WSP 035

Red Handed

The Wizard Space Program had only been expecting the four Minor Wizards sent from Axiom when the laboratory was complete. Sure, they had extra rooms for more, but they had thought that they would come in slowly over time.

This turned out not to be the case. In addition to the four Minor Wizards who were sent from Axiom, two Journeyman Wizards had arrived by choice, three people from Willow Hollow had decided to join up including one of Lila and Suro’s kids, and two others who had shown up from nearby villages and just asked for work.

It was rapidly becoming too many to keep track of at all times. The Wizard Space Program was growing.

The silence the laboratory had in the early days after construction was now completely gone. Even at night, there would generally be someone working on something. In the day, however, it was absolute cacophony.

Mostly due to Krays.

“All right cadets!” Krays shouted, doing her best to look like an army general and failing miserably, but she still managed to get some salutes from the younger members of the program and Jeh. “Today I’ve got another challenge for you all!”

“Your challenges rarely advance science,” one of the wizards said.

“But they are fun!”

“For some people.”

“And I am part of those people!” Jeh said, stepping forward, which prompted a few of the others to come forward as well.

“Great!” Krays pulled out a glass vial filled with some kind of sparkling purple liquid. “We have in here a rather… noxious concoction that I’m not going to tell you the effects of!”

“Do you even know?” Someone called from the back.

“That question sounds like the sort of question a volunteer would ask!” Krays said, pointing at the tabby cat who had spoken up. “Come on up!”

The cat groaned, but she did come forward. “Okay, what terrible thing is going to happen to me today?”

Krays inserted the vial into the strap around the cat’s leg. “Simple. I just want you to run around the laboratory at high speed and if you can do it in less than two minutes without breaking the vial…” She pulled out a glass model of Ikyu and the Moon she had made. “You’ll get this piece of junk for your room!”

“…And if I refuse?”

“I break the vial.”

The cat thought about this.

“Your time has already started.”

With an annoyed yowl, the cat took off at high speed and left the room, crashing past Margaret as she was painting a delicate line. A large smear went across the entire canvas.

“Krays!” Margaret shouted. “This diagram needs to be very precise!”

“Stop using a paintbrush, it’s a diagram, not art!” Krays called back.

“There is elegance in calculation,” Margaret said, huffing. “Blue’s new math can produce quite beautiful patterns…” She glared at the canvas. “I can white that out…”

“Doubtful! It’ll look wrong and you’ll junk it later!”

Margaret picked up the canvas and smashed it over Krays head. “You’re right, of course.”

“…Sometimes I forget that you’re a hunter…” Krays pulled the remnant of the canvas off her head.

At this point, the cat ran in from the other side of the room and slid to a stop. “Th… there… was that…”

“Oh I didn’t time you, but it felt like two minutes.” Krays placed the glass model on a nearby table. “All yours.”

“So what do we do with this vial then?” the cat asked.

Jeh cracked the vial open by kicking it. The entire room was suddenly filled with pink glitter.

“So that’s what it does…” Krays said, rubbing her chin.

“KRAYS!” Margaret screeched.

“That was Jeh! That was Jeh!”

“You two collude on all this nonsense and you know I know it so just fess up!”

“This glitter tastes like strawberries,” Jeh said, licking her lips. “Seskii really outdid herself this time.”

“And Seskii’s on board with this too, I just, I don’t eve…” Margaret paused. “That does taste really good.”

“You’re welcome!” Seskii said, coming into the room with a broom and a mop and starting to clean everything. For being glitter, she was able to mop it up remarkably quickly. “A little annoyance in exchange for a lot of fun and delightful memories! I think that’s a worthy trade, don’t you Margaret?”

Margaret crossed her arms. “…Maybe. These jokes do get out of hand sometimes, though.”

“Oh, naturally, but I’m not going to try to stop them from their little prank war.”

Somewhere in the laboratory something exploded and someone shouted “EUREKA!” This was such a common occurrence that nobody even batted an eye at it.

“Oh, that reminds me!” one of the human Minor Wizards pulled out a small arcane device from his robes. “I made this!”

Krays picked up the largely Purple device and turned it over in her hands. “What exactly…?’

“It’s a converter, it takes will and turns it into energy. Try it out!”

Krays did. She received a shock similar to a powerful discharge of static electricity. “Yow!”

“Gotcha!”

“Oh, two can play at that game… hold this.” Krays pulled out a plank of wood and gave it to him.

He accepted it with a grin and didn’t even flinch as Krays used Blue to fill it with projectiles.

“…You’re enjoying this too much.”

“All part of the game, Krays!”

“I need to step up my game! You lot are getting too used to me!”

“KRAYS!” someone called from the hall. “SOMEONE’S LACED YOUR RESEARCH ROOM WITH SKUNK!”

Krays eyes widened. “Oh…”

“Can’t handle your own medicine?” Seskii said as she started mopping Krays down to get rid of the glitter.

“You think I can’t handle it? Ha! I shall live in the stink and think of an even more diabolical way to enact my revenge! You just wait, it shall be done! You will tremble in fear on your hands and knees before my magnificent plot! You will beg me to teach you, and I will laugh.”

“And then teach us anyway,” a gari said.

“Shut up, I’m having a moment right now.”

“What on Ikyu are you all doing!?”

Everyone turned to look at Blue in the doorway.

“Fun!” Seskii said.

Blue shook some of the strawberry glitter off her hoof. “This… fun. Really, you all are going a… a bit too far, maybe? Shouldn’t there be actual work going on?”

“Oh, we do actual work,” Krays said with a dismissive hand. “Just not when you’re looking.”

