She jabs at its face, but with momentum intended to meet resistance, and there is none. With momentum intended to compensate for a dodge on the part of the creature, but it surges forward. She's engulfed, and then there is no snake, and there is no ground, and she's falling.
She gasps. The air is clean; she doesn't need to heal poison out of herself with each breath. She sees - floating land, of sorts, there, some kind of oddly geology-themed ship maybe. She could, potentially, turn Lævateinn into something with enough surface area to steer herself onto it rather than fall farther and suffer worse from the fall, but she just recently perfected a new...
She's a bird, a swift, and she catches the wind, and her spear is a twig clutched in her feet, and she wings her way to the land.
The other floats off to the side, tied to the larger object by no less than a dozen thick ropes. It is closer to the size of a house than a village, and it seems made rather than natural - smoothed sides, windows, canvas wings that would be comically small on a bird.
On the larger sky-island, someone is chopping down a tree.
He ties them together with more rope, and uses some sort of wheeled mechanism to lift them to the top of the house-ship. The ropes holding it down relax visibly. Then he clambers up the ropes and into the ship himself. A small bird could easily follow him if it wished.
Hidden behind other foliage, she emanates sound from elsewhere than she is:
"Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?"
"If you're asking what planet this is, I don't think I can unlose you. This planet is called Cloudbank, and if I remember my astronomy lessons right it's about nine hundred light-years away from Earth. Of course, nobody's been back to Earth since the stargate broke, so we can't be sure."
"The stargate is... Some sort of massive ship orbiting the planet. It used to be a portal you could walk through and end up next to an identical portal that orbits Earth. It's hundreds of miles straight up, higher than anything can float, past the hydrogen layer. Nobody really understands the more complex parts of lost technology, sorry to say, so I haven't the first clue why it broke or how to fix it."
"Well, I don't have a way to get into orbit on me, more's the pity, even if we assumed I could fix the thing. This is very inconvenient. If the bridge doesn't reach here I may be stranded for centuries. Can I trouble you for some advice on where to spend them?"
"That depends on what you want to do, I suppose. I don't know what you can do. I'm headed down to the equatorial towns, which is probably a better starting point than here. If you don't weigh more than two hundred kilos you can come along, I'm descending anyway so extra weight isn't as much of a problem as it usually is."
"I don't weigh that much, no." She turns invisible, shapeshifts back into her normal form, and walks an illusion of herself from behind a shrub to where she's standing and merges it with her no-longer-invisible self seamlessly. She speaks with her own voice, no longer thrown: "I'd appreciate the passage. I don't know what tasks there usually are to do on a ship like yours but I may be passable at some of them."
"I've got regular flight pretty well automated. You could tend the garden, I suppose. I need to retune the engines for high pressure and finish loading that tree, and I prefer to set down on something sturdy at night so I don't collide with anything. But we can be off tomorrow morning at the earliest."
Nick has to exert considerably more effort to get the tree onto his scale. "...Two hundred forty three kilos. More than I expected, but within tolerance." He sets to trying the tree to the same set of wheels that hauled up the bundle of branches. The knots are fairly obvious, if Loki wants to help.
He pauses. "Well, you just appeared here out of nowhere. I don't know about anything that could do that. Maybe the rules are just different on Asgard and Midgard and whatever other gards you have."
The mechanism moves as he pulls steadily on a rope. When it reaches the top, he picks up his scale and climbs up the most substantial rope into a person-sized hole in the ship, waving for Loki to join him.
"I have couple of rules, though. If you're not from Cloudbank you probably don't know how to handle a ship, so don't mess with the gas sacs, or the water tanks, or the flight controls. Here's my bedroom - I'll set up a hammock for you somewhere. Don't throw anything overboard if you can help it, I can recycle most stuff. This is the kitchen, bathroom's over there. Up these stairs - these are the gas sacs, let's keep going up - And if it starts to rain, I'll need your help to put out tarps and buckets as fast as possible. Here's the garden."
Yep, that's a garden alright. It consists almost entirely of food-producing plants, most of which are similar to ones found on Earth. The plants are growing from shallow tubs full of dirt, and the whole roof is enclosed with a mostly-glass structure that lets sunlight in. It's very warm up here.
He gives a little smile. "That won't be necessary. The strawberries are about ripe, though, so you could pick some of those. And I need to repot some potato sprouts soon. But that can wait. Would you mind coming to the cargo hold and helping me rearrange a few things? You're pretty strong, and we're listing to the right because of that tree."
