"We should check the rest of the building," Fio said after a minute.
That snapped us out of admiring our find, Kyouya the first to nod agreement. "Yeah, let's take a walk around the perimeter. Damn, this quest just paid for itself ten times over!" he cheered, and all of us grinned back. Intact pre-collapse tech from Desrov? According to Fio the last piece that went on the market was years ago, and it sold for millions!
We did a quick sweep, finding the walls intact as far as we could tell. The other airplane had many of the skin panels removed in addition to the missing engine. The openings revealed a few nests of something buried in among the wiring. Several tool carts were parked nearby. Rolling out a drawer showed me a rack of sockets and bits, dull with a patina of dust and a few rust spots, but I'd seen worse in Dad's toolbox back home.
"Huh, the desert air is no joke. I'd hate to think what leaving this stuff out back in Belzerg would've done to it," Clemea mused as she poked a head up the rear cargo ramp and looked around, sword drawn. "More nests in here, and there's cables and who knows what inside."
"They must have been working on it right up to the last minute before the Destroyer showed up," I agreed. "No bodies though, think they got out on another one?"
"Maybe," she allowed, a pensive frown on her face. "This place gives me chills; I've been in actual tombs that were less creepy than this."
"It's so well preserved," Kyouya spoke up from the other side of the tail, where he'd been shining a light orb up into the empty engine bay. "That's why. Like the techs could just walk back in any minute after their lunch break and get right to work."
"Their bosses would have their asses about all the dirt," I joked. But he had a point, with everything still mostly closed up there wasn't even THAT much from outside either. A good sweeping and you'd almost be ready for business.
"Well, it's as safe here as anywhere outside a town's walls," Kyouya declared not long after. "Let's set up camp, in here is probably best. We'll want the fire outside of course."
"Thank Eris," Yunyun muttered from the other plane, where she'd finished sweeping its interior too. "Another night of jerky and I-I'd," she blushed and stuttered, realizing we'd heard her.
"No, you said it," I agreed. "Maybe set up by the wall between here and the other hangar? That and a bit of rearranging debris should keep the fire pretty sheltered."
Taking dear leader's distracted nod as our marching orders, Yunyun and I set out while he pondered the intact Dragonfly. I could see him stepping inside the cockpit door as we turned the corner.
The one nice thing about 20% humidity is it makes starting fires a snap, even without cheating with magic. It was early yet, still light out, so a fire wouldn't give much away as long as we were careful with the smoke.
"Is that…s-omething from your world?" Yunyun asked as I chopped jerky for stew with Shooting Star. After slicing up enough for dinner, I scooped up the meat and dumped it into the pot. At that I nearly added a bit of knuckle to dinner when my knife hand slipped, my head snapping around to where she was feeding the fire under the portable kettle.
"W-what makes you think…" I tried to dodge, but her softly glowing eyes pinned me like a bug on one of those creepy displays. Like she was looking right through to the back of my head.
"The Clan library has volumes on the Visitors," she replied unblinkingly. "People, mostly young men, with black hair and eyes. Possessing rare and powerful gifts, with strange customs and habits." Her voice had taken on a distant quality, as if she were reciting something from memory. Her stutter vanished at the same time. "No one knows where they come from, only that it is called Nihon and contains wonders unmatched. I didn't understand what that meant, but on seeing the Dragonfly, maybe now I do."
"Well, that rules me out. I'm about as powerful as a good sneeze!" I chuckled nervously, wiping off my scraped knuckle on a bit of rag. And just slightly creeped out.
She blinked again, coming back from her memory, and hurriedly broke eye contact. "Y-you knew exactly what that was, the s-second you saw the diagram. So did Kyouya." Turning back to the fire, which now crackled healthily, she whispered so I could barely hear. "I've seen s-something like this too. My village has a building like a smaller twin of this one, p-partly buried under a hill. Even the part inside we can reach looks the same. Even that desk in the corner. My Dad uses a desk just like it!" she hissed. "That can't be an accident!"
"No, I doubt it. We did have something sort of like the Dragonfly, but I don't know what to tell you. I don't know how it got here any more than you do."
Her shoulders slumped, and I felt like I'd just kicked a puppy. But what was I supposed to say? I didn't even know how I'd gotten here, nevermind some ancient bizjet.
The other three joined us then, carrying cups and spoons from our packs along with theirs. After distributing them to everyone, they sat opposite us looking either giddy or worried as the soup bubbled between us.