Seskii huffed. “They do work, but it can be interrupted at a moment’s notice for nonsense. That said, Blue, was that not also how you and Vaughan worked?”

Blue blinked. “Well it wasn’t quite this… loud and…” She glanced at the glitter. “Messy.”

“I’m not sure I ever did work,” Jeh said, shrugging. “And it took a while but eventually I could get you all to play with me basically whenever. Speaking of, hey, Margaret, want to go hunting?”

Margaret stopped painting on a canvas she had recently cleared of glitter. “…Yes.”

“Then let’s go, it should be fun!” With that, Jeh and Margaret just left.

“Pilots,” Krays grumbled. “Impulsive, the lot of them.”

“Like you wouldn’t do the same,” Blue countered.

“Ah, but I’m not a pilot, so I narrowly avoid insulting myself! Behold, the master at work, nitpicker!”

“Mhm…” Blue rolled her eyes. “Well, you all… have fun, I guess, I’m here for some math texts. Need to examine the behavior of a series…” She awkwardly walked through the strawberry glitter and came out the other side, finding that it was easy to shake off of her hooves once she wasn’t standing in it anymore. “Huh…”

She walked through the main hall of the laboratory. Something exploded somewhere and was followed by an “oops.” She wasn’t fazed by this in the slightest. She went to the library and trotted right to the math section. She pulled off the book she wanted, Large Numbers and Small Numbers; Dealing with Scaling Difficulties in Complex Calculations, and was about to leave when she heard someone sneeze.

She poked her head around the corner of the bookshelf to see… a tall vase that had been put there for decoration, but it had no plants in it. Instead, it contained a small human child in red robes.

“…What are you doing here?”

The child let out a scream of panic and tried to get out of the vase, but ended up just knocking it over, shattering it on the ground. He tried to run but Blue caught him in her telekinesis. Despite being levitated into the air, he started kicking and flailing his fists around, yet didn’t make a single sound.

“Look, kid, I’ve already got you…”

The child pulled out a Red crystal. Blue ripped it out of his hand before he could do anything.

“Now, we won’t be doing that…”

Immediately after his crystal was taken away, the kid started crying.

“Wh—hey, now there’s no need for that. You’re from the mountain, right? I’ll just have someone take you back to Joira and—”

“Liar…” the kid mumbled.

“Liar? Where else am I going to take you?”

“Your torture dungeon!”

Blue blinked. “I don’t have one of those.”

“Liar…”

“Look, where do you think this torture dungeon is?”

“I don’t know! But you have one where you take bad kids, Minnie said so!”

“And is this ‘Minnie’ a trustworthy source?”

“She… uh…” The boy glared at Blue. “More than you, Aware.”

“What are they teaching you up there…?” Blue said with a click of her tongue. “Question. If you thought we were going to take you to a torture dungeon, why are you here?”

“U-um…” the boy instinctively tried to run again, even though he was still levitated in the air.

“…Did Joira send you?”

The boy remained silent.

“I’m going to have to have Lila have a… talk with her, in that case…”

“N-no!” the boy stammered. “She didn’t send me…”

“Well then if you’d rather avoid Lila having a talk with Joira, then you best tell me what you’re actually doing here.”

“…I… I…”

“Oh look, I’m walking out of the room, dragging you with me to find Lila.”

“I’m looking for secrets I can use against you!” The boy wailed. “Everyone is so afraid of you and… and…” He started bawling again.

Blue looked at him with sad eyes. “Your people really needed to sit down and explain things to you…” Blue sighed, then set him down, releasing the telekinesis. “Kid, our people are at peace. You stay up on your mountain, we stay down here.”

“You… you’re just biding your time…”

“I know that not even Joira believes that,” Blue said, frowning. “Look, you’re free to go, but you can stick around if you want. I can show you the laboratory, prove there’s no dungeon of any sort, tell you what we actually do. If you need an incentive, knowing what we actually do could potentially be used against us totally, definitely evil people, hmm?”

The boy stared at her in confusion. “Why…?”

Blue shrugged. “I have my reasons.” And I don’t want to try to explain them to someone so far into extremism and young as you. “So, do you want to have a look around or not?”

The boy wiped his face, but nodded. “Show me your vile secrets.”

“Oookay… by the way, do you have a name?”

“You may call me… the Red Shadow.”

Blue facehooved.

“What? It’s a cool name!”

“You’re a kid all right…” Blue muttered. “Come along… kid.”

“I just told you what to call me!”

“I can’t say ‘Red Shadow’ without snorting,” Blue said, with a snort.

The kid started grumbling to himself. His fear was quickly being replaced with a distinct disgruntlement.

And so Blue showed him around the laboratory and did very brief explanations of what they did—materials testing, mathematics computing, and of course the eternal war between Krays and the various new workers; it was as much of a feature of the place as anything else. The boy never stopped being twitchy, but he clearly stopped believing they were about to torture him to death.

He didn’t smile, though, until Blue brought him into the display room that doubled as the lounge. It had been empty when the laboratory had first been constructed but now it was filled wall to wall, mostly with artistic diagrams of space made by Margaret herself. Vast canvases stretched across the walls with stars. Ikyu was portrayed from all sides, including the far sides that only Jeh had seen before. Models of the various Skyseed ships sat on some pedestals, as did a model of all the planets around Ikyu. As this doubled as the lounge, there were also several couches, a few of which were occupied by wizards, some lazily reading books. Mary was also there, just looking around at the newest of Margaret’s paintings, a constellation map.

