Session 76 - The Northern Laser Light Show

Linnet's crystal has a double, and it is confounding the crew of the Starfall.
After confiding in her friends about the nature of her malady, Linnet assembled the finest minds on the airship, and then sent Yves to find actual experts.
Fortunately, the ship carried one actual expert on the nature of sylph crystals and specifically their sudden defects, and Natron Rensa joined the group to discuss findings and offer potential solutions.
Of Natron's four suggestions, Linnet took the most immediately dangerous option, on account of it was an action she could take in the very near future, and did not involve navigating any family-related drama.
The Howling Eye, a screaming vortex in the Cardian mountains, contained heavily wind-aspected aether, and there was a chance that exposure to that aether could bring about a change in Linnet's crystal.
Isa was immediately against the idea of traveling to the Howling Eye, but relented in the face of Linnet's relentless and mildly anxious optimism.
And so we join our brave adventurers traveling through Cardian airspace aboard the Meteor, the vast crew of the Starfall far away from here, with Isa piloting, Celeste Meracydia navigating, Linnet humming, and Bast fretting...
**
"How much farther?" Bast asks without looking up from the rope he's re-coiling and securing for the third time.
The Cardian mountains do not look any different from the last time Bast and Linnet were here, though Celeste and Isa both expressed surprise when Bast mentioned that as a matter of small talk, pointing out the many differences in the geographical makeup of the mountains, trading stories and sharing anecdotes until Bast wandered away, lesson learned, though maybe not the one they intended.
"Maybe... twenty minutes? Twenty minutes before the map becomes less useful than the winds," Celeste says, also without looking up.
Twice now, the Meteor has lurched to port with no warning. The winds are making themselves known.
Isa has grown more and more focused as the winds have become more and more insistent. For the last ten minutes, she hasn't looked away from the view ahead, and has only spoken for quick questions of her navigator.
Linnet is refusing to (outwardly) panic or question the wisdom of this course of action, but if she doesn't stop rubbing the loose crystal, she's going to wear it away before she figures out what else to do with it. (She's proven to be a fairly useless navigator, so she's staring distractedly off into the clouds.)
With no way to assist in the cabin, Bast goes around to check all of the ropes and sails, looking for anything that might fail in the kind of winds Isa spoke of.
"...thank you all for coming with me and I'm sorry if this proves to be a really horrible idea," Linnet mumbles really quickly (but audibly). Then she stands up with all the confidence she can muster, tucks the loose crystal into her shirt, and grabs the railing so hard that something almost cracks.
"I'm excited!" Celeste says cheerfully, having burned through her protests the day before with Isa in private.
"I'll be excited with you, Celeste!" Linnet says. And really, who couldn't be?
Isa flicks a switch, and from somewhere outside the hull a flap shifts position. "If we're going to do something reckless, we're going to do it right," she justifies.
Finding no fault in the rigging, Bast settles down with his back against the outer wall of the cabin, tucking a spike into one of his deeper pockets and making sure it's secure. "Time to start our vacation in sunny Cardia?"
The Meteor angles itself around the closest peak, and conversation dies.
In the middle of the mountain range, one dominates, as it is the one surrounded by a raging whirlwind crackling with green lightning and purple swirling clouds.
"We're here," Celeste says into the silence.
"Eight hundred meters," Isa announces.
Linnet hooks her ankle up onto the railing in a classic barre stretch and places her hand on her crystal.
The whirlwind stretches up through the clouds, far higher than the Meteor's maximum altitude. The only approach is straight on.
Bast gives the rope wound around his waist another tug, tightening the coil not at all, and edges closer to Linnet. Just in case.
"Don't go out until we break three hundred. It'd be pointless to fall overboard ahead of schedule," Isa says.
"Far be it from us to disrupt the schedule," comes the dry retort masking quavering excitement. "I'm absolutely relying on you people who know your way around flying this thing. I can't even fly me right now, so...yeah."
"Six hundred meters. This is usually where the more sober cadets start suggesting we turn back." Isa is being very informative.
"How sober are you feeling?" Bast flashes a grin cabinward.
"More than I want to be," Isa admits. "But if we pull this off we'll drink free in any student bar in the city."
Celeste drums her fingers on the navigator's console, the whirlwind reflected in her eyes.
The Howling Eye's winds tear at the Meteor, throwing it hard to starboard, testing Isa's skill handling one of these nimbler Cardian airships. Celeste grips the strap across her chest holding her in her chair, hand on the quick release in case anyone needs any help. The map is pinned in place.
