"Scandalous!"

"Juicy!"

"Is anyone recording this? This is a delicious scoop for the guild newsletter!"

"Oh shut up everyone! Please! Our airship is floating away... At this rate, we'll be marooned out here on the Slime Rocks. Who knows when the next airship might fly by this hazardous debris field, and I don't want to starve to death..."

"Well, at least Sir Gawrgaru is on board the ship."

"...You think he'll be okay? It sounded like he stubbed his toe pretty bad."

"Eh. Might be broken. Must have been a rough landing."

"It'd be incredibly stupid if our leader died from a stubbed toe."

"If he dies, let's pretend we never knew him."

"......"

"It's not too late to catapult Lady Luna over to the airship—"

"...Please don't."

+ + +

Ume had a blank expression on her face. The untethered airship rapidly drifted away from the miniature island, and soon the bickering voices of the stranded humans were too faint to hear clearly. Even so, by this point she had already overheard more than enough. The humans were speaking in the Common Tongue, which was one of the twenty languages that Ume had studied extensively while growing up inside of her cave.

She... really... hadn't expected humans to be such a chaotic species.

The knights and heroes inside of the fairy tales that she read were way cooler and far more epic...

To be fair, Ume had been excited when their muscular leader jumped off the cliff. It was like watching the action sequence out of a Hollywood movie, and for a second Ume forgot that she was actually present at the scene. The armored adventurer crashed into the airship like a cannon ball, and Ume was pretty sure that the armored man fell through the floor and broke several wooden beams.

The airship must have been pretty flimsy and cheaply made.

Either that, or the adventurer was heavier than a wrecking ball made out of solid lead.

Regardless, Ume wasn't hearing any noises from inside the airship, so perhaps that man really was unconscious. It was a very dramatic way to stub one's toe, and the young dragon felt very conflicted about this entire sequence of events. Her very first boss fight ended up with her opponent knocking himself out, except Ume never intended to initiate a fight to begin with.

Setting humans on fire seemed like something only "bad" dragons did, so Ume had intentionally avoided doing anything that would hurt the human adventurers.

That said, that man ended up injuring himself anyway...

She never imagined that something as trivial as cutting an airship's anchor would lead to such dramatic consequences. Was this the infamous 'Butterfly Effect'? The flapping of an insect's wings on one side of the planet might eventually lead to a terrifying hurricane elsewhere? If so, the universe was awfully scary. 

Maybe being a shut-in within a cave was better...

...

.....

........It was too early to give up! >.<

Ume was on an adventure to escape from her fiancé, she couldn't be discouraged by such a slight mishap.

Her only option was to press onwards. Ume did not wish to lay eggs for that horribly evil dragon ten times her age, so this journey was one that would decide her future! Failure was absolutely not an option, and Ume needed to do everything in her power to flee as far away as possible. So far, she had stolen borrowed an airship and captured rescued an unconscious adventurer named Sir Gawrgaru who stubbed his toe, but Ume was sure that she'd encounter even more assets that would prove useful in the future.

+ + +

Oh. Incidentally.

Ume had no idea where she was going.

The airship was just drifting in the air, and the 53-year-old dragon had no idea how to drive it.

She realized fairly quickly that the vessel would collide with large floating boulders and smash to smithereens if she did nothing, so Ume floated behind the rear of airship and occasionally pushed it around various obstacles that appeared in the sky. She was pretty strong, so it was fairly effortless, kind of like a child pushing a rubber ducky around in the bathtub.

...It was actually kind of a fun.

Ahem.

Ume got carried away and pushed too hard one time, so the airship's rudder snapped like a twig.

...it wasn't an important part of the airship anyways. >_>

Like many dragons, Ume got too self-absorbed with her activity and eventually lost track of time. After an indeterminate period of random play, a large floating island appeared directly in front of her, and Ume thought that would make a great destination. She aimed her battered airship at the island and propelled it straight like a flying torpedo.

Unfortunately, she wasn't thinking very hard about how she would land the flying vessel.

By the time that sensible thought crossed her mind, it was already far too late.

The airship was on a direct collision course with one of the largest towers in the island's harbor.