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| - --07-13
- "But you saw how my Gear Knight fought against the bugs! They couldn't touch him!"
- “By the Olthoi Queen, no!” Lord Sigurd shouted, slamming his heavy fist on the table. The other two men flinched. "We'll not turn back! It's too late for such cowardice. We’ve less than half of our fuel remaining, a week's worth of stale biscuits, even less fresh water, a single boiler that barely holds steam—"
- But, as it turned out, there was no danger. The people who met Sigurd and his guards on the shore were not warriors, but merely the sleepy citizens of a place called Cavendo. Sigurd questioned their leader, a preening fellow named Kanten, until he ascertained that they were not in immediate danger from Olthoi or the Cavendo-folk. Then he relaxed. When shelter was offered, he accepted it gratefully. Word spread among the beached longboats that the Brotherhood was safe among friends.
- "And if the lands have changed?" Albert persisted.
- "And she's still taking on water?"
- "No!" both Sigurd and Albert exclaimed in unison.
- The rest of Sigurd's words were drowned by a sudden, incredible shock. Metal screamed in tearing agony as all three men tumbled across the room along with most of their furniture. A jar of watered wine toppled from a low shelf and shattered, washing the cabin floor with the color of blood.
- Failing to answer any of these questions, he began to hum an old, old song. After all, things weren't so bad--he still had his courage, didn't he? And he was used to waiting.
- "Not any longer. I mean no disrespect to your crew, Albert, they're the best tinkers alive. But this ship is built on magic as well as metalwork, and both are rusting away. For all we know, even the Empyreans who built her couldn’t restore her to fighting trim."
- "We couldn't shut down the boiler, sire. Six of us tried to close the valves--it's no good, they're frozen open. Something must have been damaged in the collision. There's no telling when, or if, she'll tear free of the reef."
- Outside the captain’s quarters, the storm continued to build. Sheets of rain whipped against the pitch-dark portholes, and every few seconds the floor heaved tremendously as the Shaper's Quest plowed through another swell. The cries of alarmed sailors could barely be heard above the howl of the tempest. The chaos outside the cabin, however, was nothing compared to the chaos within.
- "Slowly. The lower compartments are completely flooded...." A great wave struck the ship broadside, and for a moment Albert's voice was drowned out by the screaming children in the longboats. "Completely flooded, and the water's rising towards the engine room. We're not sure what will happen if the boilers are submerged...."
- Aura Buffing
- "Why, if the lands have changed, we might arrive even...."
- Now the third man, a narrow-boned, wide-eyed scholar, spoke up. "There is another way, milord. We could fight the Olthoi. We could build an army and drive them back underground...."
- Still, Ludward wouldn't leave the beach. They had to drag him up the hill towards Cavendo and safety.
- "Everybody grab an oar! Row for shore! Row for the lights!" For, indeed, a few dim signal lights were now shining from the direction of the beach. Someone on shore must have responded to their horn blasts. Sigurd hoped they were friendly, for he doubted his men had much fight left in them.
- "Launch the boats!" Sigurd cried. He stepped carefully into one of the sleek vessels as Albert did likewise. Ludward was already at the back of the boat, sandwiched between several unhappy apprentices and looking miserable. Slowly, grindingly, the Quest's ancient winches lowered the four boats into the turbulent waters.
- When the tumult subsided, Albert continued. “This storm seems like a warning, sire. Let's turn around and head for the mainland at full steam. Our remaining coal might last us that long. If we spend a few months ashore, maybe my engineers can forge a new valve assembly for the first boiler. Then, if our prospectors find a new source of coal, perhaps…”
- At each “pulse”, inactive buffs will apply a short-lived effect to all fellows in range. If they are out of range during a pulse, they will receive a visual notification on the effect icon so that they will know to move back into range. The inactive buff can be toggled on by using the skill, and using the skill a second time will turn it off.
- Less than half an hour later--for the folk of the Brotherhood were quick and decisive at need--the longboats had been hastily laden with men and women, a handful of children, and what few treasures could be gathered in a hurry. Albert was the last to clamber up from below deck. He quickly moved to his lord's side, shouting above the drenching storm.
- The following skills will now use this system for July:
{{{!
- At that moment, Albert's face was crossed by a look of exquisite pain. Lord Sigurd had seen the look before, on parents whose children had been taken by Olthoi or fever. But the Prime Engineer mastered himself in a moment. "The longboats! For the Shaper's sake, see to the longboats!" he yelled, and vanished into the rain. Lord Sigurd, leaning heavily on frail Ludward, followed him out. As they left, the ship's mighty horn sounded three times, summoning whatever aid might exist on this alien shore. Lord Sigurd felt certain that he would never set foot in the cabin again.
- "There won't be a next time, Ludward. The matter is closed. And," Sigurd added, looking at Albert, "it's time to put this talk of turning around to rest, too. We have the Empyrean charts. We know the island is out here. We know we're getting close. Unless the lands have changed, we'll make landfall in a matter of days."
- "We could live on the Shaper's Quest, send boats to the mainland..."
