Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Two — A Tale of Two Prison Colonies
Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Two — A Tale of Two Prison Colonies Things didn’t exactly go as easily as I may have wanted.For one thing, I’d thought most of the work we’d have to do would be around the crashed ship. I kind of expected to be able to reach the ship first.I hadn't foreseen that our path would be blocked by not one, but two bands of townsfolk.To the right was a group of cervid. They had leather barding and some cloth over their backs and wrapped around their front. Tassels hung from the men’s antlers, and the women wore more elaborate clothes, dyed and decorated with little beads.To the left was a group of sylph, maybe a dozen in all. They had clothes made of similar materials, leather and cloth of the same material, and they seemed to be centred around a sylph woman in an elegant set of robes.Neither group looked all that happy to see us.I took a deep breath, then stepped up. “Hello! I’m Broccoli, Broccoli Bunch! I hope we can all be friends!”The two groups eyed each other, and two of them stepped up. One of the cervid men, with a particularly impressive set of antlers, and the sylph woman in the robes.“I am Kevin Marques, mayor of Mistrust,” the cervid said.The sylph woman stepped up to his side with a dignified huff. “I am Celia Fallfront, mayor of Mistrust.”I blinked. “The town has two mayors?” I asked.“It does,” Mayor Marques said. “It is the most effective way of getting things done here, or so we’ve found. Mistrust might not be the grandest or richest place, but we do well for ourselves, at least when ships aren’t crashing down onto our fair town.”That last bit sounded very pointedly aimed at us.I winced. “Was anyone hurt?”“No,” Mayor Fallfront said. “But it was a near thing. A house was set aflame on the edge of town, and one of the ships that fell landed in a farmer’s lot.”I gasped. “Someone lost their home?”“Nearly. We put out the flames before anyone was hurt, but the damage was done,” Mayor Marques said. “Which leaves only the matter of reparations.”I was about to tell them that we’d gladly pay, when a taloned hand grabbed my shoulder and tugged me back a step. “Let me,” Amaryllis said. “Mayor, and Mayor, I am not the keenest harpy that has ever hatched, but I can put two and two together when it suits me. What’s the meaning of this ambush?”“Ambush?” I repeated.We were right on the edge of the circle created by the five cry towers. There was a bit of greenery around them, maybe a dozen or so metres of cleared space, with a few trees and some bushes. Circling that was a beaten-dirt road that split off every which way into the town proper. We were still right on the edge of that little strip of park.“They were waiting around for us to show up. This looks like one of the only paths out of the area, or at least one of the paths onto the main road dividing the town. My concern is more about why they’re trying to ambush us.”The sylph mayor harrumphed. “We are hardly trying to ambush you; we are merely guarding our peaceful town. Your arrival has caused quite the stir, and disrupted an otherwise ordinary day.”“We’re sorry,” I said. “We were tasked with delivering a cry to the Lonely Island. We didn't know that we’d be followed, or that the cry would attack us with airships and such.”“So you’re trying to deflect blame?” Mayor Fallfront asked.“Not at all,” Bastion said from right behind me. He stepped around me, and came to stand by my side. “The captain was merely informing you of what happened.”Mayor Fallfront stood a little taller as she took in Bastion. “A paladin?” she asked.“Yes,” he said.I glanced between the two, then sighed. “This is all very tense. I think we might have started on the wrong foot. My crew and I were trying to help someone when we were attacked. We didn’t mean to cause trouble in your town, and we’re sorry that we did. If there’s anything we can do to help you, then tell us. I’m sure we can negotiate.”“That’s a fair approach,” Mayor Marques said when the other mayor failed to say anything. She was too busy staring at Bastion without any expression on her face. “To be perfectly fair, I don’t think the damages to the town are that extensive. Perhaps a small remuneration would suffice?”“Like silver and gold?” I asked.“No, no, we have little use for currency here,” he said. “We can’t exactly travel to the mainland to spend it. Perhaps food? Seeds would be valuable, as well as any materials that are difficult to find on the Lonely Island.”“That sounds fair,” I said.I glanced at Amaryllis, who shrugged a bit. “It doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to barter. We have some surplus equipment, I think. And we need materials for repairs.”I nodded. “That’s why we’re here,” I said. “We’re going to salvage from the two airships that crashed around the town. They have a few things we need.”Mayor Fallfront snapped out of whatever had her staying quiet. “Those fell within the boundaries of Mistrust. They, by all rights, should be ours.”“What would you use them for?” I asked.“Why, to leave this place, perhaps?” the mayor tried. “Or merely for parts. What we use them for doesn’t matter—they belong to us.”“The cry are the ones who brought them down,” Bastion pointed out.“Then they can claim them if they wish. I doubt it though.”Amaryllis sighed. “You’re going to have us bargain for every piece we take, aren’t you?”“I suppose that would depend entirely on what you take. Mistrust has a smithy, and some very talented carpenters,” Mayor Marques said.