Uncle Falcon meets up with us and tells us what happened with the Halkyns. Uncle Hawk's party went and kicked their butts and is now occupying their village. Several high-ranking Halkyns were killed. We have missed out on quite a bit of violence (which I'm kind of glad about), but I wish I could have at least watched it on a screen or something.

I have no doubt Aunt Savannah would have tree-smacked anyone that tried to mess with Corwen.

Griza, for her part, is delighted to have been able to trust Grubwick to the care of Klog, the terrifying goblin inventor who has probably mined the entire cavern or something.

"Humans praising a goblin as a hero," Griza says. "What times we live in."

"Foreigners are way worse than goblins, anyway," Colt says. "That's what my uncles say. The adventurers are mostly okay. They're just here to kill monsters. These smugglers, though, why are they here?"

"To take advantage of us and our cousins," Rowan says.

"Amroth banned them," Uncle Falcon says. "Princess Amroth knew enough of their secrets that once her family found out, they threw the Honest Order of Aethernauts out of town. Some of them literally. Their boats had to go catch them once they started free-floating."

Gravity with aether cores is utter nonsense. Isaac Newton's reincarnations would need to start from scratch around here. Like everything else around here, it works however the cores feel like making it work. Adhering to a coherent set of rules is politeness, not necessity. A fall down the rabbit hole shows that pretty clearly.

"I bought the smugglers' ledge," Basalt says. "Amroth had, technically, already set it up for regular bribes. They were just happy at the prospect of it being used for trade with dwarves. We can just fly straight up or down and over a little, and once I cut a path through the labyrinth, we're not actually that far from Hebron."

"No more trudging through the Underswamps?" Rowan says. "That's a cause to celebrate with grape juice."

"I kind of like the Underswamps," I say, then hold up my hands at the incoming glares.

In order to do better flying around Flux, it would help to hire on someone from Flux to offset domain penalties.

There are people from Flux in the Adventurers' Guild.

One of Meadow's brief party members is from Flux, the one who got them into trouble with the Halkyns. He's willing to come along and help, figuring he owes Meadow for getting them in that situation and also wants to get back at the Halkyns' buddies himself.

I try to figure out his name before he tells us. It's… a person? Something to do with music?

"Name's Harper, by the way. Harper Cranstal Flux Tiganna."

I was close.

"Who all is going, anyway?" I ask.

The resulting clamor makes it obvious: Everyone is going.

"What if we all get shot out of the sky?" I wonder.

"Don't worry," Kestrel says. "I'm a Heroic wind mage. I could get us back to something solid just with my own power if something happened to the boat. It would just be slow, boring, and exhausting. Somebody might take pity on us and come out to rescue us first. You don't know boredom until you've gotten stuck outside a domain's gravity field."

"The rest of my party wants to go, too," Harper says. "We're all quite annoyed about being turned into mushrooms."

"We'd be packed in like apples in a barrel if everyone tried to go," I say. "I only have one boat and it's not that big. But fine, whatever."

"We could just steal another boat," Anise says brightly. "It's a pity the last one crashed into pieces."

"It's going to be a very long flight even with my reduced penalties," I say. "And if Aunt Hazel finds out we're taking even more people, she might have loaded us up with more food than we could carry."

"That's okay," Anise says. "We can sit on the food crates."

"We should have brought more pillows," I say. "People will need to sleep."

I do a headcount. There's me, Rowan, Basalt, Jade, Anise, Colt, and Kestrel, making up seven members of my party. Then there's the four members of the Daring Edgewalkers, then the four members of Meadow's party. So I have fifteen people wanting to fly on my four-by-ten meter skyboat, on at least a twenty-four hour flight. And I'm so excited that I don't even care.

The ship gets loaded up enough to almost mollify Aunt Hazel. With an Elite and a Heroic adventuring party coming along, they are also perfectly capable of buying additional supplies. More food, blankets and pillows, a magic chamber pot, several coils of rope, plus some of them have bags of holding they've put tools, weapons, and potions in.

We board the ship and make sure everyone who isn't actually flying the ship as we leave port is seated neatly in rows like this is some sort of sky bus. We attract less attention in doing so than I had anticipated. As it turns out, in a skyport with an active Adventurers' Guild, adventurers flying on skyboats is not a rare sight.

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"Everyone here? Everyone got everything?" I ask. "We're not turning around and coming back if someone forgot their lucky rabbit's foot."

Mumbled confirmation from the passengers and one more head count just in case, I nod to Kestrel to power up the skyboat. She touches the activation sigil and the rest of the sigils light up in bright azure. I take hold of the tiller and pull us away from the docking tower.

Gaining altitude, I gently turn us in the general direction of Flux. My breath catches as the shining green skymote comes over the edge of the domain. Flux is easy to see, in the distance to the left hovering in the air beneath Tiganna. Amroth is on the north edge of Tempest, but the triple city is more northwest of it. Once I've gotten us pointed in the right direction and we're not in immediate danger of having to make evasive maneuvers, I have Kestrel switch on cruise control so I can go to the prow and get a good look at where we're going.

