[EotB] 061. Airship (Patreon)

14 years, 6 months, 6 days before Romance Dawn (1524.10.30)

Hancock wasn’t a local, but after so long on Sabaody, she had no trouble finding her way to Grove 59. It actually wasn’t far from where she’d first set foot on the archipelago, coming off the Bent Cutter.

Grove 59 wasn’t a shipyard like all the others, however.

The half-dozen airships moored to the massive trunk of the mangrove tree made that difference immediately obvious.

That wasn’t to say that the airships themselves were actually all that large, though. The buoyancy of the Yarukiman bubbles allowed for their envelopes to remain at a reasonable size – still large, compared to the cargo space hanging under its belly, but nothing like the gigantic dirigibles of Earth, like the Hindenburg.

What wasn’t any different from Sabaody’s other shipyards was that, no matter the hour, crowds of dockworkers and technicians hurried back and forth all over the place, constantly busy with one thing or another: maintenance, repairs, loading, unloading... Movement never stopped.

There were rather more armed guards than at any of the more public shipyards and piers Hancock had visited, though.

From far above, clinging to the trunk of the mangrove tree, Hancock watched all of them, tracking their patrols. Hiding so far up, the wind tugged persistently at her body, trying to pull her off her perch, and sent the hem of her cloak snapping around her legs, its off-white fabric camouflaging her against the white stripes of the tree. The suitcase containing all her worldly possessions hung behind her under the cloak, entangled in her hair. It made her look like a hunchback, but it kept her hands free.

Salome, who could crawl along the nearly vertical surface unimpeded, also peered at the goings-on below, her neck stretched out far enough that Hancock almost expected her to fall any second.

“SssSssSssss?”

“No, look, he’s over there.” Her hands occupied, she used a strand of hair to point toward the distant figure of the foreman, half-hidden behind a warehouse’s corner, where he stood speaking with a group of workers. “Not sure what he’s doing exactly, but we’re still on schedule.”

“Sss.”

Indeed, it was only minutes later that the flow of crates into the blimp’s cargo hold trickled to a stop, and its ramp retracted and closed. The grappling hook tethering the airship to its mooring point on the mangrove tree snapped free, and its chain reeled it back.

Then, a steel iris cranked shut over the gaping aperture at the top of the envelope, through which the Yarukiman bubbles produced by the mangroves inside the airship had until then been able to escape. Slowly, the trapped bubbles filled the envelope, and when enough had accumulated to offset the weight of the massive vehicle, it started to float.

“All right,” Hancock said as the top of the airship rose closer to their position. “Ready?”

“SsSSSsssssS...”

Hancock chuckled. “Well, far be it from me to tell you how to feel about your powers, but do you have any idea how many humans would love to fly?”

“Ssssss!”

“Sure, sure.”

Even as they bantered, Hancock kept her gaze trained below, judging distances and trajectories and relative velocities and how likely the dockworkers on the ground were likely to see them move. Boarding the airship shouldn’t take long – seconds, at most – but during some of those seconds, they would be quite exposed.

“All right, now!”

Without further hesitation, Hancock kicked off the cliff-like trunk behind her. Salome did the same a fraction of a second before her, such that, as Hancock fell, she reached up and hooked a hand around the snake’s sinuous neck. Salome’s wings snapped open and she settled into a slow downward glide that brought the two of them ever closer to the rising dirigible.

“SsSSsSSsSSSS!”

“Hey, now. Do you know how many years I carried you around my neck? I never complained about your weight, did I?”

“SsSSsssSsss, ssSsSSsssss.”

“Yes, well... I know you’re tired of hearing me blabber on about it, but I’d be remiss not to suggest you change your size with Life Return. It’d be easier to carry me, if you did that, wouldn’t it? In fact, push that far enough and we wouldn’t need to worry about finding transport at all. You could just fly me around the world.”

“Ssss!”

The closer they got to the top of the airship without an alarm being raised, the more Hancock relaxed, until the bulk of the envelope swallowed the entire world below them, and there was no more chance of anyone spotting them from the ground.

When she was a couple of meters above the envelope, she let go of Salome and dropped, rolling to absorb the impact. Salome alighted with considerably more grace next to her, and folded her wings.