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.I wasn’t sure what to think of our strange reception. They could have been a lot worse. As it was, they didn’t feel... friendly, exactly, but they weren’t mean either. They felt more greedy than anything else.That wasn't the best, but it was better than being hostile. "Amaryllis, do you think you could handle the negotiation part? We should get to the ship sooner than later, especially if we want to see what’s worth taking.”“Yeah, that’s fair,” Amaryllis said. She smiled, and it was the kind of smile I’d expect to see on a hawk that stumbled across an injured bunny. “I’ll be sure to get us a good deal.”“Let’s all stick close,” Bastion muttered, low enough that I only just caught it with all four ears peeled.I nodded and stepped forward. “So, Mayors, could someone maybe guide us to the crashed ships? If we need any additional materials, then I’m sure we could negotiate for them once we know what we need.”Everyone seemed to think that that was perfectly reasonable, so off we went.Mistrust was a sprawling town. The homes were built with yards around them, some with gardens and others surrounded by trees. It was actually hard to see how big the town was from ground level. The cervid homes tended to be larger, but they didn’t have second storeys to them most of the time. The doors were also scaled up in size.The sylph homes were more like mini-towers, tall and thin, with as much space around them as they could manage, and they frequently had balconies around their upper floors.What was most interesting were the hybrid homes. Short, fat towers with big doors and ramps around the outside.“Do the two groups here live together?” I asked the mayors.Mayor Marques hummed, his head tilting back a bit. It was rather imposing to have someone so tall nearby. He was taller than Emmanuel had been, with much bigger antlers. “Once, we both settled in this area as two camps. We both had something the other needed, so an alliance was formed, though it was initially tenuous.”“But it’s better now?” I asked.“Oh, certainly. We had two mayors because we were two towns. But some folk trusted others, and the settlements grew closer. The cry were here long before us, of course, and their towers became the centre of our community.”“That’s so cool,” I said. “But if you’re just one town now, why are there two mayors still?”“Some issues are unique to either the cervid or sylph, and while we have grown closer, we are not all in agreement about everything, so rather than elect one leader, we have two.”I nodded. “That’s kinda cool; I like it. People getting along is something I can get behind.”“Does the town have difficulties, what with the population being made up nearly entirely of convicts?” Bastion asked.The mayors both sniffed. “I’ll have you know,” Fallfront said. “That most of the population here are the children of those originally exiled. Or their children’s children. The vast majority of the convicts here are or were the non-violent sorts. Oh, we have a few thieves, but everyone knows who they are, and when something goes missing we know who to poke at to get it back. We don’t abide the dangerous sort of criminal. Mostly, we have people who disagreed with how things were being done, in Sylphfree or the Trenten Flats.”I gestured to Bastion to drop the subject. We didn’t need to antagonize the townsfolk. I figured most of us were safe, but Bastion’s job was literally the sort of job that might lead to him arresting some of the people that were here.“Ah, there it is,” the cervid mayor said.The first of the two crashed cry airships was slumped before us, its hull leaning up against a few trees. The engine at the back looked like it had burned itself out, but not before leaving a blackened streak across the grass.The ship was rather barge-like from up close, without much depth to its keel. The sails were torn up and shredded, likely when the airship crashed through the bit of forest around us.“Is it safe to go aboard?” I asked.“Probably not,” Amaryllis said as she moved past me. “But it still has some balloons.”She was right. There were a big chunk of the ship’s balloons still left, though it had torn open in a few spots, and looked like a plastic grocery bag that had spent some time as a kitten’s chew toy.“Right! Okay. Let’s see what we can do with those remaining helium sacs. And, uh, are there any cry crew left on it?”“No,” Mayor Marques said. “A couple of cry were seen flying away from it before anyone from town came to inspect this one. The local cry poked at it too. I think they found one cry stuck in the frame of the other ship that they took with them.”“Oh,” I said. That was good to know.I was a bit surprised when Oda stepped up next to me, then wiped at his whiskery teenager mustache. “That engine looks dangerous. I don’t know how rockets work, but it was giving off a whole trail of flame earlier.”“So we take our time, and we make sure to be careful,” I said.“What do you plan on taking here?” Mayor Marques asked.“Mostly the balloons,” I said. “Ours were perforated, so we need more helium. Maybe they have some tanks of that here, but I don’t know. We could use some of the tarp that the sacs are made of too.”“Ah,” he said. “Well, that sounds like a rare and valuable resource then.”Amaryllis sighed. “Broccoli, go take care of overseeing things. I’ll handle the mayors.”“Alright,” I said. Amaryllis really was the best at negotiating that among us. I’d just do my part to help gather the things we’d need to get the Beaver back in the air.
