Chapter 1

Victor woke up on a day like any other. The suns were shining, the crystalline beaches not a house length’s away being churned by the gaseous oceans, and the sun blaring away into his eyeballs. Tossing the covers away from himself after a couple moments of denying that it was time to wake up, he stretched and put on his day-to-day clothes - porcelain mask included. Today was the day. Today was the day that he, like so many others, would set out to sail with his friends onto the endless waves of clouds on their ships and fly through the skies in search of treasures and lost artifacts from civilizations of yore.

Ever since he was a child, he had always dreamed about with his friends of finding new and exciting discoveries on how their predecessors lived, lost technology and strange tales of living among the heavens in massive metal behemoths alighting his mind with discovery on how wide the world was. Quickly putting on his socks and thick leather shoes, he quickly pinched out the torch on his bedroom wall and left the slums towards the harbor where his friends were.

Actually, wait a minute. Feces. He left his satchel in his room. And forgot to pack up his blankets and memorabilia. And forgot his journal. This was not a good way to start the beginning of the grand adventure for the rest of his life.

***

Grumbling, he quickly opened the door to the haphazardly-made hunk of metal padded with various cloths in the junkyard district and collected his things. Passing by the much better-to-do neighborhoods now that he had gotten his possessions, he reminisced on his past and how fortunate he was to have managed to weasel his way into higher education with some blackmail and subterfuge tricks he learned from his less scrupulous friends in his birthplace.

Much like any other street rat, he learned much of what he knew by the more kindly elder thieves who passed on their trade to the young orphans on the streets, with the very fortunate among them being able to be taken in by workers hoping to have some apprentices or surrogate children to pass on their legacy to.

Before he started going to one of those schools for pampered nobles thanks to a couple of “advanced persuasion techniques” the Assassin's guild taught him as a youngster, he had gotten to quite a few hijinks that nearly ended his life before he was ten years old.

In fact, he still had to wear a bunch of random masks to hide his face from any bounty hunters searching for the moderate sum that was on his head. Originally, nobles wore them so that they could talk without their facial expressions being scrutinized constantly, but it became a status symbol to imitate so most people in his general region of the Archipelago wore them.

Anyways, back to his childhood and his lucky break by being taken as an apprentice to carry on a craftsman’s legacy. Victor was one of those fortunate few street rats who got a roof over his head, living a double life of thievery and schooling with his half-senile pseudo-grandfather, an artificer by the name of Isaac. He would never forget that old man, he thought as he was dashing through the twisting alleyways of the city, hoping to God that he was not late. On the seventeen years he was on this gaseous orb of a world, Isaac was by far the most benevolent and forgiving person he had ever met, and it was by no coincidence that he decided to skip town and voyage not three weeks after the spindly old guy died of apoplexy.

Climbing onto a roof to avoid attention of the local bribe-hungry guards, he fumbled through his satchel for his journal and flipped through until he found the scribbled copy of a map he saw near the Cartographer’s guild, quickly jumping onto his greatest accomplishment as he leaped off an old roof onto a horrific patchwork of a sea-vessel barely big enough to house a ten-man skeleton crew. Onboard, a slim figure suddenly pushed Victor down and held a dagger to his throat. “Tell me why I shouldn’t slit your neck here and now, intruder”, the voice hissed.

Victor, instead of what most others would do and beg for their life, simply took off the mask he was wearing and pulled off a cheeky grin. “Because I’m too pretty to be killed?”. The figure, being his friend Silk, quickly backed off and looked embarrassed at her aggression towards her friend.

“Well, you shouldn’t have snuck up on us. I was beginning to get worried you would be delayed by some shenanigan you decided to pull before leaving. You were almost late”, she said. Victor simply shook back his hair, slung his satchel onto the makeshift moor, and said

“Are the others coming along? Today is the day we decide to become swashbuckling treasure hunters in search of our fortunes, after all. Just because we planned it out a couple years ago and decided to make a small caravel out of some shipwrecked parts to do so doesn’t mean we weren’t going to do it”.

Taking a pastry out of his bag, Victor munched on it while leaning on one of the benches on the top deck while waiting for his childhood buddy’s response. Silk simply shrugged and took out a book from a library, probably having filched it from the massive library that was their island’s main claim to fame. She loved that place so much she decided to hole up in one of the rafters in some hidey-hole just to read more of those historical drama-romance tales of some long-forgotten court instead of in the Thieve’s Guild like the other orphans.

After waiting awkwardly for a couple of minutes, he decided to strike up another conversation being the chatterbox he was. “Man, this really brings me back, doesn’t it Silk? It seems like yesterday when I got bonked on the head after trying to filch a piece of fruit from what I thought was a random hovel. What a way to start our little friend group, huh?” Silk nodded, and added “you were a stinky thing, too. Guess you weren’t always the fancy schoolboy who constantly washed himself after every burglary, now that I think about it. You’re just lucky I didn’t decide to throw you back out on the streets and decide to let the tiny weird kid talk to me while giving me back my stuff- with interest of course”.

Just as Victor was about to retort and mention exactly how he was totally in the right with zero moral fallacies on his end, the “others” mentioned previously arrived. A two-foot tall, pointy-shoe wearing elf first arrives and proceeds to bump fists with Victor, with a lithe blond-haired person of uncertain gender quietly landing after a short hop while carrying a cat. Upon seeing the cat, Victor immediately scooped it up and patted its head while talking to it, with the former bearer of the feline speaking up. “Who’s a cute little kitty? You are, you sweet fuzzy-wuzzy-” The androgynous figure immediately snapped out.

“Shush now. Victor, please put Fluffy belowdecks and turn the steering wheel. We are late enough as is.” “Come on, take it easy Levi. And who’s fault is it that we’re late? You and Bundo got here late, and honestly it’s not even that big of a deal. Just relax a bit.”. The person in question who was apparently named Levi looked at the cloudless sky and squinted, as if the sun said something mean about Levi’s mother. Bundo, the short elf’s name being called after accompanying the figure known as Levi, immediately perks up. “Bundo would like to mention that the reason beastkin Levi is so stressed is because some guards caught wind of two fairly notorious thieves going to this very harbor and are going to arrest Bundo’s friends Silk and Victor”.

An awkward silence quickly ensued, followed by a frantic rushing about. Bundo managed to haul Fluffy into the third floor of the hull, Silk climbed up into the mast and untied the sail, Levi untied the knot holding the ship into the harbor, and Victor stood there uselessly. The two guards that were previously seen guarding the harbor and accepting bribes were now staring at Victor, who stared back at them. The reason for the ensuing silence was fairly simple: Victor and the two were classmates in their school, being that they were having a guard internship due to the two’s parents being a famous mercenary company.

“Victor? What are you doing?” After a couple more moments of staring, Victor gave a quick and not-at-all suave reply. “Uh…… gotta go. Bye, I guess?”. With what is quite possibly the lamest way to begin an adventure (barely beating out starting an adventure by being accidentally trapped in a barrel and sailing for the first 3 days inside the barrel), the sails billowed, Victor gave a quick salute, and they began sailing along the top layer of the atmosphere to the island of junkyards, where their quest would begin.