A Perverted Path to Victory

Ketch

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Selliiiiieee? Ketch called in her mind, I need heeeeelp!

Through the teary-eyed blur of her climax’s aftershock, Ketch could see Mui’s shadow darkening her tent flap. He was still dressed in his armor from the day’s march, complete with spear and sword. By his outline, Ketch could see the way he was standing at military attention, hands clenched anxiously at his side.

What is the matter, my Guppy?

Came too haaard, she whined, can’t think. Can you clean my head up pleeeasse? Mui, that catfolk guy Sara likes, wants to talk and I don’t think I can lift my head.

But you are so charmingly dazed, Sellie pouted. We worked so hard to get you in so lovely a state.

We?

I and your body, I suppose, Sellie amended. Then her warm breath blew through Ketch’s ears, a sigh rushing from one end of her skull to the other. I suppose I can hide your pleasure for now.

“Ketch? Am I mistaken? I believe I saw you enter your tent, but…” Mui trailed off awkwardly.

Ketch waited a moment before responding. Sellie’s fingers combed their way through her skull, pinching off the smoldering fires of her arousal. One by one, piece by piece, Ketch’s euphoric aftershocks were snuffed out. Her trembling limbs stilled, her pounding heart slowed, and she finally managed to uncurl her fingers and toes.

Uh, Sellie? Ketch thought to her girlfriend. What about my…?

Hm, the witch intoned, a curious buzz vibrating Ketch’s spine. It seems I cannot force your soul to ignore such a Divine influence. I apologize, Guppy. But the fact that her seed affects even the soul of my Familiar is most curious…

Deep in Ketch’s belly, the burning heat of Sara’s cum still sloshed and rolled. Like liquid gold in her stomach, the Champion’s seed was a constant, unavoidable reminder of her simmering arousal. Ketch had entered her tent hungry; now she felt more than full. There was so much of it.

But if Sellie said she wasn’t able to hide the sensation from Ketch, that’s all there was to it. She would have to suffer through the effort to control herself. Sitting up from her bedroll, Ketch squared her shoulders and braced herself.

“One moment!” She called, just as Mui was turning to leave. “I just need to… make some room in here.”

“Oh!” Mui turned back. “Thank you, and of course, take your time. I do not wish to intrude upon your privacy.”

If this tent had been anything like her normal fare, Ketch wouldn’t have cared in the slightest if Mui walked straight in. Unfortunately, she was two minutes past a finger-gnawing, hip-pumping climax, and it was Selliana which had decorated the canvas interior. Ketch flipped her bedroll over, hiding the stains from drool and slick, then quickly lit several candles, hoping to burn away whatever scent she’d spread around the tent. She pulled on her pants and sorted out her top so it would cover her bare breasts, only to realize that her raging arousal had soaked through her pants on the sprint back to her tent. Cursing silently, she stuffed them in a small clothes chest and retrieved another pair, putting them on only after she used a rag to wipe away the liquid which remained. With a quick slash of her dagger, she trimmed what had become easily four feet of hair, stuffing the falling locks into a bag. Every hurried motion sent the gift in her stomach rolling, repeatedly coating her insides with something that was very, very difficult to ignore. Her body would be demanding more of it soon, she knew.

Why must something so pleasurable make such a mess? Ketch silently complained. Then, as she worked to hide the strands of her impossibly long hair, And what the hell was with the hair?

The same as her Divine Seed, Sellie purred. To have a Champion’s Blessings channeled through a doll of my own creation, a torrent of power pouring into my Familiar, is an exquisite opportunity. The perfection of spells which warp body and soul, driven by Divine Lust… Sellie sighed contentedly. You can hardly imagine them, my Guppy.

Knowing that her suffering was doing something to help Sellie out did something to settle some of her boiling emotions, but not much. After a few more hasty adjustments to the tent’s interior, she called for Mui to enter.

The catfolk man did so, setting his spear just outside the tent as he stooped to enter. His eyes squinted as he poked his head through the flap, and Ketch briefly wondered if she had lit enough candles for him to see by.

Then he sniffed the air, muzzle and whiskers twitching.

“...I see that Sara visited you recently,” he noted, carefully controlling his voice.

“Um,” Ketch squeaked. “No, actually. She hasn’t been over today. I think.”

“You think?” Mui entered the tent fully, moving forward until he could comfortably fold into a cross-legged sitting position. “She is a rather distinct woman. I doubt I’ve ever forgotten her visits with me. Especially those that leave the area smelling like this.”

Ketch’s blue skin darkened. She should have known that a few paltry candles would hide nothing from a catfolk.

“I meant that she might have been over here when I wasn’t,” Ketch explained. She wasn’t technically lying; for all she knew, Sara easily could have visited her body earlier in the day.

Mui gave her a strange look. “I see. I’d thought that most of Sara’s bedmates were more direct than I. It’s a relief to know that I’m not alone in wishing to maintain a sense of privacy about the Chosen’s role in my life.”

