“Half the tavern’s chanting my name,” she said to Sagar. “I think it’s safe to assume that, yes, I’m Elrann.”

“But you’re a woman,” Sagar said without missing a beat.

“Last time I checked,” said the woman. One of her eyebrows crept up higher than the other as she inspected Sagar, and then Ryn and Nuthea standing off a little way behind him. “Why? What’s it to you?”

Sagar snorted. “There must have been some sort of mistake. My informant, a man at the docks, told me to come here and look for an Elrann with purple hair who’s a first rate engineer.”

Elrann smiled even more widely. One of her teeth was made of silver. “Well, you found me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sagar. “You can’t be the Elrann he meant. Or maybe he got you mixed up with someone else. Engineering’s a man’s profession. Everybody knows that. A woman can’t be an engineer.”

Sagar’s beer glass exploded.

It just shattered with a loud pop, bits of broken glass falling around him on the floor, beer instantly drenching his hand and breeches, so that he was left holding only the handle.

The whole tavern went quiet. Heads turned as people looked over to see what had happened.

From the table where the girl sat, still with a wide smile on her face, a tendril of black smoke snaked up. On the tabletop, at its source, was a small bronze cylinder with a handle protruding from the bottom which the woman grasped.

A pistol. Another thing that Ryn had only heard about in stories and tales. Until now.

“Can a woman not do that, either?” Elrann said into the quiet.

The tavern burst into laughter. People slapped each other’s backs, gripped their bellies and pointed at Sagar as they wiped tears of mirth from their eyes. Ryn remembered the pirates on the airship laughing at him in the same way when he had tried to tell them about his flame powers.

Slowly, eventually, the laughter wound down and the customers went back to whatever they were doing before the little comic interruption, and the noises of the tavern resumed.

Sagar’s face had turned almost as purple as Elrann’s hair. His eyes flicked this way and that. His lips had disappeared into a tight frown. When he spoke, it was through clenched teeth.

“You are Elrann the engineer,” he said.

“If you hadn’t figured that out by now, you must be very stupid,” said Elrann.

Sagar swallowed. Whether he was swallowing pride or rage, Ryn didn’t know. Maybe it was both.

“I…we want to hire you.”

“For what?”

“To repair my ship. There’s a problem with one of the fuel lines.”

Elrann looked him up and down again.

“Sorry, I’m all booked up.”

“I can pay you.”

“So can my current clients.”

“I can pay you well. My crew and I took down an Imperial vessel recently. It was very lucrative for us.”

Elrann hesitated, and for a moment it seemed as though she might be tempted by the offer. But then: “Sorry, nothing doing,” she said. She fixed Sagar with a cool look, relaxing her eyebrows and grinning again. “I don’t do work for turdburgulars like you.”

“Nyarrrgrh!” Sagar cried in anger, and drew one of his twin curved blades from his side, unsheathing it in a smooth ringing arc. He held the point up in front of Elrann’s face, whose eyes went wide. “Say that to me again, woman!”

The table went quiet again--or at least the drinkers nearest them went quiet.

I don’t think saying the word ‘woman’ like it’s an insult is going to help us here very much, thought Ryn. He wanted to help, but he had no idea what to do, and he didn’t even have a weapon. Sagar was completing botching this. Even Ryn could tell that pulling a sword on someone holding a pistol at close range in an inn full of people was a stupid thing to do.

Nuthea stepped forward, bravely putting her hand on the captain’s back. “Now now, Sagar,” she said. “I’m sure we can find another engineer somewhere else. That airfield owner was clearly playing a prank on you. Come on, we don’t want this to become...uncivilised.”

“Hey yoush,” said a deep, drunken voice. “’m not...finnishhed wiv yoush yet.”

It was Saldor, back on his feet.

Elrann turned to look at him but kept her pistol aimed at Sagar. “Sit down, you lightweight blowhard! I beat you fair and square! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Hey, Saldor’s up again!” someone called.