"You'll never believe this," Kyouya began. "I said this quest got paid for ten times over? Huge lie. It's more like fifty. That one near the door isn't just in one piece. It turns on."
"Bullshit," was the first word out of my mouth, followed by, "It's older than our grandparents. I've never even had a phone that lasted me more than five years, nevermind five generations."
"Come see, then." He replied smugly. "But that's not the best part. I ran the built-in diagnostic, and it came back mostly clean. All it needs is refueling and a clean out, and I think it'll fly."
I glanced at the girls on either side of him, and found both of them looking warily at each other. Neither spoke up as their hero continued "So I say we wheel it outside, fire up the engines, and take the easy route home! Land outside the capital and we'll be the heroes of the hour. And richer than dukes to boot."
That…was awfully tempting. Like something right out of a Final Fantasy game, find the amazing lost artifact and bring it home to fame, wealth, and glory. Cutscene plays, everybody levels up, new areas on the world map unlocked. Pretty much everything I ever wanted since I came to an actual game world.
"Ah, are you a pilot?" I asked, seeing a bit of a flaw in his plan.
"No, but they used a Playstation controller for the controls." Kyouya snorted "There's no way whoever flew it was a pilot either. I'll bet you can handle it just fine."
"Him?!" all three others complained.
"What, I hardly ever played games, and never touched a flight sim. But I'll bet Subaru here does all the time, and knows them backwards and forwards," 'Dear Leader' suggested while ladling himself some stew.
"Wwe could just strip i-it for parts and metal," Yunyun counter offered. "Aluminum is used in D-dragon Knight's armor. I-t's valuable. And the mechanical p-p-parts," she stuttered to a halt at Kyouya's growing frown, copying his ladling out a portion to cover her embarrassment.
"The other one, sure," Kyouya agreed, gesturing with his spoon. "The one that actually works? No, no way. But I tried to use my magic to power it up all the way and it wasn't nearly enough. And the quest is only for one Dragonfly, not two. We can divide the other one up any way we want. If you want to come back and salvage it in exchange for using your mana to refuel the working one, that's fine with me."
Yunyun choked on her soup, and I couldn't blame her. I'd listened to enough drunken debates between Dust and Taylor about armor to know the Dragon Knight stuff was as good as it got, both light and strong. Only adamantoise was better, and quality material like that COST. With it being a lot rarer than back home, at least several tons of pure aluminum was a small fortune.
"KYOUYA!" Clemea gasped in horror, "I was a merchant's daughter you know! There might not be that much aluminum in the whole kingdom! You're going to just give it away!?"
Fio smirked and leaned close to him. "Generosity suits a knight. And who else here has enough magic to make the other one fly? She won't be getting anything for free."
"Wwwwell, it's still a lot of money," her rival furiously backpedaled. "But a knight should give of his fortune to help those less gifted I guess," she mumbled, following suit.
"So, that's settled. Yunyun gets salvage rights on the broken one, and we take the good one home with us. If, that is, you can fly it out," Kyouya pointed his spoon at me now.
I need to be clear here with you kids. I was not, ever, some sort of master of flying games. Even my paper airplanes barely flew, and the closest I'd ever come to using a real one outside riding in it was beating Ace Combat Zero as a kid.
Kyouya's expectant gaze was like a weight pressing down on me, the girls flanking him staring challengingly, daring me to contradict their object of affection. Yunyun glanced up from her bowl, a pleading look in her strongly glowing eyes as ours met.
All I needed to say was 'No.' That I couldn't fly a strange, old airplane in who knew what condition. That it wasn't safe for me to try, and I might kill us all if I did. That we should just follow Yunyun's plan, bring back a salvage crew, and just be happy with a great reward for minimal risk. Just admit I wasn't up to the job, that's all.
"Well, it can't hurt to look."
I pretended not to see the betrayed disappointment on our wizard's face.
After dinner, and true to Kyouya's word, I found there really was a Playstation 1 controller mounted to the dash on a flexible arm in front of the pilot's chair. A lit display screen above it showed the results of its self check.
"I'll be damned," I breathed. "Must be made of Nintendium."
"Another rare metal? How much is it worth?" Clemea asked quizzically.
"It's...nevermind. Just a joke. But it does claim it's ok. Did you try the controls?" I asked Kyouya.
