Chapter 62

"Fuck," Anzerath said, articulately.

It had, admittedly, been a stupid decision to start with propellers. Sure, I could get a propeller that works well enough just from my intuition, but I wanted to actually understand what I was doing, here, and that meant first understanding airfoils.

So, uh, probably should've started with a glider, not a quadcopter, but, oh well. I haven't built anything yet and also I'm the one in charge here, so I'm allowed to say "I have miscalculated, and we need to change focus if we hope to accomplish anything."

"It sure is a lot of math," I said, nodding.

I'd watched a documentary about the Wright Brothers in the closest thing my middle school had to a woodshop class, and one of the things I remembered was that they had constructed a wind tunnel to experimentally test wing profiles before they went through the trouble of building an entire plane with the wing only to find out it wouldn't work. So, naturally, I'd devised a similar apparatus, along with a few enchanted instruments to gather data and adjust variables.

Unfortunately, variables and data are numbers, and numbers don't make an airplane unless you're willing to do... well, a lot of math.

(I was pleasantly surprised to learn that calculus was already a thing the Dornish had discovered, and that I did not have to re-invent it based solely on my faint recollection of 3blue1brown videos about the basics of calculus. Having a Level 13 Wizard's obscene Mind stats may enable a lot of research and development to be done by a few people in a hangar in a few days that would've normally taken a thousand people a few years, but nonetheless, skull sweat was skull sweat.)

"But," I continued, "we do seem to have some usable data and calculations for a pretty good wing. So... what say we build a prototype propeller and test it out?"

The first quadcopter we built and tested was a dainty little thing, about the size of a bird. It would be flying inside the hangar, because we didn't want to deal with even the mild winds outside, but even though it'd be indoors, I still postponed the test flight until after we concreted the outside of the house, making it far more resilient to airstrike and also to ambient temperature swings.

"Huh," Elendar said, watching me slowly and carefully pilot the quadcopter around in a careful, lazy circuit. "So... how much magic do you need to make this work?"

"Right now, I'm using magic to substitute for complex electronics that took even longer to develop than aviation did," I said. "I don't want to reinvent electric motors, and you can't make me. But... well, if those motors and batteries and radio transceivers did exist, then this could shed all of its enchantment by just using those."

"What about for larger craft?" Cecilia asked.

"Well, for those, it would be possible to take all the magic out," I said. "A gasoline engine is a lot simpler than silicon microprocessors, and also, since the pilot is on the aircraft and able to interact with the controls directly, there's no need for remote controls. I mean, I don't want to use a gasoline engine, they're loud and stinky, but I could use one if I really needed to."

"And do you think we've gotten enough progress to start making something that a person can fly on?" Anzerath asked.

"Probably, yeah, lemme just land this thing and take some notes," I said, bringing the drone down and landing it on a workbench, before pulling out my laptop and starting to type away.

"I've been meaning to ask," Cecilia said, pointing, "but what the fuck is that?"

"It's a keyboard," Nicky said. "Roxy says it's faster and easier than using a pen, and I'm inclined to agree."

"Is it... do you just push the buttons and the letters appear?" Anzerath asked. "Are you really so lazy you'd rather do that then pick up a pen?"

"My handwriting sucks, and again, this is a lot faster," I said. "Partly because I grew up with this, in a culture that understood that writing with a pen was less convenient than using a keyboard. I mean, sure, when I try learning the Sunset language, I'll be forced to write stuff by hand because their main writing system uses something like ten thousand unique characters, but-"

"Wait, really?" Nicky asked. "Akane never mentioned anything like that to me. I thought they used an alphabet?"

"They do and they don't, if memory serves," I said. "...Actually, that memory is of a similar language on another planet, so maybe we should just go ask the Sakurais if we care that much."

"I... don't think I do, to be honest."

"Then that's the end of that."

"I actually don't know," Haruna said. "I never learned how to read or write in my mother tongue."

"Huh," I said.

"That was pretty common in the Sunset Kingdoms," Haruna continued. "I knew a few scribes, and they'd complain about how long they'd have to study to learn the thousands of courtly characters, so... not exactly surprising that nobody but scribes bothered with it."

