The city of Baltimare has what historians only stopped calling a chequered past after the First Escape of Discord and the chess board appearance of the local Ponyville area. It was first founded when a travelling fish-griffon pranked a noblepony by telling her that the seaweed in the Horseshoe Bay was a local delicacy, which backfired slightly when Her Royal Highness Princess Celestia was seen trying some at a royal banquet one evening several weeks later.
Celestia would later admit to not actually enjoying it and just keeping her smile running as usual, but by that point the court had seen this and all immediately started asking for it (assuming it was an acquired taste and that they just didn’t get it at the time). The town would grow into a joint pony-griffon fishing port and later trading city, with the shipyards of Baltimare crafting some of the finest seagoing and later air-ships in all Equus.
It also had a reputation as a pirate town, given that nobody in Equestria paid much attention to what happened on the seas beyond the horizon, meaning that so long as no one asked too closely about where your cargo came from, any ship could dock there. And in any town where pirates make port, there will be taverns and pubs to accommodate their tastes for food and booze.
Like all good back corners, the corner of The Timber Heart pub was shrouded in shadow and smelled slightly of wine. Many stories have been told involving that particular corner, including one about a griffon ranger, 4 breezies and a magical piece of jewellery that the barman thought was rather funny, even if it did cost him several pillows.
Pitching Moment wasn’t much for history, so didn’t really care about the legacy of the corner she was sat in. The light grey unicorn with blue-white striped hair and cloud for a cutie mark was much more interested in seeing whether the solution to her problems could be found at the bottom of this particular bottle of wine.
So engrossed was she in her studies that she failed to notice when the pub’s door opened and she completely ignored the character who entered. She didn’t notice as the pub’s newest patron headed up to the bar, collected a drink, and headed towards her.
“You’re in my spot” the figure announced after standing in front of her for a few moments. At this, she looked up.
Her first thought was ‘minotaur’. Her second disagreed with her first and pointed out the fact that minotaurs usually have horns. Her third also mentioned that they’re also usually a bit bigger, and would probably have to stoop down in a room with a ceiling the height it was. Her fourth noted that minotaurs don’t usually wear that many clothes. Her fifth grew exasperated with her and nearly shouted at her that minotaurs are blue, not slightly off pink.
Her sixth was that she’d been staring for a while and should probably reply to whatever the not-minotaur was.
“What?” Yeah, that’d do it
“That there is my seat” said the not-minotaur, smiling strangely at her. “There are many like it, but that one is mine.” It dawned on the slightly inebriated Pitching Moment that he was trying to take her seat away from her.
“What do you mean ‘this is your seat’?” she asked, slightly annoyed. “I don’t see your name on it.”
“Sure it is! It’s carved underneath the table, just to your left there!”
Pitching leaned over to look. As she did so, she was suddenly pushed so that she overbalanced and fell to the floor. As she stood up, the figure stole the chair and sat down. Pitching whirled around. “Hey!” she shouted.
The figure put down his drink, a large rocks glass filled with what looked like whiskey, his hat and a plate of hay fries, the latter of which he pushed towards Pitching with a “Ok, here you are”.
Pitching spluttered for a moment, before settling herself down in the chair opposite where she had been sitting and taking one of the hay fries. “What do you want?” She asked.
“Who says I want anything?” the stranger replied. “Maybe I just want to sit and drink! Goodness knows I’ve not had a drink in… well far too long at least,” he continued as he took a swig of his drink. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.”
“You sit at my table without asking and steal my chair, whilst I’m sitting in it I might add. You clearly want to speak to me. What do you want?”
“Believe me or not, this is actually my seat, or at least used to be,” the stranger repeated his claim. “I’ve been out of town for a while. Why are you here?”
The question reminded Pitching of why she was halfway through the bottle in the first place, and she slumped back to her original position of slouched over the table from her new seat. “Why should you care?” she grumbled.
“Hey, I see someone drinking as much as I usually would for breakfast, I’m gonna want to know why! So, come on, have at me. What’s got your tail in a twist?”
Pitching sighed. “I just got kicked out of the only job I ever wanted ‘cos some stupid asshat up in Canterlot decided that he didn’t like the airship I built for him.”
The stranger cocked his head sideways. “Airship?”
“Yeah, I design airships for a living, over in the Ember-Air Shipyards. Or,” she sighed again, “I used to at least.”
“I didn’t know someone could fire you over something like that.”
“That’s what I thought too, but when I went to the guard about it they said that it wasn’t their problem,” Pitching grumbled, a stormy look on her face.
The stranger looked like he was thinking hard about something. He took a long pull from his drink, looked slyly at Pitching, and asked, as innocently as possible, “Can I see your design?”
Pitching lit up her horn and levitated out the satchel she’d left underneath the table, and withdrew a blueprint, spreading it out for them both to see.
The stranger looked over the drawing with an appreciative eye. “That’s an interesting design. I’m betting that it wasn’t a griffon that rejected this design.”
“Right” Pitching agreed. “We did manage to sell the airship to a griffon mercenary thankfully, but the original client viewed the hawk-head design as an insult, so forced the company to fire me.”
The stranger leaned back in his chair, took a sip of his drink, then leaned his head back, obviously thinking about something. “How much does it cost to have a custom airship like that one built?” he asked after a moment.
“That one was 30,000 bits,” Pitching replied. “It really all depends on how large you want it though, I’ve worked on projects that can be anywhere from 10,000 all the way up to 250,000 bits, although that one was commissioned by Princess Luna after her return.” At this, the stranger looked puzzled.
“Luna? She was away?”