Ketch resisted the urge to giggle, placing a hand on her warm belly. She had enjoyed the sight of Mui and Sara in bed plenty of times, of course, as she had with many couples throughout the army, and thus felt absolutely certain the gentlemanly catfolk didn’t understand the true reason for her timidity. If Ketch’s time beneath Sara was more akin to Mui’s, she wouldn’t have been the slightest bit reserved about discussing it.

“Well,” she forcefully said, cheeks still aflame with embarrassment, “regardless. What did you want to ask? We haven’t, um, talked much.”

Though I’ve seen you far more than you’ll ever know, Ketch silently added. Many people thought Ketch was frequently dispatched by Sara on various missions. In reality, those were rare. She spent most of her time in shouting distance of the Champion or one of her wives, always unseen. Though Mui would never know it, Ketch had spent more time with the man than he had with anyone save Sara herself.

Mui folded his hands in his lap, shoulders rising as he filled his lungs. He looked Ketch straight in the eye.

“The Chosen believes that difficult questions are best asked directly, without obfuscation.”

Ketch winced. Uh-oh.

“Are you in love with Sara Brown?”

Ketch stared.

Mui stared back.

The sounds of the army’s goings on filtered in from beyond.

When Ketch realized that was really all he was going to ask, she shifted awkwardly.

“Um, no,” she said. “No, I’m not.”

Mui, mouth half-open to respond, left his jaw hanging for a moment.

“...no?” He asked quietly. “That is your response? Just a simple, unadorned ‘no’?”

“I have a girlfriend back home,” Ketch explained.

“Ah.” Mui licked his whiskers. “The nature of northerner’s relationships is still too strange for me to easily grasp, I suppose. I would have thought that, if you were involved with a partner– or in your case partners– as deeply as you are with Sara, you must love them.”

Ketch swallowed a giggle. “Oh, don’t worry,” she assured him, “my girlfriend and I aren’t in the most common kind of relationship. Northerners aren’t really like us. There’s only one Sellie in Tulian.”

“And one Sara in the Empire, I suppose.” Mui’s eyes wandered around the tent, avoiding eye contact. “Are you not going to question why I would ask so strange a question of you?”

“No. I think it’s obvious. You-”

No, he is not asking your permission for Sara’s hand in marriage, my Guppy.

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Nothing.” She put her hands in her lap, interlacing her fingers. It was best to keep herself still. Every time she moved in a way that disturbed Sara’s gift in her stomach, the craving grew. “Um, actually, yes. I want to know why you asked.”

Mui wiped his hands down his face, making a mess of his muzzle’s fur. “I do not know if I can speak of it, truthfully. I must choose my words carefully. Did you come by your skill… naturally?”

Ketch’s eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh! You haven’t gotten her Blessing yet?”

His lips curled in an unpleasant way, a fanged grimace. “If you refer to what I believe you do, then no. I have not. Yet you, who profess not to love her, have?”

“I have, yes. It started a long time ago. Without Sara, I’d be…” Ketch stopped herself from saying ‘wouldn’t be much.’ She was Sellie’s. She’d never been fated for a normal life. “...not nearly as Skilled as I am now. I definitely wouldn’t have reached my Seventeenth Advancement.”

Mui’s jaws shut with an audible click. “That is… Ketch. We do not know one another. You did not have to share this information. You do not need to debase yourself at my behest.”

This time, Ketch couldn’t stop the giggle.

“I think that I stopped caring about those kinds of things a long time ago. Maybe even before I met Sara. You don’t have to worry about offending me, Mui.” Her eyes swept down the catfolk’s nervous body. “Did you have a point in asking me this? Surely Sara would have been the better person to ask about her Blessings?”

Mui’s grimace deepened. “I cannot ask her. It would… complicate things. I want to come to an answer alone. She calls herself the Champion of Passion, no? I am still unfamiliar with the way northerners view the gods, but the title certainly strikes me as one belonging to one would distribute Blessings based upon emotions as Passionate as love. Yet you say that you do not love her, yes?”

“I love what she does to me,” Ketch said with a faint smile. Her head still swam with endorphins. She’d likely regret saying that later. “But love her? No. And even if I ended up in love, I definitely didn’t fall in love in a week. That’s how long it took before I started to notice her Blessings changing my Advancements.”

No matter what explanations or truth Ketch offered, Mui’s expression had failed to change for the better. His sense of discontent remained.

“A week? Only? And I have been with her for months…”

“And?” Ketch asked. “She’s a Champion. You’ve heard the legends just like me. Maybe different ones, but everyone knows they’re strange. You can’t predict what happens around her.” Ketch laughed. It made the gold in her stomach jiggle, and she had to suppress a gasp. “Really,” she reiterated, slightly breathless, “I never know what to expect next. Not at all. I can’t imagine you know, either.”

