In the days following the Gaping Maw’s return to the sky, Iris had a quick recovery and soon returned to work. With one less mast to share the load of steering the ship through harsh winds, the remaining sails were under an unusual amount of stress, which kept iris busy blipping around and tending to ropes and knots throughout much of the day. She soon fell back into her usual schedule of working, training, eating dinner and training some more before each restless night of sleep.

One evening, her first round of training was interrupted by a faint boom from the far end of the cargo hold. As she curiously blipped closer, she soon heard someone in the midst of a coughing fit. With the collection of glow stones dangling from various parts of her body flashing in and out as she blipped, Iris was impossible to miss as she approached.

“Careful,” Cameron said as he stifled the last of his coughs, “I’ve got explosives laying out.”

Iris abruptly stopped her approach and dropped to the floor several feet from Cameron. He had moved around barrels and crates to give himself a decently sized clear area to work. A pair of waist-high crates pushed up against each other served as a work bench, and meticulously placed across it were bowls and vials housing various liquids, powders and grains. In the center of the clearing was another waist-high crate, this one thoroughly scorched and marked with soot across its top half. Finally, on the opposite side of the clearing from the work bench, was something Iris recognized as a miniature version of the machine the gargoyle tinkerers used to make boomrocks.

“Trying to blow yourself up?” Iris asked.

Cameron scoffed as he used a cloth to wipe soot from his face, “something like that. I’m trying to stabilize these damn boomrocks.”

“Well you haven’t blown a hole in the ship, so you must be having some success.”

Cameron leaned over his workbench and shook his head, “I’ve found about six different ways to dampen the explosion, but that’s not what I want. I want the same explosion, just a bit harder to trigger.”

Iris blipped over beside the workbench and started peering over the various notes he had scattered about. Some were presumably handwritten by him, but most were crude charcoal diagrams scribbled on rough parchment. Calling them diagrams felt a bit generous to Iris, as they mostly consisted of basic outlines, stick figures, and exaggerated punctuation marks.

“There’s your problem,” Iris said, “these notes are mostly nonsense.”

Cameron sighed with a slight laugh, “take it up with the gargoyles. I don’t know what most of it is even supposed to say. I mean, look at this!”

Cameron briefly flipped through a few of the notes before selecting one and handing it to Iris. The note included a rough drawing of crystal-like shape, which Iris assumed to represent a boomrock, underneath three stacked, waving lines and above three large dots in a horizontal line, ending with a question mark.

“What the hell is that?” he asked with exasperation.

“Maybe these lines are supposed to be wind?” Iris suggested.

He shook his head, “then the dots wouldn’t make any sense. A gust of wind is enough to make a boomrock blow, and the tinkerers mark explosions with a bunch of bold lines fanning outwards.”

“Did you try asking Killup to decipher it for you?”

“Absolutely not! I let him help once and it was less than ten minutes before he almost got us both killed.”

“Hm, maybe Adan then? He’s good with language.”

Cameron thought about it for a moment, “he’s got a steady hand and a stable mind, I think I could trust him not to blow me up.”

“Then I’ll be right back,” Iris blipped away.

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A few minutes later, Adan came descending down the stairs and deftly climbed over the obstacle course of crates and barrels between him and Cameron, led by the flashing light of a blipping Iris. After a few quiet moments inspecting various gargoyle notes, Adan finally spoke.

“I believe this is supposed to be water,” he pointed to the wave-y lines, and then to the dots at the bottom, “and this means to wait and see what happens. I’d guess this was a plan for an experiment yet to be conducted.”

“That’s no use, I’ve tried submerging boomrocks in water, they just start shaking violently like they’re about to blow.”

“Well did you try waiting?” Iris asked.

Cameron looked at her blankly for a second, then silently walked away. He grabbed a nearby barrel by the rim and rolled it into the center of the clearing, popping the lid off to reveal the water still sloshing around inside. He returned to the workbench to retrieve a small wooden box, placed far away from any other items, and delicately carried it over the barrel. Opening the box revealed a small sliver of boomrock glowing brightly. With a gloved hand, he carefully removed the sliver and gently dropped it into the water before kicked off the floor to launch himself backwards in a blur.

