CH175 Toy airship bombardment
As more of the snow melted, Merumeru along with one of the sailor dolls kept doing test flights.
Alex used [possess doll] to help the slime girl pilot the toy airship. Together they flew along the frozen region, pushing further away from the floating island and coming back, seeing how well the ship was handling the icing problem. After a few days it looked like they could confidently make it to the forest, and then to the swamp past it.
Some time later, the crafters from Zeke and Trudy’s families surprised Alex by pulling off what looked to be impossible. They scrounged enough materials from the things along the island to get the 2nd toy airship assembled.
“The second one is good enough to fly.” Zeke pointed to the freshly finished toy airship.
“Now you and Merumeru can deliver bugs together.” Fufi sounded excited. “I’ll fly along too.”
“How did you pull this off?” Alex asked.
“Nothing special.” Zeke explained. “We’ve been eating food from cans and other weird packages all winter, so the small forge my uncle set up could melt it down. It is very wasteful to package everything in metal. So we made sure to salvage all of the cans. There is a lot of other odd stuff that is left over from the otherworldly food, but we’ll think of something that it can be used for eventually.”
“I normally would just throw stuff out.” Alex considered. “There is a burn barrel out back. So some stuff I’d just do that for, but normally we pay someone to come and take stuff away. Anyway I’m going to have to make a bigger doll if we want to go out with two of these toy ships. Ariel would be a good person to captain one but she’s busy fighting demons right now, probably.”
After thanking the nearly-turned-into-a-maid man, Alex met up with Merumeru on the airship landing to do the mosquito bombing mission that they had been planning.
“Meru!” Merumeru sported a new aviator outfit Alex made for her. She helped make the goggles. The goggles didn’t do anything, but they completed the airship pilot look nicely.
“Are you ready to do this for real this time?” Alex asked the slime girl.
“Ruuu!” Merumeru excitedly agreed.
In a now-becoming-less-rare moment professor copperpot decided to keep an eye on his mosquito collection to make sure they made it onto the airship okay. He was even wearing a plumber outfit.
“We’ll see you there at the swamp?” Alex went inside the castle, found a warm chair to sit in. But not before doing a double take to make sure that the reclusive gnome wasn’t a hallucination.
“Yes,” The gnome nodded. “I have to make sure that this actually works. And it is not like I haven’t stayed there before. It’ll just be like going back to my old lab.”
In sailor doll form, Alex headed up to the toy airship and was picked up by Merumeru. The slime girl used her jumpy boots to hop into the ship.
Alex, being a bit small in this form, let Merumeru set up the fresh, cutely decorated candle. She lit it and then went to wind the key that would get the clockwork mechanisms spinning up.
Merumeru and Alex checked the cargo tank, it was filled with some water that had larva in it, and the upper part had a wet towel with the adult bugs stored in it. Everything looked to be in order.
“Meru!” Called out when they had pulled up all the lines that kept them tethered to the airship landing.
“Looks like we are starting to drift in the wind.” Alex watched the ship drift away from the castle. “Want to engage the propellers?”
“Ru!” Merumeru saluted then pulled the lever to put the propellers into gear.
The propellers let out a bzzzt noise when they started rotating. The ship lurched forward taking off at a brisk rate through the mist. Shortly after the ship headed past the trees and they completely lost visibility. Everything was cold and white. They had traveled over the edge of the floating island and into the mist.
“Island cleared.” Alex looked at some gauges. “We still have an air speed reading so it looks like there isn’t too much of an icing problem yet.”
“Meru!” The slime girl announced. She lowered the stick that controlled the ailerons to lower their altitude and get out of the extra cold weather that was going to come up on them as soon as they exited the mist barrier.
Being a mostly-wooden doll, Alex didn’t feel anything, but the dive made her sailor clothing float up a bit.
“Mee!” Merumeru pulled up on the stick when they made it out of the clouds and were flying over the frozen wasteland.
Alex looked around to see where they were in regards to the temple of catalina but they were far enough away. To get their bearings, she instead looked to a gyro set up in the cockpit that had a compass mounted in the dash behind it.
“Looks like we are headed southwest.” The small sailor doll complemented the slime girl. “Good job Merumeru for not getting turned around in the clouds.”
Fufi flew up beside them when they came out a few moments later. “This way. The currents are better to follow me.”
“Ru!” Merumeru heard the flamingo’s loud squawk and followed her.
Fufi flapped ahead and led the way. They found a nice tail wind and after a smooth, but cold flight made it out of the ice biome and into the mountains growing trees, steadily headed southwest.
Some signs of trees waking up showed themselves from above. The mostly brown floor of trees had some bright greens in spots. There still were some patches of snow because they were at a high altitude and evergreen trees kept their needles through winter but the slow change looked like a landscape waking up after sleeping for the winter.
“It looks like the hull is icing up.” Alex pointed at the pressure gauge which was reading zero. It only did that when the pitot tube was covered in ice, blocking it. “We’ll have to fly lower in warmer air.”
“Meru.” Merumeru lowered the stick again, flying only a few hundred feet off the ground.
“That is probably as low as we should go.” Alex looked at the window, the trees were much closer now. “If we go any lower we’ll risk hitting a tree.”
