Chapter 61

"Hey Cecilia, do you know anything about the process of buying land in Dorn?" I asked.

"A little," Cecilia said, looking up from her book. "Why?"

"I have a new obsession to pursue, but I'm gonna need a ton of open space far away from buildings and people, and I don't wanna use the ocean because it'd be pretty inconvenient," I said.

"Tell me more?" Cecilia prompted, closing her book. As she set it aside, I couldn't help but notice the swell in her belly, which... honestly, had me worried. Pregnancy wasn't risk-free, even for people in their 20s. For someone in her fifties? It was incredibly rare to begin with, but it was also incredibly risky.

Of course, that was back home, where no human was capable of punching a mountain in half, whereas here, I could probably shoot Cecilia with a copper-lead bullet and she'd react to it like a nerf dart. Between the, frankly, excessive amounts of magic we had, and how supernaturally tough everyone involved is, I suppose I was just freaking out over nothing.

"See, when Akane took Mystic Artificer at Level 3, she made a mechanical crow pseudofamiliar," I said. "I'd thought, at the time, that it was pretty cool how y'all had figured out how to successfully replicate the flight of a bird."

"Then you learned the wings are for show and we just enchant them to levitate, and that in fact we haven't figured out how to replicate the flight of a bird?"

"Exactly, and that is why I want to buy an empty stretch of nowhere that's far away from everything, because I was not an aerospace engineer in my past life and like fuck am I gonna build a working airplane without a few accidents and crashes in the meantime."

"Uh huh... and... explain to me what an airplane is?"

"It uses fixed wings that don't flap, and propels itself through either a spinning set of wings called a propeller, or a gushing volcano of superheated air called a jet engine. I... don't feel like engineering a jet from first principles, so I'm starting with a propeller."

"...Y'know what, you can explain the whole thing in more detail later. First, let's get to the land grant office and see about getting you a patch of desert to use."

My plot of land was nearer to the western edge of Dorn, and in sight of a mountain range usually called The Spine, which made the west coast of Dorn fairly humid and cast a long rain shadow over everything to the east of it, which was, for historical reasons, where everyone actually lived.

It was about six hundred miles from Dornhelm, and as such, absolutely nobody wanted it, because at a comfortable walking pace of ten miles a day- stopping frequently to rest and drink, what with the arid climate- it would take two months just to get there, and another two months to get back. Horses could speed that up, but even a horse nomad had a top speed of sixty miles a day, and I had zero interest in a ten day camping trip before I could get to the place where I'd be on a camping trip while I figured out airplanes from scratch.

Luckily for me, I was a Wizard who knew what an automobile was, and I got to build my fucking tank at last. Was that wholly unnecessary? Maybe. Dorn's uninhabited hinterlands may have been completely devoid of roads, and tracked vehicles were better at handling rough terrain than wheeled vehicles, but I'm pretty sure I could've just built a van with an enchanted suspension that would've worked just fine.

Still. Tank. Not really a tank, though. Unarmored personnel carrier. An oversized van with tracks instead of wheels.

At any rate, because I had all sorts of magic bullshit that let me ignore silly little problems that real engineers had to deal with, I was able to turbocharge the fuck out of this thing to a top cruising speed of a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Suspension was still necessary to keep it from breaking Usagi's neck every time we went over a rock, but I managed it.

"All that work, for this," Haruna observed.

"Nothing beside remains," I quoted. "Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away."

There was a moment where nobody said anything.

"Anyway, this place isn't very windy, so that's nice," I continued. "We've got plenty of daylight left, but all the same, no sense wasting it. Let's get the prefabs set up, yeah?"

We unpacked the tank (I know it isn't but let me have this) and set up the buildings we'd be living and working in during our time out here, the first of which was something that could generously be described as a house. It was a long, narrow building, in the shape of a cylinder that'd been cut in half and laid on its new flat side. The frame and sheathing both were corrugated steel, fabricated on the Purpleheart Collective's factory floor, and the only windows were in the front and back caps, which constituted half of the wood in this thing. The other half of the wood was a layer of plywood flooring, which would probably get covered by rugs as people got sick of the plywood and started making rugs.

