[center][h3]The Red Cap Junta[/h3][/center]

Director Glough stood firm and proud before the window of his ship’s bridge, his oversized and silvered mustache waxed to perfection and the slight balding atop his head concealed by that signature red hat of his that the entire party had quickly come to imitate. He was not one for flattery, but he [i]did[/i] appreciate uniformity. The Director was a hard man; he was nearing the end of what one could call ‘middle-aged’ and his life’s experiences and a long history of command had left him with little patience for anything short of excellence and disciplined obedience. It was easy to fall in line and not question him, because his voice could (without warning!) go from a gentle and fatherly tone to the booming roar of a drill instructor, and he had an intimidating form to match the sound! He was a towering gnome, just shy of four feet tall.

Even after his fall from grace, a good deal of his party remained loyal and strong. They had failed to petition the king to see reason and deploy the army to displace or exterminate the giant savages that threatened their homeland’s borders, and after that, they had failed to covertly incite war. Now the faction had been proclaimed treasonous, but in the resulting strife and series of high-profile arrests, Glough had managed to escape the king’s clutches relatively unscathed. Blazes, some of the soldiers and police sent to stop him had been party sympathizers that had instead joined his new separatist army. All had expected nothing less than a civil war, but to their surprise, the Director had instead had his private army storm a royal airfield, commandeer the largest airship they could find. The party named it the Red January, after the bloodfilled month in which they’d seized it, and then they proceeded to board Glough and his strongest supporters and venture off into the sunset. Royal loyalists and civilians could only speculate what his motivations were and whether he would ever return from exile.

There was overwhelming blue to be seen all around, like a smothering blanket—the blue of the sky above and around, the blue of the ocean below. They had been flying for a long time, and Glough was growing restless from being stuck on the zeppelin for so long. They all were, but few could hide it as well as him. The Director turned to one of his senior officers. “Delfus, reiterate your proposal statement.”

“...certainly,” one of the gnomes answered. He was confused for a moment, for Glough was not a forgetful gnome and he always paid attention to the details and committed them to memory. But perhaps this was not for the Director’s own benefit; restating the reasons for their departure and the logic behind it would surely raise morale and reassure any wavering officers present.

“Our force projections were clear—we could have inflicted major damage, but ultimately it would have been a losing war to try to face the Royal Army. It will be better by far to establish a stronghold elsewhere, to effectively achieve our goal of self-governance for free whilst allowing us to bide our time, gather our strength, and perhaps later retake the kingdom should such opportunity present itself.”

He paused for breath, then continued, “According to our calculations, the world is a spheroidal object of far larger size than is accounted for in all the maps of the known regions. We are likely to come across entirely new lands as we maintain this latitude, but even if we are met with bad luck or it comes to be that there are no uncharted lands beyond the sea, we should have sufficient supplies to-“

Delfus, easily distracted, turned his gaze toward the distance where a flock of seabirds approached fearlessly. Director Glough clenched his jaw at the nonsensical interruption and almost turned red with rage when all his other staff began to point and clamor about the stupid animals. But then Glough realized the implications, and even his stony face broke and showed the hints of a smile; birds often indicated the presence of a nearby landmass, for they needed to roost and could only range so far—

There was a horrible sound, like the roar of some mythical monster. Metal screamed as it grated and ground upon itself, and then the ship began to [i]lurch[/i]. Something had gone horribly wrong with one of the propellors! Unsecured items and careless personnel on deck began to slide. Glough was immediately shouting commands and ordering damage control; to their horror, they realized that one of the accursed birds had flown into a propellor and somehow jammed it. They were losing control! Attempting a landing would have been suicidal, even if they were able to see more than the faintest hint of a distant beach.

The response was quick, just as it had to be. The Director sent in the best and bravest mechanics. Dangling by ropes and harnesses off the side of the leaning deck, they carefully worked to unjam and restart the propellor. They had the spare parts, but it was hard to get down into the damned thing..! One of them jabbed a wrench into the loosened blades and pulled, pulled, using it as a lever to tear the deformed piece free. But he overdid it, and with a gasp he sent the jagged piece of metal flying upward. They all looked up in horror as it punctured the balloon above and they began losing air. Rapidly they had to attempt to patch it. They did so with impressive speed, having been well drilled, but even so the patch wasn’t quite airtight and they all knew it. Their shio was bleeding its lifeblood, and after losinf as much air as they had, they were already being forced to dump huge quantities of ballast just to maintain their altitude.

Another flock of birds approached, heading directly toward the zeppelin. It was a deliberate attack! Sabotage! The Director knew this, for birds were rather small and therefore logic would dictate that they were cunning creatures. It was well known among gnomish scientists that a species’ size and intelligence tend towards an inversely proportional relationship, as a larger being must devote more of its brainpower to mundane things like muscle movement as compared to high order thought. For examples one needed to look no farther than ants, perhaps the most organized and intelligent of all animals, or the gnomish race itself, which the ‘Red Caps’ held to be clearly superior to the barbaric, primitive, violent giants that were all the other breeds of sapients.

In any case, the birds’ small size and demonstrable intelligence made their betrayal and refusal of his ideals (nay, his party’s very life and presence) all the more insulting. The Director ordered his crew to battle stations, then issued the command, “Vaporize them!”

The ray and lightning cannons made short work of those seagulls. The breeze was just right to carry a brief whiff of roasted poultry. But then, the impossible! One of the accursed birds had slipped past all of the weaponfire, and it managed to fly straight into a different propellor...

Over the next day they’d struggled mightily to keep the Red January airborne, but she had sustained fatally targeted injuries that they lacked the means to repair without further supplies and a dedicated hangar, much less while in flight. It was a wonder they kept her as long as they did, but then again, they’d abandoned any semblance of an attempt at navigation. Plains and forest passed by beneath them completely unseen, for they all spent the entirety of their focus on damage control, but even that was not enough. On the second day they finally abandoned hope for the Red January and began evacuation preparations. They crated what provisions and loose equipment they could, and then issued out parachutes to all the crew, but damned there were too many passengers! There weren’t enough parachutes for everyone as well as all of the supply crates, and Glough had half a mind to deny some of the more useless or traumatized gnomes their parachutes in favor of ensuring the cargo crates’ survival instead. But that would have been bad for morale...

It was near an idyllic river and some mountains that they finally jumped overboard. As they slowly drifted down to safety, they observed the Red January make its final descent. The now crewless zeppelin hit the ground and exploded in a huge fireball, as oversized vehicles were wont to do. Director Glough steeled his face in seething rage, while some of his more sentimental party members openly wept.

Well, at least they’d found some land...but now they were trapped, with no way back, no chance to map the area, no infrastructure, and no idea of whether there were any giant savages to be found in this queer land. The stoic and cold Director let his mask crack for just a moment.