Over the next week of travel, Iris spent her mornings and afternoons blipping around the masts and sails of the Gaping Maw monotonously checking and retying knots. The job itself was rather boring, but the views were unmatched, the wind in her face never got any less exhilarating, and it provided an excellent training ground for daring blips and acrobatic maneuvers. At the end of each shift she would review her journal and find a small but satisfying increase in experience, proving it to be worthwhile beyond just serving as exercise.

After her shifts she would retreat below deck to the cargo hold, where she continued her training. She would always begin by exploring the limits of her powers, practicing blipping items in and out of her bottomless bag or tossing a handful of pebbles into the air and testing how many she could blip back into her hands before they hit the floor. During this training, she occasionally experimented with blipping herself in and out of the bottomless bag, but so far had no positive results. The sword work was saved for last, and she would practice forms until exhaustion so that when she finally collapsed into bed she could fall quickly to sleep. This meant she awoke every morning with sore muscles, but it was a small price to pay for grinding out experience, increasing her strength, and actually getting restful sleep.

Her crew duties occasionally required her to delve into the lower decks of the ship, either to retrieve something from the cargo hull or perform routine checks of the many knots in the mechanical deck. She wasn't exactly sure why she had to check those knots, as it seemed none of the mechanisms were actually in use and she couldn't imagine how any of the knots would work themselves loose, but the boatswain had made it abundantly clear that it was crucial the mechanisms were in top shape and ready to deploy at a moment's notice.

In order to be certain she was never alone in the dark during these trips below deck, she had taken to wearing several pieces of glow stone on her body at all times. This included a necklace that hung slightly lower than the locket her mother had given her, several small pieces woven into thin rope bracelets on either wrist, and a hefty chunk hanging from her belt beside the bottomless bag in a leather sack which Eli had helped her fashion. Out of an abundance of caution, Abby would also carry a pair of lanterns overhead whenever Iris entered a dark part of the ship.

One afternoon, she found herself finished with her rounds in the mechanical deck much sooner than usual. Nelson, her boss, would certainly expect her to return to the main deck and find additional duties to undertake until her shift was over, but she had something else in mind. She decided to take a look around the mechanical deck beyond her usual areas in search of answers to the question that burned in her mind every time she came down here -- what was all this for?

At first her search seemed fruitless, as she found nothing she hadn't seen before -- or at least nothing that looked any different from what she had already seen. After a series of blips through tight and otherwise unreachable spaces carried her deep into the maze of beams, sails and ropes, however, she finally found something intriguing. A plank of flooring hadn't been nailed down, and gave slightly beneath her step.

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As Abby wormed her tentacles through the machinery to bring a lantern close to the floor, Iris dropped to her hands and knees and hefted the plank out of its slot. Beneath it, she found what appeared to be the side of a very large and heavy duty barrel. She focused her awareness ability on the contents of the barrel and was able to discern that it contained a liquid. It was significantly thicker than water and seemed quite dense. After a moment of searching through her memories, she identified where she had found a liquid like this before -- in dozens of barrels in the cargo hold, each labeled "oil."

Ignoring the additional questions this raised for now, she returned her focus to her awareness ability and discerned that there were metal pipes connected to what would be the top and bottom of the barrel were it upright. It took a bit of work and a lot of backtracking, but she was eventually able to track the pipe through the floorboards and out into one of the walkable sections of the mechanical deck, where she found an exposed vertical pipe sealed with a metal twist cap. The exterior of the pipe was stained with the black cruddy remains of spilled oil, and on the floor beside it was a wooden funnel caked in old oil with a crack splitting down its side.

With her curiosity thoroughly enflamed, she returned to the open gap in the floor where the large barrel was housed and traced the pipe in the other direction. This proved even more difficult, as the machinery only grew denser and more entangled the further towards the stern she traveled. Eventually, however, she found the end. In the very back starboard corner of the ship, the pipe finally connected to something. It was a massive cylinder half inset into the floor, even with only its top half exposed it still took up almost the full height of the deck. The body of the cylinder was made from a strange blue-grey metal she didn't recognize, but thick iron bands stretched around it as reinforcement. After a few difficult blips, she found an identical cylinder in the opposite corner of the deck.

She stood there in a tight gap between several beams and pipes for quite a long time, impatiently tapping her foot as she struggled to imagine what the purpose of any of this might be. Finally, she sighed.

"What do you think, Abby?"

Uncertain noises came from the bag.

"Yeah, I've got no clue either."

As she was making her way back through the entangled mess of machinery, she heard the voice of Nelson calling out for her. After swearing under her breath, she increased her pace and soon blipped up beside him.

"Yes sir?" she reported dutifully.

He gave her a critical, almost scornful look, "were you slacking off?"

"No sir," she answered hurriedly, "I saw a rat and thought it might chew on the sails, so I was trying to catch it."

"Did you?"

"Uh-- well, I was about to, but then I then heard you call my name, so--"

"Convenient," he grumbled, "get back to the main deck and run checks on the main mast."

"I already did," she protested, before quickly adding "sir" at the end.

"Then do it again," Nelson said with an annoyed tone, as if that were the obvious conclusion she should come to.

She fought the urge to roll her eyes, and blipped away.