It was fairly barren and was pretty small, since all that was really needed was a comfy bed and some blankets to work. There was a problem when he first made it, as the bunk bed he was on was being tested to see if it could support two people while swaying from side to side due to the boat movement. As it turned out, it could not and he almost ended up getting crushed by the top bed being occupied by Silk, requiring three guards to remove the bed from on top of him so he could go back home.

There wasn’t much need to go over the bathrooms, as they could just have latrines that incinerated the waste and dumped the charcoal into the air below the buoyant ship, and they were too poor to get cannons or afford something as valuable as blast-powder anyways. That stuff was too rare to buy unless you had something similar to a small village’s treasury, buying enough for about a thousand cannonballs at best. There was a small library filled to about a tenth of its maximum capacity, all romance novels and history books that Silk was adamant on keeping. There was a small workshop with some tools to disassemble and reassemble things, a “treasure room” that Levi made as an excuse to have a private den that held food in the top, and even a shower room that had more than one type of soap. While Victor was unfazed by such a thing due to his time at his school, the others were generally astonished by the luxury of such a thing. It scooped up the vapor on the clouds they sailed on and turned it into running water, something that took them years to figure out how to make. In fact, they hadn’t seen anyone else do anything close to that, even on the massive merchant galleons the government used.

Essentially, everything was in order. The ship looked rough, being cobbled together by a couple of kids over the years by shipwrecked parts, but it was serviceable and was made of wood buoyant enough to float over the atmosphere layers. Satisfied by this inspection, he then decided to take a nap after putting his meager belongings into a cubby. Grabbing the knob that protruded at chest level, he grabbed the knob on the door and made it slide upwards to reveal an alcove built into the wall. Satisfied with this, he then took some beast pelt he stole from a noble a couple years back from it and wrapped himself in it like a cocoon, falling asleep quickly.

Meanwhile, Silk was keeping watch, being satisfied for the first time in a long while. She was beginning to get bored with the Thieve’s guild, actually, despite her deciding to stay. Victor left, being the scatterbrained dingus he was, but she had to admit that having to watch over your back was kind of rough after a while. She herself actually didn’t sleep in the barracks there, building her own burrow on top of the rafters of the Grand Library in a crany no one searched for. The city was famous for their library, one of the remnants of the mysterious Lost Civilization that contained their history. A large portion of it rotted away, the one containing their research and technological records, but their other areas remained completely intact. More important to Silk, they had the romance novel section there. She might give the others a hard time and be a little more rough and tumble with her friends, but Silk still liked to enjoy the more delicate things in life. More specifically, a novel by one A.N Amarden, titled The Plated Rose. It featured on the cover two frankly ridiculous looking knights wearing revealing clothing specifically designed to show off their abdominal regions with improbably toned physiques, both facing a young noblewoman looking pensive.

The story of this book was rather interesting as well, as of course it was 100% the plot that interested her and nothing else. It featured a tournament of the knights of yore, competing over a fair lady’s hand in marriage. The lady in question was a high-ranking daughter of a duchess, the sole heir and looking for someone who might be able to assist her in her ruling of the land she had. She was currently caught between the two characters on the cover, named Wradden and Jack, the former a charming nobleman and the latter a grizzled farmer-turned-soldier. She had to choose between the two, and something about having not one but two people who weren’t total morons or incompatible with her was something that Silk had to admit she was envious of. She might not admit it, but honestly part of the reason she was adventuring was to not only get more romance or history books from the lost civilization, but to experience one of those stories herself. Unfortunately, since this was reality, there weren’t any of those anorexic-yet-muscly guys who were begging for her hand. Instead, the options she had were someone who was essentially an insane mad-scholar type folktale villain’s backstory or a short gremlin who constantly referred to himself in the third person. There was also Levi, but the beastkin frankly had the personality of a wooden board. After observing a bird slam it’s head into the window near the library and quickly get scooped up by Bundo presumably for dinner, she shook her head and went back to reading about Lady Alleb’s weighing of the choices between the two knights.