At this, Pitching gave him her best ‘you serious?’ look.
“Hey, I said I’ve been out of the loop didn’t I?” the stranger continued quickly.
“I suppose…” Pitching replied. “Ok, so you know the Mare in the Moon?” The stranger gave her a blank look. “Seriously? Every foal in Equestria knows the story!”
The stranger looked down at himself and back up at her with his best ‘not a pony’ look.
Pitching took a moment to suspend her disbelief enough so that she could believe that someone could have not heard about this. “Basically, Princess Luna went crazy just over a thousand years ago and tried to declare eternal night, calling herself Nightmare Moon, but Celestia beat her and sealed her in the moon for a thousand years.”
“The hell? I thought those two were inseparable!” the stranger muttered, mostly to himself.
“Well, as it turns out, Luna’d gotten possessed by some evil nightmare spirit or something so wasn’t herself,” Pitching continued. “Fast forward to a couple years back, she gets out of the moon and tries again, but this time the Elements of Harmony blasted her with the power of rainbows and friendship and turned her good again. Anyway, airships hadn’t been invented back in her time, so we got to build one for her!”
“That I understand,” the stranger chuckled. “It was all waterborne ships back in those days.” He went back to staring at the ceiling, occasionally sipping his drink, lost in thought. Pitching watched him for a few minutes, before going back to her own.
She was halfway through the plate of hay fries and her thoughts had meandered back towards interesting faces a certain prince could pull if she dunked a bucket of mud over his head when the stranger spoke up again. “So, what are your plans now?”
“Huh?” Pitching looked at him like he was crazy.
“Are you going to look for a job with another company?” he clarified his earlier question.
Pitching’s face fell back to its unhappy mode and she slumped back to the table. “I already asked around, and the prince has made it quite clear that no company that hires me will get any royal commissions ever again, so nopony will.”
“Prince you say? There’s a male alicorn now? And he’s that petty that he’ll ruin somebody’s life over an airship design that he didn’t care for?” the stranger sounded offended on her behalf.
“What? No, Prince Blueblood. He’s like, the head of the nobility or something? I don’t think he’s actually a prince, just calls himself that to appease his ego.”
“Ah, just a massive tool,” The stranger chuckled.
After another drink, he gave her a calculating look, then spoke again, almost hesitantly. “How hard would it be for you to build your own airship?”
Pitching looked at him like he was mad. “What are you drinking? I can’t afford my own airship!”
He gave her another look. “Ok, let’s say that you had all the money in the Royal coffers. Could you build it?”
Pitching opened her mouth to retort, but then the idea took root. “I guess you could…” she responded after a moment. “You’d need to get the materials pre-cut and delivered, order the tools and equipment and hire a workforce to help build it. You’d have to rent out dock space or build your own, either would be just as costly as each other really, but I suppose it would be possible.”
The stranger thought to himself for a minute. “She’d need to be the fastest thing in the sky, able to outrun the fastest pegasi at full speed,” he began, speaking slowly, almost to himself. “Quiet too, so that she could approach a sleeping dragon without waking it up. She wouldn’t need to be too tough, but she’d still want to be able to take a few mana bolts from a war mage or a dragon’s fire a few times before needing to be repaired. She’d want to have a fair amount of hold space for cargo while at the same time having just as much if not more defensive armament than a mercenary escort ship. And… let’s say ten crew members but operable by only two or three if needed.”
Pitching wanted to exclaim how silly the whole concept was, but as he spoke, ideas crept into her mind. Deck layout and engine locations, balloon envelope styles and decoration, flight systems and weapon mountings. Once the stranger had finished speaking, he sat back and watched as her eyes flicked left and right as slowly in her mind’s eye, an image of the airship she could build with those specifications slowly came into focus. It would be the greatest ship she, or anypony for that matter, had ever built.
“How much would it cost?” the stranger whispered just loudly enough for her to hear, but deep as she was in thought she didn’t realise he’d said anything. Her train of thought had well and truly left the station now and was accelerating down the tracks at breakneck speed. Material amounts and costs started adding themselves up, labour and the cost of a dock for the length of time required added itself to the figure.
“It’d be 300,000 bits at least, probably closer to 4 actually” she muttered.
“Capital!” exclaimed the stranger, shocking her back to reality. “I’ll provide the money, you provide the plans and we can go from there! Sound good to you?”
“What?” Pitching spluttered. “Are you serious? You have that kind of money?”
“…Not right now, but give me a couple of days and I’ll have that money.” He smiled at her. “So, are you in or not?”
Pitching blinked a few times. The thought occurred to her that if he was lying then she really had nothing to lose at this point, but if he wasn’t… “I’m in.”
The stranger put his hand up to his face and spat in his palm, before reaching out and grabbing her forehoof before she had a chance to pull it away. As soon as he let go, she pulled her foreleg back and wiped it disgustedly. The stranger ignored her protests as he got to his feet and downed the rest of his drink. “I’ll be back at this table same time next week. You bring your designs, I’ll bring the money, and we can go from there! We good? We’re good! Right then! Pitching Moment, I’m looking forward to our partnership!”
As he moved to pick up his hat, Pitching Moment managed to get a word in. “I think you’re crazy, but to Tartarus with it. I’ll see you in a week. Hang on, you never gave me your name! What do I call you?”
The largest smile Pitching Moment had ever seen spread across the stranger’s face. “This is a day in the history books for you, Pitching moment.” The smile broke into a grin as he twirled his hat in his fingers before placing it on his head It seemed to Pitching Moment as if this was something he’d been waiting to say all his life. “You will always remember this as the day that you met, Captain Jack Sparrow!”