Alex next headed to the shop and inspected the progress of the clockwork boat project. The hull was complete along with the beams for the different levels. The supports for the deck had also been id in pce and secured. Only a certain sea elf was currently in the shop.

  “It looks like the next step is putting all the complicated gearing into pce.” Alex consulted her notes that she’d id out along with some of the books from the clockwork dungeon.

  Ariel also looked at some of the pns. “This is incredibly complex Alex. Though it looks like they figured out the bilge pump.”

  Alex saw the cylinder had been put in pce and some gears, shafts and belts to turn it. A brass pipe went from the bottom of the toy ship to a hole outside above where the water line was supposed to be.

  “The pump is not all that different from what a normal ship would have.” Alex pointed out. “The only improvement to this one is that it wouldn’t require someone to manually operate the pump. You’d just wind it up and pull a lever to release the spring tension and it’ll go for 10 minutes because of the enchantment.”

  “What about the rest of the stuff?” Ariel asked, gncing at the piles of bronze parts that the children had been creating from out the window.

  “If we have enough of the small parts I can throw them together.” Alex made clockwork dolls so she was confident that her skills in toymaking could throw together a toy ship. “I’m just a little worried about only having brass and wood to work with. A harder metal would be better for the stuff that will be constantly getting wet.”

  “Is that what those rocks are for?” The sea elf looked outside and inspected the tons of ore that Merumeru had picked out. “Merumeru might need some help.”

  “Meru!” The slime girl struggled to move some of the heavier boulders out of the carriage.

  “You don’t like to wait.” Alex thought that the rocks could wait until morning but apparently Merumeru wanted them now.

  “Ru!!!” Merumeru tried to push on a bigger serpentine-stripped rock but her tiny frame couldn’t support it. She kicked it with her little boots but it just rocked back and forth a bit.

  Alex fetched the dolls from the carriage and danced to get them going.

  Edelweiss, being the strongest and heaviest, proved to be the best at unching them out of the carriage. She could just charge them with her shield and send them out the door.

  After a few minutes they had a pile of the rocks sitting in front of the shop.

  “Meru!” Merumeru picked up a small one and headed over to the little doll-operated series of contraptions for smelting brass.

  “I don’t think that is going to work.” Alex pulled the hand-sized rock out of Merumeru’s hand when she tried to dump it into a melted pot of brass. “It will need to get hotter. Unless that is silver or something that has about the same melting point as brass.”

  Alex fished around and found an old thermometer in the shop. She pced it in the molten brass. “See, it looks like it is about 900C. Is that hot enough to melt that unknown ore?”

  “Meru me me me ru ru meeeruu.” Merumeru stomped and gave Alex an angry look for taking her rock.

  Ariel furrowed her brows. “You really should figure out how to understand elemental one of these days.” She took the rock from Alex and looked it over. “Merumeru says that this is something called paldium ore. Do you know what that is?”

  Alex tried to remember. “Is that some kind of catalyst? I can’t remember but it sounds like something that they’d use in catalytic converters.”

  “Catalytic converter.” Ariel tested the unfamiliar word. “That is nothing I've ever heard of.”

  The bck-haired girl pointed at the parked jeep in the twilight. “It is something for the exhaust system for engines. Not sure exactly how that works but they make it so that the exhaust isn’t as bad. The metal is very valuable.”

  “As valuable as gold?” The sea elf raised got a greedy look on her face.

  “Maybe?” Alex shrugged. “It is simir to ptinum I believe. Is that valuable here?”

  Ariel nodded. “Yes, ptinum is more valuable than gold.”

  Ariel eyed the rock, using a skill on it. “My booty appraisal skill says that this is not as valuable as ptinum ore or gold ore, not even silver ore.”

  Alex frowned. “Well then your system skill doesn’t work really well. Industries really need this for those converters.”

  Ariel shrugged. “It might be useful in your world, but in this one I would think most people running a mine would consider it a byproduct of what they are really after.”

  “Reminds me of cobalt.” Alex chuckled. “People used to think that stuff was worthless too.”

  “Cobalt is useless.” Ariel frowned.

  “Exactly.” Alex smugly left it at that.

  “Merumeru me me ruuuu mee.” Merumeru compined, grabbing at the rock.

  “You can take it back to town and ask the smiths there to dissolve it if it gives you indigestion.” Ariel patted the slime girl on the head and gave her back the rock.

  “Anyway, it has been a long few days.” Alex headed back to the carriage. “Let's get some sleep and see what we can get done in the morning.”

  “Okay, I’m excited about this kind of ship.” Ariel waved and headed back towards the water. “We’ll talk ter.”

  “Take care.” Fufi waved a wing.

  “Meruuuuu!” Merumeru also waved.