“Woah…” the ‘Red Shadow’ said, eyes wide. “This…”

“I said we went to space, didn’t I?” Blue said. “This is what we see up there, what we’ve learned. And this…” Blue trotted over to a small metal sphere with eight spheres on rods sticking out of it. “This is a model of the Moonshot, the ship we will be taking to the moon.”

“That thing outside is a ship!?” the boy gasped.

“When we finish building it, it will be. It takes a lot to get it into the sky, but our pilot, Jeh, should be able to get it up there. And then we’ll go all the way to the moon.” Blue chuckled. “We call it Operation Lunacy. Because it’s crazy.”

“What’s on the moon?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we’re going there. To find out.”

“Wow…”

“Anyway, that concludes the tour.” Blue walked to the front doors and opened them. “You’re free to go, tell everyone on Mt. Cascade that we aren’t secretly plotting their downfall or something.”

The ‘Red Shadow’ nervously looked at Blue and took a step outside. Then he bolted off in a run, laughing. “Foool! I now have all I need! You will live to regret this, Aware! Ahahahahaah!” He ran off as fast as his feet could carry him.

Mary walked up to Blue. “He… does realize the lab is open to the public, right?”

“I don’t think he picked up on that,” Blue said with a shrug.

“What would we have done if he had actually gotten to the real classified stuff in the cabin?”

Blue clicked her tongue. “Well then we really would have needed to talk to Lila, but… he’s just a kid, even if he had that, what would he do? For that matter, what would the Red Seekers do? It’s not like they have the ability to replicate any of the technology…”

~~~

Night had fallen.

Vaughan’s snores filled the halls of the cabin.

Jeh had opted to sleep in a tree that night. While she did still prefer beds, every now and then she just wanted to go back to nature.

Blue had been working but was now passed out and drooling on one of her many calculations. A note to have one of the Minor Wizards do the calculations for her to save time was quickly becoming so soggy as to be illegible.

Amidst all this peaceful slumber, a thin flattened wire poked its way through a slit in the window. It was somehow able to bend once it had been stuck through, reaching for the window’s latch and curving around it. It took a few tries, but eventually, the window latch popped and the flattened wire was removed. The window slid open, and in snuck a dark humanoid figure dressed all in black. He moved almost without a sound at all, carefully making his way through the halls of the cabin. What few creaks the floorboards made as he moved were drowned out by the sound of Vaughan’s snores, and the intruder was smart enough to step down only when Vaughan was loud enough.

He would wake no one up as he made his way up the stairs to Vaughan’s study. He turned the doorknob as Vaughan stored, and slowly opened the door in segments, letting the creak be drowned out by other noises. Once the door was open enough for him to slip in, he did, and immediately started rummaging through drawers, looking for anything that looked important. This was rather difficult without a light, because most of it was paper. However, he eventually found a drawer that was locked, and that meant it had to have something worthwhile. After waiting for the timing of the snores to be just right, he broke the lock with a swift swipe to the mechanism. The drawer popped open and he found… an old, framed portrait inside?

At this point, the room was suddenly bathed in light. The intruder jumped onto his feet, staring in alarm at Seskii and Keller, who had both turned on their lamps at the same time.

Seskii snickered. “Hey, looks like it’s a tie!”

“Sure seems that way, don’t it?”

“Now who wins?”

“No one, worst possible outcome.” Keller blew some smoke into the air. “Should we bother tryin’ t’ see who gets the next one?”

“Eh, probably not worth it,” Seskii said. “We’re both just too good for that.”

“Agreed.”

The intruder jumped into the window, shattering it and sending glass onto the ground below. He was now significantly higher off the ground than he was when he entered, which was why he hadn’t come in through this window, but he was sure he could roll and make a quick getaway.

Or, he would have, had Seskii not somehow already been outside, standing on the exterior windowsill, grabbing him by the neck before he could even clear the cabin. “Now, where do you think you’re going?”

“Wh… how?” the intruder stammered.

“Good question,” Seskii said with a wink. She gently placed him back down inside the cabin, where Keller slapped a pair of handcuffs on him.

“Mission complete!” Seskii cheered.

“And now comes the fun part…” Keller said, grabbing the intruder by the chin. “Given your complexion, you’re from Shimvale, yes? Who are you working for exactly?”

The intruder refused to say anything. Instead, he started singing…

Keller activated his Magenta magic and then punched the intruder in the face precisely as hard as needed to knock the man out.

“Keller!” Seskii chided. “I could have just gagged him!” She gestured to a rag she hadn’t been holding a second ago.

“Couldn’t take any chances. The guy’s a singer.” Keller tilted his head. “This is gonna make it a might bit difficult t’ interrogate him…”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll figure something out.” Seskii leaned down to the drawer that had been busted open, examining the picture inside. It was a small framed graphite drawing of a woman in a wizard hat. She had her tongue out and was winking with one of her fingers under her open eye. A decidedly silly image.

Seskii quietly closed the drawer and got a new lock for it.

~~~

The following day, the Moonshot was a flurry of activity. The scaffolding that held up the multi-core drive and the pilot seat had been completed the day before, which meant everything else could start being installed. This was a bit of an awkward maneuver since, while in space, there would be no specific downward direction, while on Ikyu there was a constant pull and it made it rather difficult to affix furniture to the ceiling.

But it was being done nonetheless. Orange magic was being used extensively to lift the pieces of furniture to the “ceiling”. Sometimes wizards or workers were levitated up to the workstation to weld or otherwise affix the various implements where they needed to be, but the fairy was able to get up there without help. While he was small, he was quite precise and agile. The various workers were adding chairs, tables, and various hatches in the inner wall that led to the space between the Moonshot’s two layers, where things like the compressed air tanks, food storage, paper storage, and waste storage were being installed.

