The New Alston Aviators (Altamira)

[Awkin]

Cathel Ward once set out guidelines for the reasonable and honorable conduct of research. The eighty-third of which was that 'Any invention must be a viable means of escaping an emergency in the place it is researched.' This did several things, including the accidental discovery of the anbaric bulb through premature testing after a collapse in the unused mine it was being researched in, a new and interesting cure for smallpox after two vats spilled into one another during a fire in the lepor pits of the Hiration empire, as well as pruning off the numerous bad and above all expensive inventors who caused the incident which they were then unable to escape.

It did, however, mean that the 'New Alston Aviation
Research Centre' was constructed high on a peak of sheer rock in the northenmost arpeligio of the Atari mountains.

"Lack of foresight, that's what it was," grumbled the wizened basket-puller as he winched the iron chain through the unnervingly not-so-intricate cogs that carried the basket up the rockface. Nervously, Johann raised his tinted goggles and peered over the side of the basket at the dizzyingly distant ground below him. He pinched his nose -- the air had been thin enough as it was.

"I mean, who'd they expect to cart up all their visitors, all their materials, all that flippin' glass? Fairies? No. It fell to us -- the working men of these mountains. It's hard enough filling our contracts without people building mechanical-ruddy-birds in the most hard-to-reach place in the continent!" He almost snarled the phrase, and Johann found himself wishing he'd waited for the next basket. It wasn't bad for a penny, got him up faster than a people-carrier and he didn't mind sitting on a crate -- but the heartfelt lecture was a bit much. "You know what I'm saying, right?"

"Yeah. Intimately." Glancing at their destination, so tentalizingly distant above him, Johann realized the need for further conversation. "Umm, when they've taken all the stuff up to the centre and lumped them into... bigger stuff, how do they get them down?"

"They fly."

"What, all of them?"

"'Em as don't don't fly twice."

"I see."

After a minte or so the old man jammed the chain to the winch with what looked very much like 'whatever he could get his hands on at the time' and, with startling agility and a 'Just a mo' clambered off up the last length of chain, hooking his fingers between links, and onto the jutting gantry that Johann could see shortly above him -- like a patch of sky made from wood.

He tracked the mans' footsteps by watching where he blocked the light streaming down through the gaps in the planking, and hurriedly set about checking the crates -- which seemed to be filled with precise levers and valuable machine parts set in bronze. He relaxed slightly -- he had some reassurance that the basket-puller wouldn't cut the chain now and let him plummet to his death.

Many things have been said about Johann's paranoia. He hears them spoken at every turn.

"Right, guy!" A voice from above drew Johann's attention, and showed him a rope ladder-- uncurling in flight. It swung past once or twice before he managed to grab it -- his weight curbing the pendulous motion. Hooking his leg round and buffeted by the wind, he began to climb.

The first thing that strikes you, they say, is the sun. Then the wind turns you, and you see the centre itself. Kim Alston, they say, designed the basket gantries so that visitors would be caught in awe by her architecture: the sun reflecting off and through the massive glass panels like a thousand facets of light itself. A mighty structure -- a gargantuan growth of crystal out of the side of the mountain -- on a jutting precipice of brown rock, up above the clouds, close to the gods.

And, pressing two pennies into the basket-puller's palm, Johann stumbled onwards.

~'/-\'~

Inside the glass-paneled dome was a shantytown of workshops. Built not only on the ground, but alike a growth of mushrooms -- stacked upon one another, each one a platform of wood supported, one way or another, on the ones below -- the ones on either side, and via massive timber struts attaching them to the seasoned oak frame of the dome itself. Almost each platform was adorned with workbenches, haphazard railings of same shape or form and often some kind of flight-mechanism -- if a sail or a grappling-hook or a propellor or an engine or a gondola.
Some of the the smaller ones nearest the outside, and therefore the lightest, bore shelves of books and fusty old people. One edge of the dome curved down to meet the brown stone of the mountain -- into which had been carved narrow sleeping-alcoves, floored with furs and coarse blankets.

