NOVEL NEXT Book 4, Chapter 10
"The Harpy is not your ship," Envy said.
"Look, the refits-" I began.
"The Harpy," Envy repeated quite forcefully, "is not your ship."
I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath to steady myself.
One of the key elements that was hammered on constantly by Abbondanza and Thompson in their lessons was the importance of not only speed, but also maneuverability. We needed to be able to outrun the pirates, but we also had to be able to turn on a dime, and avoid letting them cut us off, surround us, and otherwise trap us in no-win situations. Another thing that was greatly emphasized was the importance of firing angles, and the limitations of heavy shipboard weapons that were hard for a humanoid operator to pick up, carry, and reorient as they saw fit.
As such, if The Harpy was going to take on an entire fleet of organized air pirates, she'd have to be the fastest ship in the skies, with the best weapon emplacements possible. Which, well, she wasn't, hence the need for a pretty major refit.
It wasn't outside my abilities, though. To the same extent that I was a Wizard trained by an ancient elven archmage, I was also a machinist/engineer trained by a grizzled dwarven forgemaster. I had built my motorcycle and my van both from scratch; refitting an airship with a few extra components was entirely doable.
And if it had been my airship, I'd just be doing exactly that. Unfortunately, while the Harpies were generally willing to follow my lead, they were less willing to let me make serious and permanent changes to The Harpy, which was their airship.
"These aren't all non-starters," Vanessa began.
"No, they are," Envy said firmly.
"Look," Vanessa said, putting a hand on Envy's shoulder. "I get it. Honestly, I'm with you on some of this- like hell I'm going to let her cut multiple four foot holes in the hull and mount giant steel-and-glass balls on our ship. That sort of huge, experimental nonsense- absolutely not, not on our ship. But. Replacing the engine, and relocating the helm to somewhere more convenient? Those are perfectly reasonable modifications, and they'd be easy to undo if we decided not to keep them."
"I don't want any modifications to my ship!" Envy protested.
"The pirates sure do," I said bluntly. "Let me remind you that this is on the table because we're about to go into battle against a competent foe who outnumbers us, and if we don't seize every advantage we can, then they will blow our ship out of the sky and kill us all in the process. So. Do you want The Harpy to be faster and nimbler? Or do you want it to be a pile of bloodied and charred scrapwood at the bottom of the ocean?"
"I'd like to cut in here and make note of something important," Volex said, emerging from her reliquary. "We've got maybe a week to do refits before we have to go pirate hunting. Upgrading the engines and the helm within that time is doable; designing, fabricating, and installing brand-new enclosed turrets that nobody has ever seen before is not."
"It wouldn't be a design nobody's seen before if these dipshits working for the military would pull up their fucking socks already," I grumbled.
"Yes, yes, everyone who isn't you is stupid," Volex said, patting me on the shoulder. "Poor baby, so unfairly put-upon with the burden of genius, which most definitely is not a result of having an entire mechanical engineering degree crammed into your skull by a grizzled old dwarf, but without any of the practical work experience in the industry that would usually accompany such a degree of skill, which leads you to work with insane mage-forged materials that do impossible things while also being incredibly expensive for production."
I rolled my eyes.
"Speaking of incredibly expensive, Envy, I'm going to need your help," Volex said.
"I'm not made of money," Envy said, folding her arms.
"No, but you are the only Occultist on this ship who isn't me or Cat, and Cat's going to be busy," Volex said. "Cat's developed a horrendous atrocity that can best be described as 'Lucifer's bottle rockets,' and she's very insistent that they require a very complex and expensive guidance enchantment, which would be best done with Occult magic. I've already got the enchantment figured out, and can walk you through it; I just need another pair of hands and another magicka pool."
"Does Erica know any Occultism?" I asked. "I feel like she might be a useful addition, here."
"She does not," Vanessa said, shaking her head. "We're all specialists, here, and Envy is it, as far as Occultists go."
"Right, well," Envy said. "I'll see what I can do, regarding these guidance enchantments."
"And Cat, you'll have to hand my reliquary over to Envy for the duration," Volex added.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
I blinked, about to ask if she was sure that I should hand over the bottle that contained her soul and bound her to the will and expectations of whoever held it, but I got a telepathic message from her:
"You've already marked my reliquary with your object-teleport spell. Just call it back to your hand once we're done."
I hummed quietly.
"Alright, if you say so..."
"Fair enough," I said, pulling Volex's reliquary out of my pocket. "Here, Envy. Treat Volex right, you hear me? If she has complaints about your conduct, I will be taking them seriously."
"Yes, yes, you're a prince among men and your word is law," Envy muttered, taking the reliquary from me. "Go bother someone else."