Linnet scrambles for something to do and decides the best thing to do is "hold this part of the ship down so it doesn't fall off."
Isa grunts, gripping the steering yoke tightly and showing the strain of keeping on course. "Five-fifty," she calls out.
"Easterly winds, still on target!" Celeste says back, that catch in her words as the excitement and anxiety meet in her throat. "Bast, damage?"
Bast makes his way carefully along the side, one hand on the rigging at all times, adjusting the trim of the main sail when the tilt from the crosswinds starts to become hazardous. His answering: "All good so far!" is hard to hear above the howling wind.
"Celeste, tell me honestly, how bad of an idea was this?" asks Linnet, moving a knob very carefully at the navigator's instruction.
"It's only a bad idea if we don't learn anything," Celeste says, trying not to listen to the sounds the metal makes all around her.
The winds continue strong from the east, trying their best to fling the Meteor into one of the neighboring mountains.
"Five-twenty!" Isa yells over the growing noise, turning the ship to a slightly slower, but slightly safer, approach.
The ship banks twenty-five degrees as the winds tear at the hull.
A particularly strong gust rips the rope Bast is adjusting out of his hands, and he can almost hear stitches popping loose in the sail before he recaptures it and ties it down again.
"Five hundred meters!" Isa calls, "Keep that port vane secure!"
The winds shift.
The winds quite literally shift, a wall of air buffeting from the west and pitching the ship into a spiral before Isa pulls it level. The whirlwind has completely changed direction, the new winds blowing exponentially harder, the new winds practically sizzling with magic, bathing the Meteor in arcane light.
The Howling Eye rejects the intruders, and will continue to do so until the intruders are no more.
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa," Isa mutters, yawing hard to get the boat back on its intended line. "Four fifty," she reads out, but those were a hard-earned fifty meters.
Celeste grits her teeth, calling out bearings as Isa battles the controls.
"No...you...DON'T!" Linnet slams right back, twirling around so fast she practically generates her own counter-wind from her braid. When she skids to a stop, a wave of her own magic buffets into the Meteor's sails.
Bast, given a scant second of warning by the changing sound of the storm, pries his fingers off the rope ladder he was hanging from and yells "Still holding!" with no expectation of being heard.
The next roar of the winds overpowers any words shouted in that ten seconds, but no one has to shout out the element when the raging flames are all anyone can see.
Flames, winds, confined space, magic, terrible ideas, this is all going wrong, this is all your fault... fortunately, the winds are loud enough to cover Linnet's screaming, and anyway, it might just be taken for anger. Or adrenaline. Or...something.
Bast yanks his hand away from the railing as the world fills with billowing flame - then hastily claps it back on, not seeing anything that's not flame-infested to grab instead.
Isa pitches Meteor nose-down to avoid a gout of flame, but in order to do so she has to reach across a vent, right as a gust of superheated air jets out of it. She mutters a stream of curses like a protective ward as she pulls the lever, but the skin on her forearm is already reddening angrily as she brings her arm back. "Three seventy-five. Damn."
The wall of wind is accompanied by a physical wall of jagged ice, ready to shatter the Meteor's hull.
"Now this I know how to handle." Linnet does something complicated with her hands and ends with them folded in front of her face, then screams and pushes the wall of ice in two - just enough to either side for the Meteor to scrape on through. The sparks that ping off either side are blue, cold, and smell faintly of wintergreen.
"Ha! Thank you," Isa declares, and guns it through the gap. "Three hundred meters!"
Bast's snarl at the chunk of ice that breaks off from the wall, narrowly misses him and takes out a piece of the port railing goes unheard over the roar of the storm.
The shards of ice behind Meteor crackle with the remnants of Linnet's furious magic, and Bast can see them exploding with that arcane energy.
Everything behind Meteor goes away in the blinding light of a cannon's shot.
The beam of light fired from the Howling Eye is at least forty feet high, obliterating the wall of ice fractured from Linnet's dramatic push forward.
The winds increase in intensity. Through the whirling funnel, all aboard can see energy begin cycling up along a massive physical structure of some sort, coalescing in one central point, tracking the airship.
The aether is rich with the power of wind. Now is the time.
"ISA YOU COULD HAVE MENTIONED THE TWELVESDAMNED CANNON!" Linnet is at the prow of the ship now, soaking in as much of the wind as she can possibly hold, trying to hold back on a stream of apologies so as not to distract her crewmates.
"Art, you could have mentioned the damned cannon," Isa mutters to herself, trying as hard as she can to juke the ship around without flinging Linnet into the void.
