Chapter 426: Flight

The cold spring afternoon was blessedly free of clouds or wind. A perfect day for a maiden voyage. Hopefully. It was also possible it could turn into a perfect day for a complete and abject failure, but Jadis wasn’t betting on it. She had almost full and total confidence that Sabina’s first large-scale model would work exactly as intended. That said, she wasn’t willing to risk lives unnecessarily. At least, no one’s life but her own.

“But it’s my experiment and I know how it works and I’m certain that it will work exactly as intended and there is no need to worry! I am best equipped to make and adjustments or repairs if something does happen which it won’t but if it does, I can fix it!”

“No,” Dys said with her arms folded and her face set in stone. “I’m doing it and that’s final. If something happens, I’m the one with the most health. I can survive anything bad that might happen and Eir can heal me while I’m in the air if that’s necessary.”

“Also, if repairs are needed, I’m just going to come right back down. No fixing shit in midair,” Jay added from where she and her other self were putting the finishing touches on the vessel.

“But it’s my experiment!” Sabina whined childishly.

“You wouldn’t try to wear that armor you made for Jadis, would you?” Sorcha patted the half-elf on the hip. “Just look at it like that. Just because you made it, doesn’t mean you’re the best person to use it.”

“But I at least got to put on the helmet!” the smith moaned dramatically. “Can’t I at least ride in it?”

“You put on the helmet?” Syd laughed at the absurd thought of Sabina wearing a piece of armor that was comically oversized for her.

“You can ride it once we know it’s safe,” Jay assured her pouting lover. “Just be patient.”

“Fine. But you better review the controls with me again! Come here and look at this part. You need to make sure you don’t push this lever the wrong way or you’ll nosedive! Also, this part controls—”

Jadis made sure that her Jay self paid full attention to Sabina’s careful explanation of the controls. While she understood them well since she had helped Sabina come up with the design, she didn’t want to cause problems by misunderstanding some part of the controls that Sabina might have recently adjusted or modified. While that part of her focused on the smith’s words, her Syd self left the setup area to have a talk with the audience. More specifically, one member in particular, who had not been expected or really invited to join them that day.

Having left Fortune’s Favored headquarters shortly after noon, Jadis and her entire company had made their way to the southern gates of the capital city. Just as they had arrived at the gates, Severina had called out to them, causing Jadis to halt. Her delight at the fortune of having her new angelic lover join them on their outing quickly turned to dismay when she saw who was with her. That dismay had since turned to a mix of mild apprehension and annoyance since the frustrating man had proven intractable in his determination to follow them.

“I can smell you scheming from twenty yards away,” Syd announced as she approached the gold-skinned elf. “Don’t think for a moment I don’t know what you’re up to.”

“My dear Jadis,” Prince Kestil said with a thin smile, “Telling a prince that you can ‘smell him’ is hardly good etiquette. Please don’t say things that make me agree with my brother’s opinions.”

“Sometimes people in charge need to hear the things that people wouldn’t ordinarily dare to say to them,” Syd told the prince. “Lucky for you, I don’t really give a damn about etiquette or your station. It’s a great chance to hear what blunt idiots like me have to think.”

“Jadis,” Severina said in a warning tone, though her expression was pleading. “Mind your manners, please.”

“It’s fine, Severina,” Kestil let out an amused chuckle as he waved dismissively. “I don’t entirely disagree with the sentiment. I know that in some kingdoms, royalty employs individuals known as ‘jesters’ for just such a purpose. I can’t imagine ever paying for the service myself, but I will humbly accept the criticism if it is offered freely.”

That was at least one thing that Jadis could appreciate about the younger prince. Unlike his brother, the man was at least able to handle an opposing view with a sense of humor.

“Besides, I would hardly force you to arrest your new sweetheart the very day after you’ve declared your affection for one another.”

Severina made a strangled noise in her throat while her whole body went rigid. Syd gaped openly at the second prince, caught between anger at being spied on and humor at the jibe. The situation was not helped by the cackling laughter coming from Kerr in the distance.