---
"Catherine?" Envy called out as she entered the engine room- which was, specifically, the aftcastle, which had once held the helm and a periscope and a basic enchanted steam engine, and which now had a bunch of aluminum castings I was busily machining and scraping and fettling and filing and polishing into working engines. "Are you in here?"
"Yeah," I called out from behind the wall of stacked engine blocks, standing at the mill and bringing the cylinder to final dimension. "What is it, Envy?"
"Volex has been working me like a dog," Envy complained as she walked in, ducking past the wall of engines to step into my field of view. "This is... uh... Are you still working?"
"I am, because I am not a child," I said simply. "You think being a 'born hero' or whatever the fuck you said makes this easy? You think this shit happens on its own? Because it fucking doesn't, Envy. For all of this to work, someone has to make it work. Someone has to grit their teeth and put in the elbow grease, and act like a goddamn adult. So. Cry me a fucking river. And once you're done with your little tantrum? Get back to fucking work."
I grunted wordlessly as I backed the mill out of the current cylinder, and advanced the engine block to the next step in the jig, lining up the next cylinder with the boring head perfectly.
"...Are you okay?" Envy asked.
"Envy, we are about to fight a fleet of sky pirates, with the sort of organization and equipment that's typically reserved for actual navies," I said. "Yes, we have beyond-cutting-edge long-ranged weapons to engage them with, but as The Harpy currently stands, we'd still get rushed down, surrounded, and then we all die horrible deaths, because it turns out that pirates, who are willing to kill merchants who don't want to fight at all, aren't terribly merciful to enemy combatants." The boring head bottomed out, and I pulled it back up and out- oh, how I longed for a quill power feed on this mill, but alas, I didn't have the time to make that, and no, making and installing it wouldn't save more time than it consumed over this job. I'd done the math, in my head, over the course of the three hours I'd spent in front of the mill.
(Most of my work today had been foundry work, preparing a number of sand molds to cast all the engine parts I needed. Previous experimentation told me that aluminum engines could work, they just needed more aggressive cooling, and I already knew how to handle that, so I'd cast the engine blocks, cylinder heads, pistons, con-rods, and crank shafts in aluminum, because none of this needed to be durable and hard-wearing, it just had to be quick and easy to make. I'd make this shit from die-cast zinc if I thought they'd hold up to any amount of use.)
"That's the thing I don't think you quite understand, regarding me being such an accomplished Adventurer," I continued. "It's not that I've gone on more bandit-killing expeditions than you have. It's that I have, through circumstances largely beyond my control, ended up in incredibly violent do-or-die situations on multiple occasions. And on that Paimon adventure, I did die. Three times! In one day! It was deeply fucking unpleasant! And while sure, I was 'handed' these grand quests through circumstance and coincidence, I need you to understand two key things: one, actually surviving those adventures required a truly unreasonable amount of preparation and training over not only the weeks leading up to those adventures but my entire fucking life. I sometimes feel guilty about having a bedtime, rather than simply working on my current project until exhaustion forces me to stop! And two: the thing about these adventures that I was 'given' with 'no effort of my own' are actually very unwanted and traumatizing experiences that keep being foisted upon me without my say in the matter."
"...Ah," Envy said quietly.
"So, if I seem unsympathetic to your plight, that's why," I said. "Intellectually, I can acknowledge that your situation sucks. You worked hard to get into one of the most prestigious universities on the continent, for your family's sake more than your own, and now, here at the end, Helen Rosewood is threatening to expel you because she has a bug up her ass about the fact you intend to use her education for something besides her preferred use-case. However, emotionally, all I can think of is the fact that you don't seem to understand that Adventurers get killed all the time, and they're not always lucky enough to die in one piece so a Healer can bring them back. So. Y'know." I shrugged, and started boring the final cylinder on this engine block. "It's not a bed of roses for any of us, I suppose."
"...I'm sorry," Envy said. "Is... Is that what you wanted to hear?"
"It helps," I said quietly. "I'm sorry too, Envy, I... I shouldn't be taking this out on you. The worst you've ever been is annoying. Can we... How about we just pretend this conversation didn't happen?"
"Unfortunately, that's not an option," Envy said, shaking her head. "I didn't just come in here to complain, after all."
"Oh?"
"Volex told me to drag you out of here and to the dinner table so you'd actually eat something."
"...You'll have to-"
I discovered, a moment later, that Envy was, in fact, a very skilled Bard, and that she apparently had enough magicka left to knock me out with an Occult sleep spell. From there, she'd carried me out of the engine room and down to the common room, setting me down in a chair at the dining table, and only allowing me to wake up once there was a plate in front of me and a fork in my hands.
...Well, if she was going to insist...