Once we'd gotten the "house" set up, we could start working on the bigger, but far less vital, hangar. It was also a single arch made of metal that was stretched out to be very long, but rather than a simple semicircle, it had walls that went straight up for twenty feet before curving in to a semi-peaked arch. The frame was just angle iron that'd already been bent, measured, drilled, and cut into the right shape, and in the interest of not wasting time or being overly precious, we used pop rivets instead of nuts and bolts to tie the structural members together, and then even more pop rivets to tie the corrugated steel sheathing panels to the frame.

And while myself, Nicky, Anzerath, Cecilia, and Elendar put the hangar together, everyone else was inside the house, unpacking some flat-pack furniture and putting up divider walls so that we could have "actual living spaces" or some nonsense like that. Ffft.

"Well," Cecilia said, admiring our handiwork as she stepped back. "It sure is big. Any... particular reason for that, or...?"

"A one-person airplane may be small, but they can get a lot bigger," I said. "This hangar is... honestly, a bit of a compromise. But, well, it'll be plenty big for the one-person test craft we'll be building, so..."

"I'm still unclear on what exactly we're doing out here," Elendar said. "Aside from... constructing a deeply un-luxurious winter home."

"We are going to be reinventing aerospace engineering, one heavier-than-air flier at a time," I said. "I mean, there probably wouldn't be much harm in a lighter-than-air flier just for fun, but I really do not give a fuck about hot air balloons. Anyway, the reason we're out here is simple: none of us actually know what the fuck we're doing, not even me, and I don't wanna crash an experimental flying vehicle into someone's house."

"Ah," Elendar said.

"Do you at least... know any theory as to how flying vehicles work?" Anzerath asked.

"I know about the Bernoulli Principle and Newton's Third Law, plus some other trivia, but, uh... well, I'm gonna need my Level 13 Intelligence if I'm gonna turn] that into any halfway functional aircraft. And, in the spirit of doing one thing at a time... I think we're gonna start by building a quadcopter."

"Roxy, none of us have any idea what you're talking about," Nicky said patiently.

"So, a helicopter is an aircraft that flies by using a giant propeller to pull itself up through the air," I explained. "However, that one giant propeller isn't enough to make it controllable, so there's a smaller tail propeller as well as a complex linkage to change the angle of the main propeller's blades mid-flight, and it's just- eugh. Horrendously complicated. A quadcopter exchanges all that mechanical complexity for something that's more complex to control, but which I can trivialize with properly-programmed enchantments: by using four propellers in a square, moving it and turning it every which way is simply a matter of strategically speeding up and slowing down each propeller. And this is what I want to start with because I only have a vague idea of what a propeller should be shaped like, and we really need to figure that out before we start introducing other shit."

"Let's go inside and eat dinner first, then you can cover a whiteboard in diagrams and equations."

The sun had set, and we were beginning to settle down for the night.

"There's a strange kind of beauty in the desert, isn't there?" Akane asked, sitting down next to me in her own folding chair.

I looked out over the vast, arid expanses. The flat nothingness, whose only detail was a dotting of short scrub scattered across the planes, that slowly gave way to foothills as you turned your gaze west, and then, behind us, the grand, craggy, imposing presence of The Spine.

"A bit, yeah," I admitted. "I grew up someplace hot, where it didn't rain that much, but... honestly, this is still pretty extreme for me. Grass was everywhere there wasn't pavement, and from the top of the hill I lived on, I could see trees for miles and miles. This... This is a bit new, for me."

I hummed quietly as I leaned back in my chair. At some point, I'd wanna do some mudbrick or concrete over the top of the house, then bury it for thermal mass. Also, to make it safer to have next to an experimental aircraft proving ground. Hrm. Maybe that should be tomorrow. It'd be a delay, but...

I sighed.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Akane asked.

"Thinking about how I'm out here in the middle of the desert trying to do something objectively stupid, and how it's not just my time it's wasting," I said. "I mean, how many of us actually want to be out here in this goddamn desert with nothing to do but dick around on your phone or help reinvent airplanes?"

"I mean, phones are pretty good at keeping us entertained," Akane pointed out. "Also, we might be just a bit more boredom-tolerant than you are."

"Still..."

"Also," Akane said, "you didn't make any of us come with you. You said you were going into the desert to build airplanes for a month or two, and we all decided to come with you."

I sighed.

"We're out here in this desert because you're here, Roxy," Akane said. "I can't speak for the others, but... for me? That alone is enough."

I looked up at the night sky, studded with stars.

"...Well," I said, turning to look at my girlfriend. "I suppose now I've gotta make it worth your while, huh?"