Rylan cleared his throat, wiping his sweaty palms on his britches as he faced the group gathered around the stove he’d been slaving over for the past hour or so. Relax, he told himself. They’re not food-critics just... former pirates. “If I-if I could have everyone’s attention please?”

  Unfortunately, his voice was pretty much drowned out by Soren’s excited rambling to Halloth, and Yuel’s laughter at something Tamina had said.

  Next to him, Nazyr huffed out a breath. “Oy! Chef Rylan’s got something to say! D’you clodpolls want dinner or nah?!”

  That certainly got everyone’s attention.

  Rylan swallowed, trying not to show how unnerved he was by the captain’s piercing eyes. “Thank you, Nazyr. A-Anyway, I just wanted to apologise for taking a bit longer than anticipated—getting to know a new kitchen and all that—but hopefully you’ll forgive me after tasting what we prepared.”

  “What’s that?” Soren called back, cupping a hand to the side of his head. “I can’t hear you over the rumbling of Tammi’s stomach!”

  Tamina glared at him. “Maybe you should consider putting a little less grease in that hair of yours, think it might be clogging up your ears.”

  Soren gasped, bringing a hand up to his blue locks, freshly coifed with some pomade he’d mooched off of Yuel, then he turned to Rylan. “You better hurry your speech,” he stage-whispered. “She’s getting cranky!”

  “If milord Thistlethorn would stop interrupting, please,” Rylan said, shooting him a pointed look. “Then I could finish saying that... I’ll keep it short as I know you’re all hungry. So, without further ado, I present you today’s dinner: fried rice with wild spring onion, grilled mist-eel, and fogbass poached in rice vinegar. Enjoy.”

  Rylan flinched back as the hungry horde sprang up as one to descend upon its meal. The table they had dragged out was laden with food, but he was still starting to worry it wouldn’t be enough.

  He stared in amazement at the stacked plates leaving the table, until Nazyr drew his attention with a cough. “Milord,” he said, offering up a full plate with a twinkle in his eyes. “Ye should have some ‘fore it’s all gone.”

  Rylan accepted it with a smile. “Thank you, Naz. And thanks for helping me cook today.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Rylan’s worries about the food running out turned out to have been excessive. He’d intended for there to be leftovers, after all, and even after people went back for seconds, there was still a sizable portion left.

  It was a good thing too, as most people were about done eating by the time the last crewmember of the Black Sheep finally showed himself.

  The door on the side of the hull flew open with a bang, and out stepped a short man with messy white curls spilling out from beneath a headband covered in strange contraptions. The way he squinted into the light caused the wrinkles next to his eyes to stand out, but despite his seeming advanced age, he moved quite spryly, bony fingers smoothing out some imaginary crease in the dark-brown waistcoat he wore over a white shirt with long, rolled-up sleeves. “Nazyr, I thought I’d asked you not to track mud into...”

  The ‘professor’ stopped in his tracks, blinking as he stared at the new faces seated amongst the crew, before he rubbed his eyes as if in disbelief.

  Yuel sprang to his feet, clapping his hands together as he did. “Isai! How lovely of you to join us! It was about time you met our new friends; these are Thars Soren, Tamina, and Rylan.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Soren said politely, inclining his head slightly. “We hear you’re the man who’s going to—”

  “New friends,” Isai repeated, cutting Soren off with an edge to his voice. “And where did these new friends come from, exactly?”

  “They wandered into the city this morning,” Halloth replied, his voice soft and deep. “A gift from the spirits.”

  Isai’s gaze snapped towards his much-larger crewmate, derision in his eyes. “They just happened to wander into the greatest archaeological discovery of the past thirty years?”

  “Actually,” Soren said, seeming unperturbed at having been interrupted. “A herd of kelpies brought us here.”

  Isai glanced over at his captain.

  “Thar Thistlethorn and his friends got lost, and are our honoured guests,” she stated placidly. “We’ll be giving them a ride out of this shared predicament when we leave. That is all.”

  “I see,” Isai replied. Then he shrugged, the tension seeming to leak out of him as he finally sauntered on. “Well, it’s not like it could worsen the company around here.”

  Nazyr and Yuel booed him, to which the man just grinned, his studious eyes flicking from Soren, to Rylan, and ending up at Tamina, where they stayed as he came to a halt in front of her. “Tamina, was it? Raise your arm for a second, would you?”

  From his position sitting next to her, Rylan got a close-up view as she raised a brow at him instead, but then lifted her right arm.

  He rolled his eyes. “I meant the interesting one.”

  Tamina’s expression darkened, but she dropped her arm and raised her prosthetic, though not quite as high.

  Isai clicked his tongue, shaking his head. “That is a delicate piece of machinery you’ve got there, girl. Don’t you know you’re supposed to take care of it?”