Three perfect circles (all exactly 20 kilometers in diameter) make up the tri-city, offset from one another so that each of the lower ones is partially in light and partially in shadow. At the top, Gleam's topside bears walls around the entire edge, but the underside is another story. Buildings sprawl across both sides of each domain, with massive bridges the size of skyscrapers connecting each of them to one another.

It is a spectacular view we will be watching for many hours because we are not exactly traveling at the speed of a jet plane.

Skills increased: Maintenance (Organization), Mechanics (Piloting), Enhanced Senses (Celestial Inspiration)

We're not entirely alone in the air. Other flying craft make their way from one domain to another. From aether pinnaces like ours, to tiny speedboats, sleek yachts and sloops, to massive galleons. I wish I could get a better look at them, but even the ones flying to and from different ports in Tempest are many kilometers away and I can't make out any details beyond their size and guessing at their class of ship.

Wonder the Wizard pulls out a telescope and hands it to me. "Hey, kid. Take a look through this."

It's a larger, more complicated telescope than the one my cousin got for her naming day from our grandmother. I put it to my eye and adjust it till the distant domains snap into clarity. I thought I'd been able to see buildings before, but now I can actually see them as buildings rather than inferring them. I can't make out individual people or anything from here, never mind read any street signs, but I pick up the vague circular shape of what might be an arena amid the more square buildings.

Skills increased: Mechanics (Optics)

I offer it back to him, but he shakes his head.

"Hand it back after the quest, if I survive," Wonder says. "You're the one flying the boat. You need it more than me right now."

With our course laid in, we settle in to chat.

"Here's what I think was supposed to happen," I say to Rowan. "You got a quest to find that sword. You wanted to be a tank, and it's good for defense. Talgarth expected you to go to Amroth and visit the Adventurers' Guild for it, didn't it?"

"I knew about the Adventurers' Guild, but it didn't send me directly there," Rowan says. "I planned to go there eventually anyway. I just wanted to explore a bit on my own first. I saw those goblins and found a cave…"

"Ah, quest procrastination," Kestrel says. "What do you have up next?"

"Just to do whatever Drake wants," Rowan says. "And Drake wants me to do whatever I want. So that's unhelpful."

"Well, you should still get spillover from Drake's quests, at least. Maybe you'll get a personal quest once this one is done with."

"I hope so," Rowan says. "I want quest bonuses. Ugh, I wish I'd had time to train with this thing before we rushed off to do this."

"We don't have to rush," Kestrel says. "I just wanted to get off Tempest so I didn't lose my class bonuses. You can stop and do some training and sidequests while the Daring Edgewalkers get a feel for the land and do some recon and deal with any high levels that might stop us from robbing some pirates and blowing up some magic drugs."

"That's what we're here for!" Uncle Falcon pipes in.

"And the Doomed Mushroom Party can do whatever they want," Kestrel says.

"That's not our name…" Harper groans.

I turn to Kestrel. "I have to ask… how did you enchant the cake? I hope you didn't mix sigil ink into the frosting."

Kestrel laughs. "No, no. There's a baking-themed dungeon in Zenith that I visited before coming here. One of the monsters there has mystic lard that can be made into frosting."

"I'm not sure how to feel about that," I say.

"What, can't read yourself with your own [Empathy] skill?" Kestrel asks.

"Mostly because I have several mes who all feel differently about that. They started off the same, but their experiences led to different paths. I, Drake, think it's pretty cool, while Alex thinks it's gross. I have also done more cooking than Alex ever did and he had never watched a devil-goat being slaughtered."

I take a moment to see if I can identify the names of the two adventurers whose names I didn't catch. One of them is a human man in his late teens with stubbly beard that looks more like he just failed to grow one rather than that he hasn't shaved in a few days. Let's see… it's not a bird, at any rate. Maybe a piece of armor or clothing? Probably made of leather, too.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" the man asks.

"Oh, sorry, I was trying to read your aura with my [Naming] skill as practice," I say. "I couldn't get any closer than something that's probably worn and made of leather."

"My name is Baldric," he says with a chuckle.

"Ah!" I say, and turn to the other member of the party.

She's a tall, blonde woman in her thirties with a large sword strapped to her back. "Go ahead. At least it passes the time."

"Oh, I think I know this one," I say. "A flower. There's yellow? Buttercup?"

She snorts. "Crowfoot. And they're only partly yellow."

"I was close?" I say.

Skills increased: Clairvoyance (Naming), Knowledge (Botany)

"At least the system gives credit for trying sometimes," I say, smiling at the notification.

The aether flows coming out from Tiganna are powerful but don't impede me much, much like how Corwen lets me land inside the village but I can't even cross overhead of any other village too closely. Most of the people on board were born in the Tiganna System.

As we slowly approach, I pull up my 'Jobs' tab in my third eye's user interface. The quest Flux gave me is very simple. Even peak-Novice level [Aspect Analysis] would clearly be able to discern it. It's just an invitation. Merely a pointer quest, but what will it offer next once I get there? There's no telling, with aether cores.

Amroth's job offer has a lot more experience attached to it. More involved, but no less straightforward. Destroy the source of the floj being smuggled into Amroth. I would have done that with or without a quest, but it will be nice to actually get credit for it. Being paid to do something you were going to do anyway is always a plus.

Meanwhile, Tempest still wants to pit me against the goblins. Annoying.

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