"If it wasn't a chaotic scene, if it was an orderly evacuation, we would be able to give you specifics about what our preferences would be, such as evacuating first the disabled, then the elderly and infants. That would of course be our preference. But the reality on the scene does not permit that. We're going to do the best we can with the resources we have." ~ David Catania

  I pushed through the massive metal doors without bothering to repair them, though that would be a trivial endeavor, merely requiring replacing some rusted out elements in the lock and in the wheel assemblages. I was far too curious about what was on the other side of the wall to take it slow, particularly as I knew I wasn’t actually damaging anything by doing so.

  The far side of the wall opened into a large, central open space as I’d expected, with a battery of smaller enclosed spaces flanking it on both sides. Across from the main hangar doors were a matching set of doors that must, at some point, have opened to the air beyond the cliff's edge. All I could guess was that at some point, those outer doors had been secured through the application of a massive wielding of earth magic. Whether that was a security measure or some final indicator of the abandonment of the city was unclear. Possibly when I absorbed that piece of the hangar, I’d find some clue as to why and how exactly the doors had been closed in such a permanent way.

  In the meantime, advancing into the central hangar space, I took note of some of its key features. I’d been throwing around the terms ‘massive’ and ‘large’, and that was certainly fair from a gnomish perspective. The main hangar must have been 20 meters tall and 100 meters across, with the doors I’d just crossed roughly 60 meters from the opposing set. It was, objectively, a large room and for gnomes it would have seemed vast and cavernous – nearly large enough to put the entire connected city into it.

  The floor was dominated by a pair of massive stone and steel cradles that from the look of them would have been used to support the construction of at least two skyships that would have been nearly 50 meters from stem to stern and about 20 meters across the beam. There were indications of places where cranes and similar heavy equipment would have been secured, but those had either been dismantled or destroyed by the passage of time. Given the lack of debris, I suspected the former.

  The space had a distinctly funereal feel to it, and I expanded my domain to the ceiling in order to turn the lights back on. It wasn’t as though I needed the light, but there was something that felt deeply appropriate about returning the place to a working state. That said, the central space was essentially empty and it seemed unlikely I’d find anything particularly useful there. Still, I absorbed the open area in its entirety, partly for the sake of completeness and partly to savor the anticipation of checking out the side rooms and the main exit doors. I did find some work spaces built into the subfloor parts of the hangar, presumably to enable work on the keel after it had been laid down or possibly for the machinery that would have been needed to secure and release the ship from its cradle.

  I found a few bits of scrap metal and some remains of basic ship elements and tools. The scrap metal was the most interesting to me as it suggested that much of the ships’ frame, at least, had been constructed of aluminum. That was mostly interesting because while the element was just as common in this world as it was in my previous one, it required more elaborate smelting procedures to secure in a pure form than most other common metals. I certainly understood the logic, though, as it was lighter and less prone to oxidation than iron or steel while still being reasonably sturdy.

  I turned my attention to the outer doors next, finding them to be in roughly the same shape as the interior facing doors. A little refreshing of some key elements would seem them rapidly back in a functional state. Pushing my attention beyond them, I found they’d been covered carefully by earth magic that left a few centimeter airgap between the two-meter-thick stone panel and the doors they’d sealed shut. I could remove it easily enough, or simply absorb it, but opted to leave it be for the time being. I had no need for another entrance, after all. There was no obvious mechanism for removing the panel. I assumed that given the effort they’d put in, there was no intent to ever reopen the hangar once the final departure had been made from this sheltering space.

  I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that, wherever the gnomish citizens of the city had gone, this was likely their final departure point. They’d loaded up here into at least two substantial ships and departed, sealing the hangar, and by extension their entire city, presumably with the intention of preserving it – either for posterity or in hopes of some future return that had simply never happened.

