"Turn left," Glenice said casually. "Continue to pull up on the stick slightly."

Ingrid pulled the stick to the left side, and the airplane began to tilt, with the left wing dropping and the right wing rising. The ground was still dropping away rapidly, but the world began to rotate to the right. Soon they were facing the white-capped peaks in the distance.

"Push right on the stick until the wings are level," Glenice said. When the wings were level, she said "every time you turn you do three things. Push the stick one way while pulling on the stick slightly so you don't lose altitude. Hold the stick there until you want to stop, then push the stick to the opposite side until the wings are level."

"Understood," Ingrid said.

Glenice pointed to a gauge with two needles inside, one of which was moving more quickly than the other. "This is the altimeter. When this gets to three on the fat needle, turn left again." Then she pointed to the needle in the green arc. "This is airspeed. The green arc means we can fly. If the airspeed drops below the green arc, we will stall and the nose will drop on its own. If you keep pulling up during a stall, we fall out of the sky and die."

Ingrid's eyes went wide as she looked over at Glenice in the right seat. Glenice nodded.

"I'm serious. If airspeed starts to fall you push down on the stick until it goes back up."

The fat needle on the altimeter reached three, and Ingrid began to turn left as instructed. Then she leveled the wings. As they flew parallel to the airfield far below, Ingrid could see the top of the great airship that had landed. The entire top of the airship was a smooth, flat surface painted with white and yellow stripes. There were a few small airplanes parked on that flat surface.

As they flew, Glenice asked Ingrid to repeat the principles of flight that she had learned so far. Ingrid's answers were correct. "I'm surprised, I wish all my students were like you," Glenice said.

"This is really easy," Ingrid said. "But I am guessing that I might panic if we fall out of the sky."

"You are bright. I like you. What were you doing before you enlisted?"

"I was a baker."

"Can you read and write?"

Ingrid nodded. "Yes, the matron of my orphanage taught us all how to read and write and do numbers."

"How old are you?"

"I'm not sure. My mother never told the matron how old I was when I arrived. I'm probably about eighteen or nineteen."

"I can believe that," Glenice said.

To the left, across the grasslands and past the town, the ocean was gleaming in the afternoon light. The angle of the sun was dropping. They turned left once again, and began to fly towards the ocean.

"Do you have a special man?" Glenice asked.

Ingrid shook her head vigorously. "No way. The girls I grew up with all got pregnant and now they have to work all day long to take care of their kids. And besides, I do not..."

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"You do not... what?"

Ingrid said nothing.

"You do not like boys maybe? If that's the case, then you'll fit right in. Half the girls in the Air Navy are like that. They would rather sleep with each other. The other half are flexible. Even I've slept with a girl once. I don't regret it."

Ingrid blushed. "That's private."

"I don't really think it matters much. So, is it true? Do you swing the other way?"

"Yes," Ingrid admitted. "You must be from a big city, to be so comfortable talking about this with a stranger."

"I'm from the Empire," Glenice said.

"Oh! So that is why you have an accent," Ingrid said. "Wave Crest is a small town. Some of the people say mean things about me when I'm not there."

"Well, now you can get away from them."

As they flew over the town, Ingrid looked down upon it and saw it from the sky in great detail for the first time. She recognized every street, every building, as she had seen them all thousands of times, just not from this angle. She could see the aftermath of all the confetti falling onto the streets, and even the little umbrellas of the cafes. She could not hear the music from the town, however. In fact, the roar of the engine was not too strong.

"How can we hear each other?" Ingrid asked. "The engine should be very loud, right?"

Glenice held up a swirling crystal of turquoise and orange. "Air Elemental," she said. "I never dismissed it after I landed. You cannot see it, but it is blocking most of the sound from the engine. We would go deaf in just a few minutes otherwise. This airplane has a turbine engine attached to a propeller. It's not as powerful as the turbines that the fighters use, and it doesn't need to be. However, it is still quite loud."

They passed over the shore and then flew out over the ocean. The water was blindingly bright in the spot where it reflected the light of the sun. The harbor was filled with steel warships with enormous guns. They each had a rope from bow to stern dotted with countless colorful flags.

Out over the ocean, Glenice began to explain the relationship between pitch and airspeed. When climbing in altitude, the airspeed went down. When pointing the nose down and descending, the airspeed rapidly increased, and the throttle needed to be relaxed to compensate. Soon, Ingrid was changing altitude and controlling the throttle at the same time.

"You are a natural!" Glenice said. "I don't usually do this, but I'll let you land the plane. Turn around and go back to the airstrip."

They lined up far away from the airstrip, with the nose pointed down towards the white line in the middle. With the throttle pulled back to slow down, Glenice pointed to a lever between them with three settings. "Drop this down one notch," She said.

The flaps on both wings began to drop slightly, the nose went up slightly and the airspeed went down.

"Push the nose down slightly and then drop the flaps one more notch. Keep the airspeed constant right here," She said, pointing to a spot on the airspeed gauge below the green area.

"That's below the green," Ingrid said.

"Yeah, but the flaps are down, and it's still in the smaller white arc. Like I said, we will need to be going very slow to land."

With all three notches of flaps down and constant adjustments to the throttle, Ingrid pointed the nose at the edge of the airfield.

"Pull up on the stick at the last second and hover across the airfield. It is fine to float for a while, since this is your first time. Keep the nose pointed just above the airfield as you push the throttle all the way in slowly."

As Glenice had warned, the airplane did seem to just float over the airfield for a while, before a loud horn sounded and the airplane dropped violently onto the ground. The shock of the bounce knocked Ingrid forward slightly. They went forward but were losing speed, and soon they were going slow enough to use the brakes.

"Good enough landing I think. Use the throttle and the brakes again to take us over to where those planes are parked."

As they drove across the ground, Ingrid said: "This is such a wonderful machine. So, so wonderful." She felt tears in her eyes, partly for the joy of flying, and partly for the loss of that joy while back on the ground.

"They are cheap and very easy to make," Glenice said. "The metal is all shaped by a Metal Elemental almost instantly, and the other parts are mass-produced in factories. There is a factory in the Capital that can assemble twenty of this type of craft every single day. The rest of the factories produce fighters. They can make fifty fighter jets a day right now, but there are plans for more factories to bring that number up to two hundred."

"Sounds like you will need a lot of pilots," Ingrid said.

"You have absolutely no idea."