What Little Remains Of Terpsichore Ironheart

"This was The Harpy as of two months ago," the poor, beleaguered Imperial Intelligence officer began, gesturing to a surprisingly crisp color photograph projected on the screen. "It was a perfectly ordinary corvette-class airship of Hikaano make, with the only distinguishing feature being that it was owned by an adventuring party called The Harpies."

"They're that all-female legacy party, right?" one of the assembled engineers- an unremarkable man named Tim Johnson- asked.

"Don't interrupt," the Intelligence officer said firmly, before clicking a small remote. The projected image changed to a very weird-looking airship, and he continued talking. "This is The Harpy as of two days ago, when Catherine Ironheart- after half a semester of college education, over a period of two weeks- refitted The Harpy into the fastest and and nimblest airship in the sky. One week from today, I will have to personally explain to the Emperor what happened here and what the Navy plans to do in response."

Another click, and now, it was a much, much blurrier image.

"We weren't able to get much information out of the battle," the Intelligence officer continued. "That Bard of theirs is an absolute menace, and we could only pierce her veil to get a single snapshot of the Fire Breath's main deck covered in dead bodies, with Catherine Ironheart in the process of making several more of them out of the ship's poor marines. However, in the background, we can see what looks to be a Grigian corvette being hit by an artillery-grade fireball."

"Fired from an airship?" the weapons engineer, Jackson Thompson, demanded.

"We don't know for certain, but if they had some other firing platform to hand, we have no evidence of it, and no idea what it might be."

Another click, and a simple t-table was now on the screen.

"The Harpy, a single corvette-class airship, sustained zero fatalities, while inflicting seven hundred fatalities on a fleet of sixty military-grade airships, including six frigate-class airships and The Fire Breath, the largest airship ever lofted."

"A question, sir," the junior engineer in the room, one Matthew Cain, said. "Do we have reason to believe that Catherine Ironheart now owns The Fire Breath?"

"We are as yet unconvinced that The Fire Breath is more dangerous than The Harpy, a ship that, if Catherine Ironheart does not outright own, she can certainly recreate whenever she feels like it," the Intelligence officer said. "That is the core issue at hand, gentlemen: Catherine Ironheart has devised a set of refits that would turn an ordinary corvette-class airship into the fastest and nimblest thing in the skies, which can take on an entire airfleet and win. This is what the Emperor is concerned with; can we match, if not outdo, what this one teenager managed to do in two weeks? And if we can't, how do we intend to stop her from dropping whatever bombs she likes on whatever cities she likes?"

"I keep telling you people, we need to stop making them look like boats, it's a stupid and inefficient design for what it's doing," Tim said.

"Will I finally get a chance to prove that whole resin-impregnated fiberglass idea I've been working on?" another engineer- Mike Freeman- asked. "I bet it'd be even lighter than wood, and easier to shape into whatever the hell we want."

"Do we have more photographs of The Harpy's new configuration?" Matthew asked.

"It may be wise to start with reverse-engineering, yes," the Intelligence agent said. "We've got handouts with more photographs of The Harpy to be perused after this briefing. Any further questions?"

"What kind of budget are we looking at, here?" a grizzled senior engineer with a long, greying beard asked. His name might have been Randall Smith when he was a young man, but these days, everyone called him Hoss, for reasons nobody- not even Hoss himself- could adequately explain.

"As it so happens, we are very fortunate to have Catherine's receipts from the workshop she contracted. We know exactly how much money she spent on this. The preliminary budget is ten times that amount; likely there are components she supplied herself that we don't know about."

"Are we going to have to replicate her weapons, too?" Jackson asked. "Because that's the sort of thing that'll require a paradigm-shifting breakthrough."

"At the moment, we're satisfied with conventional battlestaves. If you do find a paradigm-shifting breakthrough, that would be excellent, but I want your focus to be on maneuverability. Any further questions? ...No? Good. We meet back here on Friday; come up with an actionable plan."

---

"I was right!" Tim cried, watching their test pilot put The Falcon through its paces in a thoroughly impressive shakedown cruise. "Those sideways rudders are important! I was right!"

With ten times Catherine Ironheart's budget, and also a surplus of airship parts- and airships- lying around the Imperial Navy's Research Base 02, the team of engineers was able to replicate The Harpy's refits in a matter of days... mostly.

"There's no way she used that many lightning crystals," Matthew said. "That was most of our budget."

"Good catch," Hoss rumbled. "But bear in mind, kid- this is an elf we're talkin' about. Her daddy might be an archmage with so many lightning crystals cluttering up the basement he was glad for her to take 'em."

"We already know she didn't use lightning crystals," Jackson said, holding the handout he'd been given. "Says here in the receipts that she bought a bunch of dynamos from the dwarves- she had something in there making rotary motion to turn into electricity."

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"...I missed that," Matthew said, frowning. "Alright... what do we think it was? I think the handout mentioned Catherine was a dimensionalist, so... she might have stuffed a bunch of steam engines into the engine room?"

"She didn't buy any of those," Jackson pointed out.

"Maybe she already had them," Matthew said.

"I doubt it," Hoss said. "There's nothing in there indicating she'd just have a hundred steam engines in her pockets, so if she used them, she probably would've bought those from the dwarves. Which means whatever engines she did use, they must've been something bespoke she made herself, rather than off-the-shelf components. We don't know what those engines were, but I think we can make an educated guess at how many there were and how much power each of them needed to make."

