
Alex considered the 20 foot long toy boat, sitting on the trailer. “Well, if it won’t fit through the pipe then what can we do?”
“Can you fly it?” Fufi flapped her wings.
“How would we do that?” Alex eyed the flamingo.
“Would balloons work? You could work with that candle maker back in town to make some cute ones. It worked with the airboat.” The pink bird explained.
Alex turned to Ariel. “Can you sail a boat through the air?”
“Could and should are two different things. A wagon can be made to float across a river but that doesn’t make it sea worthy.” The sea elf shook her head. “This is getting into astral sea territory. The mages that specialized in that left this world along with the elves. A wind mage would be able to have limited success. But airships are purpose built for sailing, trying to convert vessels from what they are initially designed to do usually doesn’t end well.”
Alex agreed and looked around at what they had on hand. The carriage was able to hold the small sail boat on top of it. But the toy ship weighed more than the carriage. If they tried to strap it to the top it might crush the wooden vehicle or cause it to fall over from being too top heavy. They could try to use balloons to lower it to the ground, if the winds didn’t blow it away then they’d have a ship sitting on the side of a frozen mountain. It wasn’t like they could get a team of harpies to pull it back to town.
Alex walked into the workshop and looked around. A spare trailer hitch on one of the wire selves caught her eye. “I wonder if we could cheese it.” The magical girl picked up the metal rod with a ball on the end.
Cid followed Alex into the shop. “Cheese it?”
Alex regarded the carpenter. “When I set the sailboat on top of the carriage and turned it into a card the card had the small boat and the carriage counting as one card.”
“Are you suggesting pulling it like you would with that jeep carriage?” Cid frowned. “That trailer doesn’t have any breaks. I think a wainwright would say that pulling such a heavy load that way could lead to disaster if you ever encountered a hill.”
“It would just have to go to the dock. The road from town is fairly flat. It might be worth trying just to see if a carriage and trailer combination would count as a single card.” Alex pulled out some thick nuts and bolts. “We could bolt it to the frame and latch the two together.”
Cid nodded. “That shouldn’t be too hard with those magic drill tools you have.”
“Electric.” Alex corrected the old carpenter. “It doesn’t use magic to run.”
“It functions really similar to something that takes a lightning gem to run.” Ariel decided to unhelpfully add.
Cid got the privilege of drilling some holes in the carriage frame and bolting the trailer hitch to the back of the trailer. The carriage bottom was too high to sit flush so they had to make a bit of a jig to not have it pull the trailer at an angle. They screwed some L-brackets where appropriate to give it a bit more strength. It looked a little janky though.
“It doesn’t look very cute at all.” Fufi complained.
“This is just to test a proof of concept.” Alex told the flamingo. “We can add some more decorations later. Remember Ki said that winter is coming. I’d like to try to get things going at the shipwrights in the capitol before winter comes in full force.”
Turning the carriage with the trailer and toy ship into card form surprisingly worked. After taking a moment to consider daisy-chaining the semi-truck trailer to the other trailer but deciding that unless they ran across a refinery it wasn’t worth trying the magical girl moved on.
“This has got to be cheating somehow.” Alex waved the card with a clockwork carriage and a modern trailer, with a toy 19th-century-style ship on it. “Nevermind that, who wants to head back to town with me?”
It turned out that everyone wanted to see the launch of the ship.
“You three are prisoners so you’ll have to stay here.” Aqua rebuked the nobles.
The monolithic group of maids started to protest when the nereid gave her declaration but Yvne held up a hand to stop them. Apparently they defaulted back into going along with whatever the mistress wanted.
Some of the people who could work on masonry work and carpentry were asked to stay and continue making the hull for the second ship, build up the castle, and fashion temporary housing for winter.
Most of the people on the sky island finished what they were working on, slipped into their plumber outfits and tried not to get too soaked when getting in the pipe suspended above the water. An aspen tree and an apple tree greeted them. Both trees had lost their leaves. Everyone stopped and spent some time with Bob and Martha, then took the portal pipe back to town.
Like before, everything felt a little different. Ki being asleep now for around a month left a gap. Her being in hibernation left the land in her domain feeling like it was also sleeping. The trees had lost their leaves, the temperature dropped, and less people wandered the town.
Alex approached a pine-needle-haired nymph working the counter of the adventurer’s guild. “Hello.”
“Hello magical girl Alex.” The plant-girl spoke a bit slowly. “Hello magical girl Ariel.”
Alex cut to the chase. “Not sure if you are the right person to ask. But we are trying to get a ship built for Ariel. But there isn’t a good drydock to use. We are too far inland. So we came up with a bit of a plan.”
“Oh?” The nymph tilted her head.
Alex, Fufi, Funi, and Ariel spoke over each other going through the not-very-well-thought-out plan to get a ship built at the Jass capital city and steal it when it went to sea.
Several other evergreen nymphs joined them in the street. After finding a big enough space, the card transformed into a carriage with a trailer that had a boat on it. The nymphs perked up and started inspecting oddly enough the tires and undercarriage of the two wooden objects.
One nymph picked out an acorn lodged in the fender. “Ohhhh.” She showed it off to her cousins.
Rather than being interested in the toy boat. They gushed over seeds and plant debris that had attached itself from the sky island.
“Where did you find all these new seeds?” The receptionist held out a hand with the various things she’d collected.
“They are from my home. They came along for the ride.” Alex sounded a bit confused.
“We’d like to plant them.” She continued in her slow cadence. “Would it be okay if we adopted them?”