The Moonshot was designed to house four people, but it could physically hold a lot more. About eight in total, each with enough space to work on something, and that wasn’t counting someone sitting in the central pilot seat. The pilot’s seat and drives were held aloft by eight steel rods coated in glass, each of which extended to the Moonshot’s outer wall. These rods served two purposes—not only were they structural support, but they also indicated where the spherical “handholds” were for steering the ship—the things couldn’t be seen, but any pilot would know exactly where they were due to the rods.

The rods themselves led to a complex spherical gyroscope that held the multi-core drive and the pilot’s seat. The entire thing could be rotated in any direction and locked in place, giving the pilot complete control. While the Skyseeds had largely relied on Yellow crystal to make this work, creating such a large gyroscope that would be under significant stress out of Colored crystal was simply not feasible. Instead, the mechanisms were composed of steel-reinforced glass lubricated with special oils. The oil was, admittedly, rather expensive, but once it was applied it didn’t need to be again.

It was not quite as smooth as a natural Yellow crystal, but it was still smooth enough for Jeh to spin it around like a top.

“Wheeeee!” Jeh called as she twirled herself around. She currently had the ‘up-down’ controls on the chair fixed at a 45-degree angle while pulling herself ‘left-right’ as fast as she could manage, spinning around so quickly that it was making her dizzy. “This is amazing! Margaret, you have to try this!”

“I will try it as soon as you stop playing!” Margaret called from outside. “There’s not exactly much space in there!”

“Well, yeah, but, eh.” Jeh kept spinning herself around for a few minutes. She eventually unlocked the ‘up-down’ directional control and let herself spin completely freely. However, as she was under the pull of Ikyu, she rather quickly found her seat pulled to the bottom of the apparatus, where she was lying on her back and looking straight up. The drive was perfectly centered in the gyroscope, but the seat was not, so Jeh was able to look over the drive and see the upper window. It was day, yes, but the moon just happened to be overhead.

Jeh grinned. “We’re coming for you, buddy, just you wait…”

With this, she removed all the belts and latches that kept her affixed to the chair and hopped out, landing on the couch and upsetting a worker who was currently trying to close a hatch that didn’t want to close. She gave him a quick apology before climbing out the door. There was no easy way in because while they had a ramp leading up to the Moonshot’s door, which was currently pointed sideways, the interior was still a nearly perfect sphere, and getting up to the equatorial region where the door was at was somewhat awkward. “She’s all yours…” Jeh said, bowing to Margaret.

Margaret stepped in and slid down to the couch, trying her best not to upset the workers. She was tall enough that she had to duck not to bump her head on the gyroscopic apparatus. However, this made it a bit easier for her to climb in. The seat was designed for most humanoids, though naturally there were upper and lower size limits. Margaret was well within the tolerance and strapped herself in. Unlike Jeh, she wasn’t one for wildly spinning herself around and tried to carefully control which direction she was pointing. “A little awkward, it’s not full freedom of movement…”

“You can point anywhere.”

“Yes, but with only two directions of motion… for instance, from here I can’t just drag myself to the uppermost point. I have to…” She rotated the main rail the seat was riding on with a grunt, and then forcibly pulled herself up the ring. “Takes… two… steps…”

“That’ll be much easier to do in space.”

“I sure hope so…”

“Well, have fun, I’ll leave you to it!”

“Sadly… I don’t think I have a strong enough will to actually drive this thing…”

“You can have support for liftoff, I might need that. But I’m driving it first!”

“Yeah… and I get to stay down here.” Margaret chuckled. “I’m more than a little jealous.”

“You’ll get to the moon eventually, don’t worry.”

“I wonder what sorts of wonders you will find up there…?”

Jeh shrugged. “Who knows?” With that, she left Margaret and marched down the ramp. Vaughan and Blue were down there, talking to… Joira? And some kid in a red robe?

“…Hello,” Joira said, clearly attempting to be courteous.

Blue sighed. “What did he tell you? That we’re evil diabolical conquer-the-world types?”

“Not at all, which is surprising for how much he listens to Minnie. No, I’m here because he won’t shut up about your…” Joira glanced at the Moonshot. “…Spaceship.”

“It is pretty awesome, hard not to talk about,” Vaughan said with a grin.

“I can’t believe…” Joira put a hand to the bridge of her nose and let out an exasperated sigh. “Look. I hear you’re taking on basically anyone who wants to work for you.” She shoved the kid forward. “Take him, I’m sure he can be useful getting you all tea or cleaning floors or something.”

Blue blinked. “You… excuse me, I think I might be hearing this wrong. You want to give him to us?”

Joira scowled. “This is not a gift, nor is it some attempt to make friends. It is simply the best place for young Arno’s growth, in my opinion, and I believe you will take him.”

“Red Shadow…” Arno grumbled.

“We have let you live in your self-created delusions long enough, Arno.” Joira hissed. “You need to see the world for what it is, not for whatever Minnie tells you it is.”

“But…”

“I thought you wanted to see more ‘cool space things?’ The price is staying here rather than on the mountain most of the time.”

The boy looked at the Moonshot. “Yes… I will learn all the secrets… and then the Red shall spread between the stars themselves!”

“Quite the devout little Red Seeker,” Blue deadpanned.

“Oh shut up, don’t make this any more humiliating for me than it already is,” Joira grumbled.

“I don’t think it should be,” Vaughan said. “You’re being far more reasonable today than you usually are, and you’re going against your inner desires to do what you think is best for the kid.”

“I do have a few… conditions.”

Blue raised an eyebrow. “Conditions?”