“I will also remind you, young Jadis, that I only allow you the one assault on my person,” Kestil mildly stated as he placed his forefinger next to his nose.

“Okay, putting the discussion of publicly airing personal information aside for the moment,” Syd grumbled, “I’m just going to reinforce that no matter what you see here, we are not giving you the plans for the enchantments that are powering this vessel.”

“Who said that I would ask for them?” Kestil held a hand to his chest. “This contraption of yours is likely to result in nothing more than a wasted afternoon. Besides which, even if it does work, I would never use the concept of eminent domain to force your hand.”

“Of course not,” Syd agreed dryly.

“Naturally, I would pay you for the enchantments.”

“Not happening.”

Kestil offered her a light scowl from his seat on the low stone wall that edged the open pasture they had chosen for their test flight. He looked like quite the foppish nobleman with his fancy clothing and the overpriced blanket one his guards had set on the wall for him so that his pants wouldn’t get dirty. Jadis could only imagine what was going through the heads of the poor farmers who owned the pasture, seeing Jadis and her crew as well as the second prince of the empire having a conversation only a few hundred yards away from their back porch.

“We will continue this discussion later,” Kestil announced imperiously as he turned his gaze away from Syd. “It seems that the show is just about to begin.”

“Yes, it is,” Syd agreed as she turned to look at airship her inventive lover had created from scratch in mere weeks. “Let’s just hope it isn’t a tragedy.”

When Jadis first revealed her Earthly origins to Sabina, she had spent a lot of the conversation explaining technological inventions from her home world to her insatiably curious lover. Jadis wasn’t an expert on mechanics, or really anything when it came to Earth technology, but she had a more than decent grasp on the basics. Those basics had been enough to set off an avalanche of magic-based ideas in Sabina. Most of the ideas that Sabina had come up with seemed far out of reach to Jadis, but Sabina understood magic and enchantments in a way that impressed even aged experts like High Priest Doru. She was truly a savant when it came to enchanting. So if anyone was going to be able to make a leap in magical enchantments using technological advancements, Sabina was.

Considering her initial interest in both electricity and motors, Jadis had first thought that Sabina might try to make some kind of motor vehicle. That turned out to not be the case, as Sabina had far greater foresight than Jadis. Or rather, she had a better understanding of previous experiments performed by enchanters who had come before her.

In the past, wagons had been made that were designed to travel at high-speed using enchantments that allowed horses or other beasts of burden, sometimes magical ones, to pull the vehicle far faster than would normally be possible. The problem with those wagons was the same problem that showed itself when Jadis pulled the Behemoth at the higher speeds that she was capable of achieving. The roads simply did not hold up.

Many of the issues with the stability of the wagon were resolved thanks to the spring suspension system that Sabina had been able to make thanks to Jadis’ input, but that didn’t change the fact that roads on Oros just weren’t meant to handle those kinds of speeds. Cobblestone roads were torn apart by the hard wagon wheels when they went too fast, and dirt roads were so poor that Jadis couldn’t really run all out without risking the wagon flipping over. While Sabina was positive that she could make something in the future based off of her small-scale tests, a magic-powered land vehicle just wasn’t practical for the time being. Nor would it meet Jadis’ vision of being to travel long distances in short amounts of time.

With land out of the running and the sea an equally fruitless prospect for different reasons, that left one final horizon. The sky.

Jadis watched with a growing sense of anticipation as the huge black balloon filled with hot air. It was a long, horizontally elliptical shape that was about twice the length of the Behemoth wagon, or about eighty feet. The balloon wasn’t as wide around as it was long, so it had a somewhat streamlined appearance. It reminded Jadis of some depictions of flying saucers she had seen back on Earth, albeit in a strangely medieval way. The lower half of the balloon was a rigid structure with a wood frame, while the upper half was just cloth. The cloth Sabina had chosen was a thick woolen material, so it was both fire and water repellent. The whole surface had been coated in a thick black alchemical mixture that made the balloon airtight and watertight.