The surface of the dirigible was crisscrossed by a plethora of taut ropes stretched over its length, presumably so the crew could climb them like a ladder to perform repairs mid-flight, if it ever proved necessary. The curve of the envelope beneath her was fairly gentle, but it still didn’t inspire much confidence in Hancock, so she stayed prone and didn’t hesitate to grab onto one of the ropes, just in case.

It would be embarrassing to fall off now.

It would be deadly to fall off later, once they were over the sea.

“I’m almost surprised how smoothly that went,” she said, her words almost stolen from her mouth by a violent gust of wind that whipped the hood of her cloak off her head.

“SssSsssSSssss.”

“Yes. Let neither of us jinx it now.”

The airship continued to rise for a short while. It was still well short of the impossibly tall canopy of Sabaody’s mangroves when the iris cracked open again – just enough that Hancock caught a few small bubbles escaping, and just enough to gradually settle at a stable altitude.

With a whir of engines, the airship’s propellers kicked into life, and with ponderous slowness, it spun around toward the open sea, then set off, at first only seeming to inch forward, but then picking up to a decent speed as inertia built up.

Hancock had seen and done many impossible things since she arrived in this world, such that it was a lot harder to surprise or amaze her than it had ever been as a standard earthling. She could move faster than the untrained eye could track. She had walked through the inferno of a burning city. She had fought enormous beasts in Maiden Island’s jungles. She had seen a dozen different magnificent sights, prowling the Grand Line with the Kuja Pirates.

But damn if it wasn’t incredibly cool to ride on top of a flying airship.

An exhilarated smile on her face and a childish giggle threatening to burst out of her chest, Hancock watched Sabaody grow more and more distant on one side, while on the other, the towering shadow of the Red Line crept ever closer, blurred by distance yet still visible even from so many kilometers away.

Hancock wasn’t surprised by the blimp’s itinerary. The thing couldn’t fly high enough to crest the Red Line, of course, but it would still have to stay close to it. It wasn’t like an Eternal Pose could point to a South Blue island, after all, so rigidly following the Red Line was the most reliable way to reach its destination.

But then, neither could it stray too close. The Grand Line’s weather was violent and unpredictable. It would only take one unlucky storm to dash the aircraft against the cliff.

The trip was not without risk.

Hancock wasn’t too worried, though. The entire business model rested on its reliability. She trusted the airship’s crew to handle any hiccups along the way.

♦♦♦

The greatest such hiccup was a brief squall that suddenly swept in soon after night fell. It was fairly mild as far as weather went, especially for the Grand Line, but the winds and lashing rains still made for a rather uncomfortable few hours.

Salome spent those hours tightly wrapped around Hancock’s body, under her cloak, lest the wind carry her away, while Hancock herself made sure to tangle her hand in one of the ropes covering the blimp’s envelope.

She didn’t expect her grip to fail because of a bit of wind, but... just in case.

The propellers were powerful enough to pull away from the storm, until the airship crossed the into the Calm Belt.

The boundary separating it from the Grand Line may not have been tangible or visible, but the transition was still immediately obvious. From one minute to the next, the sky cleared, and the wind calmed drastically. The latter didn’t fade entirely, since the airship itself still moved at considerable speed, but it definitely got more pleasant.

And the airship’s speed certainly was considerable, to have reached the Calm Belt from Sabaody in only a handful of hours.

In a race, this blimp would have left a seaborne ship in the dust.

With the Calm Belt’s more clement weather, Hancock and Salome had more leisure to appreciate the scenery. While there wasn’t much to actually see with empty ocean spreading to the horizon in every direction and not a single island in sight, their high vantage point did allow them to glimpse the absolutely titanic shadow of a sea king lurking just below the mirror-smooth surface.

Not even a scrap of the actual creature peeked out into direct view – not a toe, not a tendril, not even a fin ominously cutting through the water – but it was still quite an experience to see even the mere shadow of something of such unthinkable size just... pass by.

Not actually seeing the creature made it perhaps more striking. It let the imagination run wild.

But despite these short bursts of excitement, the Calm Belt, as its name suggested, was only a thin geographical strip, and without any obstacles to get in its way, the airship took only a short while to cross it from end to end.

The transition this time wasn’t as obvious as the one from the Grand Line to the Calm Belt, but suddenly, there was still something indefinably different... The lack of an intangible weight Hancock had felt ever since she was born, such that she only noticed its presence now that it was gone.

The air just felt... lighter, maybe, in some strange fashion.

Hopefully, that was a good omen for her adventures in the Blues.