He shook his head sadly. "Yeah, but I don't have the magic to make it do much. The flaps on the wings moved a bit, but the fans didn't even twitch."
That was good news at least. I tried it myself while leaning out a sliding panel in the glass, and sure enough the control surfaces on the tail and wings moved when I pressed the right buttons. So far so good.
"I'll bet those fans have to move too, rotate from flat to up and down I mean. They made a grinding noise when I touched the shoulder buttons on the controller, but didn't do anything otherwise. Either stuck, in which case so are we, or…" I mused out loud. "Yunyun, can you give me a boost?"
She regarded me coldly, consideringly for a moment, but then turned and made her way to a fist sized clear crystal set inside the cockpit door. Eyes closed, she cupped both hands on it.
Immediately, the cockpit lights came up from a yellow glow to full strength. In the open cargo bay more strip lights along the floor and ceiling lit up as well, bathing the white painted metal and reclining seats inside in an artificial glow I hadn't realized I missed.
"Ok! Now we're getting somewhere!" Kyouya cheered while leaning over my shoulder, pointing out the window to the left fan pod. It still made some scary creaking and groaning noises, but it was also rotating from flat to up and down. Landing mode to flight. Looking the other way, I saw the right one following suit, even when I reversed the direction.
After several more cycles of this and the other controls, things started to smooth out but Fio started to get impatient.
"Looks like it works. Now what? Those blade things have to turn right? Like a reverse windmill?"
"Yeah, but we're not doing that in here. The wind would wreck everything, and those doors look frozen shut," I pointed out, nodding at the big sliding doors ahead of us.
"Leave that to me," Kyouya chuckled. "Shut it down for tonight, it's getting dark. First thing tomorrow? We take this thing for a spin."
I followed the shutdown instructions on the screen, and turned in the seat but Kyouya was already out the door and down on the floor talking excitedly with his cheerleaders.
Yunyun came over to the group and was in the middle of an impassioned plea as I walked up.
"...the Village does scouting flights with our familiars here sometimes. They don't always come back, the Demon King's air force does make patrols!"
"And I'll gladly risk that over having some mechanical problem happening two thousand meters or more up and dooming us all. At least we can kill demons." Kyouya disagreed. "No, we take it low and slow. We'll be harder to spot if something is in the air with us, and if anything breaks we should be able to land quickly. Leave the doors open and the cargo ramp down, too. If something does happen we need to have a good chance of getting out."
"But if we do meet them we're Onion Ducks!"
"We agreed to follow his lead, right?" I reminded her gently. I got a furious glare for my trouble, but she did drop it. Moving away from all of us to the desk she was talking about before, she began rifling through the drawers she'd forced open at some point.
"...heed my call! SWORD OF THE CHOSEN ONE!"
With that, a howling blast of golden magic blasted forth from Gram, scouring the concrete floor, the rusty hangar doors, and the top of several dozen meters of concrete pad past them away in a furious barrage of light.
The swordsman turned, eyeing the wingspan of our prize against the hole in the doors. "That should do it. Let's push her outside and see what she'll do!"
On flat, rotted out rubber tires, that was easier said than done. There was a lot of straining, and cursing, and one near miss with an engine pod that just barely cleared the edge of the hole after the nose wheel took a wrong turn at a bad moment. But before long, for the first time in decades the Dragonfly's glass stood gleaming in the mid morning sun after a quick wipe down with a spare shirt and Create Water.
"Ok. Now for the dangerous part. I'm going to bring everything to full power and start the engines. There's no point in anyone else being nearby when that happens," I tried to manfully declare with my fist to my chest, hoping that I didn't sound like a five year old instead.
With that, I stepped into the cockpit. Sensibly, everyone else scurried back and found something solid. Glad to know I wasn't the only one who thought this plan was bonkers. Kyouya was even putting his armor on, the jerk.
Muttering a brief prayer to whoever was listening, I pressed and held down the start button on the controller like the screen prompt told me.
At first not much happened. Just a wheezing gasp from the left pod, some flakes of rust and old paint falling away from inside. I was afraid we'd be walking home after all for a moment, but then the blades creaked past whatever was blocking them inside the shroud surrounding them and began to turn. Slowly, then faster and faster until they blurred into a silver disk. The right pod followed the same process, canceling out the vibration in the chair as it too began spinning up to speed.
Once that seemed finished, I checked the next bullet point on the screen.
