Chapter 63

"Alright, short hops were a success," I said. "I think we've gotten the center of gravity right, and with some real good tolerances- I can lean any which way in my seat without throwing things too badly."

"You feeling good for a proper test flight, now?" Cecilia asked, as she scribbled down notes on her clipboard.

"I am, yeah," I said, nodding. "Alright, step back, I'm gonna turn this bird around and try to take off."

Our first airplane was what the authorities of my home would consider an "ultralight": it weighed about as much as the person piloting it, and had only a single seat. There were probably more stipulations to that rule, but I didn't know them, and wasn't really in a position to check. Point was, we'd started small, and...

...Well, despite my best efforts to do something quick and dirty that barely worked and simply proved that the concept was viable, I was working with a team that had stratospherically high Mind Stats, and those did help when doing engineering work. As such, despite this dinky little toy plane having been designed in two days and fabricated in one, by a group of people who'd known nothing about aviation two weeks ago, it actually handled really, really well. It was dead easy to fly, it held its course admirably, and the worst thing I could say about it was that its stability meant it would probably never be a hyper-nimble aerobatic show-plane. But, well. That was fine with me; I didn't need it to be that. All I needed was an airplane that'd teach us how to fly.

And by god, did I get it.

I'd played a few flight sims, in my time. Not that many, honestly, and I'd never been particularly good at them. But... It hit a lot different to actually be in a low-flying ultralight, to see the ground passing by beneath you, to feel the gentle push of acceleration as you banked into a turn.

I understood, now, why hobby aviation existed. Why so many people would pay so much, for fuel and equipment and training, just to be able to experience this.

It was a magical experience, and I couldn't wait to share it with the others.

Over the next week or so, we did a lot more "test flights" in our first airplane, which had been christened The Updrake, after myself and also dragons; for some reason, Cecilia and Anzerath were stuck on the phrase "steel dragon" as a name for airplanes. Most of the test flights, to be perfectly honest, were not 'testing' anything; I'd simply made a very fun toy, and everyone wanted a turn with it.

So, I let them. All of them. I'd been skittish about letting a pregnant woman fly an experimental airplane unassisted, but the fact of the matter was, even at Level 5 in a non-delver class, Usagi and Haruna were amazingly durable for a human, and they were also equipped with heavily-enchanted safety gear that would make it nearly impossible to be injured at all.

Also, I'd built a simulator before the actual thing, and made everyone learn the controls through that before being allowed to fly the real thing.

And while everyone was taking turns on the Updrake Mark 1... I was working on the Mark 2.

I tried to restrain myself, a little. Getting greedy and trying to build the biggest, baddest, and/or coolest plane in the world on my second outing would've been a bad idea. Still, I didn't want to build another ultralight, either; I already had one, and as cool as it was, it was mostly just a toy, and I wanted something that could feasibly be put to practical use.

"Gentlemen... behold!"

"It's bigger," Lisa noted, appraising the Updrake Mark 2.

And indeed, it was noticeably bigger. Not by a huge amount, I hadn't built a full-scale passenger jet, but still. The Mark 1's fuselage was pretty thin; the seat was more like a saddle, and the rudder pedals were on the outside of the aircraft, meaning you didn't sit in the cockpit, but rather straddled it, like a horse or a motorcycle. The Mark 2's fuselage, meanwhile, was big enough around that the fully-enclosed cockpit could fit a pilot and copilot, and behind it was a space where passengers, cargo, or both could be stowed. Not a huge amount of either, to be clear- this was not a passenger jet, capable of carrying hundreds of passengers. This was a small airplane that only looked big next to an ultralight.

"This right here is a real airplane," I said. "Back home, an airplane like this would require a license to fly, and would involve a lot of paperwork and flight plans. We... do not have any of those regulatory bodies, here, and to be honest, I kinda wish we did."

"What? Why?" Anzerath asked, frowning.

"Because I'd like it if there was an experienced, long-standing institution with a lot of guidelines for shit that wouldn't occur to anyone without a lot of their own experience who could give me a comprehensive checklist of what I needed to do and account for before I could start flying with confidence and safety," I said. "Instead, we get to figure all that shit out ourselves, which is going to be... really fucking scary. Also tedious. Preferably tedious. I'd rather we make our own safety regulations out of an abundance of caution rather than writing them in blood because a stupid mistake got someone killed."