“He’ll return to our camp once a week and tell us what’s going on. The moment I feel like any of you are trying to brainwash him into your naïve way of thinking, I will take him back. He is an employee, not a target for conversion.”

“That… should be fine?” Blue said. “I think one of our new wizards is a Blue Seeker, hasn’t caused any problems yet.”

“We shall see…” Joira said.

“The Blue enemy is here!?” Arno gasped. “This is an excellent reconnaissance opportunity…”

Joira put a forced smile on her face. “So, will you take him?” Even Blue could tell she looked rather desperate.

“I’m sure we can find something for him to do,” Vaughan said. “Welcome aboard, Red Shadow.”

Arno lit up like a Purple storm lamp. “You have the heart of a true Seeker! I knew your robes made you trustworthy!”

Vaughan patted Arno on the head. “I’m not a Red Seeker, you know that, right?”

“But… you’re wearing red…”

“Arno!” Joira gasped. “Have you seriously not understood who Vaughan is!? The Red Wizard of the valley, the…”

“Wow, you don’t look anything like the lurching monster Minnie says you are,” Arno said. “…Guess she was mistaken.”

“I… I can’t even…” Joira said, shaking her head.

“Maybe you should have taught him better?” Blue suggested.

“Hey! I’m taught amazingly! I know everything there is to know about Red and how it’s the best Color and how it will burn everything!” He beamed. “It’s great!”

“You sound fun,” Jeh said.

Arno turned to her. “Who’re you?”

“Jeh. Pilot. Immortal.”

Arno narrowed his eyes. Then he grinned. “Our rivalry shall be legendary! I challenge you to a duel!”

“A duel of what?” Jeh asked.

Arno took up a defensive combat stance indicative of some kind of martial art. “Hand-to-hand combat! You’re smaller than me, so I’ll win! I—”

Jeh rushed to him and punched him in the stomach, knocking him down.

“Ooogh…”

“Jeh!” Blue called.

“What? He challenged me to a duel! He even specified hand-to-hand combat!”

“I… well…”

“How could this happen?” Arno asked, staring at the sky. “I was taller… they only beat me because I was shorter…”

“He’s a few petals short of a daisy, isn’t he?” Jeh asked.

“I’m not a plant!”

“Oh no, of course not…” Jeh rolled her eyes, helping him up. “Welcome aboard.”

“The Red… shall triumph…”

“Sure, buddy, sure.”

~~~

Hyrii stood, leaning on the railing of the palace, looking out over the city of Axiom, particularly at the great tree. She found her gaze drawn to the section of the city in the tree’s almost ever-present shadow, shrouded from the light of the sun.

She tilted her head to the side. That can’t be a great place to live, come to think of it…

“Heeeeeeey!”

Hyrii glanced behind her to see Via running up. This was all the time she got to react before Via pulled her into a hug from behind. Hyrii didn’t resist, but she did gag.

“How’s being a princess treating you?”

“Honestly?” Hyrii leaned against the railing. “Not all that different, you all basically accepted me as part of the family a while ago, showed me all the secrets, I got dragged on an important mission…” She twirled her hand in the air. “I just live here now. …and I don’t have to be afraid about acting a little too improper around Wyett, which is a major plus.”

“I bet it is…” Via said, letting out a long, dreamy sigh.

“You’re more of a hopeless romantic than I am, and I just got married.” Hyrii chuckled.

“I knoooow, but it’s just… it’s so cute and it’s so wonderful and it makes life so much more life!” Via paused. “I’m sticking with that. Yep.”

Hyrii smiled and turned her head back to the city. She looked at the shade of the tree again, frowning. “Via, you’re the one who knows the people the best. What’s it like to live… in that shadow? I’m… not sure why, but I’ve never thought about it until now.”

“Probably because you lived on the other side of the palace.” Via frowned. “That place is… very awkward. Back when Grandma was queen, it was just where the poor people ended up because property there was in the shadow and continually rained on by everyone living in the Canopy. So Grandma made a big program to move everyone out of there and turn the base into a bit of a park.” She crossed her arms. “It worked. The people got new homes. But nobody wanted to go to a park in the shadow of the Canopy either, so the park was abandoned and the place was left as a ghost town. And people will go to fill available space…” Via sighed. “It’s where the homeless go, and the criminals, hiding under the Canopy’s shadow.”

“Surely you’ve tried to do something?” Hyrii asked.

Via groaned. “It’s so annoyingly complicated. We can’t just give them money for a lot of reasons I don’t really understand, but it has something to do with the economy and how most of the beggars aren’t there by circumstance but by choice because you won’t starve in Axiom if you don’t work unlike most other places… and those who are part of the criminal enterprises have a large vested interest in keeping an area like that full of people so it’s easy to hide.” She tapped her foot. “Dad tried to fix it once, order everyone out, built a new district and everything. In five years, the Shadow had even more people for some reason.”

Hyrii pressed her hands together, thinking. “And it would just be cruel to make it impossible to go there, some people probably do have attachments and history there…”

“Yeah… the guy who runs the district is an old human, great heart, isn’t very effective but cares deeply for everyone there. His family has lived there for generations and if we tried to remove everyone… he’d probably fight us.” Via shook her head. “It’s just an ugly situation that we don’t know how to deal with, is what it is. It’s like Axiom wants a place like it in it.”

“Hmm…” Hyrii tapped her foot. “I’ll be thinking about it.”

“Oh, yes, thank you,” Via let out a sigh of relief. “Wyett’s always so paranoid about ‘actual threats’ and Tenrayce is convinced there are ‘more valuable uses of our time’ and Dad’s busy and Mom… well uh, Mom’s never been one to play the politics game.” Via took Hyrii’s hand in her own and beamed. “But those are our people out there, and I’m too stupid to think of a solution.”

Even now, Hyrii had to remind herself that Via did not mind being somewhat dumb at all, and just saw using the word “stupid” as being honest. It still felt weird to just let that slide and not go “oh no, you’re not stupid…” Hyrii had tried that a few times. It just made Via laugh.

“I’ll work on it, promise,” Hyrii eventually settled on.

“I think I should get my notebook where I write down problems I think are important. Not… whatever we talked about in the last meeting.”

“Military applications are important discussions right now, Via,” Hyrii pointed out.

“But… they just want to drop rocks from space. Why was it so complicated? Just go up there, look down, drop the rock!”

“Wind, Via. Also Ikyu rotates, you’re moving while you’re up there…”

Via crossed her arms. “All those science people make things harder than they have to be. Just drop the rock.”

“You wouldn’t want to accidentally hit something you weren’t aiming at, right?”

“I…” Via paused. “…I’d rather not drop the rock at all…”

Hyrii frowned. “Sometimes you really do need to strike something as hard as you possibly can, it’s good to have the option.”

“I don’t know. If Wyett was in charge, he’d be using it…”

“Good thing he’s not King yet, he still has time to learn.” Hyrii smirked. “And I have time to soften him up. And he me.”

“Awww… listen to you!” Via grinned. “It’s so adorable and honorable and nice and… and… something, I dunno, insert a positive romantic word here.”

“Romantic?”

“…Dangit, yes.” Via giggled. “Anyway, do you want to see my notebook?”

“Yes, please do, let’s see what I think about it…”