  “I didn’t get the chance to bring my tools,” she replied coolly. “And for some reason, licensed mechanics appear to be in short supply at the bottom of the cloudsea.”

  “Well, you’re in luck,” Isai muttered, lowering a magnifying glass attached to his headband to his right eye, as he knelt down in front of her prosthetic limb. “This is the latest model, isn’t it? The PA72? Tell you what, follow me to my workshop for a bit, and I’ll take her apart and tune her up.”

  She studied him, seeming hesitant. “Are you... licensed to work on these?”

  A snort came from Yuel on her other side. “Honey, he helped pioneer that technology. Our professor used to work for the Thorns themselves, you know?”

  “Nobody likes a braggart, Yuel,” Isai said as he stood up and released his magnifying glass, which was automatically retracted by a spring system. Still, despite his words, he was smiling. “Now, come along dear, I’ll—”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Oy,” Nazyr interrupted. “Don’t ye think ye should eat something first?”

  Isai let out a sigh, his shoulders slumping. “Right. I suppose I... hold on, what’s this now?”

  Rylan cleared his throat. “That’s, ehm, grilled mist-eel. We also made some fried rice with spring onion, and poached fogbass.”

  Isai spun around to stare at him, fervour in his eyes. “Boy... you cook? We no longer need to eat Nazyr’s fogging slop?!”

  “Oy!” Nazyr protested. “I helped make that, ya tottering fossil!”

  But Isai wasn’t listening. He was alternating between filling his bowl with food and stuffing it in his mouth, while making delighted noises.

  “All right, you win this one Halloth,” he finally said, seeming filled with new energy. “A gift from the spirits indeed.”

  Halloth chuckled, placing his palms together and bowing slightly. Scary as the man had originally seemed to Rylan with his massive frame and his many tattoos, he by now felt the man was truly a gentle giant.

  “Come along girl,” Isai said, beckoning her with his bowl and mouth full. “I can eat and work at the same time.”

  Seemingly convinced, Tamina stood up.

  “Can I watch?” Rylan asked, rising as well.

  “You, my boy, can come in whenever you like,” Isai replied, already disappearing into the ship. “As long as you keep cooking, that is. Just don’t touch anything!”

  The floor inside the professor’s workshop was slightly slanted, and absolutely covered in stains, burns, pockmarks, and scraps of metal. Rylan walked carefully to avoid the worst of it, as he curiously took in the dimly lit space.

  There were various shiny steel devices and contraptions laid out on workbenches, most of them opened up to reveal a mess of springs, tubes and coppery wires of unknown function. Patches of colour revealed the presence of various Divine Metals, and small hexagonal plates of glowmetal dotted the walls and ceiling, bathing the room in a soft, otherworldly glow.

  The biggest device stood on the floor in the centre of the room, but it was covered by a tarp, so other than it’s roughly spherical shape, Rylan couldn’t make much out.

  Isai led Tamina to a mostly-empty workbench in the rear, then started rummaging around in a toolkit, muttering to himself and shaking his head as he pulled out a variety of wrenches, pliers, and screwdrivers, stopping occasionally to take a bite of his food.

  When he started using said tools to loosen the clamps on Tamina’s shoulder, Rylan took an eager step closer, only to falter when Tamina glanced back at him with an odd look on her face, before averting her eyes.

  For a moment, he failed to understand. Then the prosthetic came loose, revealing something he’d never seen before: the stump where her upper arm ended.

  Oh...

  Rylan’s eyes darted around the room for a moment, then he steeled his resolve and continued moving forward, deciding it would probably be least awkward if he just didn’t make a big deal out of it.

  He ended up standing to her right, looking on curiously as the professor laid her prosthetic out on the workbench, and started opening it up with practised motions.

  After a few seconds, Tamina seemed to relax again.

  “So, how exactly does the, ehm, PA72 work?” Rylan asked, as the prosthetic’s mysterious innards came into view bit by bit.

  “Well,” Isai started. “You see these tubes? They’re full of water vapour. Or they’re supposed to be, anyway; it seems your friend here has sprung a bit of a leak, and some of the vapour got out. Probably just wear and tear; all this sand that’s gotten in can’t have helped either.”

  Tamina grunted, but didn’t reply.

  “So they’re pressurised with steam?” Rylan asked. “And that pushes things inside?”

  “Yes, and no,” Isai managed to bring out with his mouth full, without looking up from where he was opening up some kind of valve. Thankfully, he swallowed before continuing. “They’re not pressurised, they just have a higher density of water vapour than the cloudsea inside. Steam was the original concept we worked with, but the prototypes were apparently rather counterintuitive to use. Also, there were some complaints about burns, I guess.”

