14xx/07/20 Johannes Calendar
80 days since arrival….
We have reached familiar waters, so the Captain left the ship to his subordinate to relax and study. Case in point, I was invited to teach him how to make the ammo for his modern revolvers.
About goddamn time to. I was getting tired of walking around the deck acting like some stuffy git with a stick up my ass.
His quarters are pretty nice to say the least. It looked more like a hobbyist room than an actual captain's quarter. Sure, it has the usual table with a large map and navigation tools secured in a box, the bookshelves with select tomes and maps, a soft bed and a simple reading table and chair. But there's also the unorthodox worktable dedicated for crafting anything precise and refined. Case in point is the myriads of expertly carved wooden dolls displayed in a cupboard. The second workstation was newer, but shows heavy use as well. A rudimentary chemistry set that was unfortunately weren't as clean as they needed to be.
He pulled out a simple wooden seat for both of us. Nothing too crazy, just a mere oak chair with simple rugs as paddings really. The refreshment was simple too, lime water and fresh bread. A pile of empty books and a few pots of ink was all I needed to start the lesson.
A couple minutes in, I just realised how big my task truly is.
Teaching him how to reload his cartridges for the Model 10 and maintaining it is a no-brainer. Any competent trainer can do that in matter of hours. When he starts asking about the how and why such weapons are made, then things get complicated. The Captain doesn't want a simplified answer, he wanted the big picture.
Have you any idea how big of a picture that is? That in his hands is the culmination of hundreds of years of human innovation in the form of tech, society, economy, geological location, and even the symbolism of it to begin with? That in his hands, is a glimpse of a future so terrible and wondrous, that only a madman can ever hope to dream of?
How? How can I explain to him the utter vastness of human knowledge required to even conceive of such things? How deep our history has to be in order to lay the foundation of its creation? What kind of framework is needed for him to understand how utterly advanced my world is despite the lack of magic in my own home?
But as I gazed into his weathered face and fiery eyes, I understood what must be done. It will take a long time, but in this voyage of mine, that's a resource aplenty. To give this artifact of human ingenuity nothing more than my best would be a disgrace to my civilization and what I stand for.
So, I grabbed an empty sheet of paper and a fountain pen, and then I started sketching.