“Give me those sixty gold pieces back!”

“No way, I won them fairly! Game’s over!”

“It’s not over till one of them can’t drink any more, and he’s still conscious!”

Shouted arguments resumed.

Amidst them, Saldor said “Hey! Nobodies callsh me a lightwit blard!”

He pulled back a fist and took a swing at Elrann, who leapt up out of her chair and moved away from the table, keeping her pistol trained on Sagar.

“Butt out, imbecile,” said Sagar, “we’re having a conversation!” He kicked the man hard in his muscled stomach and Saldor doubled up with a grunt, clutching it.

A large man with a thick black beard who had been sitting next to Saldor stood up and snarled at Sagar. “Oi! You hit my man Saldor! That’s cheating!”

“Oh shut up, Orsan!” said another man next to him. “You’re just sour ’cause he lost!” The man took a swing at Orsan and hit him in the face, knocking the man into Saldor, who took offence and in his drunken stupor punched his own supporter back the way he had come.

Chaos erupted. Soon everyone was calling everyone else names and accusing each other of cheating at the bets, and then fists and feet were flying as the fighting grew into a full-on tavern brawl.

“Give me those coins!”

“Mine! Mine! I won!”

“Get off me you mongrel!”

Sagar still had a sword pointed at Elrann, but a man got thrown over the table and crashed into the side of him, making him drop it. When it clattered to the floor, Ryn picked it up for him to keep it safe. Sagar didn’t even seem to notice he’d dropped it. As soon as he’d scrambled back onto his feet, he dived back into the melee, yelling curses and throwing punches.

Elrann clicked off a mechanism on the top of her pistol, stashed it somewhere inside her overall and cried, “Bloody skypirates! Arses too big for their breeches! I won that drinking game fair and square! Hey you lot, don’t forget I get 10% commission on all winning bets on me!” She dived into the fray too, punching and kicking her way through the crowd to try to get back to Sagar, who by now was lost in the midst of the brawl.

Fists flew into faces, knees into groins, elbows into stomachs. Men roared with anger and pain and defiance. Bodies were launched this way and that. A chair broke. Somebody’s tooth rattled on the floor and stopped near Ryn’s foot. More people rushed over from the other tables to try to break up the fight, or join in. Some were shouting for Saldor, some for Elrann, but it was impossible to tell which side was winning, or if there really were sides any more. Somewhere in the middle of the mass of bodies stood Sagar and Elrann and Saldor, occasionally colliding with each other and wrestling, before being broken apart again, but they kept disappearing out of view among the carnage of limbs.

Ryn and Nuthea stood watching all of this in shocked silence.

They shared a look of open-mouthed horror. Apparently neither of them had ever seen anything like this before.

“This is no good,” said Ryn over the din. “We’re never going to get the ship fixed like this. At this rate we might even lose our captain.”

“I know,” said Nuthea. “That foolish man is going to get himself killed, all because of his pride. We need to do something. We need to get their attention somehow.”

“How?” said Ryn.

Nuthea licked her upper lip and looked at him. After a moment she said “Your powers.”

“What? No! I don’t even know how to use them properly yet! You use yours!”

“Lightning is unpredictable and hard to contain, especially inside. I have to aim it at a specific target to discharge it, but it’s too cramped in here and there are too many people. I might miss my target or lose control and kill someone or, even worse, it might jump between several people. You, though…” Her blue eyes glittered. “You’ve touched the Fire Ruby. You have flame projection powers. Flame can be controlled a little more easily than lightning, surely. You can show them some fire burning and get their attention.”

“I...I don’t know how,” Ryn said, his chest tightening, his mouth going dry. “I’ve only ever projected fire once before, when I was really desperate and about to die, and it didn’t work again afterwards. I’m not sure I can do it again.”

“Oh, of course you can,” said Nuthea, and pulled Ryn by the arm out of the way of a man stumbling backwards from being kicked in the face. “I’ll teach you. Hold out your hand.”