~~~

Lila trotted out into the forest clearing. “Agent Keller, I did say you could come see me at my house, right? There’s no need f—”

She saw the human man tied up, gagged, and bruised.

“Pretty sure ya didn’t want your kids t’ see this one,” Keller said, tapping out some ashes from the roll he was smoking.

“A… spy?”

“Yes, but worse. A singer.”

Lila frowned. “He’s from Shimvale then?”

“He’s at least operating under Kaykayzee’s orders. Though I can’t get anything else out of him.”

“…A man of your skills?”

“It has nothing t’ do with my skills. Watch.” Keller ungagged him.

He immediately started singing as loud as he could, at which point Keller gagged him again.

“I am fairly sure he’s been commanded t’ respond only in singin’,” Keller said. “He couldn’t tell us anythin’ even if he wanted t’.“

“My, that’s certainly effective…” Lila said, starting to circle the man. He was pale-skinned and had short, ice-blue hair. “His appearance…?”

“Suggests he’s from Northern Shimvale, but ah don’t wanna jump t’ conclusions, that could be a ruse as well.”

“A spy that, when captured, can’t be a liability… effective. And, furthermore, we cannot say for certain if he is fully in control of his actions, so punishing him for them would be completely unacceptable.”

“At least it wouldn’t hold up in court.”

“We are not engaging in extra-judicial punishments, Keller,” Lila said with narrowed eyes.

“Just lettin’ ya know your options.” He paused. “The song is classified anyway, no public court could try him.”

Lila tapped her paw on the ground. “In that case, we don’t have a jail so we need to transfer him to one. I’m afraid I don’t know the procedure.”

“We put him in someone’s house until the Crown can send a contingent.” Keller looked up at the overcast sky. “I think winter’s gonna stop that from bein’ speedy.”

“Hold him for the winter… oh my, we’ll have to figure out how to feed him without him belting that song.”

“I know how to force food down. Unless he’s been commanded to starve himself, but there ain’t anythin’ we can do ‘bout that if so.”

Lila shook her head. “Such terrible actions… All of this, every bit of it, is simply terrible. Spies, control, lives in the balance… it reminds me far too much of home.”

“Never been t’ the Tempest myself, but the reports sure are somethin’.”

Lila nodded, focusing her gaze back on the spy. “…Big G can hold him, the mines have plenty of space. We just have to be sure to get him an arcane heater. You’ll be in charge of… keeping his song from infecting everyone.”

“Will do,” Keller said with a tip of his hat.

“Do we know what he was looking for?”

“He was rummagin’ through Vaughan’s study. Whatever he was lookin’ for, he didn’t find it, just found an old picture in a locked drawer.”

“That picture is very precious to Vaughan; I hope it’s still safe?”

“Didn’t even give the man time t’ touch it.”

“Good.”

“Who is that, if ya don’t mind me askin’?”

“His wife. He has a more professional frame of her hanging in the main hall, you’ve probably seen it. That one, though… that one shows who she was.”

“If that picture shows who she was, she must have been quite the character.”

Lila laughed. “Alice Vaughan was perhaps the craziest person I have ever known, and I’ve lived in the Tempest and work with a Wizard Space Program.”

“Wish I could have known her.”

“I wonder… would she have loved you and your style or despised what you represent? I’m not sure, she was one to run hot and cold and nowhere in-between.”

“Ah, either way, woulda been fascinatin’, I bet.”

