[i]“Always,[/i] darling.” Vasilia agreed from the helm. “It’s one loss, then straight to the nearest lonely mountain peak. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say their newfound meditative piety was more a newfound meditative tantrum.”

“Maybe losing is an important part of a balanced diet.” Dolce offered.

“The Fates certainly seem to think so. The moment you declare yourself invincible, every person in the system with so much as a pointy stick takes it as a personal challenge to prove you wrong. The wise weaponmaster would hire a bouncer or three to keep out the riffraff.”

Vasilia didn’t need invincible; that was a fool’s errand. You didn’t win by being invincible, you won by being just slightly better where it counted. She’d gladly take surviving, thank you very much, but  even that was looking to be a tall order. The weeks since the Armada had been difficult for all of them, but every new problem demanded the Captain’s attention, and didn’t care much if she was ill or healthy. Apollo’s untimely reprimand had greviously taxed her constitution. Though her regalia was as spotless as always, though she sat with back straight and perfect poise, each breath came harder than it ought to, and her attention threatened to slip away with the slightest lapse in focus.

It had taken one miracle to escape, and another to get them this far. She sincerely doubted her ability to deliver a third.

What they needed was [i]more.[/i] More hands, more capabilities, more tricks to hide up their sleeves, more leeway for things to go wrong without dooming the whole voyage. All they had was a battered old ship, a miniature phalanx, and a barebones command staff. If they could find something and someones in the ruins of Molech’s keep, that might be just the thing to keep them all going. She didn't care to entertain the future where they came back empty-handed.

Dolce, meanwhile, sat cleaning the valves and workings of his favored instrument, the saxophone. At the terrible sight of the Spear, he’d thought some music might help steel their nerves for the journey ahead, and Vasilia couldn’t have agree more. It was good to have something to occupy himself with. Something...simple.

He’d gathered, from the limited resources aboard the Plousios, that it really wasn’t that difficult to put a machine back together. The problem was putting it back together without hurting it worse. A Stage Machine, for example, might be repaired night after night after night, but every time it rose, it would be as if it was its first performance again. To keep the memories and self intact, that would take a skilled hand.

Stories told of such hands, devised - or perhaps recruited, as some tell it - by Molech himself. Machines with a high purpose, with skill and knowledge beyond even their makers. A machine, to create machines. Revered, respected, feared, by those without hearts of flesh. And when all others declared a mechanical thread ended, they could prove it had not. The Fates, in mechanical form.

And all the legends agreed they’d been lost when Barassidar fell.

It was good to only have a saxophone to worry about. He doubted he’d have the luxury for long.