//------------------------------// // Sinking, Soaring // Story: The Olden World // by Czar_Yoshi //------------------------------// Gerardo flew low over the swamped treeline, Maple held carefully in his powerful talons. He didn't trust her not to slip from his back, and so she dangled, carried with safety valued over comfort. He made out factories, fields and roads, sticking mostly to the original river course where no shadowed obstacles protruded from the newly-formed lake. The water's sweeping arrival had pushed and scattered so many buildings that nothing was certain, but his course was roughly true, and Sosa began to fall away, the dark tower of Karma Industries slowly approaching on his left. The waters rose around the land platform that served as the town's base, but didn't breach it, leaving Grand Acorn's primly-placed woodwork of shops and houses safe and dry. The streets weren't empty; some evacuees remained in the town who had failed to find room in the tower, others had emerged from their shelters to sit or stand in shocked vigil at the edge of the sloshing water. Wind tossed Gerardo's headcrest as he passed the tower's darkened windows, colorful murals of terrified faces plastered against them like imprisoned souls, watching the water and only visible when the angle was just right. Gerardo tried to meet their eyes as he passed, but to them, he was just a phantom in the night. They couldn't know he was flying to raise a legendary airship constructed in secret as a means of restoring Sosa's economic dominance... and even if they did, what difference would it make? Gerardo moved on, putting the tower behind him and shivering at the wind. The Earth District was still warm from its daylight baking, and hadn't suffered the frigid water that scoured the eastern valley, but even after Maple's pink magic he couldn't shake the memory of the lake's chill from his bones. West of Ironridge, the southern mountains turned, meandering in a northwesterly direction, and the Yule turned north to follow them. But it took its time doing so... or would have, if the ponies of the Earth District hadn't changed its route, forcing it to skirt a wider distance around the city, with the goal of improving drainage and usable land. Instead, they had gotten the Graveyard out of the deal, a desolate and lonesome monument to the past... and now the river had burst its rerouted banks, occupying both the new riverbed and old. Dozens upon dozens of abandoned ships bobbed fitfully where they had been retired, water gracing their dusty hulls once again, some floating, others leaning, some actively sinking and far too many mere shadows beneath the waves. They groaned of wood, metal and regret, knocking against each other in a listless attempt to roam, the waters calling them to service of a port that didn't exist. Above it all, the warehouse stood, its four walls keeping each other upright as the water surrounded it like an infinite moat. Any trace of the riverbank on which it had stood was gone, leaving it a lone citadel in the waves, water once more flowing inside through a broad entrance that had seen ships sail in and out in Sosa's glory days. Gerardo angled straight for that entrance, heart beating faster as he made for the cavernous interior, feathers rigid in anticipation of what he would find. The inside of the warehouse was dark, the floor completely flooded, water filling the work pit and washing up over the raised platform deck that surrounded it. The silhouette of a hull drifted aimlessly, the wooden supports that kept it off the ground having long since collapsed, and it gently knocked against the submerged shell of platforms. Gerardo circled it, soaring in close, but it looked as if even the initial shock of the flood hadn't fazed it. It made sense, after all: the ship's hull was made from proto-technology designed to usher in the next generation of sea ships. It was made to take a beating. At last, Gerardo furled his wings, landing on the ship's deck and carefully depositing Maple as he made to catch his breath. It bobbed faintly under him, performing its duty for the first time ever, new and polished and ready to serve. While the boats outside had been called back from the grave, this one was being given its maiden voyage, love and commitment and hope for the future pouring from every inch of its hoof-carved construction. As Gerardo affixed Maple to his back and began to make for the door belowdecks, it occurred to him that even without its mystical power source, the ship would make for a very seaworthy vessel, and could still sail the world the old-fashioned way. It was, after all, designed from the beginning with both air and water in mind. The stairs were pitch-dark enough to realize that in the absence of all other light, Maple's pink eyes glowed faintly. That was useful, Gerardo mused, pointing her forward like a flash club, still having to feel his way forward to avoid tripping. He reached the landing, turned, and fumbled with the door to the engine room. Fortunately, the ship's designers had put it near to the entrance, rather than buried in rooms and