Airship Pirates, Chapter 1: Isabel

[Garlock]

[OOC: I was a bit worried nobody else was posting.]

The illusion had faded as soon as he saw the men on the rope, himself. Garlock had played with the idea of igniting it under their feet after he saw Rip grease it. But since they were already having such fun, he just watched, sniggering. One fell off into the world below. The other landed neatly at their feet, conked out soon after by a remnant of the meal before. That being done and reported, there was just one loose end: The boarding ship. It'd been tethered to the Bonny Read, but it was starting to drift. And while its engines had been left on so it wouldn't be dragged like dead weight, their own course, plus the currents in the air were causing it to go higher, higher... The rope could not be reached.

The man on the nest's floor was lucky in that sense. He might end up keeping his life. Perhaps... Garlock stepped towards the railing near the bit of rope, talking to himself.

"Little ship, little ship, let me in. Not by the air of my blimpy blimp blimp. Hmm, blow you up? No, way too soon. Gotta do something. They won't give in. Ah..."

He held up his hands and said "Shadow-Grapple", black energy cords conjured from his palms and formed small hands at the ends. If the small ship was spotted too soon, detached from the Queen Alice's Revenge, they'd know the jig is up. The little hands shot out and gripped the slick rope in several places, coiling around it like snakes and twisting their way up until reaching somewhere not-so-greasy. Several dark cords began to do the same with the railing, allowing Garlock to put his hands down and face the others.

"This will buy us some time, and some options. The Alice may be waiting for them to show or readying an attack. They won't wait at all if they see this thing adrift. I'll handle things up here for now, in case they show themselves."

The rope that had been dangling free was almost back, the small airship nearly in its original position. Garlock had some plan for it yet. Meanwhile, the cat had gone separately down to the area of the engine room, where the sabotage had been. It didn't take an airship scientist to put it together. The silence at the crow's nest, the tumbling, the intruders... The ship still ran, of course, but there was obvious damage that even an untrained feline could see. As soon as he could reach the comm-tube, a grim voice said...

"You'd better get some people in the engine room."

[Sareth]

The voice continued. "And bring the prisoner to the bridge. Make sure Rip heads to the engines, and Tiny to the bridge."

Inside, on the bridge, Captain Rackham was pacing the small space, muttering something about keel hauling, something far less effective on an airship that was completely lacking in barnacle encrustations. The helmsman was still working on trying to turn the wheel, uselessly, and Kattie was looking highly exasperated. She bent back down to the speaking tube. "I need to know casualty counts and damage reports soonest."

[Graybeard]

"I may have hit him a little ... too hard," Rip said as Garlock reached where the saboteur was lying. He was still breathing, but in ragged gasps, and the force of the scone of stone had reshaped the back of his head to something suitable for use as an ashtray. (Well, if he expired, at least he wouldn't be wasted; maybe Thurston could salvage the skull in conjunction with his cigars.) "Or should we just try to heal him?"

Rip and Garlock looked at each other, exchanged head shakes. This was one of those situations where spellcasters really wanted to conserve mana for more important things, like inflicting death and mayhem, not helping riffraff get over it. Very well, then.

"I guess I'd better get him down to Doc Barrel while you do whatever you were going to up here," Rip said. Garlock's expression changed to one of pure horror for a moment, but Rip wasn't done. "Not to worry. We can interrogate him just fine if he's missing an arm or two, and I don't think the sawbones is going to find a way to erroneously amputate his mouth..."

[Boogeyman]

Baralwe was happily whistling below decks in his makeshift operating room. One by one he was removing his various implements from his apron and checking them to make sure that they were up to his standard of clean. Once in awhile he scraped his fingernail across the metal to remove a bit of stuck on... something. He heard all the excitement going on and knew that sooner or later someone would be coming in to see him. While there were plenty of able bodied magical healers aboard people still managed to find their way to him every time there was excitement. Thus when his latest patient was brought to him he clapped his hands together and boomed in a jolly voice "Well who do we have here? One of the new boys? Didn't last very long did he?"

As Rip set him down on the table Barrel gingerly lifted the patient's head and clucked his tongue. "That's a nasty one, I'll have to get to work on him right away." With smile on his face he pulled a length of hose out of his apron and placed one end in an empty bowl. Working very carefully he snaked the other end into the head would in between some pieces of broken bone to start draining blood. It was a very delicate process since one wrong move could put the tubing into the man's gray matter. Suddenly he looked up and continued placing the tube while looking at Rip. "So, what's actually happening out there?"

[Graybeard]

"So, what's actually happening out there?"