“I suppose,” Mui allowed.

“So do you want her Blessing?” Ketch asked. “Is that what your concern is? That you could be like Evie, Hurlish and me, but you aren’t?”

Ketch could see Mui’s throat bob as he swallowed. He remained silent for a long time. Then, without a response, he pushed himself to his feet.

“Thank you for your honesty, Ketch. And I apologize for the intrusion. May you have a pleasant evening.”

She blinked at his back as the Imperial soldier ducked through the tent flap, grabbing his spear in a smooth motion.

“You… too?” Ketch watched him go.

Don’t trouble yourself over it, Guppy, Sellie whispered. You did well. He had questions. Questions that you answered. Those caught in the tangle of a Champion’s life tread a difficult path. You could have offered little more.

“But I’m caught in Sara’s life,” Ketch mumbled, leaning back into her bedroll. The heat in her belly was growing. Glowing.

You grace her web, true. But it is not her fate which has ensnared you. The warm waters of Ketch’s home began to ripple up her body, coddling her in a familiar embrace. Your fate is mine to choose. Worry not, little Guppy. I will take care of you.

Ketch sighed through her smile, letting her eyes flutter closed.

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Tinvel

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Enveloped in the cool mist of a cloudbank, a murmured spell lit Tinvel’s fingers, which he held over the Sunrise’s instrument panel. The wind drove water into his exposed face, stinging pops of hundred-mile-an-hour droplets dotting his skin. He ignored them as best he could, focusing on the tools which could help him navigate his way through the impenetrable fog.

The Sunrise, with every further iteration of its design, had gained newer and more advanced instrumentation. When he’d first built it, the only indicators on his dash had been a water-filled sphere which vaguely told him his plane’s orientation and a compass embedded into the wood. Since then, he’d added so much more. A barometer allowed him to see the air pressure at a glance, warning him when he was approaching a hypoxic altitude, alongside a simple spinning needle which represented his current airspeed– though it lacked units of speed, he knew by heart when he was accelerating towards the range of self-destruction. A bright crystal in the center of the dash was bound to the central geode, dimming with the overall engine’s charge, giving him a vague warning of how much energy the Sunrise had left. The attitude indicator had been improved, water replaced with a far-less frictional mechanical fluid, a prototype form of hydraulic fluid, allowing much more accurate readings on the plane’s current angle. The compass was similarly improved, special enchanted metals insulating it from being influenced by the plane’s metallic parts.

Even if he hadn’t had all his fancy new gadgets, Tinvel would have been confident he could fly through the blinding clouds without issue. The point of this journey wasn’t to practice for himself; it was to help the two other pilots flying nearby.

Several days prior, the third generation of Tulian Aircraft had been completed. Voth’s holy grail of mechanical capability had finally been met: artificers were no longer strictly required to operate the artificery engines. Through several clever workarounds, courtesy of cooperation between Tinvel and the Artificer’s Union, even the least magically talented could now adjust a plane’s engines.

Barely.

Tinvel wasn’t happy with the solution they’d come up with. It was inelegant, inconsistent, and he was convinced it was going to be prone to disastrous failure. Voth had been insistent, however, so he’d put the changes together.

In the clouds, Tinvel heard the buzzing hum of two other engines. As best as he could tell by sound alone, they were flying straight and level, maintaining a constant speed. This was their instrument-only training flight, and he’d only know how well they’d maintained position once all three aeroplanes burst from the cloudbank.

The mechanism which a non-artificer could use to control their plane’s engine was a clunky one. Since the emeralds which powered the propeller were proximity-activated, pulsing every time the stepped crankshaft came within a certain distance, Tinvel had added the simplest mechanism he could think of: mounting the crystals in a metal slide, attached to cables which the pilot could push and pull on. If you pushed the crystals forward, they would eventually reach the point where they’d be activated on every sweep of the propeller, and if you pulled them far enough back, they’d remain inactive. The more crystals you had operating, the faster you’d go.

It was a bad solution. Every adjustment of the crystals came with a rattling clunka-clunk-clunk as the propeller was battered by off-beat energy pulses, requiring several seconds of disconcerting clanging to reach its new operating speed. They hadn’t flown the new engines long enough to see how much worse the wear and tear would be, but Tinvel suspected it’d be atrocious. Just the sound of every throttle adjustment had him cringing, expecting the engines to rip themselves to shreds. It was pretty inarguable, even to Voth, that artificers were still the best choice for pilots. They just didn’t have the luxury of manning an entire branch of the military with those who possessed Talavan’s Gift.

“You hear that?” Chona asked.

“Yeah,” Tinvel said. “That’s the third time they’ve made that hard adjustment. Either something’s wrong with their engine, or we’re gonna have to keep them the hell out of the flight program.”