Ariel stepped in. “That’d be fine but what can we get in exchange?”
The nymph kept quiet for a minute. “What would you want?”
“Could we get lumber?” Ariel spoke with confidence. “Enough to build a boat 10 times the size of that one?”
The nymphs chatted amongst themselves, considering this. “That is fine, but only ones within a couple miles of town. The older ones need to be protected and don’t cut down any shrub people.”
With the deal struck, Alex lended the chainsaw to one of the most promising members of the two extended families they adopted and got to cutting down trees. They made sure to only cut down ones that would be useful for building a boat, avoiding the smaller ones. With all the super-human strength people it didn’t take long to get a bundle of thousands of tons of lumber lashed together with ropes near the docks.
They slowly backed the carriage part way into the water until the toy ship floated off the trailer. Sadly, the submerged trailer tried to drag the carriage in the water as well. But onlookers intervened and pulled the carriage out right away.
“And that was supposed to be the easy part of the plan.” Alex turned the now-boatless-trailer carriage combo back into a card and pocketed it. “Now we need to head to the capital and try to sell them on the idea of building a large boat but buying the lumber from us. I really wish we would have brought one of the siblings. Other than trying to deal with the demons by proxy with dolls we don’t have much of a plan.”
Merumeru hopped on the boat and lashed lines to the pier. It looked like she’d figured out a couple things about sailboats through this ordeal.
“Meru!” She cheered when the toy boat’s lines secured it to the dock.
“The demons will try something clever.” Ariel didn’t sound phased. “You’ll agree to something, they’ll double cross you, and when that fails then continue on like normal until they try something else.”
“You think they’ll be that blatant?” Alex boggled.
“Yep, first they’ll demand everything you have.” She stated this like talking about the weather. “Then if intimidation and domination doesn’t work they’ll just be more subtle. The goal would be to endure enough to get the shipwrights going. Be patient and pragmatic. If they think they can win by stiffing you at the end then they’ll have fallen for the trap.”
“What should we look out for?” Alex was getting cold feet now that this plan was getting closer to becoming a reality.
“Any tier 3 demons.” Ariel said seriously. “Most tier 2 demons with mind or control powers shouldn’t be able to affect you by proxy. Avoid any succubus or incubus.”
“What do they look like?” Alex gulped.
“When glamored, they look like extremely attractive people.” The sea elf explained. “If not glamored they have horns, wings, and a spade-tipped tail. There is one tier 4 demon but it is cultivating near the castle and hasn’t moved in decades. If it wakes we all need to get as far away as quickly as possible.”
“Okay.” Alex took a deep breath. “No pressure.”
Merumeru threw her mini-sub card into the water. The sub bobbed up and down but there was a chain with a flexible hose attached to it. A larger sphere of metal and glass bobbed in the water behind it.
“Merumeru finished her little project.” Ariel clapped. “She wanted to make a way for us to hide out in the harbor while this went down.”
Funi explained a bit more. “Aqua Merumeru and Ariel were talking and they thought it was very likely that you’d lose at least one doll to some low level demon trying to show off to its peers. If you stayed at the swamp it would take days to get another doll to the capital. Merumeru said she could just make another portal pipe, but with the higher tiered demons living around there they might sense the magic. Also the king or nobles might notice the pipes on their lands. So they decided hiding out underwater would be the best way.”
Alex crossed her arms but couldn’t refute that. “I guess it beats trying to blend in. That didn’t go well last time.”
Alex walked down the dock and checked out the bathysphere Merumeru made. She pointed to a hatch on top. The slime girl must have used up some of the steel to make this. The steel was two inches thick and each cardinal direction had a six inch thick glass dome. The glass, sadly, was not perfectly clear. Alex opened the hatch on top, and hopped inside. There was a pressure gauge inside and another one had a pipe that went outside. They looked familiar. Alex guessed she snagged them from spare parts from the workshop. The bottom also had a hatch that could be opened inward to create a moonpool. Some ballast tanks lined the outside. Some pipes went from them to the inside. It could go up and down by filling or flooding the ballast tanks. The inside was a 10 foot diameter sphere with a triple bunk bed, storage for food, water and day-to-day items.
“This is some really thick steel and glass.” Alex thought she overdid it.
“Meru me ru ru ru.” Merumeru explained, forming her hands into a book.
“It is from one of the books?” Alex wasn’t sure if there was one with pictures of bathyspheres. “I don’t think you’d need to make one so deep to sit at the bottom of the harbor.”
Merumeru smiled. She looked like she might have been ready to go to the deepest part of the ocean if given a chance.
After getting everything set up, Alex settled into the bathysphere, possessed a doll and helped sail the toy boat downstream. They lashed the sub and attached craft to the boat. Merumeru, Ariel and a magical girl possessing a wooden doll in a school-girl sailor outfit fumbled about with the ship, keeping afloat and going downstream.
The sub didn’t weigh much. However the bathysphere weighed a whole lot more than the toy ship. They had to keep the ballast tanks completely full of air and above water as much as possible to not have it become an unintentional anchor.
Luckily they were going down river. And Ariel’s skills made up for a lot of the problems that treating a clipper ship like a tugboat would have brought up. They didn’t make as good of a pace as the air boat.
Some of the people from town got the barge out and used it to pull the floating pile of logs. The plan was to leave it in the swamp, just outside where the kingdom’s borders would have been and when they got the kingdom to buy it to take it the rest of the way. The tricky part was that no humans could be seen by demons. They had to make this seem like another race was trading with the Jass kingdom so the demons wouldn’t be contractually obligated to hunt them down.