  My attention turned to the rooms one either side of the main hangar – three on each side, all the same size and symmetrically placed. On the right side as I faced the outer doors, I decided the spaces had been work spaces as I could see remnants of a forge in one room, a shop that might have been for textiles, from the pins and needles I found wedged into crevices in the floor, and some other space that required a lot of mana lights and some raised stone work tables.

  To the left, the rooms seemed more like office space – presumably for the head shipbuilder and his assistants, or possibly for some of the master craftsmen involved in the work. There wasn’t a lot of evidence to support that claim, really. Mostly I expected that some administrative space was needed, and these rooms lacked the evidence of industrial-scaled crafting I’d seen on the other side.

  The real win for me came in the last room I absorbed into my domain – the one on the left closest to the outer doors. At some point, presumably near the launching of the first ship, the gnomish engineers and shipbuilders had commemorated the event with a substantial bronze plaque. Well, frankly I was willing to bet they’d commemorated it with a lot more than that, but the 2 meter X 3 meter, finely detailed slab of bronze inset and sealed with earth magic hadn’t been removed when the rest of the place had been decommissioned or abandoned.

  It was showing some corrosion in places, but as I claimed it I removed the corrosion and restored the plaque as best I could. As you’d expect, the central image depicted a intricately detailed skyship – presumably a product of the shipyard.- complete with scale and a listing of the technical specifications. One corner included a list of names, and here I was assuming these were at least the upper-level craftsmen involved in the project. And of course, across the top of the plaque was a simple inscription which, transliterated by my epigraphy skill, gave the ship’s rather ominous name: HMS Relkhold’s Salvation – first of her line.

  Between the image and the list of technical specifications, I could get a pretty solid sense of the ship’s design. While a substantial ship by any standard, it was truly massive on a gnomish scale. It has some minor armaments, but it was clearly designed primarily as a people mover with 15 decks full of cramped (even by gnomish standards) staterooms and a steerage hold that might have been used to wedge in even more people. According to the specs, at least, it had a ship’s complement of over 50 airmen (airgnomes?) and would have been able to transport something like three or four thousand gnomes – albeit for short periods.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  They hadn’t emptied the city in a single flight, but with at least two of these, they probably could have done so in less than ten. Depending on where they were going and how many other ships they were using, I could see the city being vacated in a matter of days to weeks,

  I was, of course, reading rather a lot into a single ship’s name and an engraved image, but this did seem like the simplest explanation for the state of the abandoned city. I pondered the other possibilities for a while – there were quite a few after all. Ships’ names frequently were chosen for dramatic purposes, regardless of their actual function – but it was hard to see such a ship, capable of transporting a significant percentage of the city’s population, with such a name as anything but a last-ditch effort to leave on their own terms.

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  The Professors Keradji had not actually managed to dress themselves fully at any point in the day. The demands of new works representing potential advances in their own areas of study required their full and focused attention. Mercifully, while they had only the one institutional reader between the two of them, they did have their own personal readers which, if not as capable as the larger device were certainly able to handle a single new book for each of them.

  Ahmed made quicker progress through his new book, largely because unlike his wife he wasn’t having to simultaneously translate the book and learn an entirely new system of mathematical notation. At the same time, he was in many ways much more frustrated as many of the systems and concepts being described were quite different from his understanding of how his own world functioned. The temptation to ascribe it all as nonsensical and the result of an entirely different universe with very different laws was strong – yet, he could see how many of the effects being described might be true for his own world and could, in fact, explain some things that had always simply been attributed to the actions of the gods.

  Raina, on the other hand, was having to work rather more slowly to make sure that she understood the concepts being described but working in a matter of pure logic and the simple systematic approach of this new system she was less wracked by existential doubt. The mathematics here were perfectly reasonable, fit well with her existing knowledge and experience, and if anything, only clarified the connections between many practical calculations that had been derived from concrete measurements and the underlying abstract mathematical concepts. She’d be poring over the book for weeks, most likely, but the work was clear and directed.