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Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Three — Sanity Check
Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Three — Sanity Check The work of getting the Beaver fixed and ready for flight was tough, but not impossibly so. We found two intact helium sacs at the first cry airship, and one at the second. They were considerably smaller than the sacs the Beaver Cleaver had by default, but Amaryllis and Awen did a bit of math together and figured that they’d be enough, if just barely.The better news was the intact helium tank aboard one of the ships. It was a big brass cylinder that took two to lift, but we managed, especially as some of the townsfolk from Mistrust didn’t seem to mind giving us a hand.Initially, they weren’t super open to helping us, but they were quite neighbourly after we proved we didn’t intend to cause any trouble.Amaryllis seemed fairly pleased with her negotiations. We were going to lose a lot of the produce we had. As it turned out, Mistrust lacked some very basic things, and the mayors were both interested in getting all of the potatoes and turnips and onions we had in our pantry, even those that had started to sprout buds.The town would soon have more vegetables to eat, which seemed to excite them a lot. When I asked Mayor Marques about it, he said that they had a few local crops for their gardens, but not many. Mostly carrots and some local plants they’d discovered were edible.By the time noon rolled around, we had all the new balloons mounted within the wrapping tarp of the Beaver Cleaver’s original balloon. With one of the burst sacs repaired and refilled, the Beaver was slowly gaining back some of its buoyancy.It would be a bit of a rough flight though, with us relying on our gravity generator to reduce our weight. Awen was in the engine room monitoring the machinery while some of our other mechanically-inclined teammates scurried over the ship and patched things up. It wouldn’t do for a bad bit of sewing to open up a tear.“Your crew is quite competent,” Mayor Fallfront said as she came to stand next to me.I grinned and nodded. “We have some of the very best,” I said. “Maybe not the most experienced, but they’re all people I’d consider friends, and that’s important, I think.”“Hmm. Where will you be flying next? Not somewhere too distant, I imagine?”“Sylphfree,” I said. “It’s not too far now, and we’re late to arrive already. I think we’ll make it though.”The mayor hummed again, then looked at me critically. “You might want to be careful. Sylphfree is a beautiful nation, with some excellent people. Smart, talented people, but they value certain virtues more than others. Propriety is greater than kindness in the eyes of many a sylph.”“Oh,” I said. That wasn’t great. She didn’t seem to want to explain much more than that, though, and soon returned to the other mayor. The town was organizing things so that their best gardeners would get some samples from our pantry. Amaryllis had also traded away a bunch of other foodstuffs, things they couldn’t get here. Flour and grains and such. I think they were hoping to find some seeds they could plant too.We ended up meeting mostly outside. I slapped together some sandwiches with what we had left-we really would need to restock soon-and handed them out to everyone in the crew.By the time the sun was clearly starting to dip, we were just about done fixing up the Beaver as best we could.The detour to the Lonely Island had cost us about a day, I figured. Maybe a tiny bit less since we had flown as fast as we could after the Grey Wall, as opposed to just taking our time.Still, it was my failing as a captain that was leading us to be even later to our appointment. I didn’t regret the fun we had, or the great adventures helping people that needed helping, but it was still my fault that we’d be late.As we were packing things up and picking up the tools that had gotten scattered around, I noticed a familiar cry hovering closer. “Moonie!”“Hello,” Moonie said. “I wanted to greet you one last time before you took off again.”I grinned and bounced over to the cry to give it a quick, tight hug. “It’s nice of you to come say bye. Did you make any new friends?”“We are... uncertain if we have made friends, but we have certainly met new and interesting cry. This place is better than I had imagined or hoped for. There are still many things to do, and the cry who are here are very different from the cry I know, and even more different from each other.”“That sounds nice,” I said. “You get to meet not just new people, but strange new people.”“I have!” Moonie spun around, and while I wasn’t an expert at reading cry body language, I figured that was a good sign they were happy.We chatted, just for a little bit, but it was obvious that Moonie was excited to return to their new friends, and I had a lot of work ahead of me too.It was hard, being all responsible and stuff.Once everyone was back aboard the Beaver and the sails were tucked in, I turned to Clive behind the wheel and nodded. “Alright, bring him up.”The engine rumbled to life and I felt the ship shifting a moment before we started to rise. The crew cheered. Well, mostly it was just me, but technically I was part of the crew too.It was slow, no faster than I could walk, but we were moving upwards, the ground dropping below and the cry towers sliding past. The wind picked up a little, and set us to rocking, but with Clive at the helm, we managed to stay right in the middle until we cleared the tops of the towers.The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.