Tinvel and Chona were flying in the center of a hidden formation, two rookie pilots hidden in the mist off their left and right flanks. Both pilots had more experienced pilots in their backseat, giving them instructions, but the ultimate control of the plane was in the hands of a complete rookie. Tinvel desperately wished he had those ‘flight simulators’ Professor Brown had talked so much about, but something so absurdly advanced was likely decades away. For better or worse, getting in the cockpit was the only way to learn.

Tinvel wiped his flight goggles for the thousandth time, squinting ahead. It seemed like light was beginning to pierce through the dense cloud. It was nearly noon, but deep in the belly of Tulian’s low cloudcover, you could have thought night had just fallen. Only the barest light made it through. Stiff winds and the heavy patter of suspended water droplets battered the Halfeye. If they’d had the fuel-guzzling, air-breathing engines of Professor Brown’s world, this would have been an impossible flight.

“You look left, I’ll look right,” Tinvel told Chona. “I don’t want to pop out of the cloud and end up with a plane heading right for us.”

“Got it,” Chona said.

A few seconds later, with all the suddenness of a curtain torn from a window, the clouds gave way to a blinding light.

“Clear left!”

“Clear right!” Tinvel replied. Then he amended, “Kinda!”

Bursting from the cloudfront, Tinvel could see that the Halfeye off their right side was more than far enough away for safety’s sake, some thousand yards between them, but that wasn’t the full story. The rookie pilot, a young soldier whose fine eyesight and unquestioned bravery hadn’t helped him be any less of a terrible shot, burst out of the cloud with his wings at what looked like a 70º angle.

“Fucking hell,” Chona muttered as the pilot hastily rolled hard right, correcting himself to level flight. He’d lost hundreds of feet of altitude as their trio passed through the fog. If he’d been night-flying, like this was supposed to be training him for, that could have slammed him straight into the terrain. “How did he not feel that?”

“Screw that,” Tinvel said back, “how’d he not notice his flight instruments telling him how off his orientation was? Was he not paying attention? That’s the whole point of this flight.”

“I’m sure Affe’s already chewing him out.”

“At least he’s good at telling people how bad they are,” Tinvel grumbled. “Not afraid to hold back on that at all.”

Chona’s only response was a snort of mild amusement. The fact that he could hear such a small sound was remarkable on its own, however. The sixth edition of the intraplane communication system was doing wonders. The rubber hose from before, enchanted to be filled with dead air, had been thinned considerably, and it no longer required attaching to a mask over the face. Professor Brown had told Tinvel about bone-contact headphones from his old world, and with a bit of fiddling, they’d been replicated– a metal pad attached to the skin over the jawbone was enough to transmit the slightest of sounds. Only once suitably enchanted for vibrational amplification, of course.

Not by Tinvel, however. That was an incredible source of frustration for him. The longer he’d been involved with various works, the more and more Tinvel had been forced to delegate his efforts to others. Not just other University students, but also the Artificer Union, which was still largely composed of teenaged Carrion immigrants. Tinvel knew they did good work, of course, and if the Governess said they could be trusted, he’d trust them. He just hated having to give up control over the things he’d worked so hard for. The current edition of the intraplane communicator was finally good enough to be produced en masse, one given to every pilot in the Tulian Air Force, and even if he’d provided the sketches, it hadn’t been his hand that put the final touches on the design. He just had too much to do.

Don’t be a gloryhound, Professor Garen’s voice echoed in his ears. Through gifts of others and your own remarkable talent, you’ve achieved more than any artificer your age could dare to dream of.

Tinvel didn’t know how to explain to his Professor that that wasn’t the problem. He cared about getting credit, sure, but his frustration stemmed from a more childish well than even that.

He liked working on artificing projects.

Between his duties to the Air Force, his ongoing University lessons, and yes, spending time with Chona, he was busier than he’d been in his entire life. Every time he had an exciting idea for something he’d love to pursue, his only chance to interact with the idea came in the form of a hasty sketch and a letter written to someone else who could do the work for him. The chance to delve deep into the world opened to him by Talavan’s Gift, to tease and tweak the secrets of the universe from stone, steel, and gem, came less often every day.

But I still get to fly, he reminded himself. That’s what matters most.

“Do you see the harbor?” He asked Chona. Old habits almost had him yelling to be heard over the breeze, but that wasn’t necessary anymore. They could hear one another’s voice as if they were sitting across from another in a stuffy basement.

“Not yet, but we should be close,” Chona replied. “I recognize the area. Maybe about ten minutes until we have it in sight.”

Tinvel checked his cockpit panel, looking at the speedometer– by far the most important of the new instruments the Sunrise had been equipped with. This was the tool’s maiden flight, and he’d been taking careful notes of its readouts through the trip. With Professor Brown having finally declared an official definition for a “meter” (equal to the radius of a standard light crystal’s circle of illumination), a whole new world of mapmaking had been opened up to the Tulian Air Force. After so much time spent suffering the delays caused by horribly inaccurate maps, Tinvel and Chona were determined to get something more reliable in the works. All they needed now was to determine that their speedometer worked.

