《Cloudsea - Fool's Edge Book One》Chapter 13 - Funambulism
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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THE SPACE LEGACY
-= New chapter every Wednesday! =- What would you do if you found an ancient spaceship? Michael Freeman is a disabled veteran who had just been fired from his mind-numbing cubicle job, which allowed his opportunistic girlfriend to dump him. Now, he only wants to spend some time in his grandfather's mountain cabin to unwind away from the drudgery of daily life with a cold beer in his hands. Standing in his way is an ancient spaceship with an emotional AI, nanites that have invaded his body, an international crime syndicate, a suicidal FBI agent on a vigilante mission, terrorists... and this is just the beginning. What can one man do when faced with insurmountable odds? Call it quits? Or… call some of his old army buddies and blow those obstacles to smithereens. Can he become more than he had ever dreamed, reaching further than any man before? Staying under the radar of the powers that be while righting a few wrongs of the modern world. He is sure of three things: 1. He really doesn’t want to follow the rules anymore... aside from his own. 2. Space is the ultimate frontier, and he had been given a turnkey technology to reach it—if they let him. 3. Those that want to hurt him and the people he cares about will rue the day they were born. You do not always get what you wish for… sometimes, you get one hell of a lot more. --- “Really entertaining, and a promising future.” - RR Reviewer “Good old sci-fi novel” - RR Reviewer “Sci-fi with a realistic MC” - RR Reviewer “Wow, seriously... just wow” - RR Reviewer “I'm hooked!” - RR Reviewer “A well crafted story.” - RR Reviewer “A Sci-fi Novel I can appreciate” - RR Reviewer “This is f....ing good.” - RR Reviewer -------------------------------------------------- Advance chapters available on Patreon -------------------------------------------------- The original art for the cover picture was made by N. Dasco
8 418I Will Be Recognized
~~~~~~~~~~ On present day Earth, a university student was run over by a truck.When he awoke, he had discovered himself to be in a completely different world filled with magic. Not just that, he was also synchronized with a system.Daniel: a normal person; friend of the hero, possessor of the system. He was an anomaly.Watch how the protagonist interacts with the new world and how his existence starts to change the world. In this world, he will forge a new path unbeknownst to the gods.~~~~~~~~~~By: SilentPain Webnovel, RoyalRoad Every other day or so, 4-8 pm est
8 92Blair Nys: Blood and Benevolence
Blair is a young man and even of royal heritage. As such his life has followed a strict plan since birth. Only for it to suddenly, in the time span of a finger snipping, change. Connections to another world opened up. Humans with powers made of the wildest imaginations, stepped out of them, calling themselves cultivators. Naturally, earth’s population went into an uproar. One piece of information created an especially great stir. The cultivators were there to pick disciples. Millions rushed to them, and Blair wanted to be one of them. There was just one problem. His lord father was strictly against interaction with those magical beings. He always dreaded a foreign power gaining influence in his court. Well, the old man never changes, and now it was the same as ever. His sister wasn´t even allowed to study abroad. However, all his senses told Blair that the future lay in the cultivator's hands. His plan was to gain knowledge, power, and maybe influence. Then he would return. One night he simply vanished in the darkness, away from his father’s claws. Will he succeed? That is hard to tell. The immortal world is an unforgiving place, even worse than earth. It’s just that Blair doesn’t know that yet. Can he survive there, and gain a footing in the new era of qi and godly hermits? Only time will tell, and Blair has to fight for every minute. Authors note: Give the story a try. It’s my personal blend of qi, cultivation, and struggles of morality and power. If I can deliver on all that is another question, but I will give it my best. As a further note, I am not using any of the usual strict realms and extreme power differences. It’s more about gathering and refining qi. Whoever uses his chances, sneak attacks, intuitions, and skills in a better way wins. However, having more or better qi will help, but I am not at a point where I have written a lot of that, so I might promise too much. Thanks for reading so far and checking my synopsis out, now you might give the story a try. Have fun. The picture is from JCK5D (Pixabay)
8 198Chaos Of The New Era
The end of an Era signifies the chaos that will soon follow. The last bastions of Humanity must fight on to prevail against the Laws of Heaven that threatens to destroy them once and for all, within this chaos a child lives a solitude life in the confines of the family estate. The only son, and unloved son, of the Idicium family is not well known throughout the Empire. Heroes are a thing of an adventure book and magic is a thing far off from him, Viran Idicium lives an unloved life in the small world that is the estate he lives in. With the advent of a new brother and the tutelage of a new teacher, Viran finds the path he needs to take in order to find a bigger world for himself. The boy thought he knew what the path would entail, but the mocking of Gods and the howls of beasts will soon change everything he thought he knew. Please note any mistakes/criticisms. Comments, reviews, and the sort are appreciated.
8 195Raven
What is the purpose of your life?Is it wealth? Power? Or something else?But does it even matter, since everything would be over when you're dead?Nay, the truth isn't something like that.Very few had known about the truth of life and death, and I, Raven, am one of them.Do you have what it takes to know about the truth? If so, then... follow me on my journey to unravel the truth.-----------------------------------------------------------------------Cover pic (Raven) drawn by our glorious artist, drealicious. Many thanks to you!
8 192Useless | Depressed Deku |
- Book completed - ⚠️ - there will be self harm and depression in here. Please do not do anything dangerous that any of the characters do.You might be a little disappointed at the extra chapterBefore you read, there will be self harm in this story as well as depression and stuff as you can obviously see from the title.Enjoy ~Also any other pictures I used besides the cover aren't mine. (If you're confused, I own the cover but not the rest of the pictures used)
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