"So. It must be pretty strange - I can't imagine what it would be like to walk in a straight line for dozens of klicks and just always have more land to walk on, like Earth is supposed to have. You probably have a lot of questions about how this place works."
"I think I have the gist. Floating islands, of which that one was apparently medium-sized, and ships between them, and some Midgardian living things but apparently also some native, and I imagine this causes all sorts of logistical problems especially with collecting raw materials, as you mentioned. One doesn't usually walk long distances on one's own feet; that's what horses are for."
"I've never heard of horses before. And yes, that's about the gist of it. There's also the danger of falling, especially children falling - my jacket has a glider built in, so even if I fall I'll probably be able to glide onto another island. And bad weather - if you go too low the air fills with sulfur, and if you go too high it fills with hydrogen. I lost half my glass when I suddenly flew into a crosswind, once. Is there anything you need other than the hammock and maybe something to eat?"
"I'd expect the islands with children on them, and perhaps even those with adults, to be fenced, but perhaps the children can get around such precautions and dare one another to do it? Food and the opportunity to sleep are my most immediate needs - I may be used to eating more than you're expecting me to, but I can go on short rations for a few days if supplies are limited. In the medium-term I would like paper."
"Paper is actually kind of expensive - hmm. Well, if you're going to water my plants, I suppose I can pay you with food and paper and charcoal sticks. I want the paper back when you're done if possible, though, I can turn it into pulp and make soft fabric with it. I still have to retune the engines before bed. And I should probably explain the basics of flying, but that might wait until tomorrow."
"How would I know what you want the paper for? Well, like I said, paper is expensive. You already helped with the tree and the cargo and you're going to help with the plants, so I'll feed you and give you two charcoal sticks and... Let's say twenty sheets of wetmill paper. It's already been remade a few times, so it's a bit flimsier than you might be used to, but it'll work."
"Alright. You can find your paper in the box labelled 37 on the right shelf. Charcoal sticks are in the narrow box next to it. There's food in the kitchen, eat what you like. Please only take what I said you could. I've got to go work on the engines, and unless you're secretly a mechanic I don't think you can help with that."
About an hour later, he comes back in different clothes.
"Engine two is having compression issues, which is less than ideal. And I think my last batch of hydrogen was impure. Ah well, I've had worse things happen. You pretty much know what there is to know about me already - wandering trader and tinker on the up and down run. I'm curious about you, though, you're from another planet! So, what's Asgard like?"
"What do people do with their time? Most people here fly ships, or work farms, or make crafts. We don't really have queens - it's hard to rule lots of islands when they can just float away if they don't like you ruling them. I visited a few towns that had kings, but they only ruled the one town. How are asgardians different from humans?"
"We're denser - I was categorizing that under 'tougher'. I don't have a way to turn you into an Asgardian, I'm afraid, and I've never heard of it being done either, and by the time I could even potentially make any useful progress on it via independent development you would probably already be dead."
She stays up a little, making illusory lights in lieu of a notebook to draw out the shape of her thoughts regarding the planet-transiting snake monster. Presumably Heimdall will have already said something, and maybe she'll be collected as soon as she wanders close enough to somewhere the Bifrost can connect - but it's possible the planet is inaccessible that way; she's never heard of it before - well. She can't get home on her own unless she finishes her teleportation spell, which will certainly take decades. And more than twenty sheets of paper, but if she writes very small and densely she can probably make some progress like that.
Eventually she lets all her illusions wink out and she sleeps.
The next morning, Nick prepares a simple breakfast, yells into the cargo hold about the availability of food, and starts untying the ropes holding his houseship to the island. If Loki is nearby, he will start pointing out useful objects and what they do, or talking about the operation of an airship more or less at random.
At one point he pauses and asks, "How did you end up here anyway? Were you just walking along and, boom, island?"
"How do you know Anglish, anyway? I don't imagine it's a common language on Asgard."
"It's not. That's something called Allspeak. Which may or may not contain awkward translation glitches - once I went for quite a long time without noticing that it was switching the genders of all gendered words on me - but serves for most purposes. I'm using different terms for 'something that eats other creatures' and 'something that is dangerous to people'. A ladybug eats other creatures; a bilgesnipe is dangerous but only eats plants."