ladders and difficult hatches. The door slid open. Inside, a faint amber light intensified: emergency systems, powered by some backup battery aboard the ship, awoken by his presence. It wouldn't have been light enough to see by had his eyes not already been adjusted to the dark, but Gerardo found his way to the poles holding the cutie mark helmets with relative ease. There wasn't anywhere optimal to set Maple, so he settled for laying her against the wall, mentally resolving to drag out a mattress from the cabins at earliest convenience. He picked up a helmet and looked down at her. "You are fine with this, yes? One last time before we proceed?" Maple looked straight back at him, her pink irises the only part of her that was discernible under the light. They wavered, tried to move... and looked straight at him, asking for something she had no voice to specify. Gerardo tried to guess, though he wasn't the champion of that: after all the time Valey had left him, he hadn't been able to puzzle out what she had meant by 'no' in the eastern valley. "If this works, we'll be back to Starlight in a flash, and we will as well if it doesn't." Maple closed her eyes. "I'll take that as not a no, then." Gerardo stepped forward, reached, and gently affixed the helmet to Maple's cutie mark. It fit. Good. He turned to the consoles lining the interior wall; they were dim. Eyes struggling under the meager light, he scanned them for anything that looked like an on switch. One presented itself... Click. The room exploded, blinding Gerardo in pink. If his eyes hadn't been fully dilated, it wouldn't have been half as bad, but the underworld flames racing through the mesh of rails overhead forced him to scrunch his eyes, cover them with a talon, and avert his gaze. After several seconds, as he grew more used to the light that filtered through his eyelids and the whoosh of flames had smoothed to a soft shimmer like the magic of a very large unicorn, he dared open them. Maple shimmered. The cable connecting her to the terminals shimmered, but didn't break. The crystal mesh and twisting iron suspended from the ceiling was surrounded by a cloud of pink fog of seemingly infinite depth, stars twinkling so far behind it it could have been a portal to real space. The light and noise was coming from everywhere, all at once... and as the seconds turned into minutes, the reaction stayed steady. He glanced at Maple, and she stared back with eyes that flickered between pink and red, laying on her side and unable to move. She would be fine. Gerardo turned to make for the bridge. The rest of the ship was lit, too. Shinespark's harmony extractor powered everything, and now that it had an energy source, Gerardo was walking through one of the few places in Ironridge that wasn't suffering from a blackout. Lighting shone merrily, expertly engineered to illuminate floors and walls evenly without any point sources that were painful to look at. The cabin was alive, a broad bank of sensors and indicators and glowing lights on controls flashing on a console beneath the windshield. There were two chairs, pony-sized, in case the ship needed a co-pilot. Using his passing familiarity of manaship controls from sailing a Sosan model up the Yule to Riverfall, Gerardo easily picked out the seat with the ship's primary interface. The levers were labeled! How nice. One was thrown, causing even more of the cabin to come to life, including a side display prompting the first-time user to set a password. He grinned at that, found the earth pony-friendly input device amid the controls, and typed 'Starlight' just in case the ship wouldn't start without it. After a two-color boot sequence, the terminal finished setting itself up, boasting two accessible files and a host of ship functions. Gerardo idly inspected them, hoping one would be an operator's manual. The first was an audio recording with a note in the description: For Shinespark. I slipped this onto the data matrix prior to installation at Arambai's request. I don't know what it is, but he wanted you to have it upon completing our mission. Good job. -Gunga. Best to leave that one alone. But the second one... Bingo! A manual with full descriptions of the ship's controls and usage. Browsing quickly, Gerardo adjusted several more levers, turned a dial all the way up, backed out in the terminal and ran a specified program, and threw a final throttle... and was rewarded as the ship stopped rocking and gravity increased, the bottom pressing up against him. In the night of the Earth District, a gentle wake rocked the ghosts of retired boats trying to come back for duty. Out from the service warehouse, a ship edged stern first, the child and final fruit of Project Aslan. It floated there proudly under the sky... and then crackled with pink energy, mist and lightning swirling upwards and coalescing into a burning comet above the deck, connected to it by ethereal strands of energy. The comet pulsed, its tail streaking out behind like the ship was already soaring unchained through the sky, and with barely a groan the ship lifted until it was hovering, free from the water.