“How do you rate their flying?” Tinvel asked. He’d been paying more attention to the control of his own aircraft than the performance of the new students. “There’s barely any turbulence today, so they should be fine.”

“Pretty straight and level, from what I’ve seen,” Chona said. “Like you said, there’s not much to fuck up right now. Unless they decide to get bored and shake the hell out of the control stick, they’ve got no excuses.”

“And they haven’t gotten bored?”

“Not bored enough to crash their planes, at least.”

“I’ll take that.”

Everyone in the air force was worried about putting new pilots in the cockpit, and Tinvel was maybe the most nervous of them all. What he would have given for one of Professor Brown’s ‘flight simulators’. As it was, the only way for a pilot to learn was to spend a bit of time pretending to wiggle the controls around on the ground, then to take to the skies. Even a secondary control stick, accessible from the rear seat, wasn’t foolproof. The first day that the new students had gone up, he’d made his first trip in years to the temple of Talavan, burning as much incense as he could afford at the Artificer’s Altar. He’d been there for so long that a line of huffy, irritated wannabe-mages had formed behind him, but he hadn’t paid them any mind. If they’d really had Talavan’s Gift, they wouldn’t have been bothering to pray for it to show itself.

So far, whether it was luck or divine blessing, they hadn’t had any lethal crashes. More than a few broken landing gears on landing, a couple tail-strikes on takeoff, and one rather dramatic cartwheel of a seaplane hitting a wave at a bad angle, but no deaths. Just injuries.

So far, he thought darkly. Voth had mostly delegated the training of the new pilots to Affe, which Tinvel was grateful for. He didn’t know if he could stomach having one of his students die on his watch. The way Professor Brown talked of his world’s history, it was only a matter of time.

“There it is,” Chona announced. “About 11-o’clock. I can see the ship waiting for us, too, and it looks like they’re already working on the grounds. Want me to signal to the others?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

Raising her hand and taking a breath, Chona’s fingers snapped, summoning a dazzling splash of light above the Sunrise. She focused on turning it into a flickering rhythm of light, on-off-on. It was the code they’d developed for communicating between aeroplanes that were too far apart for hand signals. Professor Brown was working on ‘flare guns’ of some kind, but they weren’t ready yet.

Though it wasn’t something any of them were familiar with, the other planes got the message well enough. They closed in on the Sunrise, tilting their wings inward until Tinvel could make eye contact with the other pilots.

The one off his right, the former Tulian Army soldier, had a clearly chagrined expression. He tried to lift a hand to signal something to Tinvel, but an angry shout from Affe had him jerking forward, putting both hands on the controls.

The pilot to Tinvel’s left, meanwhile, didn’t make the same mistake. He kept glancing the Sunrise’s way, but only briefly, to ensure he was maintaining separation. His backseater was Elusi, Tulian University’s only other mage who’d decided to focus entirely on artificery. Unlike Tinvel, however, she wasn’t a member of the Air Force. Tinvel didn’t know how the technicalities of it worked out in a legal sense, which had apparently been a bit of a headache to figure out, but she’d turned into something of a ‘civilian contractor’ for the Air Force. Whatever that meant.

“Lefty there seems like he’s doing a better job of it,” Tinvel noted. “He’s got a lot better control of his plane.”

“Sure, but he’s stiff as hell,” Chona said. “I haven’t seen him do anything other than fly straight and level this whole time, even when he had more than enough room to do a bit of playing around. I can’t tell if he’s scared of breaking some rule that doesn’t exist, or if he’s just scared of flying.”

“Huh. I didn’t notice that, but I’ll take your word for it. I guess Elusi’ll tell us what she thinks.”

“Hopefully she’ll actually be able to criticize someone for once.” Chona huffed, crossing her arms. She didn’t have a high opinion of Elusi; the girl was a pushover, easy to bully into doing what anyone else said. She was a decent enough pilot when she was flying on her own, but Tinvel and Voth had quickly learned that she should only be paired with a backseater who wasn’t going to try and boss her around. She caved too easily.

As they neared the secluded harbor, Tinvel began to pick out details. He could see the twin-masted ship resting in the shallow bay, its bronze ram shoved straight up onto the beach. It was one of the captured Sporaton ships from the first war, and it was one of the few that had escaped a full conversion to a cannon-armed warship. Tinvel didn’t know exactly why the Navy hadn’t bothered, but Voth had been grateful, because its sturdy prow allowed it to easily beach itself on any sandy shore. It was perfect for offloading supplies in secluded areas without port facilities.

“Now here’s the golden question,” Chona said, “how do you think the rookies are going to handle water-landing in that tiny little bay?”

Tinvel winced. “I guess we’re going to find out. I mean, they’ve both technically landed in smaller stretches of open ocean before, but…”

“But they didn’t have a shore to smash against out there.”