As large as the balloon was, Jadis knew that from a conventional physics perspective, it was nowhere near big enough to work as a transportation vehicle. The Hindenburg, which was an admittedly far higher capacity example than Jadis was shooting for, was ten times the size of the balloon Sabina had designed. Plus, that ill-fated dirigible and others like it depended on lighter-than-air gases like hydrogen or helium to get off the ground. Neither of those gases were available to Sabina and Jadis hadn’t even tried to explain what they were since she had no clue how to manufacture them herself. That meant that the airship was supported by hot air, a far inferior lifting agent. But hot air wasn’t the only thing powering the ship’s lift. Unlike the inventors and engineers of Earth, Sabina had the advantage of magic to rely on.

Magical flight wasn’t unheard of. In fact, depending on where one lived in the empire, it was relatively common. The thing was, those who were capable of flight were usually either Seraphim, or high CLR magic casters who had gained a spell that allowed them to fly. Or, even more rarely, someone who had a magic beast to ride like Wilhelm and his griffon. Jadis had met two mages who could fly in her time, one a mercenary who worked for the Flame Wolves, and the other mage being a possessed sorcerer she had been forced to kill during the attack on the Dryad grove. In both cases, the mages were capable of flight, but were only capable of giving themselves lift and could not carry others with them, much less a vehicle. The magic cost of flying as they did was also high, which meant sustained flight over long distances just wasn’t practical.

Then there were the Seraphim like Severina. Yes, the angelic avatars were winged, but Jadis knew full well that their wings were not what allowed them to fly. As big as a Seraphim’s wings were, they were nowhere near large enough to get them off the ground. Maybe they aided in gliding, and certainly they allowed for easy course corrections, but they were not what gave the Seraphim lift. Magic was powering their flight, a fact that Severina was able to easily confirm simply by hovering off the ground despite having only one wing.

Many enchanters in the past had used the spells and principles of magic to try and make vehicles that were capable of flight. How could they not when beings like Seraphim were flying all around them? The problem they encountered though was the tremendous magical cost of powering flight for anything more than a single individual.

Sabina had explained to Jadis that the inherent problem with all the other attempts that she knew of was the fact that the enchanters were basing their enchantments around the flight spells that sorcerers and wizards used, or the inherent flight magic of beings like Seraphim or creatures like griffons. In all of those cases, the enchanters were essentially just scaling up the spell to encompass a larger individual. They weren’t making a new spell, just either altering the maximum weight parameters or duplicating the original spell multiple times. The problem with that method that all the past enchanters ran into was the massive magic costs that such designs incurred. The magic power requirements didn’t scale linearly, but instead exponentially. Doubling the weight limit quadrupled the cost, with numbers only getting worse the more weight they tried to lift. That was the main reason why high capacity, sustained air travel had been considered a dead end to enchanters for hundreds of years. It was just too expensive.

That was, until Jadis had told Sabina about hot air ballons.

The idea of heavier-than-air flight being possible without the use of magic was an entirely new concept to Sabina. In fact, it was a firmly established belief in the scholarly community of empire that all flight depended on magic to some degree. Even small birds and insects were considered to be a minor version of magic beasts because of their ability to fly. Scholars and enchanters alike had simply assumed that magic had to be involved since the larger beasts like wyverns and dragons were definitely magically powered. Flight was magic, so far as the average or even educated citizen was concerned.

The oversight was… well, it was stupid, at least in Jadis’ opinion, but she could at least understand where they were coming from. If all the biggest, most obvious examples confirmed the theory, why bother checking on the little guys?

Bad science aside, Sabina had taken the ideas Jadis had given her regarding the physics of non-magical flight and ran with them. Instead of doing what everyone else had done for hundreds or even thousands of years, the half-elf had crafted an arcane enchantment that didn’t try to brute force flight but instead enhance the flight capabilities of mundane physics. The designs were entirely her own, unique and unlike any other enchantment that had been documented before. They were a true innovation, one that Sabina was justly proud of.