That seems to be about enough strangeness for him, at least right now. He consciously decides to go back to explaining the ship. Next up: Ballast and lift! The ship floats partially by being made of the same rock as the floating islands, and partly because of those gas sacs - they're filled with hydrogen, and can float on air much the same way a boat floats on water. They also have a tendency to catch fire, which is why there are no torches or lanterns here.
His preparations for flight are apparently complete. The engines sputter into motion with a loud roar, and he goes to a little room at the front of the ship with good views of the surroundings and lots of strange looking mechanisms, which he starts operating and explaining.
He attempts to answer them! It's fairly clear what each thing does and how to operate them - that thing will drop some water, making the ship lighter. That one speeds up or slows down the engines - but his explanations of how they actually work seem to be assuming a level of education Loki does not have.
He uses a compass to point the ship south, activates a panel that's supposed to keep it pointed the same direction, and lets the engines settle into a low rumble. They're descending steadily, but not particularly quickly.
"I could just vent some hydrogen and go down that way, but I prefer to have some speed under me. Something this big can't maneuver easily from a dead stop, so if I fell towards something it would be hard to get out of its way. Let's go show you what plants need how much water." He proceeds to the rooftop garden.
Books are a lovely way to pass the time, especially when she doesn't want to get down to serious work on spell invention with only a little paper to hand and when she may be fetched home by more conventional means at any moment. What are her choices?
Several books about navigation and handling lighter-than-air objects, a weather almanac, a long row of handwritten volumes consisting of detailed notes, charts, and calculations. A book filled with lists of usual weights and prices for various objects and substances. Books on farming and how one should grow plants. Lots of books that detail how the sort of mechanical devices all over the ship work and the best ways to build or fix them - though again, these seem to assume the reader has some amount of background education.
Well, she flips through the pricing books to get a sense of how much the common currency is worth, first, and then reads a navigational book which may after all continue to be useful if she gets around by turning into a bird. She's very well-educated, just not locally.
There seems to be a lot of dangerous weather. In addition to regular thunderstorms, firestorms occur when strong updrafts mix the oxygen layer and the hydrogen layer. The result burns, making heat, which feeds the updraft, and also spawning rain clouds. There are also down-plumes and up-plumes, which can suck you into the lethal lower atmosphere or spit hazardous air up into the middle layer, respectively.
Neither the navigation book nor the farming book (if she reads it) make any mention whatsoever of seasons.
She does read the farming book. This place is sparsely populated enough that making a living is probably difficult for a wandering storyteller, or even if she cares to reveal her magic a wandering healer and illusionist, and she'll probably have to leverage her strength towards their manual labor industries at least to start out.
The world isn't that sparsely populated. They pass near several floating islands with houses or villages built on them, and two other ships. As they go lower islands get more common, common enough that a swift could easily fly island-to-island and rest in between.
About halfway through the book, Nick comes in and reminds her that some of the plants on the rooftop garden need more water in the afternoon, which is now.
The ship lets out a loud rushing noise, and suddenly lurches back up. One might assume Nick is trying to shake the thing off. The thing stays put and continues to eat the wing.
She runs, pulling Lævateinn from her belt where it's been unobtrusively clipped into her hand but not expanding it yet.
And when she gets there she grows her spear in its direction, quite a long way.
You want reach, versus tentacles.
She doesn't want to puncture anything that's generating it lift, because it's currently attached to their vessel, but she does want it to decide that this meal is more painful than it bargained for.
When Loki comes in, he asks, "Are you hurt? You were in the greenhouse, right? And squids attack from above, so it must have come right at you. Did I manage to scare it off?"
Presently no further alarms are going off. Evidently satisfied with the ship's airworthiness, Nick steps back from the controls.
"Which I will check for myself to be sure. Let's go see these tentacles, I have to put them in the coldroom or they'll just rot. And then I want to find a village to set down on. I could probably still get where I was going, but I don't want to risk finding a thunderstorm with only one wing and probably holes in my greenhouse."
"Make sure the door shuts behind you if you go in here, heat will get back in. This tentacle looks like it was cut by a sharp blade. Did you use my sword? Thank you for scaring it off, if you did."
He climbs the ladder to the cavernous room that holds the gas sacs, and investigates each one. He gives the air a good sniff, too. "I don't smell rotten eggs, which means there's probably no leaks in the gas sacs, so we won't suffocate on sulfur in the near future. Never have I been more glad I decided to build this thing with a hard shell."
