-Airship Mauled, Bracing Knight-
“So you want me to go get some recruits and train them to defend the town from the next ‘Puk’ attack?” Well I guess I couldn’t be miserable for the rest of my life and I have been defending the town mostly on my own, but I couldn’t be everywhere. The town was actually beginning to grow with several families moving in to the airship houses that were built out of what crashed here. “Okay, I’ll see if I can get some recruits for a militia to protect Airship Mauled. See if you can talk to Mayor La Perm into getting a barracks built around here.”
“I’m still sending a message to Celestia for some help though.” It seemed Wary didn’t like leaving things to chance, I appreciated that idea.
I wasn’t there to stop those griffons from trying something, thankfully Sugar and Maries took care of it while I was busy checking the drop bear territories. I was supposed to be a guardian, but I couldn’t do it all alone.
-The next day, The Ardent Survivor, Jacky-
“Okay tighten up all around.” The ship followed my command and seemed to become air tight, just like I needed it to be. Aside from the a few odd pipes sticking out of the ship, it was finished and didn’t look all too different. I reached down and removed the Animating Album from the ship and sighed to myself while wiping my forehead. “Okay, that should do it. Nefer you can have the album, but don’t do anything too odd with it and use it responsibly! Now go play.”
“Okay Captain Blackcap!” Nefer ran off with the Animating Album, his trident tail wrapped in bandages.
“Savannah I need to you do me a favor.” I moved closer to our Abyssinian crew member and whispered into her ear, it flicked once or twice as I spoke into it. Her arms and legs were tightly wrapped with bandages, it gave her an authentic battle monk look.
A moment after I pulled away, she looked at me with a slightly sad expression.
“Right… I’ll get on it and will get back to you about it later.” Savannah was willing to assist me with finding the location we needed to go to.
“Gene… make sure the ship is running smoothly, we’re leaving tomorrow.” He nodded to me and just relaxed after all the trouble we had last night.
I approached the nearby railing and looked at the field of craters a short distance away from the ship. There was quite a bit of scorched ground and groaning bodies still around. I slept soundly last night, because I didn’t care about any of the other people that were involved in that noisy calamity last night.
“Belfry…” The butterfly perked up and looked at me, he was absolutely waiting to hear what I had to say. “You did a good job last night and as promised... we can spend the day doing whatever you want together.”
Belfry slowly walked up to me and cuddled up to me gently, I think he finally realized that tackling me can hurt and that I was always in a near constantly bruised state. He was fairly intelligent for something with the IQ just above being a common dog and I should give him more credit than I do.
“Okay I can see you understand, so what do you want do buddy?” At my question, the giant butterfly tilted his head ever so slowly as he stared at me.
-Ten minutes later-
“So you do realize that something horrible will happen eventually right?” My luck has been fairly aggressive since we came to Zebrica and I was certain that Belfry had to know.
Belfry nodded solemnly, then he perked up and wagged his abdomen cheerfully. He was just happy to be spending the day with me and all we were doing at the moment was playing a simple quiet game of fetch. No danger, no problems, no disasters like what happened last night while Gene and I ate our food.
Just some quiet time with a friendly giant bug that we trained to be our ship's main guard.
“Fetch!” I swung my arm forward and hurled the stick.
Belfry tried to snap his proboscis out to grab it, but missed it by the barest of an inch and quickly chased it down. It was adorable and this was actually kind of fun.
I still had no idea why we still had that giant pinecone in the hold that Belfry came with or even how Gene got it down there in the first place.
We really needed to find a use for that thing, maybe there’s a collector that likes giant objects?
I’ve heard of and seen weirder things, like that praying mantis nun in the Caves of Intrigue. Makes one wonder what happened to her when the caves disappeared. She certainly didn’t end up in Scorpio’s lair like we did, could that be what was a part of why she was so intriguing to meet?
Belfry came back up to me with his proboscis wrapped around the stick and he placed it before me looking excited. I rubbed the top of his head and took the stick into my grasp again.