"I actually am literate in the Sunset Language, but that's because I didn't have to learn it," Usagi said. "It's just kind of a rule of the System that familiars are literate in their master's language. Still, I know how our language is written and read, along with some of the cultural connotations. Our language is written by serious, educated adults with the courtly characters, which directly represent words, and by children or the semi-literate with a much smaller set of characters which represent sounds. Depending on how you count, there's only... what, fifty or so of them? Of course, these sound-characters are still used in more formal writings, just... as a way to modify and conjugate words."

"Interesting," Cecilia said, tapping her chin. "Well... I don't suppose you could teach me the language, could you?"

"It'd take a while," Usagi warned.

"I have time," Cecilia said with a shrug.

"Honestly, I'm better with Dornish than I ever was with my mother language," Haruna said. "Dorn's culture is very big on universal literacy. There's open classes for teaching people to read the Dornish alphabet, all the time, and I probably would've gone to one of them if I hadn't learned how to read on the ship over here, because a few of the Dornish deckhands knew I was planning to live there and insisted on teaching me themselves."

"Of course," Usagi said, grinning a little, "for the first few years you lived here, people kept saying you talked like a character in a book."

"And I choose to believe they found that endearing," Haruna said firmly.

"Anyhow," I said, a little uncomfortable with all this. As a white American with a functioning moral compass, I thought it was a bad thing when the anglophonic "enlightened" culture made immigrants sand off their native culture and wrap themselves in a new one. But... at the same time, I also thought that learning a new language was an unalloyed good... except, that was mostly something I applied to myself, because I was part of the dominant cultural group and felt like my self-conception as someone who tries to side with the little guy would be aided by me actually making an attempt at doing that, even if it was something as simple as learning Spanish so I could provide customer service to Mexicans.

Plus, I did find myself agreeing with the notion that a phonetic alphabet system was easier to learn than a logographic one like what most Chinese languages and Japanese used, and I also knew that this wasn't completely baseless cultural imperialism- the Korean King Sejong of Joseon created Hangul, a phonetic alphabet system of writing, for the express purpose of making it easier for people to learn to read and write, and which was now pretty much the only way Korean was written today.

But, on the other hand, the Chinese and Japanese were not stupid or backwards for sticking with their own traditional writing systems. In the modern day, with public education, they had high-nineties literacy rates just like everyone else, and clearly, it was working out fine for them.

"The first airplane prototype has been built," I said, forcing myself off that train of thought. "We're going to do some tests tomorrow, which might even result in me flying the damn thing in a big circle around the compound, if you wanna watch."

"Sure, why not," Usagi said. "Just be careful you don't crash on any of my crops."

"...Beg pardon?" I asked, blinking.

"Usagi's been keeping busy, too," Haruna said. "All of us have, really- I'm finally getting around to breeding Lactation 3 into my cowgirls, now that they've got Traits that make 'em faster to breed. But... Usagi, if you would?"

"I'm a Farmer, and ever since I read that book about the early days of Dornish settlement, I always wanted to see if I had what it took to turn a patch of barren scrub into something lush and green," Usagi said. "So, I've been reading a lot of theory on ecology, botany, agriculture, and figuring out which plants I should be using for this, and how." She shrugged. "Mostly, it's a lot of ashweed, to break up the rock and start building some actual soil. Ashweed isn't exactly delicate, but still, I'd rather not have any big gouges torn up if we can help it."

"That's..." I frowned, thinking but not saying 'what are the ethics of finding a piece of nature and irrevocably changing it just to satisfy your curiosity?' On the one hand, I very much understood the impulse of 'I wanna see if I can make something wonderful ex nihilo,' but this place wasn't nihil, it was an arid scrubland and doing just fine as that, and it was hardly like we needed to 'develop and improve' the place to make room for more people. But, back on the first hand... Usagi wasn't tapping and draining an aquifer that couldn't refill fast enough to sustain this. There was creation ex nihilo happening here- that's what the Farmer Class' class abilities did.

(There was, also, the fact that I'd also altered this land for my own benefit, but to be entirely honest, I feel like 'building a house' is somewhat less ecologically disruptive than 'introduce new plants for the express purpose of changing the local ecology.')

"...Fair enough," I said. "Have fun, and I'll try not to crash. As confident as I am that a fall from a few hundred feet into a pile of twisted metal would be survivable for a Level 13 Trickster with enchanted safety gear, I still don't think it'd be an enjoyable experience."

"Good luck," Haruna said.

I nodded back, sighing internally.

All I'd wanted to do was fly some airplanes. Why did it have to awaken so many ethical dilemmas?