Ingrid grasped Vaska's hand as she slept in the medical bay of the Ten Skies. "Titania," she said. "Try to contact your mother again. The same way you did in the Plane of Water."
Mother, mother can you hear me? Titania asked.
Yours is different, a feminine voice replied. It sounded a bit like static discharging from a sock after being rubbed on a carpet, heard in a very slow form. Hazy, crackling. The voice continued: There are others here, and Mother fears them. You seem real, as there appears to be another one, the hand you now hold, who is bonded to the Firstborn of the Queen of Darkness. However it may be a trick. The enemy may be very devious. Mother has banned bonds with mortals.
"Can you hear me?" Ingrid asked.
I can hear you mortal.
"We have the Queen of Darkness with us, the child we call Ashe. Can you see her?"
Mother does not trust her senses. Such is her fear.
"Your mother's realm is very dangerous to us. Can you stop the lightning so we can find where your mother is?"
If you do not respect Mother's sense of aesthetics, then you shall be refused audience with her.
And if you attempt to enter into Mother's realm, a second voice chimed in her mind, sounding metallic and high-pitched, then you shall be refused a bond until you have spoken to Mother's sister.
"So we need to speak with the Queen of Lightning first, before the Queen of Metal will speak to us?" Ingrid asked.
It must be so, the metallic voice replied.
We will speak no more. If you are true, then you will stand before Mother, the first voice said. Bring the child named Ashe with you.
"There are others! There are others!" Ingrid shouted.
"Others?" Glenice asked. "You mean, people from other Great Houses?"
Ingrid nodded. "Probably. People from Kanti at least. They are trying to talk to the Queen of Lightning using their own Light Elementals. The Queen fears deception, and has refused to speak with mortals. Including me. We need to find a way to fly inside that portal and talk to the Queen."
"So they are being cautious," Ashe said. She had returned to her full-sized child form, and lost her wings. "It cannot be helped, we will need to play her game for now."
"Excuse me, Lady Ghost," a soldier in the door interrupted them. "I have a message from the Captain of the Fleet. He wants you to visit the telescope to see something."
"I'll go with you," Glenice said. The child followed both of them in silence.
The circular metal grating at the top of the observation tower was empty when Ingrid pulled herself up the ladder. The room was dim, with walls made from bare metal and exposed rivets. It was occupied only by the eyepiece of the high-magnification telescope. Ingrid bent over to peer through the lens. Far away in the starry sky, she could see a bright object shaped like a massive platform with four wings. On top of that platform, there was a city.
Glenice finished climbing the ladder and looked through the eyepiece as well. The child Ashe began to climb the ladder behind them.
"That must be where the masked people live," Ingrid said. Ashe shoved Glenice out of the way and took her spot.
"Their city likely contains some secret to surviving the lightning storms," Ashe said. "If Vaska's engineers copied it, then we could apply it to our own airplanes."
"Assuming they are alive," Ingrid said. "We could wait for Vaska to wake up as well."
"If my sister's servants, your enemy, discover the secret first, then they will establish a strong presence here. It could become costly to achieve Vaska's objectives."
"We should send the scouts immediately," Glenice said. "We have a two-seat trainer on board the airship. We can put a painter in the back seat and send them to the city. And once the Marines return with Vaska's engineers, they might be able to send an expedition there to get much more detailed diagrams."
"I want to see for myself," Ingrid said.
"That is a bad idea," Glenice said. "That city may be too far away. It would be safer to send a scout alone. Once we have more data about the length of the flight, we can develop a flight plan for the trainer with the painter. I will also send for more trainers and more painters."
Waiting. Waiting. Ingrid waited for what seemed like days in the map room, but was perhaps only hours. Long enough that the Marines returned from a successful mission with all of Vaska's engineers. They landed their tilt-rotors all over the fleet, but the engineers were deposited on the deck of the Ten Skies. Several strange airplanes flew in a traffic pattern over the deck, flown by test pilots from Vaska's workshop.
Ingrid sprinted down to the deck to get a good look at them. The child, who seemed to struggle with the bulkheads inside the airship, trailed behind, but eventually found Ingrid waiting at the runway exit. Airplanes taxied past. It was freezing cold, and the child had taken to reshape her frilly dress to resemble Ingrid's fur coat and hat.
The first to land was a large fighter jet with two engines and two vertical stabilizers, angled slightly outward. Like her own fighter jet, it had an oversized horizontal stabilizer. By the time Ingrid arrived on the deck it was already taxiing past her.
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The second to land was another large fighter with two engines, however this one looked not unlike the ones the Ayaruans had sent through the portal to the Plane of Metal. It had a dozen missiles on the wings, and was likely designed for missile capacity at the cost of basic maneuvers. Unlike the Ayaruan version, it had a bubble on the bottom for ocular demons. It was too bad they could no longer be summoned.
The third airplane to land was like nothing Ingrid had ever seen. It had a single large, triangle-shaped wing in the back and no horizontal stabilizer. The tall tail fin jutted out from that large wing. In the front of the airplane, just below the canopy, there were two smaller wings that rotated up and down.
"Vaska called them canards," Glenice said as she joined them on the deck. "Some new approach to engineering. The basic idea is that if they stall, then the nose will drop, thus encouraging the fighter to gain airspeed."
"And then recover from the stall," Ingrid said.
"It is not a new idea. Canard airplanes existed during the Unification War. They have a tendency to waffle back and forth between a stall and a pitched-up nose. It is very annoying. I have flown in that one before, and it suffers from the same problem. Vaska is still working on training a cyan Orb to compensate for the problem."
"She lets you fly her prototypes?" Ingrid asked.
"She is certainly not going to risk your life on her ideas," Glenice replied.
"You are her mate," Ashe said. "While it is somewhat rare for you meat puppets, even in ancient times the females would sometimes..."
