On a whim, Kal walked to the back wall and began eyeing the gauge clusters there. This was the reactor’s forward bulkhead, conveniently placed with access doors and maintenance indicators in easy reach. Gone were the days of climbing through plumbing, covered in grease; this powerplant wasn’t just easily maintained, it was designed for it. Liquefacted poccol, with its crystallized akorol precisely augur-fed, meant she didn’t need to monitor pressure or feed rate anymore either. Fill up the tanks in port, fiddle with the reaction balancer settings for a few minutes, then throw the switch and off they’d go. Powerful, dependable, and boring.
But then of course, the Interloper was the superior ship. The Caprice, capable though she had been, could never match the newer vessel’s speed or handling - and that was despite being almost half the size. Technology was progressing at a rate even Kal had a hard time keeping up with. She looked back towards her desk, piled high with the books and drafting equipment which would ensure her future. Or, so she hoped. The more time they spent traveling in the land of dreams, the less certain she became of anything. That’s why she had to keep studying. She reckoned it wasn’t long before airships wouldn’t even need engineers stationed on them, getting all their work done on the ground, so it would be better to swap careers and become a designer. Not that she wanted to leave Thulias, but… the day was coming all the same.
From behind the tool rack in the corner, there was a sudden flash of light and a scuffle. Kal looked over. “Find yourself a snack? Good boy.” A furry little marsupial sauntered out of the shadows with a cockroach in his mouth, clearly pleased, and scaled his owner’s pant leg. Settling onto her shoulder, he reached up with dextrous fingers and began working on the bug, biting off pieces. Kal wrinkled her nose.
“You know Nikos,” she said, tousling his oversized ears, “I’m not your dining table.”
Kal looked out a porthole into the night, pitch black except for the occasional wisp of passing cloud illuminated by the vessel’s blinking nav lights. At this hour, Thulias will have engaged the autopilot and gone to bed. Things were always quiet on the way home from an expedition; the mage rarely made an appearance, and if there were still adventurers aboard - not this time, rest their souls - they would surely be sound asleep as well. It was one of the few times Kal could study in peace, or even just have some quiet solitude. And sometimes… the engineer walked over to the railing and focused on the decks below. Silence.
“Nikos, tools.”
Sometimes, she would do a little exploration of her own.
Nikos, having finished his meal, leapt down from Kal’s shoulder and loped over to the corner rack. He was a smart creature, and she’d taught him to retrieve many of her smaller items by name. The most common of these, she bundled into a leather pouch that would fit comfortably into his own. By the time he caught back up, she was already on the stairs, and he ran down the railing before jumping to her again. They were headed for the expedition floor.
The lowest of the Interloper’s decks was originally meant for oversized cargo. Enormous double doors on either side of the bay fully retracted to maximize access, such that land vehicles could be driven aboard. Lamarent Technologies, renowned airship manufacturer, had pitched the vessel to the Alor Air Force as a personnel carrier for rapid deployment of small forces near the frontlines. However, they attracted far more interest from private entities such as Greiman Carrier Services, which commissioned dozens of the craft for parcel delivery. Kal had wondered at the time how Thulias managed to get hold of one, let alone pay for it - she quickly came to suspect that their benefactor had arranged for both.
Cuvarri. Kal hated them. She hated their weird outfit, and their raspy metal voice, and the way they could just appear and disappear from the ship at will. Some natural philosophers could shift phase - the most famous ones, anyway - but even Kal knew how impressively difficult it was for them to make it across town in one piece. To teleport hundreds of kilometers, across the open ocean, on and off of a cruising airship at altitude… it wasn’t supposed to be possible. And yet Cuvarri could do it without any apparent difficulty. The mage would occasionally mention “the One”, which Kal took to mean their backing organization, but who they were and what business they had in the Slumbering Isles was not something she cared to consider. She was stuck with them, and that was enough.
She was also stuck with the many, many modifications they had made to what was now the expedition floor. Cabinets, panels, and arcane devices of all kinds lined the walls. A chute had been installed so the Interloper could airdrop packages, to support the adventurers who leapt from what used to be the cargo doors into the figments below. And in the center of the bay, dominating the space, was the Reverie Drive.
