You pass low over the town, looking for a good landing spot. You don't find any on the first leg, and as you pull into a steep climb, you kick the rudder over, hard. For one heartbeat, your plane is in the knife-edge position and falling, but you continue the turn, jiggle the fuel mixture, and pull back out into level flight.
It takes three more passes before you find a good landing spot. On the second pass, you start adding wiggles and a half-loop instead of the wingover, while you'd swear that Fat Steve pulls a hard turn fully within the wingspan of his plane, at speed. You're pretty sure that the only bits of Patchwork that aren't steel are the dash and skin, because if you tried a turn like that, important bits of the Columbia Challenger would decide they wanted to turn much faster or slower than the rest of it. A near miss was enough, thankyouverymuch. Theo begins demonstrating Thesis Statement's unique capabilities, crabbing her sideways with the engine pointing close to sixty degrees off axis. Well, at least more than forty-five, which is damn impressive.
You dive low over the town, buzzing the main drag, before pulling back on the stick, hard. The nose rises up, and up, and up, until the little plum bob you hung from the top wing is pointing over your head. For a moment, the wind stops, and you hang in the air.
And then you fall. Backwards.
You move the stick, and turn the mix to full rich. The semi-radial roars(1) to life as you wrestle your plane through a quarter-loop backwards and nose down, trying to get above your stall speed before you lose enough altitude you can't recover.
A thick rope drifts past your vision.
Oh. Right.
Theo's glider.
You bank hard in the dive, rolling into a series of progressively gentler S-curves before circling back and landing on the patch of grass you managed to find. Fat Steve is already down, and when you hop out of the Challenger, Skoll(2) at your heels, you're pretty sure that there are three furrows in the ground, rather than two, and one of them is rather further out to the sides.
And here comes Theo himself, pulling back and landing nearly vertically.
As the three of you get the mail to the train station, you tell Theo and Fat Steve about the glider, and how while you weren't able to keep a close eye on it, it didn't feel like it was bucking or trying to fall out of the sky. Well, except when you had pulled a tailslide while towing it, but you're pretty sure no plane could do that anyways, and there might never be an engine small and powerful enough to allow a plane to hang vertically for more than a few seconds.
The post is handed off, you get paid without issue, and as you you're counting the money you hear the whistle of the train pulling in.
Because things are not going to make it easy for you to pick up stress, I'm going to give you five (5) Stress right now.
You are in a strange town, where you don't know anybody. Fat Steve is already half-hidden behind a newspaper he bought on your way out of the station, and Theo has lit his pipe and is staring off into space. You've got half a day left before the sun sets.
Wat do? (Approval voting is allowed, but only one will win)
[ ] Drum up business. People always love a show, and passing the hat can mean the difference between a nice meal and asking for charity
[ ] Get drunk, you don't have anything better to do.
[ ] Follow Fat Steve. He seems to know what he's doing.
[ ] Follow Theo. Whatever happens, it'll at least be interesting.
[ ] Write-in
1 As much as it can roar, anyway. It's fairly quiet as far as engines go, mainly because it is tiny. Patchwork's W9 can often be heard from the other side of town, or over steam whistles.
2 Who'sagooddoggie?
did some playing around with the engine builder and the plane builder to get actual stats for Patchwork, which is why the update is so late tonight. Updates will be... sporadic going forward, because I have a second job. Good news, I have a second job.
