Elrann still hated to admit it, but pirate-man’s airship was an absolute beauty.

She strode out of the doors of the captain’s chambers in the forecastle and on to the main deck. Rushing air immediately greeted her, whipping her purple hair up, and she pulled her goggles down over her eyes. The skyscape, orange and pale blue and white, was decorated with the fluffy clouds of a dawn somewhere over Aibar, above which they were currently flying on their way to Farr.

It’s good to be alive.

Ryn, Vish and Cid were already up, she was surprised to see, stood together looking out over the prow of the ship, yapping about something or other and taking turns to point at the clouds and scraps of desert visible below. They hadn’t heard her come on to the deck.

“‘Bout time you got up, woman!” someone called out over the wind.

Elrann whirled on her heel. Above her, atop the ship’s forecastle, underneath her black blimp from which the body of the ship hung suspended by steel ropes, behind the ship’s wheel, stood Sagar.

“I never got my wakeup call!” Elrann yelled back.

“Ha!” the pirate scoffed, his ponytail flapping in the wind behind him. “You’d be lucky! Where’s her majesty--still sleeping?”

Always with the asking about princess-girl. “For the meantime. She needs her beauty sleep. I don’t need so much since I’m more beautiful.”

“Ha!” Sagar laughed again. He seemed happy at the helm of his ship--in his element, literally. “Listen, woman; go do a check over the engine. She’s flying fine--but you might be able to get a little more out of her.”

“Where d’ya think I was going?” Elrann shot back. “I’ll go of my own accord, thanks very much. You might be the pilot of this ship, but you ain’t the captain any more, whatever princess-girl calls ya.”

She turned away from the faint sound of Sagar’s “Rrrr,” hiding her smile, and paced across the deck to steps that led below. That’s for calling me ‘woman’ twice already today. She waved good morning to Ryn, Vish and Cid before descending.

Belowdeck were four main rooms: a hold which had been stuffed full of food supplies by princess-girl’s ‘countrywomen’ before they left, a very small brig, the engine room and the sleeping cabin.

Unfortunately, you had to go through the sleeping cabin to get to the engine room.

The sleeping cabin was filthy, the walls that enclosed its rows of hung hammocks scrawled with lewd paint graffiti or knife-scored with tallies of how many days the original crew had been in the air at a particular time. Even the Imperials hadn’t bothered to clean it up when they had occupied the ship for a while. All the same, Elrann wouldn’t have minded sleeping in the main cabin, and had done so on many other airships.

But on their first night in the air, when they had opened the door to the cabin and been hit by a wave of the smell of...men, Nuthea had spoken up.

“No,” Nuthea had said, wrinkling her nose. “Absolutely not. This does not befit a Queen.”

“But you’re not a Queen,” Sagar said. “You weren’t coronated.”

“It does not befit a princess either. I am not sleeping in here. I am not having you men leching over me and Elrann while we get dressed and undressed.”

“Well where do you suggest that you sleep?”

“Elrann and I will sleep in the captain’s quarters.”

Sagar’s face lit up. “An excellent idea. I’ll be able to keep you both company.” His wolf-grin gripped his face.

Nuthea’s expression could have curdled milk. Nuthea’s expression could have boiled milk. “No, Captain Sagar: Elrann and I will sleep in the captain’s quarters by ourselves.”

Sagar’s face turned as purple as Elrann’s hair. “But it’s the captain’s quarters! That means it’s for the captain! The clue is in the name!”

“My mind is made up,” Nuthea said. A catchphrase of hers, Elrann noticed.

“Rrrrr.”

They had argued some more, but eventually Sagar had been forced to back down when Nuthea had reminded him that he was in her pay, since she was funding this little Mid-trotting jewel-hunting escapade and keeping him in coin to be the pilot for it.

Poor moronic pirate-man… Elrann thought as she opened the door to the engine room at the back of the ship.

Wanderlust’s engine was a big, shining, black, iron beauty that filled the whole of its room. The main chamber, effectively a massive tank, had a door built into the front of it into which fuel could be shovelled--coal, usually, but this was a Class One Steam Engine made in Erm, which meant that she could run on pretty much whatever you put in her--coal, wood, oil, grass, leaves, poodoo, metal if it was hot enough, animals, even people… Elrann blinked away that particular memory from the one time she had worked on a ship with a Class One before. As long as the fuel burned or evaporated and produced some kind of smoke or gas to fly up the feeder pipe, into the engine’s compression system above and then eventually along the two fuel lines to the two air turbines that sat at the underside of Wanderlust’s bow, it would work.

She opened the door of the main chamber, its heat immediately warming her skin, and shoveled in some more coal from the nearby bag on the floor. The furnace inside glowed as it swallowed the coal, and the whirring of the ship’s turbines from outside picked up in pitch a fraction.

She shut the door and took a spanner out of one of her utility pouches, relishing the feel of the cold metal as it sat comfortably in her palm, read the gauges on the top of the engine, and set to work on it.

A Class One engine was effectively like a heart, except that instead of pumping blood, it pumped smoke, or steam. The ship’s engineer’s main job was to fine-tune the compression and decompression system in the upper chambers of the engine, built above the feeder pipe that came from the fuel tank so that the gas in it was expelled at maximum speed and at maximum efficiency along the two fuel lines to power the turbines. This was largely achieved by tightening and loosening various, screws, knuts and bolts attached to the chambers to strengthen or weaken, shrink or enlarge, the different ‘ventricles’ of the engine system.