Rip wasn't sure he knew, but he had no problem telling the doc what he did know. "Boarding party from some rival in the same line of work that we are. They did something to the engines, don't know what, I'll have to get over there and work on them, probably. This is one of the guys that did it. The skipper wants him alive for questioning, I think -- at least alive for a little while. The other saboteur -- isn't. Getting this one able to answer questions is a priority, then on to taking care of any of our guys who got hurt. I don't know what the casualty list looks like, but there are some."

He didn't wait for a response, but headed for the engine room. In his wake, a groan coming from the operating table suggested that the man from the Queen Alice's Revenge was coming around ... for now.

[Garlock]

On the way down to the engine room, Rip passed by Garlock's cat, who said "Meow" deeply. Note, he was not giving off the cat-call, but simply saying the word in his own deep voice, much the way other people say "Yo". Why he did this was unimportant. Where he was going, that was a different story... The cat headed to the frontal gunnery where the magus had been before and said...

"Alright, it's time we had a talk. You won't let newcomers use the guns, so we wish to learn."

"What good is it if a cat-"

"I can listen. That is enough. Proceed."

Meanwhile, back at the rear crow's nest, the spell of Shadow-Grapple had gone inside the small airship and began to examine things. Garlock had already manifested a spell-eye on that end, observing. Nothing special in here. It was built for missions like these, not anything long-term. The magus now went to the talkie-tube and spoke to the bridge.

"Bridge, we now have possession of the boarders' airship. Nothing useful inside, and unless you've always wanted one yourself, not much use in keeping it. However, I'm thinking it'll come in some use against the Alice itself, such as being rigged to explode or having a big spike mounted on it. That much will help if she decides to attack, because she'll only wait so long for this thing to return."

[Graybeard]

"Luminosita's Faithful Flatulence," Rip swore as he arrived at the engine room. "What happened in here? And what's that smell?"

"We're not sure, sir," the stoker said. (Rip didn't feel it worth correcting the "sir" part.) "We think that before the bad guys screwed around with the engines, they set up a time-delay stink bomb, maybe just for kicks, maybe to make it harder for us to work on the damn things."

"Well, that's not hard to take care of," Rip said. A very minor bit of spell use, and the skunk-like scent coalesced into a vaporous ball and floated away from the engines ... right into a bit of ductwork on the ceiling.

"Uh, sir, are you sure you wanted to do that?" the stoker asked. "I think that's the air intake for the heater for the captain's quarters."

"Not to worry, son; he smells worse stuff than that every night from Kattie's perfume ... or other things." The air cleared, so to speak, Rip set about inspecting the engines.

[Sareth]

"KATTIE!" Captain Rackham roared from his quarters. "WHAT THE DUCE ARE YOU WEARING THIS TIME?"

"Just the usual, sir. White button down Pirate Chick Chiq from Jaycee Pene's, The Lady Sailor black capris from the Bob March. The frilly lace bikini bri..."

"NOT THAT! PERFUME!"

"Just a light lavender, why?"

"SOMETHING STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN!"

"Have you checked the galley?"

[Graybeard]

"Can you see what the bastards did to the engines, sir?" the red-shirted stoker asked.

Rip's glance was not filled with warmth. "How should I know? I just got here. Give me a minute."

The engines were complicated enough that a superficial look wasn't going to reveal anything, and although Rip had some magical skills at diagnostics, he wasn't an engineer. As if anyone but a dwarf could figure out this damn thing, he thought sourly, peering at the meshing gears, chains, sprockets, cylinders. A thought struck him: he didn't know where the captain had got this airship. This couldn't really be a dwarven engine, could it? He put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on casting a diagnostics spell, wishing he'd conserved a little more mana earlier.

His senses magically enhanced, he swept his gaze across the engines, looking for something out of the ordinary, without knowing exactly what "ordinary" was. Based on previous experience, though, he reckoned that when he saw the damage, he'd recognize it. And sure enough, after five minutes of concentration, there it was. Buried within an impenetrable maze of gears and worm drives, he could see it: a glowing, magical outline of a ...

... Monkey wrench.

"I think I've found the problem..."

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Hey, where did everybody go?]

"I'm never going to be able to get in there and fix those gears," Rip said to no one in particular.

The engine's gears were more tightly packed than a Veracian church on smiting day. Even if he'd understood how the damn thing worked, which he certainly didn't, there was no way he could get in and fix whatever was wrong, and his spellcraft didn't have the delicacy of control to do the job remotely. There was no way anything larger than a ...

Brainstorm.

Rip bent to the speaker tube. "Engine room to bridge. Is there anybody on board who'd be willing to contribute a cat to a good cause?"