User:JohnB/Fanfiction/The Lost Airship

By JohnB

Soon after this story was written, I incorporated it into “Scotti’s Revenge” to establish Yumiya’s bona-fides as candidate for Nerevarene. When I originally described her as petite, I did not have in mind my former student, an adult who could sit in a standard-size chair and swing her legs. So in my most recent story, “The Time Traveller”, I definitively set Yumiya’s height at about the same as for a male Bosmer (if a male Bosmer can beat Dagoth Ur, then so can a female Nakan) and thus remove this distraction from “Scotti’s Revenge”.

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet done the Patchwork Airship quest, stop reading here!

If you’re curious anyway, this is the above quest put into story form but with critical details left out so as not to give too much away. If you’ve never heard of the quest, it’s because you never spoke to the wussy-looking fellow outside the Guild of Mages in Ald’ruhn. The quest is rather small and seems more trouble than it’s worth. Consider: in-game, Louis Beauchamp becomes a successful ladies' man after having sent a number of adventurers to crash-land and freeze to death in Solsteim--in this story, Yumiya is certainly not going to let him off so easily! The quest brings a generous monetary reward, but if done incorrectly, it can seriously impact the quest to become the Chieftain of Thirsk. Comparatively speaking, the Chieftain of Thirsk quest gives a far greater advantage, so flip this Louis Beauchamp a cyber-bird and continue with what you're doing.)

In Ald'ruhn:

Not long after Yumiya de Akavir was commissioned by Caius Cosades to launch the quest against Dagoth Ur, she scouted out areas around the Red Mountain to become better acquainted with the lay of the land. One thing she discovered, and this was very useful to know, was that if you stand on the silt strider platform in Ald’ruhn, equip a constant-effect levitation amulet (cf. Laurana's Amulet of Levitation), and aim right above the Ald’ruhn temple, your flight course makes a bee-line up the foyada to the Ghostfence.

Then having overflown the fence and keeping a level course around the mountain, you come right to the Odrosal doorstep, where Dagoth Odros keeps the Keening shortsword. It was too soon for Yumiya to act on this, but it was useful to know because, if you come through the Ghostgate, as I’m sure many people do, finding the various Dwemer ruins on the Red Mountain can be quite a challenge.

However, this story is not about the main quest. It is actually about a very insignificant quest that takes us all the way to Solsteim, a place where nobody goes unless they really have to.

Yumiya was also doing step-’n-fetchit jobs for the Guild of Mages in Ald’ruhn. This was a turgid “To Do” list that Yumiya would have otherwise shunned but for the Daedric dagger, called Souldrinker, that comes as a reward for one of the quests. On a number of occasions, she had tried casting the Soultrap spell and then striking with her weapon only to have the beast die after the spell had already worn off. This was rather annoying, given that a lot of her income came from the filled soul gems she sold to Creeper.

For the most part, she used the Guild teleportation to get around, but one day she didn't have far to go so we walked instead. She was approaching the Guild on foot when she noticed an elegantly-dressed gentleman standing off to the side. He was watching her as she approached, and she gauged the look that he was giving her. The look a man gives a woman can be measured on a sliding scale ranging from Bookworm to Neanderthal. This gentleman, if he can indeed be called one, was more of the Neanderthal sort, so she looked away pretending to be unaware of his presence as she approached the guild.

“Uh, excuse me,” Louis Beauchamp finally said to her, “are you by any chance a courier with news about an...an airship?”

This suddenly broke her resolve to ignore him.

“A what?!” she asked turning to him.

“I take it, then, that you aren’t the courier,” he responded downcast. But she could tell he was still side-glancing at the shape of her body all the way down to her feet.

“Hello! I’m up here!” she answered pointing to her eyes.

“Oh, excuse me!” he chuckled reddening.

Getting Roped In:

“What the hell were you talking about just now?”

Satisfied that he’d piqued her interest, he went on to explain.

“I put together a ship from various Dwemer machinery parts, and using powerful levitation spells got it to fly. I then hired a crew of adventurers and paid them well to fly to Hrothmund’s Barrow in Solsteim. The rocks are shaped like the wolf that killed Hrothmund, and the Barrow is the Eye of the Wolf. This can only be recognized from the air because on the ground it looks like just a bunch of rocks.”

Yumiya laughed out loud.

“You know, you should find a healer; you sound quite feverish.”

“I...I know this sounds crazy,” he continued timidly, “but you see, this Hrothmund was particularly ugly—I mean troll-ugly—but he was famous as a ladies’ man because he owned the ‘Amulet of Infectious Charm’. My crew flew off in the airship to fetch it for me, but there’s been no word from them. They’ve failed me, but I really must have that amulet!”

“Why? You don’t look like a troll to me.”

This was the first time a woman ever said anything even half-way decent to him, and he looked mystified.

“But take a woman’s advice,” she added so as not to sound too encouraging. “Shave the mustache and lower lip whiskers. Maybe then you’ll have better luck with the ladies.”

She opened the door to enter the guild.

“Wait! How does $ptm 2,000 sound to you?”

Yumiya shut the guild door again. That’s a lot of money. How many soul gems has she got to fill to make that much?

“Are you making me an offer?” she asked narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

“I certainly am.”