While all of this introspection was going down, a certain bird was currently being fried in the kitchen for a snack by one cheerful Bundo B. Bundo, the nineteenth to his name and scion of the Bundo lineage. Being an elf, he only had one name as per tradition, but legal papers needed three names so elves just went with it. Currently, the unlucky seagull knocked itself unconscious on a window near the library, and thus was now an ingredient in an elvish classic food: Peppermint Gumbo. Standing on his prosthetic leg and telescoping it to reach the shelf to grab some ingredients, he pondered the origins of the dish he was cooking. Not many things grew up in the permafrost-laden north where the elves originated, and it was said that Canemint was one of the only spices they had. Thus, many dishes of his home country were made with the oil of this red-and-white plant. Smelling it’s sharp aroma gave him a faint wave of nostalgia remembering his mother’s cooking, with his stubby toddler hand struggling to help cook with her. The other members of the crew either didn’t have parents, had parents who died or parents who they honestly wouldn’t miss, and never really understood the importance of having a relaxing home with a nice calming atmosphere. As a member of the crew, his job was to bring the crew together as a unified team and to enjoy the little things during the adventure, not just the endpoints and the madness that would certainly ensue due to Victor’s chaotic tendencies. As he put on the spices and boiled the seagull in a mixture of the spice and water, he sprinkled some garlic and chives into the broth to give it some extra spice while adding in a small amount of salt. After mixing and tasting a drop of it after it cooled down, he wrote down in his journal the taste. Umami, with small amounts of that cooling sensation in the back of your throat from the peppermint. The taste is similar to miso stew with a meatier overtone and a pleasant temperature. The stove works really well and evenly heats the entire soup. After being satisfied with the depth of the notes, Bundo closed his eyes and nodded while saying the words elves were so famous for: “mm-hmm. That’s some good stuff right there”

Levi was tired. Very tired. She was honestly starting to fall asleep, despite her best efforts not to by drawing some pictures. She normally didn’t wake up this early into daytime, being active mainly at dawn and whatnot. Currently, she was drawing an image of her untying the knot while Victor stared awkwardly at them. At least, that’s what an actual depiction of the event would have been. Instead, she had the engineer putting his foot on the prow as he blocked a sword strike with a pen, symbolically and literally showing how words are greater than violence. The guards in this image were not the confused and awkward adolescent nobles on an internship, but hardened soldiers ready to strike down the motley crew before their journey began. After scratching her head some more and brushing away stray hair from the paper, she thought about what to draw. It was summer, so she was shedding her hair some more than typical for beastkin to do so. Catsith in particular were prone to doing so, and although she cut her hair to be an unkempt pixie-cut it still was more than was acceptable. At this rate, she would have to sweep the floor not a day into their voyage to avoid making a mess. Truly unacceptable for the Quartermaster of the ship, she thought while adding some more shading strokes into the arm of the guard clashing his oversized sword into the stylus of the posing Victor.

Near the end of the day, the suns were quickly going down the horizon and the ring was starting to increase in visibility, a glowing band across the sky taking most of it up and blocking the stars, striations visible and the glittering plethora of colors unfolding like a bejeweled belt. Meanwhile, the four crewmates began eating their first meal, out on the deck under the clear sky with a torch hanging on the mast near the front of the ship. Fresh caught food was rare for sailors, and although they wouldn’t be needing to eat that much hard tack compared to the average one due to their miniscule crew number, it was nice to have something different than what would be the inevitable fare of seafood or rations. Silk looked up from her book and decided to talk, remarking on how the meal was seemingly altered. “I know this gumbo has been eaten by us since we were kids, but it now kind of tastes different now that we are eating it on a boat while sailing like those stories we grew up hearing about ''. No one really knew what to say to that. “I mean, we all honestly never thought this far. We always were thinking about how the vessel would work, or how someone might catch Victor and I and send us to prison, or maybe the guards would just stop and arrest us for not having a license for the half-finished boat that was sitting near the harbor for seven years. Now that we’re actually here and sailing, it’s just different than what I expected”, she explained. Levi, in a rare moment of brevity, said more than was absolutely necessary “yes. It is rather different from what I thought. I always assumed it would feel less… awkward. Like we were going with purpose, rather than just flying by the seat of our pants so to speak”. After some more chatter, the entire crew thought about what she said as they went to the cabin and slept in their bunks, dreaming of the adventures yet to come.