“Clive, full speed ahead! We have some catching up to do!”“Aye, aye, captain!”We deployed the Beaver’s sails, spun up the propeller at the back, and shot forwards over forests and rivers and hilly landscapes. We were heading north, to the next leg of our adventure, and hopefully to Sylphfree where, if everything worked out, we’d be able to stop a war.I stood on the foredeck, eyes peeled and ears straight despite the wind battering them down every so often. I was expecting someone to come up and talk. The excitement had died down a little and there wasn’t all that terribly much to do on the Beaver when we were just sailing peacefully along. I wasn’t expecting the friend to come up to me to be Joe.I hadn’t been spending all that much time with the Scallywags.That was probably a bit weird. We were on the same ship, and we had breakfast, lunch and supper together everyday. But still, all three of them tended to hang out together as their own little clique aboard the ship, the same way Steve and Gordon and Clive tended to hang out together. There were plenty of times where we’d all mix together, and I was pretty sure that everyone considered everyone else a friend.“Hey, Joe,” I said.“Hey, Broc,” Joe said. He moved to the rails and leaned down, elbows against the wooden surface. “That was exciting.”“Yeah. That fight with the rocket planes was kinda fun, but scary, then the airships. I’m glad no one was hurt,” I said.“It might have been a near thing. The Beaver’s a tough ship, but he still took a beating.”I cringed a bit. “I guess so. I really wish things had gone easier. Next time, I’m sure we’ll do better.”“So there will be a next time?” he asked.I nodded. “Definitely. Joe, I’m not the sort of bun to not do what I can to help people out. Sometimes, that means getting into a bit of trouble. Other times, that means flying halfway across the world to try and stop a war. And sometimes it’s risking hide and hare to clean some Evil roots. I want to be a good person, and that means acting on what I think is right.”Joe chuckled, his head bowing. “Yeah, I think I see that. At least you’re not all talk.”“Is it too much?” I asked while gesturing vaguely around us. “The adventures and the other crazy things we get us to?”“It’s a lot, yeah, but I think I can handle it for now. I still think the Scallywags and I will be heading out one day, but maybe... maybe we’ll do something similar? I don’t know. It feels wrong to do things when they’re not things that’ll pay you well. But it feels right to do things to help folk. I guess we might need to find some middle ground?”“You could join the Exploration Guild,” I said. Which reminded me: we hadn’t done much guild-related stuff in a while. Did they still owe us for that flower thing way back when? “They’d give you an excuse to move around a lot, meet new people, explore new dungeons.”Joe laughed. “I don’t know if I’m made for that kind of adventure. Just being on the Beaver is a lot for us already, I think. I can’t imagine doing what you and your friends do.”“I don’t think we do anything that weird, do we?” I asked.He shook his head. “You don’t realize how wild you are, all four of you.”Four of us? I suppose he was counting Bastion in our party. Which was probably fair. He was pretty close, and he had come on all the scarier adventures lately. “We’re just people trying to do our best,” I said. “Even if that sometimes means doing things that are scary.”“You’re all insane,” Joe replied with the certainty of someone that knew they were right. “But it’s not a bad sort of insane.”I pouted at him. I wasn’t nuts.Joe chuckled as he stood up and stretched his back. “Well, I’m getting back to work. Someone needs to organize our tools and such, and it sure won’t be Oda who does it. Keep us safe, captain.”“Have fun,” I said. “And don’t work too hard. Take regular breaks!” I called out.I felt like a bit of a hypocrite there. Breaks were for people who wanted to slow down.I wasn’t sure exactly what to do. It didn’t feel like a good time to start making noise. Maybe I could take a few hours to just... train things.A final glance around showed that things were pretty calm, all said and done, so I headed to the rear of the Beaver and down a level.I found Awen’s room empty; the girl was likely in the engine room again, or tinkering on her cool turret thing. Amaryllis’ room wasn’t empty. My bird friend was on her bed, face buried in some pillows and the rest of her laid out flat.“Uh,” I said.“I’m sleeping,” she said.“Are you sleeping... well?”“Yes, Broccoli, I’m sleeping well,” Amaryllis said into her pillows.“Do you need anything?”“I just spent a few hours negotiating after a very stressful morning. Not everyone is as capable as you at dealing with chaos.”She sighed and pushed herself up to stare at me from the corner of her eyes.“I desperately need a nap.”“Okay then,” I said. “Uh, nap well.”I stood around in the corridor of the ship for a moment, then sighed. Maybe I did have a problem. I couldn’t sit around and do nothing. If I could at least train, maybe, or help someone with something.I thumped a foot on the ground and stomped off to find something to do. I might, maybe, have a wee, tiny sliver of insanity in me, sure. But that was something I could bother with later. Right then and there, I needed a distraction.I’d find someone who needed a friend, or my name wasn’t Broccoli Bunch.
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