"How did you cut off its tentacles, by the way? I'd rather know if you secretly brought a weapon onto my ship. Not that I have much chance of out-fighting you, strong and fast as you are."
"So you did. I thought you had lost your weapon, since you weren't carrying anything obviously weaponlike. Should I reevaluate the potential threat of that little stick on your belt? And it's not that I think you're going to hurt me, it's that you being able to hurt me makes me slightly nervous whether or not you're going to."
"Well, better get to work."
Getting the ship to an inhabited island involves communicating from a distance, something Loki hasn't observed yet. He has a set of forty flags, and he raises them out the top of the ship in particular patterns. The village responds with its own flags.
Nick explains the meanings as he goes, the entire conversation is:
My vessel is damaged. Request permission to land.
Are you capable of maneuvering?
Capable of limited maneuvering. No danger of loss of lift.
Permission to land granted.
Then they carefully line up, letting off little spurts of water and gas and turning the engines up and down and using the control surfaces on the one remaining wing. In a little more than two hours, Nick's ship is securely tied to a wooden pole sticking out over a farming village of eight houses and some twenty people.
"Alright. Thanks for helping me set down. You could get off here if you want, but my offer to ferry you to a good-size town still stands, after I make at least a crude replacement for that wing." He slides down the ship's ropes and starts trying to trade with the farmers.
In fact, she can have two entire days as he carves down some of the tree branches into moving parts and structural components, trades some pork for glue and cotton fabric made from the farmers' own crops, replaces the broken glass in his greenhouse with some spares from a box in the cargo bay, and assembles a smaller and rather crude-looking facsimile of the wing that was torn off by that squid-thing. He is available for conversation between these activities, as are the farmers.
(She's also discreetly trying to figure out what things she can think of that seem feasible with their materials have and have not been invented yet.)
The main limitation in terms of resources seems to be that there is almost no metal of any kind available, and everything else is rather more scarce than she is used to. Organic things are plentiful, wood and the strange floating rocks are used for most constructions.
As much as possible is recycled, so they have material and chemical processing down pat. There are plenty of things she could invent and use or sell that they don't seem to have - complex clockwork, good-quality telescopes, medicine, more efficient engines that aren't mostly made of ceramic. Electrical devices are almost completely unknown (falling under 'lost technology') but the materials to make them are probably locable, if rare.
All right. So she may be able to establish herself as an inventor - they certainly spend enough time worrying about running into things that she imagines they'd appreciate telescopes, and the basics are simple. But she'd like to do it someplace a bit bigger than this. She decides she'll carry on with Nick if he'll have her, and tells him so.
"That squid tentacle will fetch a decent amount of coin if we find a town with at least a few thousand people. It occurs to me that I should pay you for it - How does half of the squidmeat's value once I sell it sound? I keep the other half because you were on my ship, and the squid smashed it up a non-negligible amount."
The town is a fairly impressive sight, almost as vertical as it is horizontal. There are lots of parks and urban gardens and pretty wildlife in the surrounding islands. People move around on little cars suspended from ropes, or miniature balloon-like things. The ship dockyard has some three dozen vessels of widely varying size and design attached to it, which Nick's somewhat-battered houseship soon joins.
...And then stops falling a few seconds later. Upon closer inspection, there is a web of rope hanging under the entire town, held up by poles extending outward from the lowest and outermost islands.
It will take Nick a few hours to arrange for repairs to his ship and a buyer for the squid and all his other food and his tree.
Loki is free to walk around the town, handed a few wooden coins (yes, wooden, and marked with a peculiar symbol that seems to be on a lot of this town's buildings - a logo of sorts), and advised to return at sunset for the rest of her money.
One might pay attention to the helpful maps posted here and there. Some of the larger islands have names, the one she's on right now is "Stairway." It's probably the most vertical, and seems to be a hub of sorts. If she wants glass and tools, why not try for the island labelled "Glissei's Glassware Workshop"?
There are telescopes by a window, conveniently labelled 'for demonstration purposes'. They are mostly made of wood and what looks like bone apart from the glass bits, very bulky, and if she looks through one, she will observe that it has weak magnification, it is difficult to adjust the focus.
Still, with this kind of materials cost she's going to have to have a collaborator or some interim sort of work. She goes out of the shop and wanders a bit more.
