3a: Mary First Flight

There are many different ways of traveling through Wildspace. Most of them are too limited, dangerous, or expensive to be useful.

The simplest way is to ride on an animal that flies. There are several trainable flying animals that can carry a person in a gravity well, and many more than can do it in zero gravity. A related method is the flapboat, which is like a rowboat but with large wings instead of oars. Many civilizations in sky archipelagos or asteroid fields need nothing else, but flight powered by muscle needs food, water, and rest, and so is rarely useful for longer journeys through empty space.

At the other extreme, the great-power navies like the Mind Flayers and the Holy Corellon Federation use extremely expensive spelljamming helms that move their massive ships at incredible velocities by directly warping space, in a manner similar to telekinesis and teleportation magic.

Civilizations in the middle have several options, and Fortuna's Kiss was equipped with several of the more practical ones, devices that can be constructed by anyone capable of making basic magic or alchemical items and used by anyone with a little training.

Earth-elemental reaction engines, like the ones that power magical constructs such as golems, generate a slow steady amount of power. They can easily be made with a variable power output and connected to a propeller. This is very useful for docking and other precise maneuvers, but too slow for long voyages.

Fire-Water reaction engines generate much more power and thrust, with a reaction somewhat like chemical rockets but more efficient and safer. They are good for emergency thrust, but using them exclusively for long voyages would be very expensive and require you to start off loaded with dangerous and volatile refined elemental matter.

The safest and most energy-efficient travel method is sailing with an elemental keel. In waterboats, the water provides the leverage that allows the ship to sail at an angle to the wind. In spaceships, the elemental keel serves this function. When activated, it holds the ship in a certain orientation, like iron filings in a magnetic field, and any force that would push the ship sideways or make it spiral in a corkscrew instead pushes it mostly forward.

Sailing with an elemental keel is much like sailing in water, but there are several important differences that must be learned through experience. Ra fal, Mabellyne, Tsinta, and Gladys were going through training drills, learning how to steer the ship under various conditions. Ra fal and Gladys each controlled one wing, using strength to pull and twist it into position. Tsinta handled the lines controlling the sail and watched for wind currents, while Gladys controlled the keel orientation. The engine had been shut down for safety and the propeller had been removed and stowed, to protect it and the crankshaft from strain as the ship lurched around.

They had progressed through the basics relatively smoothly, and were able to reliably travel at most angles against a steady wind, including sailing full and by and tacking. But then, after sailing for several hours and getting a very safe distance above the ground, they deliberately steered out of the Gray Ridge Thermal and into an area of unpredictable choppy winds in order to practice in rougher conditions.

"Strong gust incoming, two o'clock low."

"How low?"

"Um, about 60° below plane"

"Spin 40° clockwise and turn us, um, 30° port"

"Setting keel to 63° Air, 22° Fire, 5° Dark."

"That will put us in irons!"

"I think she meant 22° Water!"

"Yes, sorry!"

"Warp that wing more!"

"Teetdullh! We're too slow!"

"Watch the boom!"

"What the gritginding friction are you doing?"

The process made Mary and Sofonisba uncomfortable, both physically and socially. The random lurching and spinning of the ship threatened made them both airsick, and the constant frustrated bickering of the others made them ill at ease.

During a calm patch, Mary carefully and gently approached Ra fal, like she would approach one of her family's hounds in an ill temper. "Sofonisba needs to teach me how to ride a broomstick. Is it okay if we leave the ship and go exploring that asteroid field?"

"Yes, of course. Take as much time as you need." Mary could see the relief in Ra fal's eyes. As she guessed, part of the orc captain's stress came from looking bad in front of an audience, and removing that audience would help.

Mary was already wearing her armor and helmet, and was eager to go, but the older elf stopped her.

"Before we go out, have you ever been in zero gravity before?"

"No, I have not. Um, I don't even know what that is."

"Did you ever wonder why the ships and floating islands do not come crashing down to the ground?"