- After much bobbing and drifting, the Knight found himself wedged in a corner of the ship's hold as the last of the water drizzled away through unseen drains. After that, he had plenty of time to think. He wondered why his friend had left him behind. He wondered why the water had left him behind. And he wondered very much where the ship was going, and whether there would be anyone at the end of the journey who might care to remove him from this extremely dull and uninteresting corner.
- To be fair, things had gotten very exciting a few days ago. There was the shock of the collision that had hurled the Knight's head from its usual resting place. Then there was the shouting, the hustle of people running to and fro, and the rising water. The Knight was delighted to discover that he floated. He briefly entertained the notion of asking his friend for an aquatic body, maybe something with fins and shark teeth, until he remembered his feelings about rust.
- Sigurd nodded. "With any luck she'll stay pinned here, and we can return for salvage tomorrow. But for now, we have to get clear." Albert nodded his sad assent.
- Three bedraggled men sat around an age-cracked wooden table, tense and glaring at one another, exhausted by hours of argument. Their leader was the first to break the silence.
- The new Aura Buffing system has arrived! With the new system, certain buffs will now become “inactive” buffs; they can be toggled on and off and automatically buff all members of the same fellowship within range at regular intervals.
- Lord Sigurd was stunned by pain as his wound ripped open once more. Hazily, he stumbled to his feet as Albert leapt across the room and flung open the hatch. A torrent of wind and water blew into the room along with the cries of terrified sailors. "A reef! We've struck a reef!" one voice shouted. Another yelled, "We've been breached!" And then the dreaded death sentence: "Man overboard! Man overboard!"
- The Knight was bored, bored. He'd often found himself bored since he lost his body. It wasn't much fun to be a head on a shelf, even if you had a friend who talked to you every day and told you stories about the new bodies he'd build for you. But it was even less fun to be a head stuck in a corner with absolutely no friends at all.
- But then there hadn't been any more shouting or visitors, and the Knight suspected that he'd been left alone. That didn't cheer him up much. Then there was another terrible lurch, and the water started rising much, much faster. This also seemed less than promising. Before long, the Knight found himself floating free through the corridors of the Shaper's Quest along with innumerable bits of flotsam and trash. He rather expected to end up as a sunken treasure. It seemed like a lonely fate. Perhaps a family of brightly-colored fish would make a home in him, he thought without much hope.
- Ludward scowled. "That doesn't matter. It'll be easier next time."
- Then the strangest thing happened. A wailing siren began to sound from all directions, and rumbling mechanical clanks and whines echoed through the length of the ship. And the water started to recede! At first the Knight assumed he'd been saved, and he started shouting joyfully to his unseen rescuers. But as he floated lower and lower, and the only voice he heard was his own, he began to have his doubts. Maybe the ship itself had decided not to sink. He hadn't known it could do that, but then, he hadn't known he could float, either. One had to keep an open mind about such things.
- A Note on Crafting 2.0: We are still observing crafting behavior in the player population. We are making only a few very small adjustments right now , because any changes we make to crafting now could easily be overpowered after players increase in skill levels. We aren’t turning a blind eye to crafting concerns, but we have to proceed carefully with changes given the newness of the system.
- "Let's imagine that those boats actually returned from the mainland, which they would not. We'd still die a slow death at sea. Albert, you know this ship better than I do, and even I know she's almost spent. The first boiler will never fire again, the second will rupture within a fortnight, and then the Quest will be nothing but an oversized rowboat."
- “...and we've cannibalized the other beyond repair,” agreed Albert, Lord Sigurd’s gray-bearded Prime Engineer. "We all know the facts. But these are reasons to turn around, not to press on. If the last boiler blows at sea, we'll die out here. We’re heading into strange waters without charts, without provisions. Now this…” Albert was interrupted by a drastic lurch to starboard. From below, there were crashes and curses as dozens of small items clattered to the deck.
- "Sire, my engineers have brought the Quest back from the dead before," Albert replied stiffly. "They can do so again."
- Lord Sigurd's hand moved involuntarily to the still-painful wound in his side, where an Olthoi's talon had nearly ended his life. "One Gear Knight, Ludward," he sighed. "One Gear Knight, and how long did it take you to rebuild him?"
- “Maybe? Perhaps?" Lord Sigurd interrupted harshly. "Maybe we'll be eaten by Olthoi. Or perhaps, Albert, we'll be eaten by Olthoi! Our old protection is gone forever. We'd hold them back for a week, two weeks at most, and then they'll overwhelm our camp and pick clean our bones."
- As the voyagers made their confused, exhausted way toward the lights of the nearby town, Sigurd heard a shriek of terror from the rear. He turned to see Ludward sprinting desperately towards the surf, with Albert hot on his heels. Ludward made it eight paces into the pounding waves before he was tackled from behind, then dragged bodily back to shore. When Sigurd reached them, Ludward was still spluttering and trying to free himself from the old engineer's grip.
- "I left him--I left something on the ship, Sigurd! Oh, please, we have to go back!" But Sigurd shook his head sadly and pointed towards the sea. Ludward squinted into the rain and darkness, then uttered a soft cry of dismay. The dark silhouette of the Shaper's Quest was gone.
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