"That is private!" Ingrid snapped. "The next one is arriving. So keep quiet. What... what is that?"
The fourth airplane to arrive took several attempts to land. Because it passed multiple times, Ingrid was able to get a very good look at it flying. It was a small metal tube with very stubby wings and it looked like it should not be able to fly at all. It seemed to be moving quite fast, and it did not appear to have any flaps to help it land.
"I have no idea what that thing is," Glenice said. "Vaska never told me about anything like that."
Soldiers on the deck of the airship began to scramble about and clear the deck. Then they extended a massive net across the runway near the very end of the airship, made from extremely thick cloth. The airplane with the stubby wings hit the runway almost exactly at the edge of the airship, and took the entire length of the runway to slow down. Instead of falling off the edge at the far end, it slammed into the net, stretching it out. Ingrid shuttered.
"I hope the pilot survived that," she said.
The pilot did survive. Even as the soldiers on the deck removed the net, the airframe appeared to be repairing itself as Metal Elementals went to work. It taxied to a parking spot off the runway and Ingrid accosted the pilot as he climbed down the ladder.
"What the hell is this thing?!"
"Oh, Lady Ghost," the pilot said. He was wearing a full body jumpsuit and a helmet. His face was clean shaven with the exception of a mustache. "Supersonic test."
"I have no idea what that means," Ingrid said.
"You hook this thing... wing of a big bird, and then drop, drop, drop from high. Pitch down, full throttle as you fall. It starts go faster than sound, it does. BOOM! Shatter glass, it does."
The final airplane to land appeared to be an improvement on Vaska's spy airplane, which Ingrid had seen before. Losing interest, Ingrid returned to the map room to resume waiting. It was several more hours, and several more cycles of lightning inside the portal, before they had a painting of the city. It had grown dark in the skies of Taisia. The shadows of the peaks consumed the snowfields far below. Ingrid almost nodded off to sleep in her chair.
The city was indeed a massive platform with four wings, and it flew forward like an airplane. Huge poles, presumably lightning rods, extended high into the sky and far below. The buildings of the city were trapped inside a massive cage of metal with a hexagonal pattern of gaps in that metal. There were few openings to this cage. There were definitely people walking around on the streets inside the cage, according to the pilot's report.
The most surprising feature however was the extremely long wicks extending off the trailing edge of the wings and the trailing edge of the platform itself.
"We need to know what those wicks are made of," one of Vaska's engineers said. "They are clearly static wicks, intended to disperse static charge in a corona pattern."
"We will need to send in the Marines," Glenice said. She pointed to the openings in the cage, leading to the city streets. "The openings to the cage look large enough to land a tilt-rotor on the edge of the platform and drive it inside."
"Give the order," Ingrid said. "If they succeed once, then I want to join them for a second flight."
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The opening in the metal cage was much larger than Ingrid imagined. The city, which the engineers began to refer to as Wick City, was also quite tall. The wings extended off to either side for nearly a mile, and the long wicks trailing behind extended out toward the horizon. The ominous pale-yellow moon rushed through the sky far away.
Ashe held Ingrid's hand as they walked across the rubber street through the gates. Dozens of Marines were holding on to long ropes, dragging the tilt-rotor behind them. Beyond the gates, brutalist concrete buildings rose up from either side. The air inside the cage was saturated with a cacophony of green, magenta, purple, and cyan Colored Orbs floating about. The wide rubber streets were packed with small market stalls, covered in cloth awnings and marked by glowing signs in the Taisian language. Masked people roamed around in the streets holding skewers of deep-fried meats and vegetables.
"Lady Ghost," one of the Marines said. "It's best to stay inside the city once the lightning starts."
"Thank you soldier," Ingrid said. The people on the street seemed completely unfazed by the rapidly-approaching moon. She wandered over to one of the stalls.
The people were paying the cooks with Taisian krismarks. They were also speaking Taisian. "Can I have one of the meat skewers?" Ingrid asked.
A pot-bellied man behind the steaming stall regarded her, his unshaven face smeared with oily sweat. "You must be from the outside," he said in unaccented Taisian. "From the way you dress." He handed her two skewers. "One for you, and one for your daughter," the man said. "On the house."
"Thank you," Ingrid said.
"You are a baker," the man said. "From the town of Wave Crest. By the ocean in southern Taisia."
"Have you been to my hometown?" Ingrid asked.
"I've met you before on vacation. In Wave Crest, you sold me a loaf of bread. The word around town was... you been eyeing the girls like a young man would." He winked at her. "Not that I blame you. I'm surprised to see you have a daughter."
"I'm not her daughter!" Ashe protested. "I'm the Elemental Queen of Darkness, you bloated bag of poo."
"The mouth on this one," the man said. "It is an honor, Queen Ashe. Now if you will excuse me, you are blocking the line."
The Marines became agitated as the moon loomed on the horizon, growing ever bigger rapidly. The people on the street however did not seem to even notice. The buying, eating, kissing, and groping continued unabated.
The moon passed overhead. Lightning from the moon struck the world. The sky went mad with lightning, however the air inside the city was calm and quiet. The people on the street covered their eyes with one arm as they walked about, but otherwise did not respond to the planetary bombardment of electricity.
"Look back there," one of the Marines said, pointing behind them to the wicks trailing from the city.
Even in the blinding light of the millions of bolts of lightning, there was just enough of the starry sky to see. The wicks were venting electricity in massive glowing cones of purple plasma. Vaska's engineer had called it a corona. These cones also emanated from the wicks on the wings.
The lightning subsided. The people on the street lowered their arms. The haggling, drinking, and laughing continued. The Orbs above painted the rubber street in saturated colors. Gradually it became louder and louder as normalcy returned.
"What a strange place to live," Ingrid said.