When Yun saw Laurence in danger of being eaten he could not help but roar out in rage. Brother! He sent through the sky, Brother, behind you! Laurence looked behind him, but there was very little he could do to avoid the beast. It loomed as it reached him and swamped him in shadow. The lightning crackled and saliva dripped by him, singing his flesh and hair. The stench of ozone was everywhere.

Yun roared in rage as he saw the one member of family he actually knew in peril of being eaten. He could not accept it. He would not accept it. He cried out and threw his needle sword at the beast, watching it change in size and shape until it was more of a javelin than a sword. It flew through the sky, and with a little help from the momentum of the ship and the snake, it quickly reached the target.

The snake screamed again as it was injured once more. The javelin pierced through the thick scales and into the pulpy, sensitive material that made up the snake's nose. The snake writhed as the javelin turned to dust and returned back into Yun’s hands. He looked at the weapon in shock and then threw it out again, aiming for the underbelly of the wyrm this time. It pierced flesh once more and the snake writhed more.

The snake undulated so much that it bucked its child straight into the abyss below. It screamed out and dipped its head then saw the baby maelstrom snake fall to the desolate ground below. It screamed again and dove towards its spawn, ignoring the pain of its eye, nose and belly. Reaching the child before it hit the floor, the snake arced back up into the sky and could only watch bitterly as the ship dashed away into the distance.

Laurence groped his way back to the vessel, each pull taking far more effort than he expected. He realised that although inklight did not consume much of his mana, the consumption rate was starting to take a toll on him. It was distressing, but his mana would run out before he reached the ship with the way he was going. Taking a moment to think about his options he decided that the best way back was to shorten the rope that connected him to the ship. It was a devilishly simple answer to the problem in front of him. He split the rope of light into two strands and wrapped them round the railing and forced them to act like a conveyor belt. Within moments he had arrived back at the ship, safe and sound.

Once he got his bearings he sat down and began laughing uproariously at the situation he had been in. He had been on a knife edge and managed to survive, even though his null state had broken mid-combat. If it had been a fight of equivalent power, then it would have likely cost him his life, and almost did. Yet he also learned what it felt like to fly and could not get over how good it felt.

After Yun and Louisa managed to stop Laurence laughing and he had restored some of his heavily depleted mana reservoir they moved downstairs and begun helping clean up. There was mess everywhere, shattered tables and broken ornaments. Glass was strewn across parts of the floor and had managed to get embedded in some of the walls in the back of the ship. It was like a bomb site.

The moment the snake had left the vicinity of the ship Jonas issued the order for the mutineers to be thrown off the bridge and into the hold. He intended that they would stay there until they got back to civilised land. In the end six men and women, including Yannis, were imprisoned. Three of Yannis’ supporters were able to avoid imprisonment and potential keelhauling because of the fact that they did not take part. It would have been over before Laurence and Sleepy could do anything if they had taken part, but because they did not there was only one death and nine injuries.

The clean up process began once the vessel and the prisoners were secure. The only place in the ship that was not strewn with debris from the turbulence was the living quarters of the ship. By captain’s rule everything was packed securely away before starting a shift for running the ship. It was something that most of the crew found annoying, but now they saw the value in it. The place most damaged was the kitchen. Even when everything had been put away, the cupboards had not been secured and the cutlery, crockery and food had ended up strewn everywhere. Some of the more brittle bowls had shattered and there were shards covering and pricking everything in sight. Jonas just sighed at the sight of broken pots and spoiled food. It was not an entirely new occurrence for the crew to have to clean up shattered things, but the scale was completely different to what they were usually used to.

As the cleaning process progressed, Laurence and Yun were the most valued people nearby. Things seemed to fix themselves around the two boys, so where they walked debris would clear and the surroundings of the ship would repair faster than if they had just let the repairing array on the ship fix the vessel. The boys were both praised wherever they were seen in the ship. Everyone had seen the battle that took place on the screens of water that projected images of the snake. It was nail bitingly tense and incredibly short, but the entire thing left a massive impression on the crew. Two children had scared off a beast hundreds of times larger than themself. They put the rest of the crew to shame with their strength and bravery.

The cleanup itself took around five hours to return everything back into the shape it was before the mutiny occurred. In the end the only real damage that had been inflicted upon the crew was that they had lost a lot of food and that around a third of the crew was incarcerated, with a quarter of the rest of the crew bed-ridden. They were stretched thin, but the crew could cope. Of the twenty people, there only actually needed to be three people running the ship, a pilot, a navigator and an engineer or arrayist. While they were lacking ten people, the crew had to cycle the necessary roles round fewer crew members which meant longer standing shifts and less time off for everyone.

Laurence went to see Sleepy after he finished cleaning up the bridge. If everything went to plan then they would be leaving the floor in less than twenty hours and they still had things to discuss. From the moment he left the bridge to the moment before he arrived at the engine the boy debated over giving his friend a copy of the Book of Creation. It was a tough call, because it would have to be kept secret else Sleepy would fall into a similar predicament to the one that Jonas had posited. People would pay good money to control someone who could craft, and almost anyone could be persuaded with enough money. In the end he just decided to walk in and let Sleepy decide for herself if she wanted to learn from the Book.

“I can’t exactly stop looking over this, can I?” She said when Laurence walked through the door. “I have to check the arrays every few hours after a new battery has been implanted to make sure that everything is running smoothly. I can’t simply ‘take a break’ like you suggested.” She stopped berating Xuchi and turned round to look at who had entered the engine as she was talking. “Oh hi Laurence.”

“Fine,” Xuchi said, “I’ll let you work. But the moment you get a chance, you rest. Okay? An engineer who is comatose from sleep is a bigger problem than a little turbulence for the next few hours.” Tugging his bandanna, he walked over to the door and walked out, shaking hands with Laurence on his way out.

“So what did you come see me for?” Said Sleepy.

“I have two things I came to talk to you about. First, I’m going to be leaving the ship, and this floor of Babel in less than a day and was kind of getting in an early goodbye. We are likely not going to see each other again for a long time, but you’re my friend, so I wanted to make sure you knew you were valued.” He paused and opened his bag of holding. “Second. I wanted to give you this.”

In his hands was a slim, red leather bound book with a sigil in the shape of Laurence’s hammer on the front. It had embossed leather patterns all over it, but the two most prominent symbols were the glyphic runes for ‘Creation’ and ‘Book’.