“Indeed…” Lila looked up, seeing the moon in the sky. “She would have loved this, that I know for sure…”

~~~

Kaykayzee Ziggurat sat in her office, fuming. She tapped her fingers on her desk, glaring at the various proposals she had written in front of her.

All of them had “denied” slapped on them.

The Council hadn’t approved a single one of her proposals since Benefactor had been found.

“Problems?” the red gari that served as her secretary asked, with a very amused grin on her face.

“You can shut up,” Kayz growled.

The secretary shrugged and continued writing more proposals. “Miss Ziggurat, would you like me to say ‘righteous revenge’ again in this proposal, or perhaps go with something less confrontational, such as ‘proper response’ or ‘needed action?’ “

“It won’t matter either way, they’re stonewalling me,” Kaykayzee said, pressing her fingers together. “They want peace, the idiots.”

“I mean, I don’t want to make the big Purple cube angry.”

“Your kind’s desires are irrelevant.”

“Oh, you wound me,” the secretary deadpanned.

Kayz tapped her finger on the desk. “There has to be something that can be done… some way to get everyone to see the danger.”

“Oh, they see it all right, they just think doing anything will make the danger worse. Which, according to this analysis, is actually true—”

“Screw the analysis, this is about what’s right! That Purple cube has been killing our people in secret for Cora knows how long!”

“And she’s no longer anywhere near us and is occupied with the rigid plague.”

Kayz growled. “I know you’re not exactly on my side but are you trying to make me angry?”

“You’re doing a pretty good job of that yourself.”

Kayz kicked her desk over, spilling everything on it onto the ground, breaking a vial of ink in the process.

“Shorter temper than usual today, I see,” the secretary said.

“Shut it.” Kayz stomped around, intending to leave the office, but one of the sheets of paper caught her eye. She picked it up and examined it. The last proposal of hers that was approved, the act to send spies into Kroan to learn more about the Wizard Space Program.

Her expert had not come back, despite being… conditioned in such a particular way. At this point, it was clear that he must have been caught. He wouldn’t exactly be a security leak, but that would be a problem…

…wait, she could use this. This proposal was already approved. She could send in spies.

She could just give them… other tasks as well. Ones that nobody needed to know about. It’s not like they knew about her songs, anyway… and if anyone asked where the spies went, she had an excuse. And if enough of the Council decided to complain… well, she could probably twist opinions using her song without raising too much suspicion in that case.

“I see you’re choosing devious loophole abuse today.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kayz said dismissively as she left the room. “By the way, have a janitor come and clean all this up.”

“Of course…”

The secretary opted to finish up her work before following that order. A few minutes later, someone entered the room—Vi, the ice elemental.

“Oh! Vi!” the secretary bowed. “What brings you here?”

“I just passed Kaykayzee in the hall. She’s plotting something.”

“I don’t know what it is, but she was looking at the approval you gave her to send a spy into Kroan. I think she’s seeing a loophole.”

“How unfortunate, that will be difficult to stop…”

“Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can kick her out with a vote of no confidence.”

“It is vastly preferable for her to be here and acting in our best interests than otherwise. We do not have sufficient evidence to prove the existence of her song’s power, yet.”

The secretary folded her hands together. “Well, you’re in a pickle then, aren’t you?”

“Indeed. Your information is greatly appreciated, I shall consider if there is a way to stop her from causing a war.”

“Lock her up, I keep saying…”

“Not an option at this juncture. We’d need proof. And how does one prove the existence of magic the world at large is unaware of?”

The secretary shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Furthermore, if we push her too hard at the wrong time, she could turn the people against us with but a sound.”

“I do not envy your situation.” The secretary kicked her legs back. “Have fun with that!”

“I will not,” Vi deadpanned, drifting out of the room, leaving the secretary alone.

The secretary chuckled to herself. “Oh, I do hope you all tear yourselves apart from the inside…”

~~~

The Moonshot was not ready.

But it was close.

Close enough for a minor test.

Jeh stood in front of the Moonshot’s ramp, hands on her hips. A light dusting of snow was drifting down from the sky. It was not yet cold enough for the snow to stick, but it was a clear indication that winter had arrived. In a few weeks, there would be snow everywhere, piled up so as to make construction work nigh impossible. The Moonshot would have to be covered up and sheltered from the elements during that time.

But for now, it stood entirely free, without even a canopy—only the ramp was attached to it.

The entire Wizard Space Program was there, which was a few dozen people at this point, so many that Jeh didn’t even know all their names. Wizards, engineers, and other workers who just wanted to offer their skills to the great project. All were here for this moment where they answered a simple question.

Could Jeh pilot the Moonshot on her own power?

“Wish me luck!” Jeh said as she marched up the ramp.

“Try really really hard not to break anything!” Vaughan called after her.

“I know, I know, it’s taken so much to build this thing, I’ll be careful. …Mostly.” With a mischievous giggle, she crawled through the main hatch. She didn’t close it—they wanted to stress the main door as little as possible, as repeated use would eventually wear it out. They’d already tested it and likely wouldn’t close it again until final tests before launch. As Jeh crawled in, the others removed the ramp.

The interior of the Moonshot was a bit of a mess. There were tables on the ceiling, a couch that had been bent to sit nicely on the curvature of the ground, dozens of hatches that weren’t yet labeled with what kind of storage they led to, a spot for sleeping bags to be tethered to, some boxes of supplies that hadn’t been put anywhere but were nonetheless tied down, and one table situated over top of one of the windows with a model of Ikyu and the Moon on it, as well a star chart physically printed on the table.

All of this existed within a “height” from the edge of just below two meters, enough for an average human to stand without bonking their head against the drive mechanisms. The drive itself had a diameter of about two meters as well, holding the chair, arcane devices, and the gyroscope mechanism for moving around.

Jeh reached up and grabbed the gyroscopic mechanism, pulling herself up into the chair. It was a very comfortable and custom-designed seat with dozens of buckles and adjustable parts. She had it on most of the smaller settings given her size, but after a few clicks and lever motions, she was extremely comfortable.

She laid her left arm down on the armrest and pulled up her sleeve. She rotated a small crank that moved a strap of metal over her wrist and cinched it down tight, giving her physical contact with the crystalline wires. These led to the built-in air restorer and, of course, the drive.