The best tools are made of bone, the rest are wooden. Metal is too valuable to be used for tools, generally. (Nick's tools were all bone) One can find most purely mechanical tools one wants, from axes to hammers to pliers to shovels to wrenches - though one might have to visit a specialist shop to find, for example, a particular kind of scissors.
That'll be a change. She doesn't want alcohol. She'll take a veggie pie and a fruit tart. Maybe she should hunt things. If she flew more or less straight up over an island, killed something in midair...? She'd still need a way to transport it from wherever she caught it to a buyer, which means a ship, which is probably out of her reach for now.
Someone tries to steal the rest of her money by casually picking her pocket when they think Loki's not looking.
"Fuck. Look, I need to eat. My daughter needs to eat. Our farm burned down to bare rock, I don't have anywhere to go."
He does seem to be pretty underfed, and his clothes are scruffy. But he's shaking too much for that to seem like the whole and unaltered truth.
The security councilman recognizes the pickpocket. His hand goes to a wooden stick on his belt, but he doesn't draw it. "Ma'am, that man has a record of violent and impulsive actions. I suggest you cease to associate with him immediately."
"What the fuck am I supposed to do?!" The pickpocket yells, "You want me to just shut up, keep my head down, and let my little girl starve?"
The officer's tone is stonelike. "My role is to keep the peace. Your daughter is not my problem unless she plans to incite violence. You could always sign up for a month in the pipes, or the farms, use your pay to feed her."
The security man has no comment. He'll just continue staring threateningly at the pickpocket.
"We agreed on the price of one silgram per ten kilograms of tentacle, which works out to 49.3 grams of silver. The local currency is Liams, about 500 liams to a gram of silver, so you get 24 grams of silver and 325 Liams, or 12325 Liams."
The veggie pie and fruit tart cost her two Liams total. Paper was advertised in a shop at 9 Liams per sheet.
"It should take care of the wing and then some. Especially since I managed to sell my temporary replacement. I haven't taken a good look at my internals yet, though. If something important on the inside is subtly destroyed I could be taking a loss. But accidents happen, right?"
"Meat is pretty valuable in general, but squid in particular is only so ridiculously expensive because hardly anybody human is stupid enough to try to hunt them. You stand a much better chance, obviously, but if you take them down regularly you'll flood the market. There's other airborne wildlife that most people don't bother, though - I can suggest a particular book if you want to take up hunting, and you can prowl bookstores for it. Unless this town has a library? Not all of them do."
Nick's squid buyer arrives. She looks rich, given the very fancy-looking clothes and the guards. Squid tentacles are hauled out. Money changes hands. After being excruciatingly polite until the rich lady leaves, Nick comes over to give Loki a small pile of coins - mostly wooden, but with a few copper squares and one small silver circle. He explains which coins are what denominations. "I'll be here for a couple of weeks fixing my ship, if you want to talk to someone who's less than a total stranger. Other than that, I think this is where we part ways. Good luck in all your ventures, Loki."
Over the next few days, Nick does some careful figuring. It is actually possible to return to the same place you came from, just difficult. Predicting the prevailing winds and careful dead reckoning might do it. Of course, he also needs to actually kill the thing.
He finds Loki.
"Hello, Nick," she says, setting down the last crate in a haul. "What brings you here?"
"I figured, you're the one that fought it last time, and quite well too. So I wanted to ask if you would like to go squid-hunting. The money you have so far was just three tentacles' worth. A whole squid at the new price will make us both rich enough to buy a workshop. Same split as before as long as you pay for half the supplies."
"I will warn you that this is somewhat risky, though. It's tricky but doable to come back to the same town we left after we find a squid. But if the squid eats one of us, or breaks through the floatstone shell of my ship... For that kind of money, though, I'm willing to risk it. What do you think?"
"Please find it if you can. I need to refill consumables, expand my coldroom to fit an entire squid, and buy lots of ice. I'm going to disassemble my greenhouse, too, it'll just get smashed if we get into a fight with an adult squid. Would a walkway or platforms around the outside of the ship make it easier to fight a squid? I could build some. I'm already going to make a net launcher to try and tangle it up."