Trotting in through the entrance near ground level, Johann is overcome by sounds, dust, fumes and the felling of vast space -- captured unnaturally like a moth in an upturned glass. Striding across a floor padded with sawdust, he walks through an open eating-house, boundaries marked only by where the tables stop, a ropemakers, a tar merchant, a tanner, a sailcloth maker before stopping in a varnishers, where he swung himself onto an ornate spiral stairwell some feet above the ground -- Probably salvaged from some old airship by the ill-fit and, with a nod to the owner (an aging man, glaring at Johann over his pipe), ascended into the fray.

The various craftsmen didn't seem bothered by Johann as he climbed -- briskly walking alongside, through and around their workstations. Some looked up from their weaving and nodded, some barely glanced from their varnishing, some moved to allow him to pass andsome obstinately otherwise.

A pair of young Aviators leaning on a railing and drinking tea from a table perched on the boundary of their two workstations even offered him a tin mug, but with a little bowing hand movement, he declined. The floor bounced slightly beneath him like a dancefloor, and he had a slight skip in his step. Never stopping, only slowing if he had to. He could see why they drank tea -- this was no place to be tipsy.

Up a ladder, along a walkway of planks help with knotted string, and he was onto the launching platform. A vast, circular station with its own storm-gates into the open sky, positioned high in the dome. The workshops continued to grow around the platform -- but more sparsely. Many a dream was broken here, in expensive and laborous moments of truth, and only those who could afford to expend the effort building their platforms well risked them being hit by the occasional high wind from the storm gates, or a flying machine beyond control.

The evening sun shone amber through the glass as Johann climbd yet more tiers. He paused to rest on a railing of an old oriental couple's platform, experimenting with scarlet silk airbags on a sort of compact gondola. They ignored him, so he took a small glass of water from a workbench, and drained it. The air really is very thin, he mused -- panting onto the deck below.

On which was the boy he was looking for.

Pausing to glance at the couple, he swung himself over the railing, rested his feet on the other side and dropped, not as lightly as he'd have liked, into the cockpit of the flying machine below. Here he eased himself into a relaxed flight position and watched its owners.

He eyed at the two figures, one thin and meek in loose-fitting plain woolen clothes with a thin leather gherkin, the other broadly set, muscular and hairy: an asset somewhat hidden by his black velvet flight cap They were poring over some diagrams on yellow parchment -- almost squabbling, but not quite. There was a barrier: a definite sense of student and master.

And then the boy turned.

"William Kawther," Johann grinned. "You're a long way from Sondossa, aren't you? Don't worry --" He said, raising his hands to the larger man, who turned to reveal an impressive, well-built face and laborer's hands.
"I'm Johann Copper -- here to help. But first..." He looked above him at the rough wooden contraption. It didn't look like any other aviation machine he'd ever seen, too compact -- no sticky-out wing bits or gas canopies. He slurred the gap between the two halves of his question, "I'd like to know what it is I'm sitting in."

"It's a... new form of aviation." The burly man, as all craftsmen, keen to tell about their work -- wiped sweat from his brow as he spoke. "Will here found these documents in a guild back in the city, says they're hundreds of years old. " He walked over to the machine -- indicating the projections near the top. William, Johann noticed, glanced nervoulsy form his master to the intruder. "He believes that we can lift it with one single propeller, situated above the cockpit. En't that so, Will?"

"Umm, yes." The lad licked his lips nervously. Johann knew the lad from his days in Sondossa, he was a genius -- he lacked only the confidence and the arrogance to make him a truly formidable power.
"We've, umm, looked over the designs and they seem sound -- I think we've even found a way to stop it from spinning." He simpered slightly -- like a dog being scolded. He never was one for being in the spotlight, but he'd caused mayhem in the few weeks he'd been in Alston. News was that he'd single-handedly solved the third quarm of turbullance within an hour of arrival.
"It should revolutionize air travel. It can jump, almost, into flight -- see? No need for runways. It can land inbetween trees, in cities -- anywhere with a few square yards of open space." Johann swung his legs off the saddle, and rested his forearms on his knees: bringing his face level to those he was talking to.