As she did this now, Elrann lost herself in her work. For a time there was only the engine and she only had space to think briefly that the place where she was happiest and most in her element was in front of a metal machine, preferably an engine, tinkering and investigating and adjusting, being warmed by the heat from its burning fuel, tasting the burned taste of smoke on her tongue, listening to the industrious hum of the turbines.

But eventually she got the engine pretty much where she wanted her and her mind became free to wander.

What had she been thinking about before she got to work on the engine, again? Something had been bothering her…

Oh, yeah.

Pirate-man.

She was fairly sure that, as well as obviously ‘leching’ after Nuthea, Sagar had been sending some meaningful glances her way lately as well. It seemed that, after he had gotten over his initial shock at her short hair, tomboyishness and the fact that she was an engineer, he had become interested in her as well. It seemed that his lechy-ness knew no bounds. He wasn’t very good at either hiding or showing it, though in different ways.

Little did the stupid man know that rather than letting him into her overalls she was much more interested in trying to work out if he was actually her half-brother.

Truth be told, she reflected as she continued to tend to the engine, making some perfectionist and entirely unnecessary tweaks, Sagar had made her think of her father the very first time she had met him, in the inn in Ast. Of course, she had never met her father, but he had been described to her as a dashing skypirate with a brown leather jacket with a high collar, a rugged beard, baby blue eyes and...a ponytail.

She used her spanner to turn a [knut] on the engine, listening for the subtle change in the turbine’s hum, trying to get exactly the tone she wanted. She knew that her obsession with skypirates, airships, and eventually airship engines had originated from her being told about her father, a skypirate who had landed in Zerlan once and got her mother pregnant, but she didn’t care. She could no more change her love for them than she could change the colour of her eyes (purple) or her supernatural ability to hold her drink. They were part of her.

Early on in her acquaintance with Sagar, when they had been escaping from Ast and then trekking across the Imfisi plains, she had developed a small crush on him. Her cheeks warmed now at the memory, and it wasn’t just the warmth of the engine. It was embarrassing to see now how obviously that had been connected to her longing for her father, but at the time she had just fallen right into it. It had been so scary being in Ast when it was invaded, and Sagar had taken charge, and been so confident

She tightened another knut. But, the thing was, as time had gone by, slowly the crush had morphed into something else. She had begun to notice little things, and some big things. The big things, so obvious that she hadn’t noticed them at first, thinking them too common not to be coincidences: the brown leather jacket with a high collar, the blue eyes, the handsome features, and that ponytail. But it was the little things that had begun to stack up and make her wonder about the big things. The way his wolf-like grin sometimes reminded her of her own when she caught it in a looking glass. His slightly larger than normal front canine-teeth. His own love of airships, and all things to do with them. Even the way he growled when he got frustrated or irritated, though thankfully Elrann had so far managed to keep that particular trait of hers hidden from the other members of their traveling party. Too many coincidences had mounted up for her to continue to doubt that they weren’t just coincidences with as much conviction.

The clincher had been when Sagar had revealed that he was in possession of the ‘Wind Shell’ and that his father was Captain Edbin Figaro. Elrann’s mother hadn’t even known the name of the man that had swept her off her feet and impregnated her on the same evening, but she had told Elrann that he had been a captain of a ship, since she had seen him sail off piloting it the next day. Elrann worried that her mother, and now she, had romanticised the man, wanting him not just to be some regular old scummy skysailor or randy cabin boy. But it was what her mother had told her.

So, gradually, little by little, she had pieced together the idea that maybe, just maybe, she and Sagar might share a father.

Maybe, just maybe, Sagar might be her half-brother.

And if Sagar was her half-brother then, maybe, just maybe, he might be able to help her to find her father.

That was a good enough reason to hang around with this crew a little longer--at least until she worked up the courage to tell him.

And of course, there was also the pay (courtesy of princess-girl), the protection, and the general sense of meaningfulness now that they were questing after these magical jewel-thingamys. And the company was alright, she supposed.

But yeah, the main reason she was still here was to see if she could get a shot at finding her father, she reminded herself. If he was still alive, that was.

She walked over to the speaking tube set into the wall and put her mouth to it.

“Hey pirate-man!” she said into it.

For a moment there was no reply, just the bronze protrusion of the speaking tube.

Then: “She’s sounding pretty good, woman.”

Elrann’s lip curled up at the corner. She knew well enough not to expect a ‘thank you’ or a ‘good job’. But she also knew that she had the engine functioning damn near perfectly, and she had already been doing well since Elrann had begun looking after her. She had heard the reluctant acknowledgement of that in Sagar’s tone.

“You coming up for breakfast?” said Sagar’s voice through the speaking tube.

“In a bit,” Elrann answered. “I want to tend to her a bit more for a while.”

“Suit yourself.”

Elrann went back to the engine. There was absolutely no reason to do anything with her right now, but she liked being here, and she could always play with trying to get her functioning even more nearly perfect.

She set about the screws and knuts again, and thought about how and when she was going to bring up her theory with Sagar.