“..and what does this do?” Leona asked, making me look up from the metal bracket I was struggling to remove.

“That’s the navigational computer,” I replied. “It’s…basically like a team of surveyors and map readers I can give commands to tell what to look at.”

“And what about this?”

“That’s where the ship AI is supposed to go. Think of it like a bound spirit that is supposed to help me run things. Well, it will when I get around to building it.”

“Bound spirits? Those are usually a bad idea.”

“If you do it wrong, definitely. But I would be creating the spirit to see the ship as its home, not binding it against its will.”

“Interesting, and what about…”

We continued on like that for a long time. While Leona was fascinated and had little frame of reference for the purely mechanical parts of the Azure Horizon, she had worked with me long enough that some of the smaller quality of life improvements I had introduced when talking about or making the healing mystic codes that she could understand the broad strokes. It did make actually fabricating a new reactor and replacing the slagged one take much longer than it would have otherwise.

But she was curious and I was hardly going to discourage that kind of thinking, especially when she would be following me to god knows where and not knowing something like say, what a car was, would make her stick out more than we absolutely were going to anyway.

Besides, I was almost done anyway. A few extra minutes wasn’t going to make a difference in the end…I hoped.

Once that was done I had to check on anything else that might have been shaken up during my little crash landing now that I had power again, but for once luck seemed to be on my side. Besides a few burned out lights and a replaced length of cable for one of the doors, there was very little damage to the interior.

The exterior was another story and was scraped to hell in some places, punctured by rocks in others, and a good bit of the front was still technically buried. According to the sensors the ventral weapons were probably scrap along with a good bit of plating, but the ship was still sealed so I would have to wait until I got to a world capable of supplying large amounts of sheet metal.

Problems for another time.

Inside was good, outside was as good as it was going to get. It was time to leave, I thought as I flipped the ignition switch.

There were a few vibrations throughout the ship that had Leona looking around in a panic while I had a laser focus on the power readout. Theoretically the reactor was perfectly safe, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I had just installed a giant bomb until it came online normally at least once. But once it did and the ship started going through its full startup checks I quickly relaxed.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Everything was good.

“Last chance if you’re having second thoughts.” I told Leona, who was watching the control panel with astonishment. “I can drop you off anywhere you want, no questions asked if you don’t feel like you want to do this.”

“And miss seeing wonders like this? I could never!” My apprentice denied. “But I thought you hadn’t bound a spirit to the vessel yet, how are the little levers moving by themselves?”

They were doing what now?

I rushed over to see what she was talking about and sure enough, several switches were moving on their own. Some buttons too, now that I was looking at them.

The ship was running through initial checks and startups after the reactor was replaced so they weren’t doing anything, but what could have caused this to…

“Son of a bitch, that’s how he did it.” I muttered angrily as I figured out what was going on. “That clever bastard…”

“Is something wrong?” Leona asked worriedly.

I took a moment to calm down. No point freaking her out just because I was frustrated. “Well, as you might have guessed from the fact I crashed here, I didn’t exactly plan my landing. I was actually planning on visiting a different World entirely but one of the guardians there mistook me for one of the threats they have to deal with occasionally and managed to kick me out of the dimension entirely.” I explained. “I thought it was some kind of spell or something, but the bastard just enchanted my control panel to repeat the last few actions over and over again. That’s what caused me to skip through a few dimensions and eventually crash here when the reactor broke down and the safeties refused to let me do another jump…”

“He must have been incredibly powerful to do such a thing!” Leona exclaimed which felt like an arrow right through my heart.

“I mean, he called himself a master so he’s probably no slouch, but this is such a simple spell I don’t think he needed to try very hard…” I slouched over and hid my face.

It was actually pretty humbling.

While I couldn’t consider myself a master of magic I at least thought I had been beaten because I’d been up against someone simply stronger, more experienced, and with the backing of an organization that regularly protected their planet from extra-dimensional threats that kicked me out with irresistible force. And now I was finding out that I had really been beaten by the equivalent of a street performer doing a card trick.

“O-oh, um, well at least you discovered it now before it became an issue again?” Leona tried comforthing me, which did little to help since she was the one to notice it.

Still, I appreciated the effort.

“Yeah…anyways, the spell is broken and I’ll get some defenses over the controls when I have a chance…we shouldn’t need it for where I plan on taking us and we just packed everything up…so, ready to go?” I rambled a bit, trying to push through my embarrassment.

“As ready as I’ll ever be…but where are we going?”

I nodded at the expected question. “Eventually I want to try and find a World where I can deal with my injuries permanently, but thanks to my research with the elves it’s not an immediate problem.” The dashboard beeped in front of me and I took a second to look over the various startup errors – nothing that would stop us from taking off. “So instead I want to try and find a more technologically focused World so I can build something to help me use my magic better.”

I was sick of trying to calculate everything for my bombardment spells in my head. Getting even a basic device up and running would change all that.

It would also let me do things with a bit more finesse than ‘glass everything in that general direction’.

That would be nice…

“How does that work?” Leona asked, breaking me out of my thoughts. “Do you just look randomly until you find what you are looking for, or is there a kind of map you can use?”

“Usually I need to enter a world at random to see what’s going on but there are ways to navigate the Dimensional Sea…it’s kinda hard to explain if you don’t have the senses for it…” I debated trying to teach her for a moment before discarding the idea. I barely knew what I was doing. Trying to teach someone as tech-illiterate as Leona would only end badly. “But the good news is that I already have a good idea of where to go thanks to the random jumping the Azure Horizon was forced to do, ironically enough.”

I had only gotten a brief view before the ship jumped out of the World again but there are some sights that just stick with you.

Especially when you pulled up a saved image from the forward camera and put it on one of the cockpit screens.

“Is…is their moon…broken?!” Leona gasped as she moved closer to get a better look at the picture.

“Yeah, don’t worry too much about it. It’s not a big deal.”

Leona gave me an incredulous look. “Their moon is broken! How is that not a big deal?!

“Cause it’s been that way for a while and nothing bad has happened because of it.” I replied as I ran through the last few preflight tasks. “Besides the god that broke it isn’t even around anymore, so it’s fine.”

“The what?!”

Ah, I should give her a bit of a history lesson on the way there so she knows what to expect. It’d be awkward if she was labeled a crazy person for not knowing some of the basics…