Fluffy finished grooming himself, his fur once again cleaned in the meticulous ritual of licking that was adhered to almost religiously by cats. After finishing his hygiene maintenance, the feline morphed shapes fluidly and abruptly shrunk into a tiny kitten in order to fit through a small hole, almost unnoticed as it was behind one of Silk’s bookshelves in her library. He then deftly slipped through a winding maze of beams in the ship’s support structure into a secret area that only he and Victor knew about: the den.

Cuddling up to the engineer, both of them quickly took a nap, Victor having entered through a sliding false bottom in his cubby adjacent to the bunks, the reason for him not bothering to furnish his bunk a little more becoming clear: he didn’t need one. Indeed, his “bed” in the common area was little more than a sham, and this was where he spent most of his time, in a small side box where he would cuddle up with Fluffy.

As he stroked their team pet of an ambiguous species, he ruminated on recent events. More specifically, that they didn’t really have a general plan of where they would be going. All Acna had told them before they parted ways was to go in a general direction towards Compass Island, wherever that was. Apparently, they could find a way to explore with purpose, as opposed to just randomly wandering about aimlessly without purpose. There was apparently some sort of way to track the mat of floating plants that made up the islands, with each one having a unique signature. Once you learned to track them and exclude some that you couldn’t track, it was only a matter of time before someone made a compass that could do so.

However, he was not thinking about such things currently. What he was really interested in was those odd “addition machines” and how they worked. Currently, he was struggling to understand how to put together multiple of what the Omnic people called “gates”. How could a circuit “think”? He understood that they could essentially be coded to make set yes-or-no questions, but how exactly they went from this to being able to sort books at blinding speeds in a library made no sense. Attempting to sketch out a diagram of a basic machine that could make adding sums easier, he scratched his head in puzzlement.

Meanwhile, Silk was practicing her sword training against these weird dummies she asked Victor to rig up, with Henry occasionally firing blunt arrows and whatnot to sharpen her defensive skills. Fighting against Acna and losing terribly against Batrascu had revealed a major blind spot in her swordplay. See, while she had years of training with the Thieve’s guild, she was almost entirely focused on offense, always having the element of surprise and thus the initiative. It was only due to dumb luck and her superior weapons that she was able to defeat the chieftan’s daughter, and this showed terribly when she was unable to deflect the demon’s bare-handed strikes. Currently, she was slapping around a totem of wood with intricate spinning parts that reacted somewhat randomly and struck back, forcing her into a cycle of attacking and deflecting while making it slowly increase in intensity. While she was ruminating on these events, a blunt feathered stick hit her in the back of her head.

“Yer still distracted, Silk! Clear yer mind like ah taught ya!”, hollered the cantankerous old man. Just as she was about to retort, a quickly-timed strike from one of the pole-like protrusions that acted as limbs on the training dummy landed a brutal strike into her abdomen, tossing her back as she landed on the ground in a fetal position while groaning.

“Crap.”, she said while getting back up. That was definitely going to leave a bruise. At any rate, that was yet another weakness she had.

Henry’s eyes softened, Silk looking like the very picture of a younger version of himself struggling to get back up while his captain berated his cabin boy for such a weakness. “How about you take a break, alright? You did good, rest up.”, he said in a kindly tone.

“Alright”, responded silk, limping over to the showers to clean herself of the various grime that had accumulated while skittering about on the ship for her training. Levi, in an enclosed watchtower-like crow’s nest, looked down and commemorated the event by showing a vicious-looking silk rapidly striking her training dummy. However, her hand slipped as a bird slapped into the window and startled her, marring the portrait with a harsh slash. Levi merely sighed and threw it into the trash, where it would be incinerated after being checked by Victor for cool things and subsequently be tossed into another island to fuel the mat of dirt and decomposed plants that made up the floor. The bird promptly fell down into the jaws of a waiting Fluffy, who had left Victor’s hidey-hole in favor of a sunbathing session. Fluffy had a knack for lying down and letting birds fly into his gullet after hitting things, despite how unlikely such a thing would seem. The cat leapt away and strode off after hearing a loud curse from the crow’s nest, most likely due to the distraction ruining her work.

“I got it!”, shouted Victor as he jumped into the air from excitement. Unfortunately, due to the compact nature of his hidey-hole, he ended up banging his head on the beamed ceiling and shouting in agony. The reason for this was he had recently experienced an epiphany on how to use the basics of these circuits that made up their computers, and now knew how to build and use layers of these chips. Holding up his newest trinket, he quickly went through the cubby hole into his hideaway and skittered to the engine room, where he began building a terminal to attach the strange green cube he made. Just as he was going to start building the foundation for the interface connecting the cube and the engines, a sudden jostling of their ship atop the layer of mist that was the ocean nearly knocked him off-balance.

“LAND AHOY!”, shouted Levi from the crow’s nest. Indeed, a veritable mountain of greenish brass was directly in front of them, roughly a mile or so. As they got closer to the dock, Compass Island’s technology and general culture also became clearer. A twisted jungle of tubes and copper, it was a utopia for anyone who favored steam and hydraulics-based machinery. Clacking gears and sporadically placed gauges were evident even to someone who had yet to set foot on the island. As the ship set down it’s anchor, a voice from the pier yelled out something.

“We don’t do that here”, said a deeply tanned sailor while leaning back slightly with open palms at his waist, which were tar stained and facing towards the crew. He then motioned towards a massive crane filled with complex gears and emitting steam from various pipes, which lifted the ship and placed it on a set of rails attached to a wheeled cart, presumably for easier storage and undocking.

“Neat.”, said Victor while looking awestruck at the area. He could tell he was going to have an amazing time here. Aside from getting a compass to start their journey, he could tell a bustling city like this was bound to have a couple of hijinks to get up to. He then got up from his seat near the prow of the ship and hopped off, doing a double flip and landing with his arms out, bowing to the clapping and whistling of a couple impressed sailors. Levi was next, her catlike reflexes and agility allowing her to jump off a good thirty feet from the air and land straightly without any acrobatics from her spot at the Crow’s nest.

Silk simply hopped down from the prow, without any fanfare or fluff. She also tacitly ignored Victor’s disappointed mutterings about how that was the most “boring landing in the history of landings”, merely giving him a “mild” slap on the head with one of her cheesy romance books. Fluffy, unlike during most of their adventures, deigned to hop off nonchalantly and lick himself on his paw before going off. The crew didn’t honestly care, as Fluffy was highly self-sufficient and would probably be alright. Finally, Bundo slid down the gangplank in a fashionable entrance and finished with an elegant spin, posing with Victor to top it off.

“Let’s do this.”, said Bundo in a rare moment of first-person pronoun usage. Victor merely bumped fists with bundo and sauntered away, with Levi and Silk facepalming from the sheer cringe of the situation.