  Not really wanting to disturb anyone else, Alex Fufi and Merumeru settled into the carriage, prepared some snacks and went to bed.

  Alex, up before dawn, prepared tea and a simple breakfast. She dressed in her work clothes and began assembling the toy boat. First, she installed a brass screw propeller. Next, she added a pump to infte the ascension balloon and self-reefing sails with lever controls.

  After a few hours Aqua and Ariel came into the shop, along with some of the carpenters that had been helping with the castle and the toy boat project.

  “How’s it going?” Aqua inspected the mess of brass objects around the 10 foot model boat.

  “Fairly good.” Alex looked up, surprised to see that the day was fully in bloom despite the mist that always surrounded the floating isnd. “I got some prototype stuff working. Getting it all to fit is going to be the next big issue.”

  “Can you show me?” Ariel looked excited.

  Alex wound a tiny key that made a ticking noise, then carefully pulled a tiny lever, clicking it down one notch. One of the mainsail sheets lowered a little bit with a different ticking noise of gears.

  “That’s neat!” Ariel praised. “No one has to climb the rigging to get at the lines.”

  “It sorta works.” Alex shrugged. “There are so many lines that are needed for the sails. Also, adding in the balloon makes things really crowded. Getting it to fly is not going to be easy. Switching transportation modes is going to require having all the sails secure, then these panels opening. Then the balloons will need to be filled with air from the magical candles we made with the candle makers back in town. That takes a long time.”

  The bck-haired girl pointed to the cloth balloon that had a string coming out of the bottom. “Then the line that can open the top to descend, that is tricky. It has to be loose to not have the balloon deploy wrong, but because it is loose it can get tangled and cause the balloon to deploy wrong.”

  “That ship is fascinating.” Ariel sounded a bit more sober. “But I don’t think it is a good fit for human shipbuilders. Everyone knows that gnomes are the best at building airships.”

  “It would be nice to make a full sized one.” Alex imagined a ship over a hundred feet long taking off from the water. “Do you know any gnomes that would help?”

  “There is one grumpy old gnome.” Aqua gestured with her chin in the direction of Professor Copperpots shipping container camp. “But he’s not much of a tinkerer. Also, the st time I asked him about his kin he said that they put a geas on him to forget how to get back there as part of his banishment. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't help.”

  “That is not to say that it is impossible to contact them.” Ariel added. “I’ve seen their airships flying over the ocean before. They would trade even with humans but not in person.”

  “Mostly they would trade for food.” Aqua apparently has been a little better informed. “But the Jass kingdom is in a famine. So it doesn’t make sense for them to come here anymore.”

  “How are they feeding their popution if they can’t trade for food?” Alex asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Aqua shrugged. “I haven’t actually seen a gnome in the flesh besides the professor in years.”

  Ariel nodded her head in agreement. “They are probably being like the dwarves and sealing themselves up in a mountain somewhere. Or they could be doing like what we are doing and floating along in the clouds.”

  “In the clouds?” Alex boggled.

  “Remember,” Ariel expined. “That this isnd is incredibly valuable. The best airships are byproducts of floatstone. Floatstone is understood to be a byproduct of a certain magical girl’s magic when her team were fighting astral invaders centuries ago.”

  “Cosmos.” Alex figured out why the resource was so rare. “With the accords, no one else can make the material.”

  Ariel grinned widely. “Got it in one. With the restrictions on magical girl cosmos the only supply of floatstones on Terre are the existing ones.”

  Alex sighed. “Cannibalizing the isnd would be the easiest way to make an airship.” She shook her head. “But I really don’t want to. This is the biggest reminder of my old world and I’d like to protect it instead of exploit it.”

  “We understand.” Aqua looked at the sea elf who nodded in agreement.

  “But still,” Alex faltered. “We have to come up with some pn to force the demons back. And no matter how I look at it we just don’t have the resources to fight the endless numbers of demons that they can bring to bear.”

  At that moment Fufi flew in. “Ladies, I have some bad news. I was flying around and looking at the area around the isnd and it looks like it is slowly sinking.”

  “Sinking?” Alex puzzled, thinking that wasn’t possible. “Why?”

  Fufi looked at the tons and tons of rocks piled up outside the shop building.

  Alex’s shoulders slumped. “Oh come on.” She ran a hand through her hair in frustration. “Someone put even more weight with all the concrete and steel beams on this pce and now adding a pile of ore messes things up?”

  “To be fair,” Fufi unhelpfully became pedantic. “Magical girl Cosmos was the one that was setting this pce up when that happened.”

  Alex grumbled. “Well, I suppose this is a good lesson in running airships if nothing else. You really have to be careful about how much weight is loaded on one.”