The town has a public library. The book she wants is not in it. A certain bookstore does have it, and this particular bookstore will let you sit in a comfy sort of cafe area and read things for a much smaller fee than buying it outright. (Paper is expensive, so the book is also rather expensive)
They develop from eggs. Adults have a large main body with a bulbous gas sac above and forty to sixty long, flexible tentacles below. Their eyes are on the bottom of their heads. The brain, mouth, and other organs are in a compact section that has some chitinous armor in adults. Identifiable weak spots near vital organs include the center of the mouth, the eyes, and two joints in the chitin shell that might open a bit when the squid moves.
The squid that attacked Nick's ship was apparently a young one - of the drawings in this book, it looked most like the five-year-old squid. Adult squids are a good four or five times larger, are noted to be faster and more aggressive, and also have sharp claw-like structures on the ends of their tentacles, which typically come with a paralytic poison. Squids are noted to be fairly intelligent, and like to attack things that look like Jellywings, slow creatures that resemble living balloons and eat certain species of floating plants.
Puncturing the gas sac is undesirable, which will make this a challenge. Probably the best plan will be to get it in the eye. The claws on the tentacles will be annoying, but she isn't trying to fight the squid alongside Thor; it will merely be mildly inconvenient if Nick learns more about her magic powers than she's interested in disclosing right away.
When she has read everything the book has about squids she goes home and notes to the person from whom she has rented the apartment that she's going on a hunting trip and will be departing soon, though she doesn't know exactly when.
Several days pass with no word from Nick, though a lot of people of various sorts visit his ship. The greenhouse's plants disappear, its glass is packed away, the stone framework goes down, a smooth platform with convenient railings and poles for balancing on replace it. A large section of the cargo bay is emptied and walled off with heat-trapping fur on either side of the walls.
Five days later, another freighter bringing ice comes from the cold high-altitude high-latitude ice farms. Nick buys the entire load, fills the walled section, and comes to inform Loki that it's time to go.
"I remember asking about Asgard, but I don't think you ever answered. What do people do for a living there? Probably there's farmers, everyone needs food, but what else?"
"You really only find those specialized jobs in big towns here. A few adventurers try to explore the upper latitudes in hope of finding leftover technology from the orignal settlers. I even considered trying it once. Would you call the town guards warriors? They would use slingshots to drive off pirates or beasts if the town was attacked."
On this trip, Loki has night work. She needs to take careful records of the ship's direction and wind speed when Nick is too asleep to do it. These measurements will be used to find their way back.
"Well, call me a bleeding heart. You didn't have a house or tools or anything. You probably could have fed yourself, but you'd have been pretty miserable the first time a storm came along. Those idiot passengers are why I laid out a lot of rules for you on the first trip, though I know you enough to trust you have common sense now."
By the end of this he's yelling. He takes a deep breath. "I try to screen people for common sense before talking to them for more than five minutes or inviting them onto my ship. Other people are three quarters of why I don't have a bigger ship - this is the largest one I can manage by myself. I built her from scratch."
Is that a storm approaching from the east? It is! Nick moves to point the ship west and considers. "This is a problem. It's a large-front storm and we're right in the middle of its path. We're closer to the bottom limit of the storm, but we need to go up. So either we backtrack, or we risk not getting above it in time."
He acquires paper and starts doing some math.
This state of affairs continues for about an hour and a half. There is some violent shaking in the middle bits, but eventually they are clear of the storm.
"I think I need a nap."
If it takes too long to find any and they don't attack the ship either, she may see what squids think of illusion jellywings. She probably can't make them really convincing having only seen a picture, but it would get a squid to come out of hiding, and then she could spear it.
Nick doesn't seem to be too worried. "I brought plenty of food and water, and the gas cells were full. We can cruise around for a few days, no rush. The only thing is that every hour does make it trickier to get back again."
"I'm mostly wary of unconditional promises. If there is a compelling reason to reveal something I promised to keep secret, I will reveal the secret. If I promise to, I don't know, keep it secret that I saw someone hanging out in front of an abandoned building. Discovering them with a bloody knife and hearing that someone was murdered inside is a good reason. Thinking that abandoned buildings should be left alone is not a good reason."
"Mm. Well. I can do a number of things which I have not told you about. I would like to disclose one of them so as to speed this excursion up. I assure you that if you ever hear of a murder which could only have been committed with the use of my unusual abilities you will not be obliged to keep your promises to me, but do I otherwise have your word on your silence?"
"But I'm getting sidetracked. For now: Squid. The best way to attract it would be a large, injured-looking jellywings. The older and bigger they are, the more they accumulate damage and the easier they are for squid to hunt. Shall I keep the ship as steady as possible while you attempt to lure in our ticket to riches?"