“Good butterfly!” He squealed happily, but then went to staring at the stick expectantly. “Okay, a few more times, but if a disaster happens the both of us will have to drop everything and deal with it first. Last night was pretty rough on everyone and Flotsam is not going to be able to move much after getting her tail badly burned.”
Belfry nodded in understanding and waited patiently for me, he was the only one that hadn’t been injured last night and had been quite crucial for helping put out all of the fires.
“Here you go!” I spun around and sent the stick flying, Belfry jumped for it and caught it with a whip cracking noise of his proboscis. The stick cracked, but it didn’t split in half and he looked at it curiously.
Belfry still brought the stick back. I was actually smiling at him as I took up the stick again and prepared to throw it. I saw something in the edge of my vision, it made me quickly change my throw to hit the oncoming cheetah in a leg to stop it from attacking Belfry.
The cheetah tripped and flipped onto its back and Belfry blasted it in the face with a cloud of chemicals. It soon got up and stumbled away dizzily, with Belfry watching it while halfway raising his wings defensively.
Grabbing the stick, Belfry came over to me and looked around for a bit before giving it to me. He rubbed his proboscis against my face affectionately.
“Hey, stop that! I just saved one of my crew members from being attacked is all.” I gave him a grinning beak as he pulled back and scrutinized me before he wrapped for of his legs around me and hugged me. “Yeah, yeah, we’re friends Belfry. Is there anything other than fetch that you really wanted to do today?”
He looked at me and got a thoughtful look in his eyes.
-One snack break later-
Belfry really loved that nectar mug of his. Once he was done drinking from it, our next activity had us walking around through a fields of flowers. His instincts were to play with the flowers and spread the pollen around. It was a bit messy because Belfry was too big for these particular flowers.
At least he wasn’t crushing them all and quickly realized the size disparity between him and all the flowers.
Aside from sneezing a lot, nothing was going wrong. Belfry had fun and I just sat in the flowers nearby watching him.
Belfry was so simple minded at times and at others he could cotton on pretty well to what was going on around him. Having a larger brain made him smarter than the average butterfly.
These flowers smelled pretty good and I made sure they were safe, most of these flowers were only reactionary when mixed with certain chemicals. I had talked with a local zebra about this, because goodness knows I don’t want something like a poison joke incident to happen on my watch.
Something caught my attention, but at least this time it wasn’t a cheetah rushing towards the back of my buddy for the day.
It was just a gathering of many butterflies staying near Belfry, he was quite swamped with them and was being very careful not to crush any of his tinier cousins fluttering about his larger form and the flowers nearby.
I giggled at a bit at the sight of a giant butterfly being covered in more normal sized ones. I wondered what kind of tornado all these butterflies were causing miles away from here. Butterflies were the ones that created chaos just by existing or so it has been claimed, but here everything seemed so calm here.
I decided to stay vigilant and keep a watch out for any more trouble. Still, the smell here was quite relaxing and I eased into laying back to watch a butterfly land on the tip of my beak and look at me curiously.
After a moment it took off for the congregation around Belfry and just fluttered around.
Clear sky, no danger, just a relaxing atmosphere, then why couldn’t I relax? I feel like something should have happened by now.
I spent the next five minutes waiting for something that never came, over the next thirty minutes I started to nod off while trying to look out for anything causing my day to go south.
Eventually I woke up from my nap to find Belfry snuggling up to me and napping as well, it was some time in the afternoon and I was a little hungry.
“Belfry, get up, nap times over.” The butterfly pulled away and stretched out all his legs, he perked up and rubbed up against me and then stared expectantly. “Well you played in flowers with a lot of other butterflies, you drank some nectar and we played fetch, is there really anything else you want from this day?”
Belfry seemed particularly happy with how it’s gone so far. There was only one incident and we took care of that quickly enough. So why did I keep feeling a sense of dread and that something really bad was supposed to happen? It must be my nerves from all the stuff that has happened and today just seems… abnormally calm.