"WHAT IN YOSHUELJE'S BRAIDED PUBES WAS THAT?" Bast darts around frantically, trying to find something that might help.
The air sizzles with superheated energy, and then the lightning strikes, blinding shocks that pulse in time with the humming energy inside the Howling Eye.
The wind screams with a renewed fury, its power coming to bear along with the Eye's cannon.
Celeste's eyes reflect the growing light of the whirlwind's defense.
Bast pants shallowly, the wind seemingly refusing to fill his lungs as it slams back and forth across the deck.
Linnet wedges herself into the tiniest corner of the prow, white-knuckled, white-faced, reflecting green lightning and looking ill at ease.
Bast yanks the pocket he took care to seal earlier open and slams the spike into the deck, the rope from his belt going into tying some sort of jagged contraption to the spike anchor.
Isa curses again, and tries, too little, too late, to avoid the incoming cannon blast.
Bast pulls the rope tight with his teeth to secure the knot, then crosses the knot with wire, storm-charged sparks jumping off the ends. A rounded piece of engine casing, once housed inside the Slim Reaper, covers it and gets adjusted minutely as Bast tracks the ship's position relative to the cannon with eyes tearing up from the gale.
Finally, as the cannon winds up to fire, Bast jams the leads from the Overpayload into the roll of wire with one hand and unloads the entire charge. The other is lifted towards the center of the storm in a gesture entirely superfluous from both a magical and engineering point of view.
The cannon fires.
The massive blast of light envelopes Meteor, the sheer force of the shot throwing the airship to the side... but the airship is intact, completely intact, Bast's makeshift shield more than doing its job.
The cannon's shot, refracted by the shield, disperses all throughout the Cardian mountains, the winds absorbing the blast, slowing just long enough to reveal the silhouette of something inside the whirlwind, a cylindrical structure angled up into the sky.
Isa spares a moment to look at Celeste, the only other person left within earshot. "I don't know what he did out there, but I sure hope it lasts."
"Screw the hat, Bast, we are commissioning you a Twelvesdamned statue when we get back!" Linnet yells over her shoulder. "And yes, you can fill it with grenades and drop it on this laser from way up above, if you can convince Marina."
Bast laughs, in between gasping in lungfuls of uncooperative air, as he dashes back to securing the rigging.
"They're going to buy him the whole bar," Celeste says, eyes wide as portholes.
(Immediately after turning back to face front, Linnet squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to breathe in the smoke or feel the flames.)
Isa laughs tightly, slewing the ship around a bit. "I guess this is practice for the Forgotten, huh."
"I don't think it's Forgotten because it killed everyone that went looking for it!" Celeste's volume may not accurately reflect her confidence.
The lights begin pulsing inside the Howling Eye as the ice begins to pelt the ship.
"They literally tried to murder you at your lecture," Isa feels the need to point out, despite the life-threatening laser mountain ahead of them. Ah, friendship.
"Oh, those are just people," Celeste says. "People are fine."
"Yes!" Isa agrees, pulling hard on the rudder. "I can punch people! I can't punch mountains! If it wasn't for a demented moogle's gadgets we'd be stuff on a rock right now!"
"You can totally punch mountains! They just don't make satisfying noises!" Linnet calls out.
The cannon drowns out the shouts, casting its light show through the mountains.
The airship returns half a dozen alarms that Celeste immediately silences.
Bast, hanging from a torn rope to keep the sail it was securing from ripping away altogether, only laughs harder.
Isa reaches forward and opens the bow window. "LINNET!" she yells with all the force of a battlefield command, "IT'S TIME!"
Linnet's eyes are squinched shut, her braid is whipping like crazy, her hands are clutched to the loose crystal tucked into her shirt, and she appears to be...either praying or swearing mightily; either way, you can't hear.
Isa, with full and complete faith in her friend, throws Meteor into a plummeting dive. Leaving Linnet behind in the sky.
The crystal in Linnet's hand glows with a brilliant green light.
Linnet topples, opens her eyes, and immediately wishes she hadn't.
The rope that Bast was holding on to is all that keeps him from going overboard as well. "ISA WHAT ARE YOU DOIIIIII-" trails behind the Meteor.
Celeste is briefly weightless on the bridge for the third time in her life.
Gravity takes hold of Linnet, and starts her on her descent.
Isa keeps the thrust up, keeping ahead of the falling sylph. "C'mon c'mon c'mon" she urges no one and everyone.
The cannon's lights begin pulsing.
Linnet's arc is not changing; she is picking up speed as terminal velocity approaches.