“Yeah.” After a moment, Tinvel glanced back at Chona. “Signal them to let me land first, would you? If I think it’s too hard for them, we’ll have them land outside the bay and have them motor in on minimal power.”

“Got it.”

As Chona began making the necessary signs to the other crews, Tinvel studied the bay. He’d only seen it once before, on a scouting mission, and the arrival of the Tulian Navy had changed it considerably.

Rows of tents were laid out on the sandy shore, halfway between a sparse treeline and the high-tide mark. Piles of logs, waiting to be worked into more permanent structures, had been placed in the shape of a vague barricade around the perimeter, though it was clearly a haphazard affair. No one expected the isolated bay to be attacked by land, save perhaps for some particularly adventurous jungle beast, and this far north, the worst they could reasonably expect was a tiger or its like– easy enough for musket-armed troops to scare off.

Tinvel wasn’t concerned about the defenses, really. The bay had been picked for two reasons: its geographic location, being about halfway between the Tulian capital and the southernmost settled regions of Sporatos, and its shape. The bay, while somewhat large on the inside, was sheltered by a large sea-facing rock wall. The lone gap through which a ship might enter was thin enough that only a single ship could make it at a time, and only if it was a trim, shallow-draft vessel which pulled in all its oars. To the left and right of that gap, the rocks did an excellent job of hiding the interior from passing ships. A Sporaton vessel would have to sail exceptionally close to the shoreline to see anything meaningful through the tiny gap, and the breaking whitewaters which surrounded the area hinted to the dangerous reefs. Tinvel could only imagine how long it had taken the Tulian Navy ship to cautiously navigate the treacherous terrain.

For a Navy or Army, it was a useless geographical oddity. For the Tulian Air Force, it was the perfect seaplane base.

In the end, Tinvel’s concern for the student pilot’s landings were unfounded. The well-sheltered bay had glassy water, making his own approach a breeze. The two pilots followed shortly after, making graceful touchdowns that sent up long sprays of water, much to the approval of the watching sailors, who hooted and hollered their appreciation. Though muskets and cannon were undoubtedly the greatest source of pride the Tulian citizenry had, aeroplanes were rapidly becoming a close second. Many common soldiers and citizens revered pilots like Old Tulian had its royal Knights. The riders of impossibly powerful steeds, living symbols of a victory that was sure to come.

Not like I need any more pressure, Tinvel thought darkly.

Once he was satisfied with their landings, he joined the other aeroplanes in puttering towards the shore on their engine’s lowest power setting. The sailors greeted them at the shore. Despite the sweat dripping from their clothes after the labor required to set up a base for the aeroplanes, labor that the pilots hadn’t lifted a finger to help with, they leapt to their tasks with a grin and a cheer. Adeptly tying ropes around the Halfeye’s pontoons, they hauled the planes ashore with rhythmic chants of “heave! ho!” in a matter of minutes.

Even after the plane was placed in its spot, Tinvel spent a few minutes in the cockpit burying his nose in the flight’s notes. He was trying to do the math on the speedometer’s accuracy, comparing its reported airspeeds to the already-known distance between Tulian and the secluded harbor, but things weren’t adding up right. Either he was doing the math wrong, or his estimations of the trip’s windspeed was way off, or the speedometer was giving bad readings. He didn’t know how to tell which to blame.

When he finally folded his notebook up and hopped down from the plane, he was surprised to find himself standing face-to-face with a grinning sailor. The woman was at least twice Tinvel’s age and a couple inches taller than him, but the moment he locked eyes with her, she gave a sharp salute, a huge grin on her face.

“Welcome to Osprey Harbor, sir!” She announced proudly, holding the salute. “Glad to see you and your fellows here at last. We’ve been working hard to get things ready for you.”

Surprised by the deference he was being shown by a woman who was, by the callouses on her hands and her deeply sunworn face, a veteran sailor, Tinvel took longer than he should have to realize what he was supposed to do in return. In fact, he almost said at ease, like he’d heard from Voth so many times, but stopped himself just short. That was only for groups of soldiers. In this case, she was holding the salute because Tulian military protocol required every senior officer to return the gesture to their subordinates.

He squared his feet and slapped his right fist over his heart, suddenly very glad that he’d practiced the gesture in the mirror so often.

“Glad to be here,” he said, letting his hand fall. “I appreciate your help getting the Halfeyes up on the shore. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to get those pontoons up through the wet sand on engine power alone.”

“Ah, not a problem, sir,” the woman said, waving a dismissive hand, “our anchor capstan’s twice as hard to haul as those lovely little floats you’ve got there.” She eyed the aeroplanes with obvious relish, a twinkle in her eye. “Say there, sir. Ah, Tinvel, right?”

“I am,” he said, mildly surprised that his reputation had, quite literally, preceded him. “And you are?”

