Session 17.5 - Ship of Dreams

Isa Osler did a final lap of the room and took inventory. Large table. Window into the bridge. Twelve chairs. Bare walls. With a nod, she mentally assigned it the label War Room, and then took a seat and waited. One by one, the rest of the group filed in, with everyone’s face a mix of wonder and confusion. No injuries, no trauma. This ship certainly had secrets, but at least it wasn’t trying to kill them.
“What have we learned?” she prompted.
“That there’s a full kitchen onboard,” Linnet Leveche said.
Isa frowned.
Seeing the Cardian’s face, Linnet added, “Don’t worry, I didn’t eat anything in there.”
Isa’s frown deepened.
“The kitchen told me a few things,” Linnet went on. The sylph fidgeted slightly in her seat, a constant bit of motion swirling about her. “One, that this ship is designed to hold a lot of people, since it’s a full galley kitchen with room for a chef, sous-chef, there are prep stations, refrigeration, multiple areas for food storage, and on. Two, this ship is designed to carry a lot of people for a long distance over a long amount of time, because it feels like there’s as much room in there as there was at university.”
“Where did it go, though?” Orrey Alyon said, leaning forward on his elbows. His bag sat next to him on the table, undoubtedly filled with numerous sketches, supplies, and half-started ideas. “I’ve spent a lot of time digging into Alternan history, or at least as much of it as I could find before Papa’s situation started, and I don’t remember a record of any ship matching this description.”
“They did have airships, though?” Bast asked.
Orrey nodded. “They had multiple fleets, though nothing this advanced. Most Alternan airships worked by sail and propeller — setting aside the magic that let them fly, of course — which still gave them tremendous power over the air, but nothing like this.”
“Our ship here,” Bast patted the table, “has a lot more power than that. You’ll forgive me for not climbing into the turbines themselves to find out, but we’re not going to have to worry about the direction of the wind on her. I bet we can get up to the same speed the Slim Reaper reached.”
Across the table, Yves Mjrwin’s ears perked all the way up.
“…though we won’t,” Bast added, scowling.
The viera’s ears drooped back to their natural slouch.
“The reason history doesn’t know about this ship,” Isa said, her voice carrying a not-entirely-earned confidence, “is that it never flew.”
Orrey blinked.
“The captain’s log is blank,” Isa said. “No name, no dates, nothing. This ship has never seen the skies.”
“That feels peculiar?” Yves said. “I mean, I’m not an expert on airships — there’s a lot of things I’m not an expert on, I’ve had a few teachers who could probably put together a list for you, but I don’t have one on me — but this seems like a weird place to put an airship that’s never flown. Or to build an airship that’s never flown. Aren’t there normally…” Yves paused, rolling his hands in an attempt to convey the entire industry that creates the massive ships that sail Ducorde’s skies. “…cranes or something?”
“Generally speaking, yes,” Isa said dryly.
“Because it was definitely put together here,” Yves continued. “Primarily by hand, with people working in groups of two, going room to room. I’m not sure if there is a reason they were going two by two, but I found a few sets of tools in some of the lower down rooms, and there were always two sets of the same tools. Little goldsmithing hammers. I don’t think they’re going to be really interesting from a cultural standpoint — the hammers, I mean. They just looked like hammers.”
“Was there much magic used in the construction?” Orrey asked.
“Yes,” came the simultaneous replies from Linnet and Yves. They both looked at each other, waited for the other to start, both started talking at once, and then Linnet dissolved into laughter and waved at Yves until Yves took the initiative.
“There is a lot of magic in this ship,” he said. “I can feel it whenever I put my hand on the wall. This ship has been infused with an energy that gives it life and that power runs through the length of the ship, from the floor of the deck to the interior of the cabins and back again. What the point of that power is, I don’t know. It’s not magic from the people who were using the tiny hammers. Less… “ He paused and thought. “It’s in the bones,” he then continued, “not the skin. Magical airship bones.” He finished with a firm nod.
“Alternan architecture isn’t exactly my specialty, but their use of magic came up a lot when I was researching a few things,” Linnet said. “The entire country was built on the Gap of Termina, which isn’t exactly stable. So they wove magic into everything. All of that magic broke when the Crystal did, and then the entire place fell into the ocean. Save what we’re sitting in.” She thought about this for a moment. “We should leave soon.”
“So.” Isa straightened her shoulders. “We have an ancient airship that has never flown, that was designed to carry a small army, has magic coursing through it that may or may not be responsible for the tremendous power it carries, was built here carefully by hand instead of being built somewhere where it could be mass-produced, and now it belongs to us. Anything else?”
“I stopped counting when I got to fifty rooms below decks,” Bast said.
“There’s an observation deck about sixty feet above the bridge that I’m not going to use anymore,” Linnet said.
“Cinnabar’s already picked out her room,” Yves said.
“I don’t know what the spheres are for,” Orrey said.
Everyone’s attention flicked over to Orrey. He continued. “I was sketching them up close from outside, and the surface of the spheres is colder than the rest of the ship, and the circles themselves are made up of little hexagonal panels joined together. It’s very smooth, no visible seams or anything like that. They’re a bit more… refractory there too, the color just sings. So I was wondering what it looked like inside them to the outside, so I went to find them, and I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t find the rooms inside the spheres?” Yves asked. “I figured that was what was downstairs.”
“It’s not,” Orrey says. “We’re up high on the ship right now, and then most of the rooms are in the stretch connecting the two spheres. There’s nothing leading into either of the spheres inside the ship itself.”
“So we have room for expansion,” Isa said.
“Or there’s something already stored there and we can’t get to it,” Bast said. “I haven’t taken measurements. How big an area is inside the spheres, do you think?”
Orrey spread a few of his sketches out on the table, and started arranging them in a manner that made sense to he and Bast and no one else. After a moment, Yves scooted his chair over and started jotting down notes on a blank sheet of paper.
“…probably looking at about three to four thousand cubic meters in the big one,” Yves finished. “The smaller one looks like maybe sixty percent of that.”
“Fuel?” Isa asked.
“Tanks back up to the kitchen near the stern,” Bast said. “Not the spheres.”
“Another one of history’s mysteries,” Linnet said.
“We can figure the spheres out later,” Isa said. “We have something more pressing to figure out first.”
“What’s that?” Orrey asked.
Isa leaned forward, her forearms resting on the table, as she looked at each member of the group in turn. “What we do from here.”
TO BE CONTINUED IN FINAL FANTASY HORIZON SESSION EIGHTEEN