[indent][color=gray]"Sweet mother o' Jesus feckin' Christ! This room's going to go up in fecking flames! Oi! How 'bout you fight someone your own size, ya little shite!"[/color][/indent]

Fire crackled and blazed. Gold and red flickers illuminated the smoky stifling room; firelight flashed in reflection on the dented boiler walls and glowed dimly on the oily gears and chains. Heat pushed against Connor's skin and tickled in his throat.

The beast was cold under his hand. The scales scraped his palm as he yanked it away from Risa and plunged his shining blade between its shoulderblades. The bayonet slipped deep into the beast's ribs like a knife through butter.

And then the beast was gone.

In one moment, Connor was a knight slaying the black dragon; in the next, in less than a blink, the room was empty where the lizard had been. As if it had never existed at all. As if the beast itself had only been, simply, a figment of Connor's imagination.

Risa lay bleeding and unconscious in the dent of a boiler, flickers of fire crackling behind her. Vines had reached loosely over her arms and legs. Their white flowers caught the light of the flames.

In another corner, Samira's unmoving leg stuck out from behind another boiler.

Suichiro lay propped against the door, his head bleeding profusely and his eyes staring hollow and vacant.

Only Connor was left standing over them all, relatively unhurt, with a blade that was no longer shining.

Smoke stung his eyes and scraped in his lungs; the flames appeared as a hazy glow in the thick air.

[indent][color=gray]Some voices waited for him as usual as Sidwell unlidded and peered into the closest barrel, inhaling. Wrapping his arms around the barrel, he threw his shoulder into work and tipped it, almost hurled it across the mess deck. It rolled little but spilled its contents far over the wooden floor, soaking and dripping into the cracks to the room below.[/color][/indent]

The pungent sour smell of fermented apples spilled and spread and fizzed among the leaves and bark of the mess deck floor, masking the thick musk of smoke from below. Rotten apples and bits of fleshy core rolled and hid under cannons and tables while watery apple-wine flooded the deck and dripped through the fissures between the barky floor panels.

There were indeed more barrels: one full of what appeared to be petrified apricots, the other half-full of pickles, and a third had a human skeleton stuffed inside it, with a curved knife and a belt buckle and a bracelet made of shells.

Below, in the engine room (which was quickly running out of breathable air) it began to rain sour wine. Droplets hissed into the flames and dripped on Connor's head. A section of fire was completely put out by a particularly thick waterfall from the ceiling above it -- but the danger was still very real, and the addition of the stench of rancid wine didn't quite help Connor's ability to breathe.

[indent][color=gray]“I-I saw them...! Keys! O-on the door of the mapped up room!!! We have to get them... like 10 minutes ago, err'body! Or just--”[/color][/indent]

But Moss wasn't there. Had she been there at all? Tamara's eyes met with a wide vacant room filled with vines and overgrown cannons and boxes and tables, and a thick of saplings growing out of the middle toward the only sunlight in the ceiling. The air was thick with the stench of rancid wine, but there was no longer any smoke rising up out of the floor. For the room below, this was a bad thing.

The fox stared unblinking at Tamara Jane, as if it saw her struggles and only waited for her to realize where the true difficulties lay. Only when Tamara finally looked at the fox again did it spin around once, chasing its fluffy tail before it stared at her again. It was now standing next to a pyramid stack of cannonballs. It licked its jowls, skittered a bit away from a growing puddle of apple wine, glanced at the padlock, and stared again at Tamara.

[indent][color=gray]When he got to the top the thing that immediately caught his eye was an amazingly crafted telescope, it was unlike any he had ever seen before. Christopher had decided to take a look through it since he was already pointing out of the open ceiling in the room. When he looked outside he was floored for the second time since he was in the room, he couldn't believe what was in the sky approaching the ship that they were on.[/color][/indent]

At first, they were only shimmers in the stormy sky. With some adjustments to the telescope, Christopher might make out a few fleeting glimpses of silvery wings sparking against the dark clouds.

Thunder rolled and shook the ship's walls.

A flash of lightning momentarily blinded Christopher. Another look would show him a tiny silver bird -- one of hundreds that ebbed and flowed among the clouds, flowing together in the sky like currents in water. Veins of lightning sparked bright between them. White glimmers of electricity followed their movements and sparked on their flitting wings.

The sky was darker than it had been before.

With each flash of lightning, Christopher would see the silhouette of a huge shadow behind the swirling clouds.

[indent][color=gray]Climbing the ladder Chris found himself in another room. He was hoping to see who had knocked but didn't see anyone ready for that.[/color][/indent]

While Christopher stood atop the pillar above, watching the stormy sky through the lens of the telescope, Chris emerged from the door in the pillar.

The observatory was darkening, and its door was shut; any movement the plantlife therein might have exhibited before had ceased, and an electric sense of waiting filled the air. Wood creaked; the ship rocked.

The orrery on the table began to tick and whirr loudly. The planets moved backwards around the sun, and the Earth glowed bright, a galaxy turning inside its marble surface.

Thunder rumbled again. A flash of lightning coursed through the flock of silver birds outside and sparked bright through the opening in the ceiling.

In the flash of light, Chris would see something standing tall against the wall by the bookcases: it was thin, robed and impossibly high, with a hollow bony face that stared down deep into Chris' soul.

When the lightning was gone, so was the vision. The place where the apparition had stood was empty.