Linnet does her best to point her feet straight down so that at least she'll make less of a mess on the Meteor's deck. Assuming she doesn't get burnt to a crisp first. When she and Isa proposed this crazy scheme, there was no sandblasted laser cannon in the picture!
The sky glows even crazier colors now, between green lightning, purple clouds, red lasers, assorted fire, occasional sparks of ice, Bast's soap-bubble shield...all of it moving so fast that it blurs... Well, we tried, and at least we'll learn something, right, Celeste?
Bast climbs up to the sail, hand over hand, watching Linnet as she falls with the light of doom warming up behind her.
Isa watches the ground rushing up ahead of the ship, sparing only the briefest glance up and back to spot Linnet.
Linnet continues to fall. The winds do not respond. They do not lift her. They do not guide her.
There is power in her crystal, but it is not fully her power.
The cannon aims.
Linnet points her toes, whispers her prayers, and closes her eyes.
"ISA!" Bast doesn't have much hope of being heard, but is not inclined to remain silent regardless.
"Shit," is Isa's only reaction. She pulls back on the yoke and starts bringing Meteor up to meet Linnet's fall, hopefully not too roughly.
With a terrific crash, Linnet does splinter the deck of the Meteor, but it's sturdily built enough that she doesn't go the whole way through. She collapses to her hands and knees, one hand still with a death grip on the loose crystal, all the breath knocked out of her. "That...did not work. But it was kind of awesome? But let's never do that again." She pries her feet loose from the deck boards - with her hands, as both of her ankles are nonfunctional - and burns through about four Cure spells before standing up and dusting herself off.
"...what. Was. That?" Bast clings to the torn sail as the deck levels out below him, plainly unwilling to trust that it will stay that way just yet.
"Right. Well, the mama bird approach was as solid an idea as anything else we've had, and thank you for trying it far away from almost anyone else we could have brought," Linnet says. "...I'm sorry, Meteor, I don't have Cure spells for a boat." She pats the deck in a genuinely sympathetic gesture.
Isa yanks the rudder around as soon as she sees Linnet land, and puts the laser mountain behind them, heading out of the maelstrom with as much speed as possible.
The Howling Eye stops firing, the winds dying back down as the ship flies away.
"The idea was the same as mother birds use with their babies - once your flight feathers are developed, sometimes you just need a push out of the nest. And we figured a push in the most heavily wind-aspected location we could find anywhere would be as dramatic a test as we could run. And, well, it didn't work, but like Celeste said, it's only a bad idea if we didn't learn something."
Celeste is back and forth between the bridge and the deck, reporting to Isa on Linnet's status and tallying up the damage done to the ship as best she can.
"...let's maybe not spread that story too widely around the ship, though. Shula would kill me with a look, and Jasper would tie me to the galley table. And Rahel would start writing a play about it and we don't have that kind of fly system onboard."
"I saw the crystal glow, though," Celeste says after a final check of Linnet. "What did it do? What happened to it?"
"Excellent question." Linnet takes a very heavy seat in the cabin and pries open her clenched palm.
"...actors." Bast finally deigns to let go of the sail and drop to the deck.
It's not until Meteor is a good kilometer away before Isa sets the controls to hold course and slouches back in her chair. "Shit. I'm sorry, Linnet. Really thought that was going to work."
The crystal in Linnet's hands, the one Serj found and returned to her, shines with a healthy glow. No matter what Linnet does with it, though, it does not grant her any power, or restore any of her winds to her.
"I didn't know, but we were only going to get one chance, so we might as well take it, right?"
The crystal attached to Linnet's ankle, her personal crystal, the one weakened after the attack from Jacaranda Malison Vale, has not restored her winds to her either. It does, however, have more of a shine to it. There is some level of power there that wasn't before.
"...so maybe it worked a little?" Linnet twists her legs up into her seat, touches her crystal gently, and touches Isa's burned arm.
Linnet remains still and seated, her braid unmoving, her winds long absent.
Isa, however... slowly drifts up into the air.
Isa is no stranger to floating, but it usually starts with a jump and ends with violence. "Uh...."
Linnet can only laugh in helpless exhaustion.
Bast looks up at Isa from the seat he's draped himself over, plainly awaiting an explanation and not being too picky about where it comes from.
"Linnet, at this point I'm pretty sure it's doing this to you on purpose. And honestly," Isa says, "it's being kind of a jerk about it."
"There's a difference between being selfless and being cruel," Celeste says in agreement.
Not stating her agreement either way, Linnet's still laughing. It's that kind of worn-out, what-else-can-you-do laugh, but there's a trace of Linnet's usual warmth back in it.