“First Officer Heru of the TRS Ours Now,” she said, announcing her title formally. Tinvel desperately wished he’d learned Naval ranks. He had no idea how important a First Officer was. Probably very, right?

“Good to meet you, First Officer Heru,” he said. “And as I said, you and your crew’s-” do I refer to them as her crew? “-help was much appreciated. If you’ve got a question to ask, feel free.”

A blind man could have seen the flash of excitement make its way over the woman’s face.

“I can’t say how much I appreciate that, sir. I’ll try and keep it quick.” She cleared her throat. “Your Tinvel Engines-”

“Artifice Engines,” he automatically corrected.

She made a face, but nodded, continuing. “Your Artifice Engines, then. The speed that they propel your aeroplanes over the water, even before they take to the sky, is remarkable. The officers of the Ours Now and I were talking, and we wanted to ask you about them.”

Tinvel instantly went on his guard. Half a year ago, he’d have been utterly confident that the Tulian Military was perfectly free of spies. But the Governess had been gone a long time now, and he didn’t know this Officer Heru. He listened with a suspicious ear.

“I don’t know how difficult they are to make, sir, or how many of them you have, but we’re very interested in them. If an Artifice Engine could be mounted to a boat, for example?” She smiled, eyes searching the distance. “Well, we can think of a lot of uses for a 50-knot rowboat, sir. I know your aeroplanes are like magecraft, lightened to allow them to soar as they do, but even if our boats achieve a fraction of the speed, the possibilities very nearly outstrip my imagination.”

As the woman spoke, Tinvel felt his anxiety building. Not, surprisingly, because he thought she was some Sporaton informant, but because she clearly wasn’t. Tinvel knew about certain things that Professor Brown was doing with the Tulian Navy, and though he didn’t know much, he clearly knew more than Heru.

Say too little, and I might offend her when she discovers the truth. Say too much, and I’ve spilled a secret that’s not mine to share.

He spent too long in silence contemplating his thoughts. She was staring at him, confused.

“I think you’re right that there’s a lot of potential,” he said. “Right now, though, we’re struggling to get enough pilots and planes as it is. Hopefully there’ll be enough to try out your ideas sometime soon.”

She let out a half-disappointed laugh. “Ah, I figured you’d say that, sir. Can’t blame a lady for trying though, can you?”

He tried to smile back at her. “Don’t think I can. Still feels bad to say, though, when you’re working so hard to get us set up here.”

“Bah,” she said, turning her head like she wanted to spit to the side. “Don’t worry about that. This is no different than most any cargo run. Our ship’s got more than enough hands to go around. Less to do on shore than there is on the ship! Have to work hard to keep too many folk from malingering, else they’d all be laying around before long.” She clasped a hand over Tinvel’s shoulder, giving him a friendly shake that made it all the way down to his toes. “You keep up the good work up top, yeah? Let us know when the Spricks are comin’, so we can blow ‘em out of the water.”

Doing his best to match her energy, Tinvel grinned. “Only if we don’t burn them to the waterline first.”

“Ha! That’s the spirit! Glad to meetcha, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

First Officer Heru spun about and cupped her hands over her mouth, bellowing at the crews which had helped haul the Halfeyes up onto the beach. Just as she’d predicted, the sailors had congealed into chatty clumps, jabbering about the planes instead of returning to their work. Her booming voice sent them scurrying.

Relieved to be free of a conversation so far out of his depth, Tinvel turned back to the Sunrise.

“Gah!”

He leapt back from Chona’s face, which was hovering a few inches away from his nose. She was leaning head, torso, and waist out of the Sunrise’s back seat, tail clutching a roof spar to keep her from spilling out onto the sand.

She laughed at him, pulling back. “Looks like you got a fan, Tin.”

“Got someone who wants some aeroplane engines, more like,” he said, flushing. He moved to begin inspecting the pontoons for damage. “She’ll have to get in line. Even if we had every artificer in Tulian working on engines, it’ll be a long time before there’s enough that we’re putting them on ship’s boats.”

“Sure,” Chona said, slipping gracefully from the plane, using her hand-like feet to swing her rightside-up just before she hit the sand. “But why didn’t you tell her about the other stuff?”

“Wasn’t sure if I could,” Tinvel answered honestly. “I mean, it’s not like it’s public knowledge. Last I heard, the first prototypes haven’t hit the water.”

“She’s a First Officer, though,” Chona argued. She walked around the Sunrise, inspecting the other pontoon. “Surely she’s important enough to know.”

Across the plane’s belly, Tinvel eyed Chona. “Yeah, she’s a First Officer. I sure as the hells don’t know what that means. Do you know what rank she is in the Tulian Navy?”

Chona smiled. “Nope!”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, there you go.” He shuddered theatrically. “Gods, I hate dealing with other military people.”

