//------------------------------// // Chapter forty-two, Situations Sandy: Clever. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -A week later, the Ardent Survivor, Jacky- The more I took apart the mechanical beast, the more intrigued I was by its inner workings. Say whatever I will about Clockwork being part of a clearly evil organization, he obviously knew how to build complicated machinery. I so far had studied the front legs and head of the beastly machine after peeling away some of its rubbery outer layer, having poured out whatever oil was left in it into a jar to study later. Quite a bit of the oil had drained out onto the floor of the ballroom and most of the rest of it had been taken by the Nagrabah guards. The oil I got was what I managed squeeze out of several small pockets of it. Taking the golem apart and trying to work out how it worked was somewhat enticing for me. It had a magical crystal for a control node, similar to the one I pulled out the clockwork pony head I had disassembled. The crystals didn’t lend these machines anything resembling great intelligence, but this did mean that they could possibly only be directed by their creator and were well constructed to be impossible to tamper with. That fact would continue to be true unless I could find a unicorn, one who had at least something approaching an equivalent knowledge and skills in golem creation to help me. Clockwork’s golem control crystals were, without a doubt, entirely and completely useless to me. Surprisingly little magic went into the golems other parts, most of the magic needed was in the crystal that animated and operated the rest of the structure. The mechanics behind everything else in the golem, aside from the crystals, was actually quite sound and could be used in other more imaginative ways so long as I’m not trying to build a working golem. I liked caring for ‘The Ardent Survivor’ and working on a party tank that one time was a novel, if incredible, experience. So what was it that had me so interested in this mechanical beast that wasn’t a vehicle that I could fix or pilot? Well it had some imaginary gears in my head turning ever so slightly and I could feel an idea coming to the forefront of my mind. I wanted to build something, but I couldn’t quite figure out how I would go about doing it quite yet. The clockwork beast’s joints and inner workings were giving me quite a few ideas, but I’d need something powerful to make the most important part of the general idea come to life. My tinkering was a hobby and I didn’t think it would bear any fruit, because I wasn’t exactly good at creating new things. My expertise lay in repair of preexisting constructions, ones that I have a manual for how the things worked within them. There was also the fact that I had a habit of wrecking things with my very proximity. I still wanted to draw up a design concept for what I had in mind at least. It’s not like I really had much else to do at the moment, we were waiting on Ahuizotl, Dr. Caballeron and Teatime to make their move for the ‘Caves of Intrigue’. We did not want to cause a fracas in the city and we needed to eventually come up with plans to deal with each of the villainous guys. I was working another gear and shaft out of the machine, when something slipped and a spring sent a gear bouncing off my skull at high speeds. I was knocked onto my back and left groaning in pain on the floor, clutching at my now bruised head. There was nowhere that was absolutely safe from my luck for too long. I was thankful with the knowledge that my airship was never going to fall apart while I was on it, magical alchemy may or may not be a large factor in that. “Are you okay Captain?” Nefer, bless his innocent sounding soul, came into the room looking at the mess strewn about. “Just fine, minor concussion aside that is.” I sat up still clutching at my head as our resident green skullcap and pawed Nefer started to pad around and look at all the stuff I had been messing with for the last few days. “Anything to report Nefer?” “Nothing so far Captain. Belfry, Gene, Savannah and Flotsam haven’t seen anything noticeable all week. Those bad guys still must be working on acquiring the three other keys.” Nefer scrunched up his face in concentration as he looked me in the eyes. “Why aren’t we going after the other two keys?” “We don’t know what the keys look like, we don’t know where they are and information on them is incredibly sparse as all get out. That said, it’d be easier to stop them from getting out of the caves with what they’re after than trying to do so when they are flying under the radar in the city where my luck could cause a huge mess.” I had us way up high in