Chapter 9

The engines were a tricky beast to master. It took him two months to install them, which was about twice the time it would take for the blacksmith to do so. However, with a little bit of ingenuity, Victor was confident that he could make them better than how they were before and increase their efficiency. See, these blast-rockets were used for only short bursts that mainly revolved around getting up the massive cloudfall barriers that blocked their path. Recently, some anonymous inventor who called himself “Tek” in some attempt to brand himself as a legally-safe knock off from the Tech company had developed a way to get past them.

“The Tech company, as unimaginably uninspired as the name was, was actually quite inventive. They developed ships and sold them to anyone, from unscrupulous pirates to navy soldiers full of scruple.”

“That’s not a word.” said Silk, looking up from her book.

“Then why is it a word with “un” added to it? That’s stupid, the prefix “un” means it’s the opposite of something. You can’t have a contrast to something but claim the original doesn’t exist.”, responded Victor.

“That’s just how it is.”

“I’m looking at the dictionary, and it definitely says that “scruples” is a word. So suck it.” replied Victor triumphantly.

“Okay, so back to what I was saying about this “Tek” fellow. He has no personal information aside from stating that he is a human guy who invented this while, and I quote, “heavily inebriated”. Like I was saying on the matter of the engines, they are only built to have short bursts of speed to resist tough currents and perform the game-breaking task of sailing up mountains. However, I think that I might be able to get them to act semi-frequently and boost our ship’s speed slightly, acting up to hours at a time.”, Victor said in an explanatory manner.

“So, how would this work?” inquired Silk.

“Excellent question. You know how that one guy a couple hundred years ago made a bomb getting lightning to strike a resevoir with two rods in it?”

“Yes. Go on.” answered Silk.

“And you know how I spent my portion of the loot for luxuries on that ancient “electricity” generator?”

“Please tell me this isn’t going where I think it’s going.”

“That’s right. I’m going to power the blastrockets with the same thing. Bundo said that Hydrogen’s element will be made from this, so if I hook it up to our plumbing system or make a separate one, I could make that electricity generator from a paralyzing weapon into a living BOMB ENGINE”

“Why couldn’t we just use that “acetylene” substance that Tek supplies?” said Silk. It was fine how it was. Why did Victor always try to “improve” things? It usually meant they had something to do with explosions.

“Because it’s CRINGE and BORING.”

“Why do you use those words? You are literally the only person who calls things “cringe” and why you say that is beyond me.”

“Well too late, because in the two weeks you guys used to buy supplies and luxuries like books, I built our exploding engine and it makes our ship shmove like no-one else’s business.”

“Stop saying those weird expressions. I have no idea what you mean by them, and I know seven different languages and most of their requisite idioms.” Silk hated when Victor said this kind of stuff. It usually meant he just did something stupid.

“Point is, I have made a revolutionary new engine in two months while you guys were getting supplies and furnishing our ship with some of our hard-earned Tiles, and we can probably escape the police that are coming now that I got Levi to collect the money from that trick I did in the merchant’s sector.” Victor said this with a bored expression while studying his fingernails disinterestedly.

“Why would you fund a bunch of people’s investments with other investments, then take their money and leave? The last time you tried that “prism scheme” thing, we almost got killed by the people we stole from.” said Silk, bolting up in fear.

“Well, Levi and Bundo are on the deck, so we’re leaving. Oh look, here comes a mob of angry investors. Hold on to something or go belowdecks where Henry is taking a nap, because we’re going to be moving FAST.

With that, Victor pulled a lever in a sliding compartment at the base of the steering wheel. Grabbing on to a railing, he grinned as the wind whipped through his unkempt black hair, the ship accelerating at massive speeds. Holding on for dear life at the mainmast, Silk barely kept her grip as the ship rocketed away from the couple of rowboats that were in pursuit of them. The investors, still yelling about thievery, could do nothing but stare as the ship rocketed out of the water lake and into the familiar ocean of vapour.

The patchwork ship was barely holding together, various buoyant wood planks creaking precariously as the crew’s caravel began bouncing up and down from the velocity accrued. Levi went to the top deck and started steering the vessel, her face turning red with the strain of turning at such high speeds. They began rocketing for hours towards an enormous wall of white fog, which was slowly turning bigger and swallowing up the horizon. As they got face to face with it, the ship turned off it’s engines.

A massive cliff extending miles upwards, it was impossible to even see the top of it, it’s edge being so far out of view that it sometimes poked through the cliffs. Closer inspection revealed some odd, impossibly durable material supporting it, a hexagonal pattern stretching out to infinity belying it’s Omnic roots. No one knew why the Archipelago was trapped for centuries in a small bowl, with a couple islands surrounding the Three Great Cities, but Tek apparently had subverted that order. Carefully steering the ship to be parallel with the cloud-fall’s near-vertical incline, Levi then reactivated the engine and began rocketing upwards, the ship barely making contact with the rapidly cascading clouds. The hour it took to get up the falls seemed like an eternity, the engine’s rumbling like the breath of a dragon as the intense glow of the hydrogen-based combustion shined through the clouds. At long last, the ship finally crested over the falls in just over an hour, the suns gleaming as the ship soared through the air and landed onto the surface of the Greater Cloudsea. This was the place they had yearned to adventure in, and this was the place where their adventures would be marked as one of the greates in history.

Peering over the edge as they slowly drifted towards the nearest island, they saw the archipelago for what it truly was: A massive bowl containing the Dragon’s Corpse, small islands dotting about with the three main ones towering over them. They even saw the small black island where Batrascu had been found, and saw that it’s relation to the city of Arcnest: The dragon’s claws, submerged under the clouds, pointed exactly towards the island, with Scinticius being the nearest island. Large spirals of storms were around the place, with flashes of lightning indicating why no one else had found it: there was only a small gateway between the massive typhoons, and the crew had only gotten to the island through dumb luck. And within the claws that they now saw as a slight discoloration under the clouds, they were perhaps the only people to see that the island was being cupped inside it’s skeletal talons. The ship sailed off, the crew stunned by the revelation. It seemed that there was no way to get back for now, and no way they could tell the people below of the secret beneath the city of Arcnest.