Zeppelin Quest I: A New Adventure!

Looking out over the table, you hit your head on it rather dramatically. The route to Vienna was up in arms with the air over Bayern reputedly full of Swiss privateers and other mischief, while there wasn't any cargo headed to Rome right now. The only remaining solution would be a direct to the Bosporus, followed by a de-Aether and hoping you weren't too confused on re-entry to reality.

"Captain." A voice said from the door. Turning, you looked at Lauri.

"Yes?"

"Thank you for the extra crew. I hope this time we can have a gunnery drill before the battle." He said, formally. You just nodded.

"I'll see what I can do." You replied, looking back at the table. Shaking your head, you raked back your hair. Time to see Elizabeth.

---

It was a bit of a climb to the central bow station, but once you were there it was fairly easy to make your way to the Navigator's Perch. A fairly large room trapped under the curvature of the dorsal envelope and the bowmost lift cell, its rear border was the ammunition elevator to the spinal mount and the struts that connected the first proper lateral frame of the ship.

Elisabeth's lair wasn't too far off from the few other Navigator's Perches you'd scene over the years. Once you were through the door, you had to step carefully around numerous piles of… well, stuff for lack of a better word. On the walls, nearly a half-dozen charts sat, their hand-drawn majesty showing in how red and blue inks clashed. String pegs littered them, showing routes potential and actual. A low dresser near the room's prominent master gyrocompass was stuffed full of taped-together sheafs of paper, while a skull grinned macabre from the top.

"Eeep!" Elizabeth yelled, jumping out of an unseen hammock and dusting herself off hurridedly before she looked at you. "Captain!"

"Easy, easy!" you said carefully, walking up to her. "I'm sorry if I startled you, Elizabeth!"

Shaking her head carefully, Elisabeth just nodded carefully and moved briskly over to the gyrocompass. Tapping one of the mounts carefully, she grabbed her octant off a table and looked at you. "So, Captain… what do you need?" she asked, shyly.

"What do you know about Aetheric routes in the Balkans?" you asked, moving over to a detail chart of Europe.

"Captain…" Elisabeth asked, carefully. "Are we going there?"

"Yes. I can't seem to get around it, unfortunately."

Blinking, Elizabeth went over to the dresser with the skull on it. Digging through the drawers, she undid a sheef of papers and spread them out over what looked like either a desk or a sheet of duralumin used in structural repair balanced on old textbooks. You understood maybe one sheet in five- no two seemed to share the same hand, and you swore you saw two other sets of characters aside from the Latin alphabet.

"The Balkans isn't exactly the most airship-friendly region." Elizabeth began, picking up a paper avidly and racing over to get a reference book. Inside, table on table was printed, much like an almanac. "Part of the problem is that they're part of a theorized Aether convection current on the downstroke, which means the area is riddled with downdrafts and phenomena. Add in Bulgaria's… avid… community of privateers going after anything vaguely Ottoman, and there's a reason most anyone with sense stays out."

"We're trying a direct to Constantinople. That should get us over Macedonia before anything pushes us out of the Aether."

Elizabeth shuddered momentarily, and muttered to herself before turning to you, face to face. "I'll need a bonus. And I'll need you to learn some Navigation before we hit the Balkans so I'm not on duty all day."

"I'm not a Navigator." You pointed out mildly.

"You're close enough to learn the basics." Elizabeth said, turning from you briskly before she started scrambling around in a seabag. "Here."

Looking at it carefully, you noticed it was a stamped sheet metal octant, similar to the brass and enscrolled version Elizabeth used.

"It's an Apprentice's Octant." Elizabeth explained, thrusting a small book at you. "You can't break it, and if you can I get a free Master's Octant from the makers. The book is on common phenomena, so study up! You know how a standard sextant works, so just practice taking sights and read the book."

"Yes, Elizabeth." You said, smiling. "I'll try to return everything like I found it."

"Alright… Alek." She said, and you smiled. This was the first time she'd ever used your name, after all.

---

Casting off was a bit of an affair. The French didn't want you to leave without some very unnecessary paperwork, the customs crew was all over you like mash on moonshiners until you told Engineering to floor the Zeppelin Device and get you up over their cutter's altitude ceilings. American cutters topped out at about a thousand feet above sea level before they had expansion issues in the lift cells, and judging by the French's stoppage at what you figured was eleven hundred ASL theirs weren't too different.

"Captain, we've spotted an Aether Point." Your bridge's talker said. Nodding at him and looking to Jack, you grinned.

"Steady as she goes. Put us through the point, please."

As the Talker started yelling at everyone things to the tune of "oh shit Aether Transition get it locked down" you grinned and pulled out your octant. The Toulouse points were all quite stable, and you'd been told by Elizabeth you could do the entry on one.

{Handle Ship Roll: 1d100= 42 +39(Air Sense) +5(Skyborn) +15(Ship Bonus) -20(Untrained Navigator)=81/80}

Somehow you'd forgotten the wee little problem to make sure your octant was, you know, actually stinking level when you were at altitude. Adjusting the system to keep the tiny gyro steady, you had to give out several corrections on the way through threading the needle.

"And we're through!" you called out, laughing. Your bridge crew shot you all filthy looks, especially the talker who had to explain that yes, nothing had gone hideously wrong and it was time to cool the engines down to a dull warm and get everyone to un-tie everything they had panicked about earlier.

Alright, hard part was over! Jack could handle the bridge unless Something Funky came up, so until then you had run of the ship. So, what to do?

---

VOTES

[] Something something something, Engineering. Every time you've gone down, something's come up. Besides, you want to talk to them about a warm-water pipe to the crew quarters for radiators for the absolutely frigid nights.
[] Get your Gunnery Crews together, and sound them out for ideas for improvements. You might not want to shell out for more guns too much, but there's got to be something you can do to help the guys out.
[] Track down your passengers and try to pretend to be civilized to see exactly how much you can squeeze them or while you're in Constantinople. They've got to have connections or something you can use to do things on the cheap with.