the sky idly circling the city like a vulture and Gene was the one currently using a griffon mask to stay on the lookout for any sign of our quarries. Spying on the comings and goings of an entire city wasn’t easy, but we were managing the rotation of our watchers just fine. “Was there anything that you needed Nefer?” “Yeah, I think I know how we can deal with Ahuizotl! He’s the guy that you said has some really ferocious felines.” Motioning to Nefer to get to the point with my talons, the cat smiled and asked a question. “Why can’t we just use Belfry? Most cats have a strong sense of smell, he made the whole ship smell really odd for a while when he loosed all those chemicals all over the place. Please don’t do whatever made him do that again, it took me a whole day to clean up that mess!” “Yes and you did a good job in finding a use for all that stuff.” Fertilizer that can make the young trees bear fruit ridiculously fast, that was quite useful if you asked me. “As for your idea… I suddenly have a need to talk to Savannah.” -Savannah’s room- I found Savannah eating dates and sighing to herself as she looked over a picture of Amira. It’s too bad she wouldn’t tie herself down to the nice pony, because they really had some good chemistry together. Savannah looked up at me as I entered the room and tossed a date into her mouth. “Savannah, I know this is going to sound pretty odd… but where’s the catnip that you likely smuggled onboard my ship?” I stared at Savannah with narrowed eyes. “Catnip? There’s no catnip on this ship, I’ll have you know that I’m a clean and upstanding…” As Savannah spoke in a calm and completely airy tone that sounded far too innocent for her. I walked over to the chest loaded with her personal belongings and opened it and looked inside. “There’s none in there I assure you, and while I may like you this is a clearly invasion of my…” The inner roof the chest looked odd and sliding my talons along it, I eventually found a hidden pouch of herbs that looked suspiciously like what I’m after in small compartment. I held the pouch up with the opening pointed towards Savannah for her to clearly see the herbs sitting within it, exactly what I came asking about. I stared at her for a solid minute, she just stared back at me. “… I have absolutely no idea who that belongs to.” Savannah tried while clearly seeing my disbelieving face. She cracked a second later. “Okay, I might have picked up some in the bazaar near the entrance to Nagrabah, but can you really blame me for wanting some? Abyssinia has catnip flavored food and incense, but we never get the ‘real’ stuff because of how weird we get around it. Its use as an old time classic Abyssinian aphrodisiac is only a part of the equation… a part of which is no longer used in Abyssinia.” “No and I’m not really judging either as long as nobody gets hurt… though I’m quite sure I don’t want to know what you and Amira were doing with this stuff.” Instead of being sheepish towards me as one would expect, Savannah instead gained a fairly large grin on her face. “I just need to borrow some of it for a bit.” “For a certain cat bird of yours right?” Savannah coyly pried. I didn’t want to know how catnip effects griffons and had never considered it before. That thought, I didn’t want to have this stuff go anywhere near Gene. “No I’m going to give some of it to Belfry...” The idea I got from Nefer was simple, hallucinogen spraying butterfly with catnip equaled the ability to take out Ahuizotl’s felines out of the equation in an instant. The dubious side effects of doing such a thing will be considered at a later date when it actually became a reality. “What for?” Savannah tilted her head at me as she followed me out the door. “Well we’re going to have a run in with someone who has a number of large attack cats and we have a butterfly that can spray chemicals all over the place.” After that, I think Savannah understood where it was going and we wouldn’t have much to worry about from Ahuizotl if we went up against him. -Ten minutes later- “So be a good butterfly and remember to never create those smells around the ship.” Nothing annoyed me more than having Belfry cuddle up to me, he was always aggressively affectionate with me. Three of our crew members were close enough to cats for it to be a big problem if Belfry started spraying the newly acquired scent around. Nefer just happened to be someone who, hopefully enough, could feasibly have a good reason to be completely immune to catnip. He could also bb in the one third percentage of cats that can ignore catnip. I pushed Belfry off of me and then sat down to think, Belfry was good to go if Ahuizotl ever attacked us. Now I had to consider