"Fair enough," Cecilia said. "That's half the reason the Guild exists, after all."

"So, what are we going to do as far as testing goes?" Nicky asked. "I have a feeling that you won't be content with simply flying in a circle around the compound."

"That is precisely correct, although we are still going to do at least a bit of that. No, the real final test has required me to buy another patch of land, which some of us are going to have to drive out ahead to and prepare a second airfield, and then staff said airfield," I said. "This second piece of land is about two hundred miles north of here, so... it'll be a good two hours drive in the tank."

"Teleportation might be an option as well," Anzerath suggested.

"Teleportation?" I asked. "That's an option?"

"It's part of the advanced magical theory you never learned," Akane said. "We never went over it together because pretty much the earliest point where a Wizard can teleport a coin across a table is Level 5, and teleporting people across hundreds of miles is... uh... well, pretty much only Level 13 and up Wizards can accomplish that under the best of conditions. Most cities have wards against teleportation, which are a lot easier to do, and so teleporting into someplace that doesn't want you doing that is just flatly impossible."

"Ah," I said, nodding. "So, back when I was a dockworker, that Level 14 Wizard teleporting the contents of their cargo hold into a warehouse was..."

"Very difficult, very magic-intensive, and something that required a lot of paperwork with Dornhelm's Bureau of Magical Security," Cecilia said.

"I see, I see..." I said, nodding slowly. "So, by and large, it isn't an option, but in situations where we want to move from one end of nowhere to the other, then it is an actual option?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Anzerath said. "It... does get harder with bulky stuff we're trying to move, though, so... if we need to set up another hangar at the other airfield, then yeah, the tank will be better. Still..."

"Still?"

"There's something I've done on a much, much smaller scale, but which should still work on this scale..."

Anzerath had constructed a pair of portals, one at the main airfield, and one out at Airfield B, where she currently was sitting in the control tower, probably reading a book. With her was Elendar, also probably reading a book. On this end, our two person air traffic control tower crew consisted of Cecilia and Akane. In the plane itself, we had only a pilot and a copilot, consisting of myself and Neloteth- she was, funnily enough, the best aviator of all of us, which she attributed to having a lot of practice with turning into an albatross and going on hours-long flights where she only flapped her wings to take off, and otherwise relied on wind and rising hot air to keep herself aloft. Really, I was her copilot.

"Alright, all checks are clear," I said, ticking off the last box on the checklist. "Control, we are ready to go when you are."

"Affirmative, Updrake," Akane said through the magitech phone in the cockpit- no point in reinventing radio, they already had perfectly good magic for that. "You are clear for takeoff."

"Engaging throttle in three, two, one..." Nel said, before pushing the paired throttle levers forward, starting up the propellers.

Takeoff was smoother than silk, in her hands, and the ensuing flight, at three hundred miles an hour, saw us reach the other airport in barely more than half an hour, where we landed without a hitch.

"So," Nel said, winding down the engines, and turning to address me. She was, funnily enough, still wearing her usual outfit of skintight leather pants and a tube top, supplemented only by an aviator's leather jacket that was completely pointless in an enclosed aircraft with climate control, and which was also unfastened, because she was proud of those tits and wanted me to see them. "What next?"

"Not sure, to be honest," I said. "Probably get out, stretch our legs, do some maintenance and safety checks, and then fly back, but..." I shrugged. "I mean, after the second test flight? Dunno. I kinda feel like I've already solved aviation, and I don't really care to keep working on it. There's nothing left here that grabs my interest... aside from, maybe, helicopters, but we don't have to use real engines, so really there's no reason to not just use counter-rotating propeller pairs."

"Fair enough," Nel said, shrugging. "You made planes because you wanted them to exist and because you could, not because you wanted to work on planes?"

"Pretty much, yeah," I said, nodding. "After this... Iunno, maybe I'll start learning a language while everyone who wants to keeps playing with planes. Or maybe I'll get a head start on learning how to cope with boredom."

"I'd be happy to teach you," Nel said primly. "The secret is a lot of sex."

"Yeah, I figured."