"Right, just count the dynamos, and divide the maximum total power draw by that, plus the efficiency factor," Matthew murmured.

"I know we were told to match her," Mike began, "but that turned out to be as simple as bolting on another pair of rudders to the sides of the hull and then bolting on a dozen electric motors. And Iunno about you gentlemen, but I would like to go beyond just matching Catherine's work."

"What're you thinking?" Hoss asked.

"While you guys were busy bolting extra rudders on The Falcon, I was working on that fiberglass stuff I was talking about," Mike said. "The resin finished curing yesterday, and I've already fit up the hull with lift and propulsion. Nothing major, but I reckon it'll be an interesting proof of concept. Just the fiberglass and resin has made a pretty tough rigid shell, but for future prototypes, I think I'm gonna want to add some kind of metal reinforcement."

"How are the weight savings?" Jackson asked.

"Not enough to mount an artillery cannon on it," Mike said apologetically.

"I'm not convinced maneuverability is enough," Jackson said, tossing his handout onto the table in front of him. "You can't destroy an airship just by outmaneuvering it."

"Why not use lightning staves instead of fireball artillery?" Matthew asked.

"Because lightning staves are terrible," Jackson said. "Oh, sure, we use lightning staves and wands against the orcs on the frontier, but that's because they're unarmored barbarians and nobody wants to start a grass fire. If they had metal armor like everyone else? Nobody would be using lightning."

"Doesn't metal conduct electricity?" Tim asked.

"Yeah, it conducts the electricity away from the body," Jackson said. "If you use enough lightning, it'll heat up the metal and cook someone alive, but for that much magicka, you could cook everyone in a fifty foot radius around them with a fireball."

"At this rate," Mike said, "we might as well just write Ironheart a letter and ask her for ideas. She clearly knows something we don't."

"She's an elf," Hoss pointed out. "She'd probably kill us all if she found out we were trying to copy her invention."

"...Why?" Mike asked.

"The War of the Roses, dipshit," Jackson said.

"That was three hundred years ago!" Mike protested.

"And Ironheart's mother is three thousand years old," Jackson said. "You think the elves don't still hold a grudge?"

"Anyhow," Hoss said. "If we're going to try to match The Harpy, it looks like we're going to need miniaturized artillery. Is that going to be a 'give me three years and a million dollars' kind of hard, or a 'I have no idea how we'd even start' kind of hard?"

"It... I mean, within our current paradigm, it's doable, but not without a lot of caveats," Jackson said. "Fireball artillery of that magnitude... I mean, admittedly, it's something that's been on the backburner for decades since the last war with Grigia, so there's definitely room for improvement once we do start focusing development on it."

"What are the current operational constraints?" Matthew prompted.

"Right, right," Jackson said, rousing himself from dreams of job security. "Well, currently, an artillery piece that could blow any airship short of The Fire Breath out of the sky requires six men to operate it, five of whom have to be Grade 4 Battlemages or higher so that they can actually power the damn thing. It takes long enough to aim those artillery pieces that the idea of hitting an airship with it is ridiculous, the rate of fire is measured in minutes per shot with the record being two minutes and the average being five, and the artillery piece itself is basically a battlestaff made out of a fifteen foot section of tree trunk and mounted in a heavy cast-iron gantry for aiming it. It's light enough that you can mount it in an enchanted horseless carriage without the damn thing sinking up to its axles in the mud, which is standard practice for portability, but you can only get one of them on a single cart, and the whole thing is expensive enough that they're a byword for 'wastes of money' among weapons engineers."

"...Yeah, I can see why we don't use those against the Green Orcs," Tim said. "Fuckin' hell, five Grade 4 Battlemages? That's insane! Can they at least get a respectable number of shots off before they're out of magicka?"

"They're supposed to be given power crystals for the artillery, but on their own magicka, they can only manage ten shots before they have to stop," Jackson said. "They're usually considered to be better used for literally any other purpose, like holding up shields over a formation of soldiers to protect them from arrows. So, if we're going to develop a better artillery cannon... It has to do more with less, and I don't know if the state of the art has improved that much since the last major revision."

"...Well, the Intelligence guy said we shouldn't bother trying to replicate her weapons," Hoss said, after a few moments' pause. "He wanted maneuverability, and we delivered it. It's his problem now."

---

Emperor Constantine Irkanian the Third frowned as he digested this news.

"...Well, maneuverability is something," Constantine said, sighing. "At least our ships will stop being sitting ducks. And you're sure the weapons program will turn something up?"

"They have already developed a fireball artillery piece that requires only one operator, and is powered entirely by crystals," the Intelligence officer said. "Those crystals will need many battlemages to recharge, of course, but now those battlemages don't have to be on the ships themselves. They are also working on miniaturization, so that more than one of them can be mounted on a corvette-class airship."

"Hmph. They'll be more expensive though, won't they?" Constantine asked.

"Yes, your majesty. It is up to you whether the expense is worthwhile."

Emperor Constantine sighed.

"...Once everything is ready, I want five new Harpy-class corvettes, each fitted with two fireball cannons," Constantine said. "They'll be a test case to see if the design is worth it."

"Your will be done."

"Dismissed."

The Intelligence officer left, and Emperor Constantine sighed a second time as the door closed.

"Those fucking elves..."