Dr. Caballeron and his goons. We had more than enough combat capable beings on this ship so the goons wouldn’t be much trouble, even I could kick around Caballeron’s minions without a weapon. Not that I’d ever be unarmed anymore… I had my bow behind my back in the cannon alongside the saber and a knife. I wanted to at least prevent Caballeron from discovering anything else about ‘The End of Immortality’. We had to find a way to put him in jail so he couldn’t continue helping GODLESS any further. The real problem was that jerk Teatime, his clockwork golems were going to be difficult to take down even if they weren’t as independent as the other minions were with the other two guys. In fact… the clockwork golems were all highly dependent on Clockwork weren’t they? We would just have to prioritize targeting the monocle menace. “Can I have my catnip back now Captain Blackcap?” Savannah asked sweetly while giving me a pouty look and Belfry just added to that look standing right next to her. “Fine…” I gave her the pouch back and she ran off excited to get it back from me. “Just don’t force any of that stuff on Nefer or Gene!” “Hey, I’m old enough to be clearly responsible for my actions!” She was the older than everyone else, but responsibility didn’t exactly seem like her thing at all. Why do most of the Abyssinians that I know feel like mental asylum patients at times? There’s also the fact that they can be rather shameless at times. -Three days later, outside Nagrabah’s wall around Thieves Quarters, Teatime- I looked at the quirky jewel in my hoof and then looked to my two compatriot’s odd keys. One looked like a segmented doughnut and the other looked like an angular boomerang, these three jewels were all the same color and questionably shaped. “So… how do these keys open the ‘Caves of Intrigue’?” I just held the oval shaped jewel that had been in the sultan’s turban display up at the palace, aside from the triangular indent used to keep it in the turban I pried it from. If we couldn’t figure out how the keys work, then at least I’d have a nifty souvenir of my genius theft. “I haven’t a clue, but I know Daring Do is around… I found one of these lying on the ground.” The long faced brute held up a solitary feather that was relatively fresh as if recently molted. “She is likely to interfere when we figure out how to get into the caves.” “Yes, that is one of her feathers and its fresh. She will be trouble.” Caballeron rubbed his chin looking at the boomerang shaped jewel, he looked between our keys and his own. “Daring is most likely waiting for us to open the caves so she can stop us one at a time while we’re in there. As for the keys, they are supposed to show us the way once they are brought together and we learn their secret.” “Maybe we break them?” Ahuizotl tried to pull his key apart. The doughnut pulled apart, but it didn’t break. It was more accurate to say that the secret to his portion of the key helped us discover that his segmented doughnut was actually a scorpion’s tail, one that once unrolled had a hole at the base large enough to fit the thinner portion of the jewel I had. “I think I have figured out something of great importance my incredible comrades… but I must admit that I will give some credit to Ahuizotl and his brutish mannerisms. May I have the scorpion’s tail?” Ahuizotl handed me the tail and I forced the small part of my oval shaped jewel into the end of it and heard a click. I turned to Caballeron. “They aren’t three keys… they are three parts of one key!” I passed the tail and body to Caballeron and he put the boomerang part into the triangular indent, once the boomerang was inserted the pointed ends of the jewel split open into two pointy ends revealing that they were the claws of the scorpion key. The tail started to move, he quickly dropped the key on the ground and backed up. Instead of doing anything threatening the tail turns and send a short beam of white light in a given direction. “I believe we have found out how to find the ‘Caves of Intrigue’, Ahuizotl will of course ride with me and you can get your airship moving to follow Caballeron.” They didn’t say anything against this, since my airship was parked next to Caballeron’s after all. -An hour later, Daring Do- I had seen them assemble the key under the moonlight and that it pointed towards a specific destination. I watched as the two airships took off and I carefully followed them while hiding in a cloud. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice this odd cloud as being the only one in the sky that followed them all the way to where they're currently going. They already know I’m going to show up, so things were going to get tricky.