It was too calm! It was just so abnormal for me, what was supposed to go wrong today and why hadn’t it done so yet?!
I’m somewhat freaked out about this now.
“Scree?” Belfry patted me on the back gently and gave me a curious glance that seemed to be worried for me.
“I’m fine, just a bit high strung.” A bit? It was not just a bit, what was going on that I should feel this worried?
Gene was taking care of the ship, Savannah was going to spend the day talking with Flotsam about some things, Nefer had his hobbies and I was hanging out with Belfry.
Was there anything wrong with that picture aside from me playing with our pet butterfly today? If not… then why was I expecting something bad to happen so badly? There’s an itching at the back of my mind that says things shouldn’t be this calm.
Belfry bumped up against me and I smiled, I guess I should stop worrying. If it wasn’t going to happen, then the dread I was feeling was worthless.
-Saddle Arabia, Amira-
Ever since the Caves of Intrigue were opened, magic started running rampant around various parts of Saddle Arabia.
Flying carpets were becoming a thing, strange magical creatures of darkness tried to kidnap children, mechanical monstrosities causing havoc and tons of weird or strange magical items just started popping up everywhere.
The most recent disaster currently in progress spoke of someone who wasn’t even anywhere near here.
I would know they weren’t here, I saw them off personally after they stopped in to get some medical assistance after what happened to Mr. Eric in the Caves of Intrigue. Their airship wasn’t anywhere near this city or even on the horizon.
I and just about anyone who met Captain Blackcap were entirely suspicious of the fact that she was likely related to the fire tornado incident a while ago. There was no way that this incident could have possibly been her fault, but it still seemed like the kind of thing she could attract given what Savannah told me about her being horribly unlucky.
The current incident involved an ice tornado, a fire tornado and even a lightning spewing tornado currently wreaking havoc on the city. Mind you I wasn’t in Nagrabah at the moment, so to see such a similar incident happening again in a completely different place was mind boggling.
Oh and now they were combining into one super destructive tornado... just great.
It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough problems with someone finding out how to create an ancient petrification potion. At least the cure was simple, even if the ingredients for it were a bit difficult to obtain.
The petrification thankfully wasn’t full body, it was only encasing and could be broken with a hard enough force. The cure helped to remove the stone without actually hurting the victim.
“I should probably figure something out to stop things from getting worse.” I wasn’t exactly the well versed in magical objects, but maybe there was one nearby that can stop elemental tornadoes of doom.
A giant monster made of clouds started to slowly rise up into the air, spreading its large muscular arms made of smoke.
-Zebrica, Jacky-
A few more rounds of fetch, washing off all the pollen from Belfry’s body and then giving him an affectionate hug. Things between us couldn’t be going better.
“Let’s head back to the ship, I’m still feeling suspicious that something must be up about today.” It seemed Belfry agreed with me as he started to lead me back to the ship and seemed to be on the lookout for trouble too. “Hopefully nothing too bad happened while we were gone.”
Within minutes we approached the ship and boarded.
“Hey Jacky, Savannah is almost done cooking some food… did things go well?” Gene looked at both of us in curiosity.
“A little too well for my tastes, we’re getting out of Zebrica immediately tomorrow morning.” I crossed my arms and looked about. “What happened here and what did Savannah make?”
“Nothing and she’s made grilled fish and vegetables for skewers.” Gene looked particularly calm, but even his eyes started darting about. “We’re supposed to skewer what we want, she also set out salt, pepper, paprika and hot sauce. Now that you mention it, things have been too quiet today. What was your worst recent incident? I mean today and not last night.”
“Cheetah attack, went for Belfry, happened hours ago.” Then I spent a lot of time around a ton of butterflies in flowers. “I tripped it up with a stick and Belfry gassed it to make it leave us alone.”
“And nothing has happened since then?” Despite his calm tone, Gene actually sat up and his wings tightened rigidly against his back. “Everyone, let’s stay on high alert for the next few hours and hope that nothing like last night happens.”