“To do what?”

“To go to Solsteim, bring back tidings of what happened to my ship, and above all bring me the Amulet of Infectious Charm. What do you say?”

“Hey, I’m all yours!”

“Great!” he said opening his arms to embrace her. She shoved him away.

“Figuratively speaking, Buster!”

The Quest:

After some preparation, she boarded the silt strider to Khuul and transferred to the longboat to Frostmoth. She had to endure several days of living off the land and fending off the all the beasts that were so alien to her. The most annoying were the Rieklings (especially the mounted ones), the Spriggans, and the Tusked Bristlebacks, in that order, but she soon realized it was better to save her energy and make wide detours around them whenever she could. The Berzerkers, witches, and reavers were fewer and farther between, so they were easier to avoid. But on the whole, what with the blizzards that blew all too often, this world was totally new to Yumiya, and the shock of it all was more than she could bear. She often ducked into a cave to get some respite from the blowing snow and enemy attacks, but rather than bemoan her lot for having taken this job—$ptm 2000 was definitely not enough—she saw it instead as the school of hard knocks that was preparing her to face Dagoth Ur.

There was a blizzard going at full blast when she finally arrived at Hrothmund’s Bane, the stones arranged to make a picture of a wolf’s head. She used her levitation amulet to confirm it, and she was surprised how closely it resembled what Beauchamp had described. She said the password to enter the barrow, and fought the draugrs and skeletons to get to the stone pedestal where the amulet was placed almost as an afterthought because something else much more important was there, but not accessible at the moment.

The airship had to be nearby if it had made it this far, but the blowing snow was blinding. Not wishing to prolong this any further, she decided not to wait for a change in weather but set out toward the south, the direction in which the ship should have come. It was fruitless wandering, more to avoid the Rieklings than to find the ship. The sun was not far from the horizon. Out here in the wilderness was a very bad place to be at this time of day, so she decided to start building an igloo of packed snow and gathered pine branches to carpet the floor. (Note: There is a great scene in the Akira Kurosawa movie Dersu Uzala [1975] in which Dersu, sensing a blizzard about to blow on the tundra at sundown, urges the Russian engineer to help gather enough rushes to make a crude hut so as not to freeze to death.) As the sun dipped below the horizon, she crawled inside and stopped up the entrance with snow. In the dark, she pulled out a hunk of cheese and some bread and took a few bites out of each to still her hunger.

“Tomorrow when it’s not blowing,” she said to herself, “I’ll shoot me a Bristleback!”

The interior of the igloo was surprisingly warm, if a mite wet, so she slept like death warmed over. In the morning, she had to fight her way out of the snow that had buried her igloo. She had stuck a tall reed through the roof to avoid suffocation during the night. When she came out, the forest was sparkling in the sunshine, and the sky was a beautiful sapphire-blue.

She stood up and stretched out of the fetal position she’d been sleeping in. And what was that over there? A bit further to the south there was a repetitive movement in the distance. What could that possibly be? She gathered up her belongings and set out again.

The closer she got, the more she recognized the outline of a ship partially buried in snow. The movement was a fly-wheel of a Dwemer engine that was still going chukka-chukka-chukka as if unaware that it was going nowhere. Passing a large boulder, she came upon the frozen body of Captain Roberto Jodoin lying on a mattress with his head near the dying embers of a fire and a still-burning torch stuck in the snow near his feet. There was a jug of Mazte and a book lying near him. She picked up the book and furtively began paging through it as if he could wake at any moment.

It was the captain’s log. It was full of excerpts testifying to the deteriorating condition of the airship:

Excerpt 1: The “airship seems sturdy enough...”

Excerpt 4: “This monster is barely holding together.”

Excerpt 9: “I must also note that the going is slower than I'd like.”

Excerpt 11: “Beauchamp's contraption is coming apart at the seams...”

Last excerpt: “Most of the crew were killed instantly when the airship went down.”

Yumiya couldn’t stop her eyes from welling up with tears at the thought of the futility of what they were doing—and to what purpose? She put the book in her tote bag to take back with her.

She surveyed the rest of the crash site. Manolos Virith lay on the ground between the captain and the ship. Francois Marquardt lay on deck. Yumiya contemplated whether to bury the dead, but there were three bodies and only so much daylight. Piling stones was way beyond her strength at the moment. She decided it better to leave them and return to civilization as soon as possible.

Back to Beauchamp:

Louis Beauchamp was still waiting outside the Guild of Mages in Ald’ruhn as Yumiya approached.

“That was quick. I hope you didn’t give up too soon,” he told her, much to her chagrin.

“No, I brought what you asked for.”

“Really?! Splendid! So let’s have them.”

She pulled the book and the amulet out of her tote bag and handed them over, upon which she received a sack of $ptm 2,000 from him.

“Well, now let’s see how this amulet works.”

He activated the amulet and threw his arms around her. She kneed him in the groin so forcefully that he fell doubled over onto the ground going, "K-k-k-k-k-k-k!"

“That was for Captain Roberto Jodoin, Manolos Virith, and Francois Marquardt!” she snarled at him.

A Redoran guard ran up to her demanding 40 drakes or go to jail. She counted out the coins from the sack, tossed them on the ground, and entered the Guild of Mages.