It's angry now. Loki doesn't need to worry about it running away.
She shortens the haft of her spear, drawing her and the squid closer together - it is light enough to float and she is not, so this draws it down rather than her up.
She twists.
It's light enough to float and she's not, but it's also very big. Loki loses her footing is forced to grab one of the railings around the fighting platform, or go up. Given how the tentacles are arranged, though, closer to its mouth might actually the safest place to be.
The squid screams in pain when the spear twists, but it's not done fighting yet.
She shortens the spear further. She'll go up; she can pull tricks with leverage if it tries to drag her away from the ship.
If she can get close enough to cling to it and stab it between the chitin she'll take the shot.
She gets close enough to cling to the base of one of the tentacles. It's slippery and squishy and slimy, but it's solid enough to hold onto.
When the squid tries to shake her off, a gap opens in the chitin.
"Well, it's very intellectually stimulating work but I go through a lot of paper. That was one of the more time-consuming spells. The other healing ones built on some of the same groundwork, they didn't take as long. My first was fifty years. Is this the only room it tentacled its way into?"
He extracts his sword. There's a tentacle here, might as well get to work! Remove the last foot of the thing first, carefully, poison glands and all. Then cut it into light-enough-to-lift segments and carry the whole pile into the ice-room.
After taking care of the tentacle, well, there's some four dozen more up top so he heads to the roof.
"My first solo was a wyvern," she reminisces. "I had its tail made into a knife but I don't have it with me. Mostly I had my sister along, helping, sometimes her friends too. This one, well, yes, one always learns things, but nothing easily put into words."
"Well, the cargo bay is full and the rest of the ship is pretty narrow. The platform on the roof and some furs? They're probably the best padding I have - there are some rubber things in my mechanisms but not enough to make a mat. We can wear ropes so we won't fall off completely."
"...Good point. I was referring to the fact that all the stories of pirates I've heard of involve them descending by rope and fighting the target ship's crew with everyone still attached to their ropes. I had a friend who survived a pirate attack once, and to hear him tell it neither side fought to kill. But stories are stories, and you're the one with real experience fighting things so I should trust your judgement."
Nick comes back with his thread. With the bright blue light making the leak obvious, he carefully lays down the glue-soaked patch, trying not to open up any more holes. A bone needle pushes thread through to hold it in place, and the material is flexible enough to seal up again over the needle-holes.
"Good catch. I could barely smell it from that side of the room. Now we get to be even more careful about sparks and check over each and every every cell thoroughly, what fun."
They check the cells thoroughly. No further leaks are evident. With a few windows open, the smell slowly dissipates over the next few hours.
After lunch and some further chores, Nick would like to continue learning to fight.
Well, then, he gets a review of all the ways to fall, and then he can learn to retain his grip on someone he's trying to keep hold of. Loki doesn't break any of his fingers - she doesn't rely on mere superior strength to break his incorrect grips at all. If he does it wrong a little twist of her arm will free her wrist.
He manages to learn the grips fairly quickly, though using leverage correctly escapes him for a while. Gripping things and climbing around is an essential part of living on an airship - a few new ways to do it to a person and not a rope are quickly learned when he leans on the old patterns.
They arrive at the town. There is a careful dance of ascending and descending and left and right. Apart from Nick swearing at the pilot of another ship with poor maneuvering skills (Nick's ship comes off better from the encounter, it's made of rock and the other one is not), nothing particularly exciting happens.
The squid-lady apparently had someone watching the skies for Nick's ship. She is waiting eagerly by the docks. With her fine clothes and guards, of course.
Nick is a good negotiator. Unless Loki objects or wants to keep a trophy, he sells every part of the squid, from the poison barbs to the teeth to the deflated gas sac, except the chitin shell, which he wants to keep for himself.
When she's finished, she addresses both of them. "I would like to invite the two of you to a feast in your honor, two days from now, if you would accept. We will eat the first of this wonderful bounty there."
Nick glances at Loki.
The Baroness nods. "My staff will contact you with details. Any clothing of reasonable quality will be appropriate so long as it... Minimizes exposure." She leaves.
Nick turns to Loki. "Your share is 2060 grams of silver. My share is 1900 grams. The difference is to account for the chitin shell, as if I'd bought your half of it. Does this sound reasonable? I have the accounting all right here, if you wish to check."