  Ahmed was providing a somewhat unwelcome distraction, however, as she’d periodically hear him exclaiming over some novel piece of information that might or might not apply to this world.

  “They claim that in their world, the guts of people and animals of all sorts are filled with entire assemblages of exceedingly tiny creatures that help them to digest their food and extract nutrients from it. It’s like there’s an entire world of creatures and plants that live their entire lives within our intestines. Possibly worse – there are itty bitty bugs that live on our skin and eat the dead parts as we replace them.”

  She thought that might give her nightmares, and her resultant scowl had briefly quieted her partner.

  “There are places in their world so deep in the ocean that light never reaches them where creatures thrive in a narrow zone where the heat from volcanic vents is balanced by the cold of the surrounding ocean.”

  The concept that caught his attention most directly though was the theory of evolution through natural selection. It directly conflicted with the many examples of divine creation, many of which were well documented. Yet, at the same time, it explained a lot of the observed variations in populations and some of the changes seen over time. No one had been able to explain why the gods, for instance, might want to slowly increase the size of birds’ beaks for generations, then equally slowly reverse it. The focus on environmental pressures and the coevolution of animals and their food sources and their environment explained a lot, frankly, though obviously divine creation was a bigger factor in this world than the other. He’d be spending his next few weeks trying to work out how much control the gods exerted on these systems directly and how much they let play out on their own.

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  Baronet Tibold von Wilmot was in the process of rather nervously wringing his hands, to his butler’s discreet amusement, as he questioned his dauntingly capable niece, the good captain Ysabell von Wilmot, about the preparations for his intended expedition.

  “But Ysabell, it’s been 10 days since I approached you about this quick jaunt. How much longer will it be?”

  His niece, an iron-jawed woman with her slowly silvering hair pulled back in a no-nonsense braid, shook her head slowly and looked down impatiently at her favorite relative. “Yes, Uncle, it’s ONLY been ten days. I’ve been rearranging our scheduling as quickly as I can, but we cannot simply drop our existing business without catastrophic effects on the family business. The ship and crew are, of course, in good condition for the trip, and I’ve secured replacement crew for those who were unwilling to volunteer to accompany the ship to a sky island controlled by a dragon. We will have the ship out from under its current obligations in roughly four days – as I TOLD you when you first approached me, and as I have told you every other day SINCE!”

  Parsifal winced at that, almost visibly. He’d done his best to explain the facts to his lordship, and to be fair, he thought that the baronet understood the need. It didn’t help to mitigate his impatience very much, though, and it was only through repeated discussions that he’d managed to keep those interruptions to an every other day basis.

  The captain eyed the butler with a smile quirking the corners of her mouth. “So Pars, how are preparations on your end? Have you got an adventuring crew assembled? Fully outfitted? Briefed on the nature of your expedition?” She’d always found him to be a perfect counterweight to her uncle – stolidly practical and a virtuoso at subverting the worst of his employers’ ideas. His willingness to countenance the expedition told Ysabell that it wasn’t as foolish as it seemed at a superficial level.

  He smiled politely back at her, understanding her diversionary tactic quite well. “Indeed, Captain. While only his lordship and two of his original crew are still up for the trip, we have secured seven other adventurers – all with ties to his original party – to fill out the roster. I’ve secured rations for the trip and for a three-day delving (with a bit of excess just in case). They are not all fully briefed, but our first, full-party meeting is scheduled for tomorrow night. I’ve also taken the liberty of notifying the adventurers’ guild in the beastkin kingdom of our intent to visit enroute to the sky island. If all goes to plan, we should have two days in their capital to check in with the guild for final updates before the final leg to the sky island."

  She clapped him firmly on the shoulder. “Good man! I’ve always appreciated your meticulous planning. Now, please take my uncle to his next appointment so that I can return to my own planning.”

  “As you say, Captain.” He turned towards his employer. “Shall we, sir? I believe you have a lunch date with the old friends who are coming along.”