"I just assumed they were magic, or that they were made of those strange materials that don't fall."

"That is not a bad guess, but the truth is even stranger. Gravity is generated whenever there is a sufficiently flat boundary between Earth and Air. Imagine an invisible bubble..." Suddenly, wind changed, the ship lurched beneath them and started spinning, and orc and goblin curses started flying through the air. Sofonisba steadied herself and took a deep breath. "We should go now. We can talk on the way. I was planning on teaching you how to deal with nausea, but staying longer will just make things worse."

The others managed to steady the ship again, and Sofonisba showed Mary how to mount and activate the broomstick, then quickly taught her an exercise to steady her stomach. "As soon as you turn it on, it will cancel the ship's gravity and you will be floating. Just think about standing still, and then think about walking slowly. Be sure that your feet are in front of the foot peg, not on top, or you may slide off. Just push off and move a little away from the ship. Walking pace, no sudden movements."

Mary nodded nervously, and then activated the broomstick, going through the sequence she had been shown. It worked on the first try, and, with a brief lurch, all of her weight disappeared and her armor no longer pressed down on her shoulders and hips. It still fit well, however, and she was now very glad for the hours of armor adjustment she had stood through. She gradually began to drift away from the deck.

After the first shock, it felt good. She had no nausea or stomach problems at all. She floated for a few seconds, then imagined herself gently floating forward, and was soon drifting over the ship's railing and into space. She was flying!

Then Sofonisba took off, moving with practiced ease and speed. She came alongside Mary and gestured for her to follow, away from the ship and toward the asteroids.

Mary yelled, "I'm flying! This is great! I can go anywhere in any direction and I feel like I can do anything!"

When they were safely away from the ship, the elf warrior smiled at Mary. "Yes. You are doing good. I am very happy that you are comfortable with flying; it makes things easier. Now, the most important thing to remember about flying with broomsticks is that it drains you, just as though you had run that same distance. But it can move twice as fast as you can, so you can get drained quite rapidly if you are not careful. So, to start out, we should fly slowly, at a walking speed."

Sofonisba set the pace, and Mary flew close by her side. It was surprisingly easy. She simply thought about how fast she wanted to go, by imagining walking faster or slower, and gently moved the stick in the desired direction by shifting her arm and hips. Mary desperately wanted to cut loose and fly around faster, but she followed the elf's instructions, and took the time to notice the sensations in her body as she moved. Although her legs and arms were not moving at all, it did feel like she was walking at a brisk pace. After a couple minutes, she turned and asked, "Does it drain you like running a distance, or swimming that distance? Swimming is harder because the water gives way instead of being solid. And what is the broomstick pushing against?"

Sofnonisba looked at Mary with respect. "That is a very good question. Yes, in order to move forward, you have to push something backwards. The very short version of what broomsticks do is that they take Life from your body and combine it with some of the Death stored in the broomstick. The Life and Death destroy each other, and the resulting energy is hurled backwards from the bristles at an extreme velocity, much faster than the speed of sound. The process is efficient, so it feels like walking or running."

Mary flinched a little during the elf's talk, and her direction changed before she corrected it. "That sounds dangerous. What does this energy do to the stuff it hits?"

"In a well-tuned broomstick, the energy vanishes into the astral plane after a meter or so. And yes, you do need to make sure that the bristles are not pointed at anything you care about. Anyone hit by bristle exhaust will need magical healing to stabilize their life-energy within a month or so, or they risk getting a kind of cancer."

"Is all this why brooms have a really bad reputation? My family always said that they are a dangerous menace, only used by mad witches and, um.." Mary was about to say 'demihumans' but then she stopped herself, as some part of her had realized that she had never heard a non-human use that word, so it might be considered rude, and it was definitely rude in this context. She lamely finished "and other bad people."

Sofonisba knew exactly what word was left unsaid, but chose to ignore it. "Yes, brooms are easy enough to make that almost any magic-user can throw one together with a couple dark rituals, but without proper maintenance and safety precautions they will twist and pollute both the user and the surrounding area."