You had to admit, you were'nt always the best Captain in the world. Mostly because your first reaction after the Aether Transition was to go to your quarters, crawl in a ball, and take a long nap.

Hell, you were tired. You earned it.

Of course, once you woke up you decided you needed to Do Something. Your father might have been Catholic, but he proved that work ethic was more of a Germanic Virtue than anything the Protestants had made for themselves, and that particular trait had been pounded into your head ever since you could stand on a boiler watch or run across a mainspar.

Also, you couldn't get ten minutes of consecutive sleep in from the sound of Czeslawa snoring across the hallway in the medical area. A good nap required it to be longer than two sneezes after all.

So, Doing Something. Aside from the deep desire to take a nap, you also had those passengers aboard in what you were pretty sure was a passenger area whacked together under the dorsal keel, first to second frame. At least, checking the planbook in your small cubby of ship's literature, that's where any passenger compartments were to be located as per the modular design system so the secondary heads could be located just aft of the second frame and tie into the primary waste line to the rear waste handling system and water recovery tanks.

So when you got to the second frame, you were on one hand highly relieved to see the passenger quarters exactly where they should be. Less entertaining was the fact they were directly over a lift cell. Normally, this wouldn't bug you.

Normally you had a bit more than an alcohol-fueled haze describing your passengers and or cargo. Even back when you were… fifteen? You think you owned your first lighter at fifteen. Anyway, you'd always, always made sure to keep the cargo and passengers nice and tight and secure, so that if something happened then there wouldn't be a mess.

Especially considering what happened after you crashed your first lighter.

"Good afternoon, Captain!" you heard cheerfully as you opened the door to the stateroom and quarters. Inside the brightly-lit room, you smelled a hint of mint julips, along with a warm tobacco smoke scent.

"Good afternoon, Mister Lee." You replied diplomatically. "Tell me, do I smell tobacco?"

"You would indeed!" the English lordling said, chuckling. "Care for a cigarette?"

"No. As a point of order, I need you all to refrain from smoking while onboard." You replied, frank. "This entire passenger area sits over a lift cell, and as such there is a potential for hydrogen seepage into your quarters."

As one of the ladies, French if you were to presume, asked if it was dangerous, Thomas scoffed. "Why, I've seen the lads at the Royal Society douse matches in hydrogen gas before!" he exclaimed.

"So have I." you remarked offhandedly. "I've also crashed lighters with their envelopes on fire, though, so I'd say on the by and by that the best ships only have fire in their boilers."

Thomas and several of the gentlemen looked at you. "Crashed?" he asked. "It sounds like quite the tale!"

You chuckled, and moved over to the wet bar. Pulling out an ashtray, you wet it and passed it around. "After I can rest easy on knowing I won't need to repeat the experience."

As several cigarettes were snuffed, you smiled and went over to the cards table. "To start, a lighter is a far cry from a rigid-hulled ship of the skies and Aether as this. The engines are small rotary affairs, and they have no legs to speak of- but for an eventual captain, they're an essential experience…"

---

Batting your eyes open, you groaned. God damn it all, you were wearing that fez again and you'd passed out on the cards table. On the plus side, though, you remembered everything- including, after the better part of a bottle of what looked suspiciously like some Mexican rotgut liquor best used for stripping paint, that young Mr. Lee would be putting together a collection to fund a week's berth in Constantinople. He'd pressed you on a stay, and in return you'd pressed him for funds to do so. Ten days had been negotiated- seven on his behalf, two on yours for the handling of cargo, and an early departure on the tenth to dodge the rent collectors.

Still, as you got your hat back, you moved out of their quarters carefully and down to the mess. Two rounds of hangover cure later and some breakfast, you mosied on down to the bridge to see what was happening. The answer being nothing, you then started the long climb to get topside so you could practice taking sitings with your Navigator's Octant.

The process of taking a siting was theoretically simple- just sight the horizon, sight your item, tune the device, and read off the time and measurement. In practice, read in the Aether, it was a little harder. For starters, there was no sun, just light. The other problem was there weren't any celestial bodies.

In short, it was much like being in the middle of the ocean at high noon on the equator. You had zero things telling you which way was which, no points of reference, and no landmarks or benchmarks.

Which is where Navigators came in. They weren't exactly common, but they were a hell of an improvement on the dead reckoning a merely mortal captain was stuck using. However they did it, they managed to pull landmarks and references out of the glowing, warm mists of clouds and colors and translate that into probable location, relative speed, and heading. Theories abounded on their nature, and more than a few places put them on a tight leash.

Thank God America didn't, or you'd never have gotten Elisabeth. Still, as you peered around the sky through your octant's lens, you noticed something. A flash of green?

{Navigation: 1d100=90 +39(Air Sense) -20(Untrained) -20(Aether) -10(Uncharted) -10(Poor Tools) = 71/75. Failure.)

No matter. You'd practiced today, and you were fairly certain disturbing Elisabeth right now when she took the evening watch readings would be a bad idea. Besides, you probably still smelled like alcohol fumes. Not exactly an admirable state of affairs, that.

Still, you had time to kill before you needed to be the Officer on Deck. What to do, what to do…

---

VOTES

[] You were fairly certain the ship had a fairly spacious aft shower and baths for long haul trips. Might as well use them, get cleaned up.
[] More Responsibility Time- hunt down Donald and make sure all your cargo scuttles are assembled right, and you can clear anything that's in danger of going up double-quick.
[] Go back to your cabin and go over the books. A week's long enough to get some minor work done to the ship- maybe look into some upgrades?