“You picked a bad line of work for that, Tin.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled. Finding the pontoons themselves free of damage, he moved to inspecting the spars which connected them to the plane’s fuselage. “Maybe if I actually knew what rank meant what between the branches, that might help. I know the Governess and Professor Brown had all their arguments for separate military branches, but it sure makes stuff like this a headache.”

“Don’t think there’s a book for you to read on it, sad to say,” Chona teased. “Y’know, seeing as we’re all making it up as we go along.”

Tinvel snorted, taking a breath for his retort. Then he noticed a small scuff in the pontoon spar. He took out a piece of chalk and marked it for later inspection before responding.

“Maybe you and I are making it up as we go along,” he said, “but she sure seemed to know what she was doing. People like her, Voth, the Governess, they’ve got it together. I didn’t have a damn clue.”

“I’d bet you twenty copper they’re just as lost as you,” Chona said. She moved toward the front of the plane, running a thumb over the propeller. “They’re just better at faking it than you.”

“Better?” He challenged. “I think I handled that pretty well.”

Chona looked away from her inspection just long enough to roll her eyes at Tinvel. “Oh, yeah, sure. When you stared at her for twenty seconds in dead silence? Smooth as butter.”

“It was not twenty seconds.”

“Sure felt like it. Maybe if you’d actually asked to borrow Professor Brown’s watch like I said you should, we could know.”

Tinvel scoffed, moving toward the front of the plane as well, to check the underside of the engine cowling. “There’s no way he’d give us that thing. Sure, we’ve already got the sketches of it sent off to jewelers, but it’s still the only working one in the world. It’d just be a waste of breath.”

“You don’t think Professor Brown would be fine with his watch getting used to test new equipment?” Chona turned her back as she cranked the propeller around, inspecting the next wooden blade. Her tail stretched out, landing in a light curl on Tinvel’s hip. “Maybe if you actually bothered to grab a pair and argue with him for once, he’d help us out more.”

“Yeah, right. As if he’s not already the busiest guy in Tulian. He’s got more things to worry about than a speedometer test.”

“You know he loves airplanes,” Chona said. Her tail slid further around him, tightening. “Sure, he might have more important stuff or whatever, but we’re working on his favorite project. Honestly, I think you could be abusing that more.”

“Like you can’t?” Tinvel countered. “I can count on one hand the number of times you’ve actually argued with the Professors, Chona. Don’t pretend like you’re any better.”

“I’m way better than you.” Her tail suddenly dragged Tinvel in, spinning him around so he was facing the propeller. She pointed. “Hey, look at this. Is that a stress fracture? We still haven’t replaced the blades once on this thing. Surely they’re reaching end-of-life.”

Tinvel scooted up next to her, shoulder-to-shoulder, inspecting the tiny mark she was pointing at. It might have been a fracture, but it could just as easily be a small cosmetic nick, or the sheen peeling away…

“And this procedure, rookie, is the most important of all!” Affe’s voice sounded. Tinvel glanced over. The mage was guiding the new pilot, Wenson, with an arm around his shoulders. With a spread palm, Affe gestured broadly at Chona and Tinvel. “When you see a sight like this, the steps are simple! You loudly announce your presence, point at Tinvel and Chona like so, bend at the waist, and make the following noise!”

What next spewed from the mage-pilot’s mouth was a revoltingly accurate imitation of violent vomiting, complete with disgusted gags, spitting, and groans of agony. Bent double, the mage popped his stomach hard several times, coughing, looked up once more, and then launched into another bout of fake puking.

Wenson, alongside a number of eavesdropping sailors, laughed loudly. Still bent double, Affe stopped his charade for a brief moment to speak in a bright, clear voice.

“Of course, after this, the second and most important part of this procedure is even simpler. Duck.”

“Wha-”

A gust of spell-torn air buffeted the beach, throwing sand in every direction. Affe curled into a ball in the sand, cackling loudly even as he covered his eyes with both hands. While Affe only slid back a few feet on the sand, the blast of air took the rookie pilot straight in the gut, cartwheeling him up and to the side, dropping him several feet away on his side. He let out a pitiful, whiny groan.

Chona’s hand lowered, every strand of hair standing on end. Her lips were peeled back in a furious grimace, showing off her bestial incisors. Visibly exerting herself, Chona managed to get her expression under control.

“And Wenson,” she snapped, turning back to the Sunrise, “the second part of that procedure is a hell of a lot more important than the first. So if you’re gonna follow it, make sure you remember that, would you?”

The laughter of the sailors, scattered at first, became an uproar. Even Heru got in on it, laughing even as she jogged over to check on the sprawled-out aviator. By the look of him, Tinvel guessed he’d suffered nothing worse than a bruise and getting the wind knocked out of him.

Chona’s tail tightened even further around Tinvel’s waist, cinching in like a belt. With a voice that was trying to hide her laughter behind a veneer of irritation, she whispered to Tinvel,

“Come on, let’s get this shit over with. I’m done with planes for today.”

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