Mary had been feeling more and more unclean as she heard more about the broomstick operation, the feeling starting with 'take Life from your body' and slowly building from there. When Sofonisba said 'twist and pollute' Mary reflexively let go of the broomstick and jumped off. She tried to remain calm and composed, like a proper cosmopolitan woman, but completely failed, and her voice squeaked as she said, "What dark ritual was used to make this thing and fill it with Death?"

After she said this, Mary noticed that she was slowly spinning off in one direction, and her broom was moving much more quickly in the opposite direction, well out of reach. She moved her arms and legs around a little, trying to flap or swim, which only made her spin more. Then she tried not to think about what was happening, imagined that she was just lying down in a field, and forced herself not to move.

Sofonisba quickly looked at Mary and saw that she was not yet panicking. Instead of going directly to the human child, she quickly flew over to the drifting broom, grabbed it, and flew back to the still-spinning Mary and matched her velocity. Then she made a show of calmly and carefully examining the broomstick, as though nothing at all was wrong, and said, "This one is of fairly recent local Goblin manufacture, definitely after their conversion to Ioun worship..."

Mary was barely listening. She was spinning head over heels. When the elf started talking, she was looking at the blue-green blur that was the ground over twenty miles below, and then into the cloudy vastness of space, and now the ground was spinning into view again.

"... so they probably made it by going into some dungeon and harvesting the spines of a couple of low-level undead."

Panic was beginning to creep over her as she realized how stupid she had been and how bad her situation was. She was completely helpless. Now she was looking at the sky again. There was no way she could move, nothing to grab or push against. The ground spun back into view.

"There is no reason to manufacture Death energy when you can just take it,..."

One part of her thought about falling and crashing into the ground, and started to panic about that, but then as the ground moved away again she realized that she had no idea if she was moving toward or away from it, and that if the others left her, she would float helplessly until she died of thirst long before she crashed into anything.

"... and make the world a better place in the process."

Ground again. She could barely make out the Tuck River, and guessed at where her home was. Nobody would ever know what happened, nobody would ever find her. She could die, lost and alone. The only thing that might save her was the grace and kindness of people who had no reason but their sense of honor to help her.

Sofonisba held out the broom. Mary grabbed it tightly and then wrapped herself around it, clinging with both hands and her legs.

Nothing happened. She simply kept spinning and drifting. She could barely remember what she was supposed to do to reactivate it, but forced herself to calm down, put her feet back on the pegs, and turn it on. Even then, she kept spinning, and worried that it was not on, but when she imagined herself walking forward the broom edged forward, and Mary was able to pull out of the spin.

Sofonisba wordlessly started flying towards the asteroids again. Mary forced herself to calm down and focus on following her course and speed. She noticed, for the first time, that there was a leather strap on Sofonisba's wrist that was connected to the broomstick with a short silk cord.

After a few minutes, Mary said, as cheerfully as possible, "This might be a good time to keep telling me about how gravity works."

Sofonisba smiled at Mary with a knowing fae tinkle in her eyes. "Yes. Where was I?"

"Boundary between Earth and Air."

"Right. Gravity is generated whenever there is a sufficiently flat boundary between Earth and Air. Imagine an invisible bubble formed around the place where Earth and Air meet. Things, well, most things, get pulled towards the boundary, but only within the bubble. Go outside the bubble, and gravity just shuts off. There is no pull. In the Gray Ridge region, the gravity bubble extends a few hundred meters above the ground. If the ship ever got that close to the ground and entered its gravity bubble, we would fall and crash.

"So the gravity in Boomport was twisted because the mountain was poking out of the ground's gravity bubble?"

"You catch on quick. Yes, all spaceports are on the tallest mountains, the ones tall and sharp enough to be free of the bubble. By sculpting the mountain the right way, you can shape the gravity planes its rock produces and make a spaceport for ships to dock safely."