At first nothing happened, then the water started bubble as a bright light shined out from the barrel, bathing the ceiling in dancing, broiling ripples. Iris and Adan followed Cameron’s lead as he took cover behind a crate, and the three waited for several moments until the water calmed and the light dimmed. Cautiously, Cameron came out from his cover and slowly approached the barrel. After a moment of nervously peering over the rim, he held a hand out towards Iris and Adan.

“Pass me my tongs, will you?”

Iris spotted a long pair of metal tongs with leather wrapped tips atop a shorter crate beside the makeshift workbench and blipped them into her hand, then into Cameron’s. He didn’t seem to notice that they had appeared from the air rather than being placed in his waiting hand. He reached into the barrel, delicately plucked the sliver from the bottom, and cautiously withdrew it from the water. When there no was no reaction upon contact with the air, he held it higher for the others to see. Its glow was now distinctly muted and its characteristic vibration was dulled.

“I think that did it,” Cameron said, almost stunned at the revelation.

He withdrew a pinch of yellow-brown powder from one of the pouches at his waist and drizzled it into a pile on the testing crate, then gently placed the sliver on top of it. He returned to cover and checked to make sure the others had done the same, and then snapped his fingers. The powder on the crate erupted into flames, but the boomrock didn’t explode.

Cameron let out an excited laugh and — perhaps a bit recklessly — hurried over to the crate. He withdrew a larger pinch of a dark blue powder and drizzled it over the sliver before once again returning to cover.

“So far so good, if this one sets it off, we’ve found our solution. Ready?”

Iris and Adan nodded, and Cameron snapped his fingers. A boom reverberated off the hull and bounced around the cargo hold, sending a few rats hiding nearby scattering as they desperately held their tiny hats to their heads. Splinters rained down across the clearing, even reaching as far as Cameron’s workbench. Peeking out from cover, Iris saw a large hole had been blown into the crate where the boomrock had been.

Cameron was now laughing with his whole chest and pumping a fist in the air, “those dumb little ingenious bastards!”

“It seems fitting,” Adan observed, “that the solution for stabilizing rocks shaken so thoroughly they explode would be as simple as submerging them in water.”

“Exactly!” Cameron nearly shouted, “I think that’s the trick with gargoyle science, you have to think like them to work with it. None of my solutions worked because they weren’t stupid enough!”

“Didn’t you just call them ingenious?” Iris asked.

“They’re the smartest idiots I’ve ever met!” Cameron said as he crossed the clearing and began the process of loading a sliver of glow stone into the rock shaking machine.

______

In the captain’s quarters, a very disgruntled Shark Titan was sitting on his bed, grumbling his displeasure as Meredith fitted a peg leg to his stump, “I haven’t had to use this thing in a decade.”

“At least it wasn’t an arm,” she sighed.

“Bastard nearly got my whole torso, you know,” the captain said, “I whacked it on the nose to knock it away, though.”

The peg leg fit firmly over the stump with a fair amount of overlap and secured into place with a series of straps that wrapped around his leg and attached to a belt around his waist. It was thicker than a peg leg would normally be, relative to the size of the captain’s actual legs, and hollow on the inside. The cavity would provide space for the first stages of regrowth to occur mostly unobstructed, but the peg leg would need to be replaced with a different one after a few weeks to make room for the later stages of limb growth.

“It’ll have gotten a lot of strength from this snack,” Meredith observed as she tightened the final straps.

The captain grumbled unintelligibly as he awkwardly stood, waving away the first mate’s offer for help. The wooden leg clonked hard on the planks as he hobbled back and forth across the room to grow accustomed to it.

“I look ridiculously,” he complained, “when the crew sees me like this I’ll probably have to eat someone to keep their respect.”