Kal stepped quietly forward, her eyes fixed on the drive. It seemed almost… alive, somehow, with indicator lights pulsing gently on and off like a heartbeat. The engineer looked around, a last check to ensure she was alone, and hurried up to it. Excitement always eventually overtook her on these late-night visits; just her and the machine, her curiosity and its many, many secrets. She laid a hand on the control board, examining the familiar array of buttons and dials. As far as she knew, nothing else in the world was capable of doing what this machine was made for.
The Slumbering Isles were barely describable as an island chain floating in the sky, meandering over the oceans of the world in ways that made them impossibly difficult to track. Finding them was down to luck as much as anything, and their strange nature made perceiving them an even greater task. Legend had it that their appearance was linked to the mind of the dormant God of Creation, and that they shifted appearance to match his ever-changing dreams. A fairy story for children, Kal used to think, and a place sane people did not seriously claim to have seen. But she had not just seen them now, but traveled there - many times in fact, because the Interloper had been specially outfitted for the task. The Reverie Drive made it possible.
Whenever the Interloper picked up a new group of adventurers, Cuvarri would make an appearance to teach them to use the drive and then disappear just as promptly. They would return only rarely to help make sense of whatever it was the group was tasked with bringing back. Kal was certain these items allowed the drive to function, helping it attune itself to the isles - or figments, as the mage called them - and stabilize them so they could be explored. Before their previous expedition, Kal had seen Cuvarri open a side hatch in the drive she’d never noticed before, and she was intent on investigating it. As the ship’s engineer, she wanted to understand everything that went on aboard, no matter how arcane it might seem.
“Nikos, light.”
The wandering Loghec trader Kal bought the little marsupial from those years ago had certainly tried to tell her what his species was called, but she had no idea how to repeat the word. Regardless, like all his kin Nikos had enormous ear flaps that folded neatly around his skull and onto his back almost like a cape. But when hunting in the darkness of his native jungles - or behind shipboard furniture - he could whip his ears open in a flash and reveal a bright bioluminescence, stunning his prey before pouncing. After a bit of work, Kal had taught him to use his ears like a flashlight, holding them open so she could see in the dark.
As Nikos dutifully unfurled his ears, Kal found what she was looking for in his blue-tinged light. She pulled out a screwdriver and started working on the screws holding the hatch shut. The door itself was easy enough to get open, and the fasteners were retained with springs so she didn’t lose them, but angling Nikos properly to see inside proved somewhat difficult. She leaned forward to get a better look. It almost seemed like a standard fuse box, which would have been disappointing, but there was something about the way the multicolored light danced within the glass beads that drew her in…
“I do not appreciate teenagers tinkering with my life’s work, Kalliena.”
Kal lost her balance and nearly pitched over, sending the driver and a chittering Nikos to the floor. Heart racing, she gathered herself and turned to face Cuvarri, the Interloper’s haunting benefactor.
“The, uh… the access hatch came open in a storm this afternoon. I was just trying to reach in and… and close it.”
“It is unlikely that the inhibitor panel door simply swung open due to turbulence. You should not fool around with machinery you cannot understand.”
Cuvarri did not wait for a response, instead moving towards the drive. Kal scrambled out of the way, happy to have a clear path between herself and the door back to the upper decks. She watched as the mage produced a bundle of fuses from within their voluminous robes, replacing several existing ones inside the panel without looking before closing the door with a click. As they returned their masked gaze back to Kal, the screws torqued themselves into place on their own.
“It’s possible that my previous group of contractors was lost permanently within the figments due to an incorrect inhibitor configuration. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for more such misfortune, would you?”
“Well no,” stammered Kal, “but I… Wait a minute, this thing isn’t even finished? And you’re sending people out there?”
“The Reverie Drive was completed before you were born, Kalliena. We will still be learning to use it long after you’re gone. And all of my contractors well understand the risks and rewards associated with these missions. Captain Davimar knows them. Do you?”
She was preparing a retort, but just then Nikos scurried over and up her leg, returning to his spot on her shoulder without much care for the placement of his claws. Distracted, she lost her timing, and Cuvarri moved over to inspect the drive’s control board. With a hmph for emphasis, Kal turned and stormed out of the bay, finding herself breaking into a run as soon as she could no longer see the mage. They were extremely unnerving, every time, and she wanted that chill gone as quickly as possible.
Up the stairs and back on the mechanical floor, Kal plopped onto her chair with intent. Reaching for her pen and drafting paper, she thumbed through the textbook to the exercise section. It was time to get serious about her future.