  Rylan and Tamina shared a bemused glance, smiling as they looked away again.

  “But then I had a thought!” the professor continued as he placed a funnel into the opened valve, grabbed a nearby container of what appeared to be regular water, and started pouring it in. “You see, muscles don’t push, they contract. So, a prosthetic that did the same might feel more natural, as well as solve our burn complaints! So we made a design that cooled water vapour to condensation with cloudmetal, which made the cylinder experience negative pressure compared to the air outside, causing it to compress!”

  “That’s awesome,” Rylan gushed. “But how does—”

  “But then people started to complain about frostbite,” the professor continued, rolling his eyes exaggeratedly. “Admittedly, there were some other issues, like the cylinders taking a long time to decompress again. Also, not gonna lie, the prototypes were rather bulky; atmospheric pressure isn’t really strong enough for this kind of application. So we ended up with a hybrid model. Each cylinder is fitted with both cloudmetal and firemetal so that the contents on each side of its plunger can be either cooled or heated. This both serves to provide additional force, and to keep the overall temperature at a comfortable, mostly complaint-free level.”

  “So the mana it takes in all goes into the heating and cooling elements?” Rylan asked. “But how does the mana know where to go? How is it controlled?”

  “Well, the mana travels along these wires, made of a special mana-conducting alloy,” Isai explained while wrenching the valve shut again. “They split along the way into matching pairs; the wire that cools the bottom of a cylinder, also heats its top, and vice versa. All you have to do is direct the flow of mana into the right wires with your spirit.”

  Rylan frowned, eyeing the coppery wires. “So there’s no runes involved in these at all?”

  Isai snorted. “You kids and your obsession with runegear... Runes aren’t the solution to everything, you know? I mean, you could replace the functionality of the cylinders with a set of runes, but that wouldn’t help with controlling the arm in the slightest. Unless someone rediscovers the lost art of creating spiritgear—or you’re lucky enough for your runegear prosthetic to give birth to a spirit naturally—you’d actually be worse off. Fog, even if it was a spiritgear, you’d just have a sentient arm that you’d literally have to tell what to do!”

  A spiritgear as a prosthetic? Yeah, what a waste that would be...

  Everyone knew spiritgear was the ultimate runegear. Though Rylan had never seen one, he’d grown up hearing stories about legendary weapons like Stormpiercer, the javelin that never missed, and Dawnshatter, the sentient flail that could knock foes off their feet with blasts of light.

  He scratched his head, smiling sheepishly. “I guess I’m just confused how non-Quinthar use these if they’re not based on runes.”

  Tamina raised a brow at him. “Do you think only Quinthar have spirits?”

  “Well, no, but...”

  “You thought only Quinthar could direct mana,” Isai filled as he ran an oily cloth along the interior of the arm, removing any sand and dirt. “A common misconception. While non-Quinthar do need to use Cubes to power the device, their spirits are perfectly capable of learning to control the arm. It doesn’t even really seem to take them longer to practise it.”

  Rylan turned to Tamina. “How long did it take you?”

  She shrugged. “A couple of weeks before I could perform basic tasks. A few months for more complicated stuff like tying knots.”

  “The human spirit is a marvellous thing,” Isai said, already moving on to closing the prosthetic up again. “The ways it’s connected to our flesh is still scarcely understood. But with some effort, one’s spirit can learn to control one of these almost like a regular limb, because in many ways it is like a regular limb; it’s designed to be.”

  “That’s why you needed the tubes to act like muscles, and why using runes doesn’t help,” Rylan exclaimed. “It needs to function just like a regular arm, so the patient’s spirit understands what to do with it!”

  “Precisely!” Isai lifted up the arm with a grunt. “There, that ought to do it.”

  Tamina held out her stump, and Rylan watched quietly as the professor went about anchoring the prosthetic around it, and clamping it in place.

  Finally, Isai stepped back. “Go on, give it a spin.”

  Tamina apparently took that literally, as she immediately windmilled her arm at high speed, almost smacking the workbench with it.

  Rylan unconsciously took a step back.

  The professor cleared his throat. “You may need to adjust to the increased efficiency for a bit. Be careful with it in the meantime, will you?”

  “I will,” Tamina said with a smile, as she continued testing and flexing the arm. “Thank you, professor.”

  “No problem,” Isai said, grabbing his bowl and bringing a bite up to his mouth seemingly without much thought. “I’d been meaning to get a look at the latest model. It’s not bad; they’ve definitely made some improvements to the main joint’s flexibility.”

  “So professor. What’s this?” Rylan finally dared to ask, indicating the covered device in the centre of the space.

  “Ah, well that,” Professor Isai said, lowering his bowl. “That is how I plan to get us out of here.”

  science. ^^

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  : Unnatural Laws

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