Technically, Sabina’s enchantments couldn’t do anything on their own. Tack them onto a wagon and the wagon would just sit there. But combine those enchantments with the science of flight, or at least the basics that Jadis had given her, and those enchantments could make a vehicle soar. At least, that was the hope. The time for theory and small-scale tests had passed.

The final test had to be done.

“Stand back,” Jay told Sabina and her assistants. “I’ll pull the tethers off myself.”

A small, wooden cabin had been put together to act as the pilot’s seat. It was also where many of the enchantments that Sabina had crafted were slotted and also served as the base for the magic-powered motor that Sabina had made. The motor, a marvel of magical engineering, would turn the propellers that would give the airship forward momentum and maneuverability. Lift, though, was entirely up to the magically enhanced balloon. The cabin wasn’t permanently attached to the balloon; it was just a temporary measure they were using for this first test run. If everything went as planned, Sabina had assured them that the balloon would be able to be attached to the Behemoth wagon. Supposedly, the enchantments Sabina had crafted would be able to achieve lift with a load twice the weight of the wagon at full capacity.

Standing in front of the incredibly expensive experimental vehicle, Jadis prayed to any gods listening that Sabina’s calculations were right. They had used up their entire supply of eleria crystal and had even had to buy more of the rare and expensive material to make the contraption. If the airship didn’t work, it wasn’t just Sabina who would be heartbroken. Their wallets would be, too.

Sitting in the “cockpit” that was really just an open wagon seat, Jadis made a mental note to remind Sabina that they needed to install seatbelts.

“Pulling the tethers!” Dys shouted out as she ran around the airship, pulling the mooring lines free. “Keep clear!”

As her other self freed the ship from its constraints, Jay touched the control that turned the motor on. She felt the draw of magic leaving her, the small amount of magic power needed to start the motor negligible, but still necessary. While not every aspect of the controls required magic power to steer the vehicle, enough of the enchantments required those small sparks that anyone who wanted to pilot the airship would need to have some magic capability.

The motor whirred to life in near silence. Since the device was powered by magic, it made very little noise. Jadis didn’t engage the propellers, though. The first step was to simply take the ship a few feet off the ground. That was all.

“Come on, Jadis,” Jay murmured to herself. “If the Orville brothers could do this without being super strong, super tough, magically enhanced giants, then you can too.”

Slowly, brushing the lever that controlled lift with the faintest touch, Jay commanded the airship to take flight.

Immediately the vessel rose into the air, causing Jay’s stomach to practically fall out of her ass as she went far higher far faster than she anticipated. The shouts and cries of surprise, alarm, and wonder that came from everyone on the ground echoed across the half-thawed pasture as the airship quickly rose a hundred feet into the air before Jay managed to center the control and reach a point of equilibrium.

“Controls are a bit sensitive,” Dys remarked to a widely grinning Sabina.

“It must be because of the weight difference!” Sabina shouted in unbridled joy. “The balloon is meant to carry the full weight of the Behemoth so you’re far lighter than what is intended and Jadis! You’re flying!”

“Holy fuck, I am flying!” Dys cried out as she picked Sabina up and spun her around. “You did it! It works!”

“It works!” Sabina laughed with excited glee as Dys pulled her in for a sound kiss. “It really works!”

Jay marveled at the view as she took a few minutes to adjust to the feeling of success. The setup had taken most of the afternoon so the sun was dipping below the horizon, so the glorious vision of seeing a golden sunset in the west from the height of the world’s first airship filled her with even more pride at what her amazing lover had accomplished. What they had all accomplished. They could fly.

“I would very much like to discuss airship designs with you and Sabina,” Prince Kestil said, his silver eyes never leaving the floating marvel.

Syd grinned knowingly.

“I bet you would.”

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