Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

It went… surprisingly well. Zorian was a little worried, since they were making this attempt only a few days into the restart and the preparations had been made in a considerable rush. He’d had to take a potion of vigilance and miss a night of sleep entirely in order to finish constructing everything in time, so he was technically doing this while staying awake for more than 24 hours.

They only had two significant complications. One was that some of the soldiers inside the ship had barricaded themselves inside a storage room and placed high-level mental wards on themselves after they figured out how Zorian was overrunning the crew so easily. Since Zach and Zorian couldn’t use anything too destructive for fear of damaging the ship, this made the resulting situation a bit of a chore to resolve in a timely manner. Thankfully, the golem bodies of Zorian’s simulacrums were capable of taking considerable abuse, so Zorian simply sent them in to swarm the soldiers with no regards to countering attacks. The result were two simulacrums with seriously damaged torsos and one that was missing both of his legs, but the problem was solved and the damaged simulacrums could still crew the ship just fine… though the legless one kept whining to Zorian about his predicament.

The other was that once every simulacrum and missing part was in its place and they tried to take off, the airship wouldn’t budge. It turned out that someone had installed an additional safeguard that none of the people Zorian had interrogated had been aware of, and Zorian was forced to frantically search for it while Zach repelled constant assaults on the ship from the reorganized Aranhali soldiers outside. Thankfully, Zorian eventually found the section the safeguard was in. Unfortunately, it was inside an engine regulation section, and integrated into it too deeply and too subtly for Zorian to remove it cleanly in the time they had left. Aranhali battlemages were no doubt going to start teleporting in any time soon, and then they’d be forced to abort the attempt. Thus, Zorian just torched the entire mechanism, allowing them to take off but permanently crippling some of the ship’s engines.

Now the airship was in the air, rapidly distancing itself from the construction site as it flew in the direction of the Xlotic interior. However, it was considerably slower than it should have been and there was another Aranhali airship chasing after them in pursuit. Zorian had no idea how that airship had gotten on the scene so quickly. Maybe it had just happened to be in the area when they made their attempt?

In any case, the two of them were currently in the main control room, trying to figure things out. While they had done their homework before coming here and had a rough idea of what operating the Pearl of Aranhal involved, it was one thing to have a theoretical knowledge of how something worked and quite another to actually put it into practice.

"You know, this thing is harder and less exciting to pilot than I thought it would be," Zach said idly, poking and prodding the various levers and buttons on the control panel in front of him.

"I do know," Zorian told him, a little grumpily. He was rapidly becoming aware of why Aranhali plans called for a dedicated navigator that would focus fully on charting a ship’s course. He was so fobbing off this job to a simulacrum the next time they did this… "Just focus on keeping the flight engines running and be glad you’re not in charge of navigation like I am."

"I’m not so sure your job is that much harder than mine, considering you wrecked half the ship in order to get us in the air," Zach remarked.

"It wasn’t half of the ship!" Zorian protested.

Zach laughed at him.

"So easy to rile up," Zach said mirthfully. "Anyway, whoever designed this stuff should have really been pulled aside and told to cut down a little on the mysterious dials and counters. He should have put in some kind of magic panel or an illusion projector that would give you information in a more understandable form. Would that really be so hard?"

"I think you have a skewed image of how easy that kind of thing is," Zorian remarked. "That kind of thing is neither cheap nor easy, and it would make it really inconvenient to fix things if something goes wrong. Dials and counters are simple to make and fix."

"I guess," Zach conceded. "It’s still annoying that we’re not even able to see the Aranhali airship pursuing us. One would think that an option to see a pursuing enemy would be one of the core features put into a control room. I should be able to say… I don’t know, something like on screen! , and have an image of the enemy projected on these windows in front of us."

He gestured towards the large, clear windows that offered a breathtaking view of the outside world. Currently they could see nothing except the clear sky and the distant horizon, which sounded a little useless but at least it assured them they were flying straight, weren’t going to ram into anything and that the weather was pleasant enough to fly in. Pretty much what these windows were intended for, Zorian was sure.

"That would be kind of useful, actually," Zorian agreed. "And while the airship itself isn’t nearly so convenient…"

He quickly performed three different divination spells, created a large illusionary screen in the air in front of them and then cast the final spell to integrate all of these into a semi-unified whole.

The illusionary screen rippled with prismatic colors for a second before settling into a three part screen. Two of them showed a scried image of the pursuing airship in different angles. The third one gave them a downward view from a vantage point high above the Pearl of Aranhal, allowing them to easily grasp the position of the enemy airship in relation to themselves.

"Nice," Zach praised.

The other Aranhal airship was larger and more heavily-built than them. It had a more typical cylinder shape, and had a handful of cannons sticking out of its hull. The Pearl of Aranhal, on the other hand, was entirely unarmed. Even if they did have cannons of their own, they couldn’t use them, as they lacked the qualified gunners to make use of them.

Zorian wasn’t feeling very threatened, though. Despite the damage to its flight engines, the Pearl of Aranhal was still slightly faster than the other airship. The design was really proving its worth there. Gradually, minute after minute, hour after hour, they were pulling away from the other airship. Additionally, Zorian had diverted one of his simulacrums to see if something could be done about the damage he had done to the ship’s flight engines, and it seemed the answer was yes. In another two hours or so, their speed would shoot up and their pursuers would be left in the dust.

"Uh, not sure if you noticed it yet, but there is another airship in front of us," Zach said, pointing at a distant dot that had yet to enter into the range of their scrying screen but could be seen through the mundane window of the control room. "Do you think they’re here by coincidence or…?"

Crap.

Some frantic divinations quickly revealed that the third airship was most certainly not there on accident. It was moving to intercept them, and both it and their old pursuer were making minor course adjustments in order to box them in better, apparently coordinating their moves. The strange thing was that the new airship wasn’t even owned by Aranhal – it belonged to the neighboring country of Mezner. The two countries didn’t exactly have the best relations with one another, so Zorian couldn’t help but privately wonder what Aranhal had promised to the other side in order to get them to help out. A lot, probably.

They really, really didn’t want to lose the Pearl of Aranhal, it seemed.

Previously, when Zach and Zorian were securing the Pearl of Aranhal and fleeing the scene with their ill-gotten gains, they had been trying to treat their enemies with as much mercy as possible. The Aranhal soldiers posted on the construction site were perfectly justified in being outraged at them, after all, so the two time travelers tried to disable their enemies non-lethally. To Zorian’s knowledge, nobody had actually died during the theft itself, though some people did get seriously injured and the golden triclopses might have killed someone after they had left. They even left the pursuing airship be, preferring to flee rather than destroying them, as they very well could have.