With a grin, she loosened all the gyroscope’s knobs that kept it in place, allowing her seat to drift to the downward position. She was now looking straight up, which meant that the drive was also pointed straight up. “Here we go…”

She started with a small amount of will, even though she knew she was going to have to strain herself for this—she actually did want to be careful today. She used her free hand to engage all of the drive’s segments at once, but at the lowest power setting. Bit by bit, she activated higher and higher forces, feeling greater and greater drain on her will.

Surely… it’ll move… soon… right?

She was beginning to feel taxed at this point, and had she bothered to check in with herself she might have identified the pain of a headache. But check in with herself she did not, and she just pushed forward, putting her all into just getting the thing off the ground.

And then… there was a slight lurch. One side of the Moonshot was lifting off, tipping onto the other side.

Jeh grimaced. Need… secondary… control… with her free hand, she pulled out an Orange crystal and aimed it at one of the knobs outside and above her, toward the side that was tipping over. She pulled it back and…

…she wasn’t touching the ground. She heard cheering outside. The entire Moonshot was also rotating slightly. Since the gyroscope was currently loose, this had the effect of the outer shell rotating around her while she herself was still pointed directly upward.

Someone outside was shouting.

Right… I probably need to come back down.

She very, very gently lowered the power setting on the drive until she could feel herself dropping at a very slow rate. She landed awkwardly on top of one of the exterior knobs, but considering how slow she was going, she was able to tilt down to a resting position just fine.

Except when she was resting she wasn’t lying flat.

“Um…” Jeh cut the drive and looked out one of the windows to the side.

She was all but pressed against a laboratory wall. The Moonshot was no doubt leaning against it.

“Oh…” Jeh unstrapped herself and poked her head out the hatch. “Did I break a window?”

“No, just dented a wall!” Vaughan called up. “It’s… probably fine!”

“Great! Anyway, it was hard to do, but mission success!”

“We need more accurate landing…” Blue said, tapping her hoof.

“I’ll just need to remember to look down when I’m landing and… wait, the chair turns with the drive, I can only look forward.” Jeh blinked. “Um…”

“You won’t be flying alone,” Vaughan said. “We can be a spotter for you.”

“Oh, good, I was afraid for a second that there was a catastrophic flaw in the design.”

“It’s… it’s fine…” Blue said, eye visibly twitching. “It’s just… something to improve on the next model!”

“This one has to work first,” Vaughan said.

“Oh, it’ll work… or I’ll have some words with it.”

Jeh giggled, holding out her hand as the snow drifted down onto her. “Just have to wait for winter to be over, now…”

~~~

SCIENCE SEGMENT

There’s a curious limitation to the “gyroscope” in the Moonshot, it only has two degrees of freedom to rotate. This is enough to point in every direction, yes, but not to take every path to every direction.

Let me explain. Imagine the surface of a sphere with two poles. You can describe where you are on this sphere by a number that tells you how far north or south you are, and another number that tells you how far around you are east-west. This is how Longitude and Latitude work on the earth. So, you can imagine that if you had two knobs to control these positions, you could point anywhere on the sphere.

This is true, but the way to get to those points is not a straight line if you only have two ways to adjust—you would need three if you wanted complete freedom. As it is, the Moonshot’s system only has two, which we can call ‘degrees of freedom.’ To imagine the situation more abstractly, picture a circle held in place by two points on opposite sides. This circle can rotate around those two points at will, but only those two points, it can’t just spin anywhere it wants.

Imagine another point on the circle, and this point represents the pilot’s seat. This seat can move anywhere on the circle, but only on the circle. Naturally, by spinning the circle around it’s easy to see that you can get to everywhere on the surface of the sphere, but that some spots are easier than others. For instance, no matter what the rotation of the circle, the two points that hold it in place are the same, and can always be reached. The procedure for getting anywhere else involves turning the circle first until the path lines up with the desired destination, and then moving the seat along the circle itself.

In a true gyroscope, this sequence would not be necessary as there would be complete rotational freedom, and you could just try to drag yourself anywhere and everything would line up. That would require a third set of parameters, however, and was deemed unnecessary in Moonshot design. However, since they stuck with the two-parameter design, there is a bit of an awkward situation: moving to the two pivot points is easy, but moving to points near the pivot points that aren’t in line is difficult.

For instance, imagine a point right next to one of the pivots. Say you want to move to a nearby point that is 170 degrees away. You would have to rotate the entire circle those 170 degrees to actually get to that point, even though the actual distance between those points could be absurdly small! The chair would not have far to move along the circle, but the circle has a drastic distance to move, and the circle is essentially the entire drive apparatus and as such weighs a lot more.

This also limits control if you try to steer from outside by moving the various knobs. The two pivots still remain fixed in their positions, so rotating incorrectly will rotate the drive along with it. In short, some care has to be exercised when turning.

A final note: “degrees of freedom” is an actual scientific term that means something more specific than what I used it for here. In a rigid sense, the degrees of freedom in a system is the number of variables needed to describe it. You can always describe the position of something on the surface of a sphere with two variables (akin to latitude and longitude) so the system has two degrees of freedom, no matter what kind of restrictions there are on the paths you can take.

However, if you were instead considering how the object was rotating rather than the position of a dot on a sphere, you would have three degrees of freedom since it is perfectly possible for an object to be spinning around three different axes at three different speeds, thus you need three variables to describe its motion. This should make it clear that sometimes the degrees of freedom in a system depends on what part of the system you care about! (Of course, even in the rotation picture, the Moonshot’s apparatus only has two degrees of freedom as it can’t rotate around a third axis.)