"So why did we have gravity on the ship?"

"There is a thick sheet of copper built into the bottom hull of the ship. It counts as Earth, so it generates a small gravity bubble. We fall towards it, but the ship is not falling towards anything."

"Are these asteroids going to have a gravity plane?"

"No, they are too small and rounded. That is good for us, because you will get to practice basic space movements before we add in the extra complications of shifting gravity planes."

The conversation had calmed Mary down, and she was able to once again enjoy flying. It really was a nice feeling. For a while, nothing seemed to be happening, and it was kind of like riding a boat on a wide boring river, but as they got closer to the floating space rocks Mary could appreciate her movement and the control she had over it.

Sofonisba saw that Mary was eager to approach the nearest rock, a boulder several feet in diameter. "Before you get any closer, I must remind you that there is a very big difference between weight and mass. The rock is floating weightlessly, and it may look harmless because of that, but if it hits you in the head it could easily kill you, just like a falling rock on the ground. We need to go alongside it and match its velocity before touching it. Watch me."

Sofonisba spun around in a graceful loop, and Mary followed, and the two inched closer to the floating, gently spinning boulder.

At first it looked like a fairly boring chunk of granite, but as Mary got closer she could see thin feathery lichen nestled in several of its cracks and depressions. Little gray-green strands, like the leaves of pond plants, drifted in space.

"They are harmless. You can touch them if you want."

Mary tried to pick some of the strands, but they disintegrated into dust as she touched them.

"Before we go deeper into the field. I want you to gain an appreciation of the forces here. Try to grab hold of the rock."

Mary watched the rock make a full rotation, then, when a suitable handhold came around, cautiously but firmly grabbed onto it. There was a jerk, like a strong hound tugging at a leash, and then she and her broom were pulled in the direction of rotation. The rock kept spinning, but Mary kept moving in a straight line, and she was not able to maintain her grip as the boulder spun away from her. She drifted off into space.

It was easy enough for Mary to use her broom to reorient herself, and when she looked back to the boulder, it was gently drifting along as though nothing had happened.

Next, Sofonisba had Mary practice slowly approaching and kicking or pushing off the rock from various angles while riding the broom, so that she could handle an impact without hurting herself. Sometimes she bounced gracefully off, and other times she went sprawling or spinning into space.

After Sofonisba was satisfied that Mary had learned the basics of self-preservation, she finally took Mary exploring deeper into the asteroid field.

Mary traveled slowly and carefully as she looked in all directions. "Oh wow, this is impressive. Look at that flower! It is so big and pretty. Ooh, a butterfly. Wait, oh, it is over a foot long! Hey, is that a spider web between those two asteroids? Yes, wow, it is over a hundred feet! Look at that! Oof, I swallowed a gnat. Oh wow, they are everywhere. Yuck, we really need to figure out how to fit goggles under my helmet."

"Move quickly, this way. You can outfly them."

Mary spent over two hours exploring and examining the asteroid field, looking closely at everything she could, and also looking at the whole scene many times from many angles. It was like a barren mountaintop spread over a collection of floating bubbles. Most of the surface of the asteroids was either bare rock or lichen, but soil had accumulated in some cracks, enough for small plants and flowers and clumps of grass to grow, but nothing larger. The plants supported a small ecosystem of bugs, with spiders as the apex predator. Everything was longer and frailer than its gravity-based equivalent, and the flying insects drifted along and moved with slow casual flaps rather than fighting gravity with fast-fluttering wings.

Sofonisba was with Mary for most of it, but after some time the elf went to the fringes and simply watched. Finally, Mary came to her. "I think I am done now, unless you have something else to show me."

"You have seen all there is to see here. Very few people would spend the time do that. You truly do have a passion for nature and an eye for beauty."

"Wow, thanks!"

"There is one more thing to do, if you are brave enough. I think you are ready to practice jumping from rock to rock."

"Really?"

"Yes. There are several safe jumps here. I will take your broomstick and catch you if you miss or bounce off."