"Use the triangle button to increase power. Ok, here goes…" The vibration came back double, along with a slippery feeling, like I was on a patch of ice as I heard the creak of weight coming off the landing gear. Adding a little more, the creaking stopped. So did the slippery feeling, replaced by a lightness in my belly and a slight drift to the right.
I was flying.
"HAHAHA! YES!" I crowed, tapping the left arrow button to stop the drift. Tapping up the arrow, the nose dropped slightly and a somewhat faster drift forward happened instead.
"Right! OK! Now turn…" I pressed the square button and the Dragonfly wheeled in place, nose now pointing to where my party had taken cover. I waved through the windshield at them, then hurriedly put both hands back on the controller after it started beeping angrily at me.
"And now the other way…" I breathed, repeating the process with the circle button to complete a 270 degree spin so the nose now pointed into the hangar with me still drifting in the same direction, just now facing backwards. Canceling that, I added in a little more power and climbed to about 20 meters.
From up here, I could see mostly inside the neighboring hangar that had collapsed completely, and the roof of one on the other side that was in better shape, but with the doors standing open and the inside empty.
Sensing movement down below, I saw everyone had left cover and was waving me back down. So I did, easing off power a little at a time with X until I heard the gear groan under weight again. With that, I shut everything down and leaned back in the seat. Sweat dripped from my nose and chin that I hadn't noticed until now, darkening my shirt as I wiped my face.
The cockpit door opened, and Kyouya piled in followed by everyone else.
"Fantastic! I would've never believed it if I hadn't seen it!" Fio gushed. "How fast can it go? What could you see? What..." she continued, rapid fire while leaning into the gap between the two seats. Clemea and Kyouya each took a shoulder and levered her back with wry smiles.
"She's right, that was amazing. Do you think it can make the capital?" Kyouya asked
"It does mostly fly itself, I just had to tell it what direction to go. Now will the engines keep running long enough to get us there?" I shrugged. "Dunno. I'd have to go back up and do a few laps of the perimeter I think, see if anything starts to overheat or something."
"Do it," he replied immediately. "Take an hour if you need it. It'll take us that much time to catalog everything else here. Once you're finished we'll head out."
I did just that, spending most of an hour making lazy circles of the airport at around 30-40 kph, reasoning that people survived car crashes at that speed all the time. Below me I could actually see the path the Destroyer took as it walked through. On either side the remaining buildings had mostly collapsed from neglect and weather, but it left a line of total destruction drawn ruler straight through the middle. Everything above the foundations was just gone.
Nothing horrible happened, but I did get a better feel for how much mana we were going to need. Definitely would want a top off from Yunyun after I landed to pick everyone up. Assuming she didn't refuse now that it was obvious we were really doing this.
Still, this was what adventuring was supposed to be! Braving dangers and hardships to secure a priceless treasure! Not slaying overgrown frogs or rabbits! Not doing body recovery!
Finally, I decided nothing was probably going to break and headed back to our pad. The other four were lined up waiting inside the doors as I settled down, packs at their feet with a few choice bits of salvage we could bring back since we had more room than our backpacks.
Once everyone was aboard and strapped in with our loot, I lifted off again and headed south.
As agreed, I kept our altitude at around treetop height and slow enough to hopefully survive a crash, but we still made good time. Being able to take a more or less straight line at the speed of a galloping horse did wonders even if the Dragonfly was capable of way more of either. Besides, if we'd gone much faster it would've been hard to keep up on the map. As it was, Kyouya was in the other seat marking off the landmarks we'd traveled along on foot almost as fast as we came on them.
I was just wondering if I'd missed a spot on the windshield, or if I'd hit some bugs, when Warn shrieked for a split second. I had a flashing impression of something purple and white just up and appearing in front of me in an explosion of shattering glass and screaming hate before it all plowed into my chest like a battering ram.
Somewhere, I heard hooting alarms as wind whipped through the cockpit.
An impression of weightlessness, my vision dimming around the edges.
Blood frothing from ruined lungs on my lips as I heard the screams of alarm start in back, as something came snarling through the cockpit door behind me.
Radiant heat from a Fireball singing my hair around the seat back.
The stony ground of a hillside right in front of me, just beyond the nose.
The control column, leading the way for the instrument panel, slammed into what was left of my ribs, spearing right through the seat back as it kept on going.
Blackness.