The math is in long rows of neat handwriting. The figures line up perfectly, every part of the squid accounted for, as well as the original cost of squid-hunting supplies.
"Your math is correct. I have little enough familiarity with the markets that I cannot but trust your pricing of the chitin, but you came to ready agreement with the Baroness on the other parts. And if I find that you have been cheating me, I will be very angry with you. Should this not suffice?"
"When I originally dropped you off here, I fully expected not to see you again for many years, if ever. Then the squid-hunting opportunity came up. I might have just wandered off again, but with this much money I suppose I shall take a break from wandering."
Loki changes some of her silver for wooden coins, gets lunch - until she has a reliable income she will stick with vegetarianism - and then goes to visit the glazier she was talking to. She could probably buy her own workshop now, but she has little desire to churn out telescopes by hand. She would rather get a cut of what he profits by making them and spend her time on magic and exploring her new surroundings.
The glazier is rather surprised to see her. He had heard that she left a few days ago. It seems the expectation of never seeing someone again is strongly rooted. He still has her telescope diagrams, but has not yet attempted to construct one. He has questions - first of all, where does she expect to get enough silver to make mirrors on any kind of scale. Second of all, how in the world is he supposed to make a curved mirror?!?
Working from memory without any of the notes she took while studying optics makes it difficult, but she does her best to render the steps into something he'll be able to do. He should certainly make one prototype and see how easily he can sell that before he tries to churn out a great many improved telescopes, she does not disagree.
He is, however, willing to develop mirrored lenses to specification for a reasonable price plus materials cost, and let her build and sell the telescopes herself or hire someone else to do it.
It will take the glassmaker a few rounds of prototypes to produce an acceptable lens. In the meantime, Baroness Hath's feast arrives. She is contacted by one of the guards and given an address and a time to arrive. The address contains a fancy manor. It's constructed largely of wood and glass, in contrast to the floatstone buildings everyone else uses. Nick is at the door at the appropriate time.
Baroness Hath stands up. The room slowly quiets, and then she announces them. "Let us welcome the brave hunters Loki and Nicholas, who brought us the meat of a great beast! With this feast, we will celebrate one hundred and eighty years since the founding of the fine town of Liam!"
More quietly, she tells them, "If you would like to tell the tale I'm sure we would all enjoy hearing it. But if you don't want to that is fine as well."
There is lots of meat, lots of alcohol, lots of everything. It's all fresh, and whoever cooked it is excellent.
Squid really is delicious, once you get used to the texture.
Loki likes feasts. She is gentle with the alcohol, enjoys the meat, and can live with the mouthfeel of her kill for a polite serving's worth. "It's not so much of a tale. We went up, a squid visited us, and then I stabbed it until it died, the ship somewhat the worse for wear."
"If you are so modest, then it is all the more credit to you." Baroness Hath raises one more toast to the squid-hunters, but it's pretty clear that this feast is not really about them.
A few people seem to have a little too much to drink, and are 'advised' by the green-uniformed and stone sober Security Councilmen to leave. The security council is clearly well-respected. These rich and powerful people obey their judgement without questioning, even when drunk.
Nick decides to leave after about an hour and a half. "As nice as this feast is," he tells Loki, "I can't help but thinking it would be twice as good with half the people. And that's a sign that I've had enough 'socializing' for one day."
The feast could be considered over when more than a third of all persons still present are asleep/passed out drunk.
And she gets cracking on a transmutation spell.
This should actually not be that hard for anything chemically simple - pure elements. A full version that will interact with things like wood will certainly take a very, very long time, and this project uses almost nothing high-level she remembers from her previous spellwork, but turning any single-element into any other single-element, particularly if she preserves mass, might be doable in only ten to fifteen years. Of course, the most common elements here are gases that will yield very little mass - even the rock is probably admixed silica - but hydrogen is cheap and metal is expensive and both of these things are elements.
This time the result is nearly perfect. He has a little trouble making the glass completely smooth because he doesn't have any steel tools, but the current results should be good enough for a prototype. Can he have some silver with which to turn the two required lenses into mirrors?
Then she goes looking for buyers, presuming that they'll probably be someone with a ship but not necessarily.
He gets into a small bidding war with another ship-owner and pays 140 grams of silver for it, a little over twice the cost of materials and netting Loki more profit than six months' wage as a crate-hauler.