"That's good. 'Cause there's a storm coming, my friends. A mighty fury headed straight for this place. There's no point running, it's massive. Wipes out nomads, cities and towns." He looked from face to trepidous face, and leant in close to whisper.

"Within two days, all that's going to be left of this place will be dust. And the only ones who will survive are those who can fly."

[Altamira]

Three days ago, the cask of water was filled from the Phaedorna river, and loaded onboard the merchant ship Skidding Sally. The container shook from time to time, as if filled with large, invisible fish swimming back and forth. Water tried to whip through infinitely small cracks.

Twenty hours ago, the quartermaster of the merchant ship Skidding Sally thought he heard a small singing voice coming from one of the casks in the storage hold. He was escorted down to the crew’s doctor--just to be safe, the captain assured him, no one at all thought he was mad--and was tucked into his bed very tightly during the night. With straps.

Six hours ago, the Skidding Sally made port in a town by the mountains, which was really no more than a jetty with a collection of inns and bars strewn about in a common area, and unloaded its cargo for air freight. Amongst the goods were one hundred-fifteen casks of water, one hundred-fourteen of which contained some life form visible to the naked eye, and one of which contained something that could be classed as "sentient". And, considering how the organism was currently being carried in said cask and surviving, it could also be classed as something that might scoff at the assumption that “sentient” implied “human”.

The crew of the Sally knew that it was at about this time in their journey that they were supposed to resist the urge to run off and find a tavern that sold beer with less salt than ocean water (even if it was only a little less—they were well aware of the practice of selling…secondhand…beer), and knew they were expected to buckle down and sort through the casks for any signs that gave away the fact that their supplies came from anything but an artesian well somewhere in the Alps. But…as soon as that first booted foot hit dry land, the last thing the men wanted to do was sort through more water. So they tapped every cask with a hesitant palm, and whatever didn’t try to bite back was loaded onto the awaiting airship and sent up the frigid mountains to the New Alston Aviation Research Centre.

When the casks finally arrived in the center’s loading bay, half of them were frozen. The dome itself was warm enough--but a trip up through snow and icy mist and high altitudes will do strange things to water. Partially-solid casks thudded onto the wooden planks and rolled for meters until striking a wall or one another.

One of the casks said, "Ow."

A boy wandering around with the mail (he imagined he should be delivering it, but every time he set out to find someone, he got distracted by one engineering marvel or another, and well...let's say some people had some bills that were very overdue) heard this noise come from what could only be fifteen-gallons of water surrounded by wood, and dropped the letters he was carrying to investigate. He pounded on each cask with a balled-up fist until he heard the sound again.

"Can you please stop?"

Young Tom bent down and drummed on the side of the talkative barrel again. This time, all he heard was a groan.

"Is...someone in there?" he asked. His imagination was too stunned to form a better question.

"Yes! Now, please open the cask and let me out! My legs are frozen!"

Tommy ran off screaming for the center's doctor, and his mother, and anyone who could convince him that there was no savage race of peoples that stuck young girls in casks of water for days on end. Some minutes later, a large man absent-mindedly sat down for his lunch break on a barrel, and thought he heard the seat of his pants whimper.

Eventually, the cask cracked in a surge of water that certainly couldn't have come from anything but an angry ocean god. Or, in this case, an angry ocean god's daughter.

Ancia stood up, stretched, and tried to collect herself back into a shape vaguely resembling normal. Her back ached like someone had dropped an anchor onto her spine. The flesh was water--but the pain was definitely human.

"Hullo?" she called, when she could feel her feet again. The sound echoed through the dome and came back to her, unanswered.