Hours passed and the group traveled southwest, altitude lowering along the way. When they got to the swamp area the pressure gauge started reading accurately again, allowing them to get an idea about what speed they traveled at. The trees faded to brown swamp grass, rocks sticking out of the water and mud, lots of mud.
Approaching an extra boggy part of the swap they enacted the silly procedure that Merumeru really wanted to roleplay when dropping the package.
“Bobadeer to pilot, ready to deploy payload.” Alex spoke the rehearsed script.
“Meru meru me!” Merumeru pulled a lever that disengaged the fly wheel, slowing the toy airship down. She let out some of the air and dropped the altitude to just barely over the water.
“Bombs away!” Alex turned a wheel at the back of the cockpit that caused the double doors at the bottom of the ship to open and pour out the larva-filed water and let loose the wet cloth that had the adult mosquitos in it.
The water splashed into the muck, and the wet cloth did likewise shortly after. Being a little doll, she wasn’t sure but she thought she caught sight of some of those little menaces fluttering around in the air from where they buzzed out of the cloth after it unfurled.
“Bombs deployed, target struck successfully.” Alex felt a little silly playing the roll, but Merumeru chuckled happily.
“Meru!” The slime girl cheered.
“Bomb bay doors closing.” Alex turned the crank and the double doors slowly closed.
Merumeru put the propellers back into gear and the ship ascended enough to not be dangerously close to the ground, following a flamingo, leading them to the grotto base where they planned to park the airship and use it to go further out later.
Using her jumpy boots, Merumeru hopped down from the cockpit and picked a good spot to melt a loop into the wall of the grotto. Alex threw her a line and she tied it to her newly created anchor point. After that, the sailor doll extinguished the candle, then slid down the line to join the slime girl.
Fufi joined them and after getting Merumeru changed back into her plumber outfit, the trio took the portal pipe to the pipe nexus at Bob and Martha’s farm. When they emerged there still was some snow in shaded places but it largely had melted.
Merumeru’s attention shot to one of the portal pipes. She pointed at the one that went to the river island in the Jass kingdom. She dashed towards it and used her jumpy boots to hop in.
“Merumeru, no, we don’t need to go back to the kingdom, there still might be demons there.” Alex tried to sound stern, but in a doll form smaller than Merumeru, it didn’t have much effect.
But the slime girl didn’t vanish into the pipe. She looked frustrated, hopped up and down on the dirt in the bottom of the pipe with no luck.
“What?” Alex took a moment to try to figure out what was upsetting the slime girl. “It looks like that pipe is not working?”
Merumeru sat on the corner of the pipe and nodded. She had a frown on her face. “Ruuuuu.”
“I didn’t think that these things could break.” Alex considered. “Hopefully Aqua knows something about what happened. It is really close to where the nereids hang out in the river.”
“Me or my cousin can go take a look too.” Fufi added. “It is on the edge of the kingdom’s borders so we won’t be barred from flying around there.”
Bob and Martha had left the cave in the Luna grotto and were busy getting their farm ready. Alex, being a tiny doll right now figured it would be a little rude to not show up in person and speak to them with a proxy doll.
The trio took the portal pipe back to the sky island where Alex dismissed her possession of the doll and woke up in the chair she had been reclining in for the day. She felt a bit stiff and had to get up and stretch.
“I don’t know if I am ever going to get used to that.” Alex commented to the empty room. “At least it isn’t as bad as when I had to stay in the bathysphere to deal with the people in the kingdom. Waking up in that thing was a little weird.”
After walking down a couple flights of stairs the magical girl found Fufi and Merumeru. They regrouped and headed to meet with Aqua and Professor Copperpot in his damp compound.
“Hello?” Alex knocked on the door.
Aqua came to answer the door. “Come in, we were just talking about next steps.”
“We just got back.” Alex walked through the door, followed by a slime girl and a flamingo. “Hopefully we successfully introduced mosquitoes to this world.”
Professor Copperpot was mucking with some experiment in the back. “Excelent. I should go get changed and prepare to head back to the swamp.”
Aqua already wore her plumber outfit. “Yes, it is important that this plague spreads as fast as possible. So the next step is to spread those insects. To do that, we need more of them as fast as possible.”
The gnome went to a room and talked while changing. “We need infected pigs too. The goal here is for the plague to spread from the swamp to the coast. Then the carrier species will roam into neighboring lands. For this to spread exponentially, the virus, the insects and the swine will have to expand across borders without anyone noticing. To do that we can’t have a shortage of any of the three.”
“I’m surprised that you are so eager to travel.” Fufi commented. “You are fairly safe here.”
The gnome snorted. “I want to get back at the demons more than staying safe. Besides, Aqua found out some disturbing information recently.”
“What’s that?” Alex glanced at the room where the old gnome was changing.
“Underwater earthquakes.” Aqua seriously intoned. “When the their 4 demon made a fighting retreat from the angel and your overly moody friend it flooded a bunch of gnomish bunkers built below the ocean floor. Our gnomish friend couldn’t tell us that is where a settlement existed that was actually still occupied but my cousins figured it out. A bunch of them made their way to the surface in the archipelago. Shortly after there was a tsunami, add to the fact that it is only a matter of time that demons are going to try to counter attack because of the thousands of humans relocated there and it could be a perfect storm.”