The Remarkable Rift

Venturing Unto Forgotten Lands

A few miles downriver from the great waterfall upon which the Tesleyan sorcerer had died, the crew of the Ithaca discovered a small clearing composed of rocks and dried sediment. They knew not why the trees refused to grow in such a place – whether the soil had been salted at some point, or perhaps the trees burned by a bolt of lightning – but it was clear from the haphazard and asymmetrical shape of the clearing that it had not been hewn by human hands. Their ship shook and rolled, lilting to the side as if it were limping along half-dead. Ella Krispen insisted that the controls were only working some of the time, and a few of the plates which kept the ship aloft had been shifted and, in some places, even fused. This was confirmed by Elric Vastes, who explained that the steam from the Engine Room was no longer able to reach a uniform distribution on the outer hull. Without repairs, their airship would take months to reach their destination, and if they were to suffer another attack, the mission would be inconsequential when weighed against their very lives.

There was a thud and a crack as the ship dropped into the center of the clearing, perched precariously on a log that had fallen across a boulder, and then dropped another few feet as the log crumbled under the ship's mighty weight. Some nearby sticks began to turn black and the leaves even caught fire, but this was immediately extinguished by the cloud of steam released from the ship's exhaust.

Jeremiah Rixon removed his goggles and stepped outside, with Marina Zukunft following close behind. She quickly sidestepped him and ran to the nearest railing, indicating with only her eyes that they needed to disembark and search nearby. The rest of the crew, however, remained rooted to their spots after coming up on the deck, and they stared at their captain with intensely disapproving eyes. "Our handyman is dead, Captain Rixon," came the croaky voice of Joren Jurgen. "Why are we wasting time trying to find him?"

"He's not dead, Mr. Jurgen," Rixon replied to him. "Ms. Zukunft has assured me that he survived being flushed down the river."

"He fell what must have been over five hundred feet, Captain," van Killen interjected. "It doesn't take a doctor to know that no one can survive something like that. Even if his heart was still beating when he reached the bottom, he'd have been crushed to death by the raging of the pool below."

"Perhaps he managed to catch an outcropping of trees along the side of the cliff," Rixon answered. "Or maybe he caught hold of a disengaged Graviron plate and its buoyancy slowed his fall."

"If a Graviron plate was still hot enough to slow his fall, it would have turned his skin black and made his clothes catch fire," Elric Vastes joined the conversation, his low voice seeming to roll in the mist around them. "I've touched enough of them to know you don't hold it for more than a second before your skin starts to blister."

"Then maybe he caught a piece of tarp and used it as a parachute."

"A parachute?!" van Killen returned. "I mean you no offense, Captain Rixon, but I suspect our passenger's pheromones are influencing your decisions!"

"I can't say I disagree," said Vastes. "Why are we following her guidance when we have a perfectly adequate navigator of our own?" He pointed a large, meaty finger at Ella Krispen, who seemed to be trying to hide her hurt at being referred to as "adequate."

Jeremiah huffed in frustration, closed his eyes and placed one hand against his forehead in resignation. "It's because she's a psychic." This proclamation was met with silence from the rest of the crew. "I only recently discovered it when I went through our former captain's personnel files."

"Psychics ain't real," Jurgen said, breaking the silence which had enraptured the rest of the crew. "They're just fairy tales and hokum stories."