"But I could not hold onto the last one."

"If you go slow and land on one with no spin, you have a good chance."

"Maybe I can start by jumping from my broom to a rock?"

"That is a wise idea, with the caveat that you cannot jump from the broom. If you tried, you would simply push the broom away. You must use the broom to set your velocity, and then simply release it. I will catch it. Let me see, I think I know a good spot for that."

"Okay, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this."

"Just be slow and patient. Aim, let go when you are about ten meters away, release, curl your knees to your chest, and when you touch down, use your legs to slow yourself down and then grab the rock."

"Right. Do you promise you will catch me if I miss?"

"As quickly as I can."

"Okay."

Mary followed Sofonisba to the chosen spot, and then followed her instructions. She felt a brief flash of panic after she released the broom, but this time, instead of spinning into nothing, she was drifting towards solid ground. Then, when that panic subsided, her perspective shifted and it felt like she was falling 30 feet and about to painfully crash. But when she kept drifting slowly after her instincts told her she should have already hit, she was able to calm down and prepare for the landing. Her feet touched, she crouched down, grabbed for the rock...

Success! Mary was clinging to the rock like a lizard on a wall. "I did it!"

"Congratulations!" Sofonisba was right beside her with the broom. "Take some time, collect yourself, and try crawling around the rock. Again, take it slow. The faster your body goes, the harder you need to grip to avoid flying off. I am right beside you."

Mary did so, hesitantly at first, but soon she started to enjoy the feeling of control. She was moving around, weightlessly, almost effortlessly, in a fantastic place among the clouds, using only her own power. With the barest flick of her arms, she could move from handhold to handhold, her face close to tiny sweet-smelling flowers growing among the gossamer lichen. She could scamper all over and around the rock...

She moved too fast, her grip slipped, and in trying to regain it she pushed herself back into space.

"I have you." Mary felt Sofonisba's gloved hand on her shoulder, stopping her motion and her spinning.

"Just push me back to the rock. I want to try again."

"Very good."

Mary played around on the rock for several more minutes, becoming more comfortable with the movement. Sofonisba saw that she was not afraid to keep testing her limits, moving faster and trying more things, and she was prepared when Mary inevitably pushed herself too far and slipped off again. "Do you want to go back to the rock, or your broom?"

"Push me back to the rock, then hold the broom out so I can jump for it."

Mary landed on the rock, crouched, looked at the elf 30 feet away, and jumped toward the broom. But as she did so, the rock moved and spun under her feet, and her angle was slightly off. She drifted past the broom, just a foot out of reach. Sofonisba flew over and handed it to her.

"When you jump from a rock, remember that it is not solid ground. Everything will be pushed back a little when you jump from it, and if you are not jumping directly away from its center of mass, you will make it spin."

"So it is like jumping off a boat."

"Exactly."

"I can do that. Let me try again."

Mary practiced for over an hour, first jumping from rock to broom and back, and then from rock to rock. Sometimes she made the jumps, and sometimes she missed, but she always tried again, and her improvement was rapid. By the end of the hour, she was able to make hundred-foot jumps, and managed a three-stage journey, jumping with careful timing from rock to rock to rock to rock and sticking to the last one.

After that triumph, Sofonisba handed her the broom. "I think we are done for today."

"Do I have to stop now? I feel great!"

"You are getting tired, and your jumping has made the rocks move and spin faster. It is no longer safe. We should go back and eat and rest, and wait for the next asteroid field."

Mary sighed. "You're right."

Once they were clear of the rocks, Mary moved close to Sofonisba and put her hand on the elf's shoulder. "You are a really good teacher. I had so much fun today, I saw and did so many wonderful things and I know that I will be a lot safer in space now. Thank you so so much, You have been so wonderful. I..." her eyes started to tear up, and she swallowed. "You are going to be a great mother. I'm jealous of your children."

Sofonisba could not think of anything to say. She simply held Mary's hand until they got close to the ship.

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