Following the big tree guy inside, his hut thing smells so good. I think he also just smells really good too. I think he’s a he? I think he might be Don Tom, and Don Tom is a he, so I’m going with it. He smells like… a puapol! Yes, he smells exactly how puapols taste. I wonder if he grows them? Or if he tastes like one? Maybe he drops branches sometimes? Would this all be too weird to ask him?

“Sit, make yourselves comfortable,” he gestures at some stools and some suspended sheet things almost exactly like what Doktur had in his office, but smaller.

Igby bounces past me and plops into a sheet thing. I walk over and sit in one next to his. Tree man sits on a stool, where he can see us both.

"So as you may have gathered, I’m Don Tom,” he begins (I was right!), “you two are?”

“Igby!” says Igby, “and she’s Hana.”

“Ok Igby, Hana,” Don Tom says, “what kind of boat do you need?”

Before I can finish a single thought, Igby launches right in at whirlwind speed.

“It’s for her! She needs one with a nice big platform and good, sturdy storage compartments. She’s traveling across the universe, so she needs to have room for carrying whatever she can find. Ooh, and something nice to sleep on in case there’s nowhere to sleep. If you can paint it, you should make it purple, blue and black, for camouflage in the aether, so big monsters are less likely to wreck it.”

Don Tom raises a flowery eyebrow. How much thought did Igby put into that response?

“What? I was just thinking of what I’d want in a boat, figured you’d probably want one at least that cool,” Igby shrugged.

Don Tom looks at me now. I think he’s about to say something, but wait! I just remembered something!

“Oh!” I spring out of the sheet thing, “Chris told me to give you this. You know him, right?”

I walk up and hand him the envelope. Don Tom’s flowery eyes get a little bigger, and he takes it in his long, branchy arm. He opens it up, and reads the letter inside with a silent smile.

“Yes, I remember. Chris and Flo. You know, they traveled quite a bit as well,” he says with a small smile.

“Wait, really?!” I jump up, “Why would they stop?”

Come to think of it, they both seemed pretty knowledgeable on different planets in the universe. Chris told us kids stories about a pair of young, traveling botanists, who went to hundreds of worlds collecting information on all kinds of plants. Was that them the whole time?

Don Tom smiles, “They just couldn’t keep up with themselves anymore. So they retired to a small, peaceful planet far out of the way where they’d raise children together.”

“Wow, I hope I don’t get old.”

Don Tom chuckles, and gets up from his stool and begins walking towards another door on the other side of the room, labeled “WORKSHOP”. Igby and I both follow.

“Now then, if you have nothing to add on to Igby’s boat ideas, let’s get started. I can certainly see what I can do as far as painting goes, although that’s not my specialty.”

“Alright!” Igby and I both say at the same time, and we follow Don Tom into the workshop.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

~~~

Don Tom has been working on the boat for some hours now. Apparently it usually takes longer, but I guess he has a lot of parts lying around that work well. He said he only needed to make a couple small changes to a blueprint he already had, and that he could just figure it out as he goes. Igby’s pretty much been following him around the whole time, asking questions. I’ve just found a nice, comfy corner to relax in. I think he might’ve specifically prepared this corner of the workshop for people to chill in while he works, because this nice, soft orange rug and matching pillows feel slightly out of place among all the saws and hammers and stuff. It’s such a good thing that one of the first things I packed was a big bag of nuts, because times like these call for munching.

Finally, after a small nap on my part, Don Tom makes his announcement.

“Alright, she’s all done!” he says, “just need to get the bubble on her.”

I lift my head to look, and wow. It’s so big and colorful! There is absolutely no recognizable pattern to the black, blue, and purple shapes on it- there’s straight lines, random squiggles, perfect circles… I can’t even really process it. But it’s not harsh on the eyes at all, in fact you almost don’t even notice it until you look at it.

Getting up to look closer, the actual boat is shaped like a big bowl with a flat platform over the top. In the center is a big pole, and at the very top is a big slab of wood perpendicular to the platform with two long, white ropes hanging down from it.

Suddenly, from a trap door on the other side of the boat that I’m only now noticing, Igby’s head pops out.

“Don’t just stand all the way over there, come check it out!” he says before popping right back inside.

I jump and climb up onto the platform and walk over to the trap door, climbing down the latter inside. It’s not quite tall enough to stand all the way up, but looking around, there’s so much space! There’s some big chests to my left, and to my right are shelves that slide open and closed. Next to the chests on my left is a big, round table that comes out of the wall, with three big orange sheets hanging from the ceiling surrounding it. I think they might be for sitting in? I hope they’re for sitting in. They’re attached to the ground with white ropes, presumably so they don’t swing around too much. Finally in the back are five long, hexagonal compartments with suspended orange sheets in them– three on top, two on the bottom. Igby is sitting in the bottom right one, looking at me.

“Well? Ya like it? We went with hexagonal prisms for the sleeping pods for optimal efficiency of space!” Igby says.

“This is so much better than I could’ve imagined!” I’m still pretty much in awe.

Igby hops out of the sleeping pod.

“Alright then!” he points a finger as high in the air as he can manage, given the low ceiling, “Let’s let Don Tom do the last step then!”

We exit the boat and jump onto the ground, where Don Tom is standing waiting for us.

“You kids ready?”

“Yes!” we both shout.

He pulls a thick cord, and on the other side of the workshop, the wall starts lifting, revealing a circular platform with a big, round hole in the middle.

“Now listen!” Don Tom begins, “I’m going to prepare the world tree bubble right there in the middle, and then I’m gonna run back here and all three of us are gonna push the boat into it. Got it?”

Igby and I nod.

“Alright!”

Don Tom moves briskly to the outside platform. I watch him dip his hands into a bowl, and then bring them to his mouth in a circle. When he blows into it, a giant purple bubble forms! When it’s about a third again bigger than the boat, he stops blowing and quickly comes back.

“And push!” he says.

The three of us push with all our combined might, and with a big shove, the boat falls off the platform and into the bubble.

“She’s all ready now!” says Don Tom, brushing his hands together, like they do on my planet when you’re done with a situation. I guess they do that here too!

Igby grabs me by both of my shoulders.

“Before you leave, can we take it for a test spin?”

He looks so excited, there’s literally no possible way I can refuse.

“Yeah, of course,” I say, “let’s go!”

Attached to the base of the boat is a long, white rope, which Don Tom grabs and hands to me.

“Just pull her up the world dock, and jump through the bubble onto the platform. Those ropes up on the platform control that big slab of wood, which is how you steer through aether currents and ride gravitational waves. Any questions?”

“Nope, I think that makes sense!” I nod.

“Ok. I’m gonna come see you off to make sure everything goes well.”

Igby and I nod.

The crowd on the ground level parts for us, with our big floating purple boat. We get all the way to the world dock, where I fell down here from. Now that I’m actually looking at it, I think I probably should’ve actually died when I fell. It’s a HUGE tree, with a spiral ramp going all the way up, and a platform at the very top. I guess since the boat is floating, it won’t take very much effort to just walk up there with it.

We finally get up to the top of the dock.

“So I just let go and jump on, right?” I ask, still holding the rope and standing at the edge of the dock.

Don Tom gives me a thumbs up (although I’m not sure if you can really call that a thumb. Tiny twig up?).

I nod and let go of the rope. I squat down and get ready to jump. Building momentum with my arms, I’m flying through the air, and then–

Pop.