Rowan led me to a hangar, where a number of high tech looking vehicles were parked. "The engineer wanted to move the shuttle, and told me to use this to find it." He stopped at parking spot #12C, which was empty except for a small wooden square, and gave me a hopeful look.
“It’s a teleporter,” I explained. “It’ll take you right to where they moved it. Just poke it, and you'll arrive in the right spot. Here, I'll show you."
I arrived in a completely different area, fortunately one that had sunshine. A handful of men and two women stood on a black tarmac painted up like a helipad, and were surrounding a vehicle that looked like a giant steel egg on its side, one of those fancy ones with all the decor. They had taken panels off one section and were peering curiously inside, taking pictures and making notes and chatting excitedly.
Rowan arrived directly behind me. I jumped to one side to avoid being landed on. “Ta da!” I exclaimed cheerfully, as he looked wildly around.
That attracted the attention of the mechanics. “How did you get here?” one asked.
“Another one came down here? We said not to try!” exclaimed a second.
“Mistress Wilrhyn lives here, and has offered her assistance.” Rowan explained, shading his eyes from the sun. “Why are you taking it apart?”
“To see what kind of alterations we can make.”
“It’s wild in there! I’ve never seen connectors like this before. And do you know what this is?”
“No,” he didn’t even bother looking at what the man was pointing at. “Have you found a translation for the manual?”
“ImAMess is working on it.”
Another of the mechanics, sitting on the ground and surrounded by laptops, books and tablets, sighed morosely. “It’s not Klingon,” he said sadly. “But I think this MIGHT be a schematic for that panel.”
This brought everyone over to look at the screen, and I took the opportunity to take a closer look at the ship while they chattered excitedly. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It certainly didn’t look elfmade. It didn’t even feel quite human made, but what did I know about spacecraft?
I climbed up the open gangway and looked around. It looked like any standard sci-fi movie type spacecraft, all hard surfaces and low lighting, save for a thick white woven blanket, carelessly tossed over a long, padded bench built into one wall.
I picked it up, staring at the row of different sized stars woven along one edge. Now this was elfmade. I’d had one like it, but the stars had been different colors.
Sitting on the bench, I rubbed my fingers over one of the stars. My vision blurred, or perhaps cleared, and for a moment, I could see the color. A soft blue.
“Did you understand anything they were saying?”
I jumped. Rowan was standing in the doorway. Hatchway?
“It was all too technical for me, except they can’t get much higher than 4000 meters, which has always been the case for everyone. It’d be a really big deal if they could, you know.”
“So they tell me.” He climbed into the shuttle and sat down in one of the chairs by the big control panel and began pushing buttons.
I moved to see what he was doing, which was typing on a keyboard with painstaking slowness. The alphabet wasn’t one I had ever seen before. “What language is that?”
“Warrit.”
“Huh. I’ve never heard of it.”
“Be grateful. They are dangerous.”
I glanced around, noticing the labels on the various panels were in the same alphabet. “Did you steal this thing?” I teased.
He briefly paused in his typing, but didn’t say anything. That was enough of an answer for me.
“You didn’t!”
“It would be more accurate to call it a war prize.”
I sat down in the other chair, waiting for him to finish his task. “You’re at war?” I asked, as the screen went blank.
“No. Not yet. I cannot tell you much, the information is very confidential. They do not seem to know we exist, and while we would like to keep it that way, we must prepare ourselves for our eventual discovery by them.”
“But you’ve stolen their space ship! They’re going to miss it.”
“The Panatian Military - let's say they salvaged a shipwreck. They wanted to use it to explore these new worlds we don’t have access to, and felt that having an obvious, peaceful mission would get us further.”
“Boldly going where no elf has gone before?" I teased.
He eyeballed me for probably the third time that day. “The vessel’s records reported sightings of a people that sounded very much like Lyran elves at specific coordinates. We are being bold in our efforts, but there should be elves at our destination.”
There was a loud beep, and he reached over and flipped a switch on the crowded panel. A scratchy voice came through the speaker. “Alpinia? It's about time!”
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