Maiden Voyage of the ASJ Apexis

There it was, at long last, our first ship completed. I know people doubted my reasons for building it. Like, yeah, I know we have rifts that transport us to planets in an instant, but transport is only one thing a ship can be used for. One thing is defense. Pirates did not find us yet, but when they do, having a ship throwing arcane fire at them will be invaluable. Also, transport. Yes, I know what I just said, but our orders can sometimes be pretty big, and other than using half of my porters to push a giant box, we can now use the ship to move the whole thing more easily. Sure, it costs quite a bit, but I figure the opportunities it gives us outweigh the costs. For the past few weeks, we’ve been building the ship and preparing everything it needed.

A Titanic Task

Who says only Titans can move and shape lands? Well, people who don’t know much, or who are dogmatically following some silly beliefs. For your information, ethereals can move lands. As I learned some time ago, they sometimes locate worlds shattered by the Burning Legion (or Old Gods, or other nasties – yes, there are more) and take whole chunks of those worlds, snap some magic technology to them and relocate those chunks elsewhere for easy harvest by their ethereal and grav crews. A lot of the minerals or items you may have purchased or otherwise acquired from ethereals come from these. So when I learned about an ethereal in deep debt who was willing to part with his land-moving devices, I was quick to jump on the occasion.

Back in my element

For the longest time, I’ve been stuck on this groundling world with no way out, nor any way to meet more of my kind. All I had were these unfamiliar, strange people and too often I had to even pretend I’m something different. And now I’m in luck, because Krasha managed to open a portal to another world, one more familiar to me. I mean, it was just gnomes at first, and I don’t really like them (who does?) but it was the Gnadra Confederacy. Finally, I was back in a familiar territory. I would run back to my homeworld using this opportunity but I actually managed to get a well-paying job here, with the opportunity to use the knowledge that would have been useless on Wawhira, but to my present employer it’s gold. I’m back out of “miraculous trader” and into “interstellar guide”!

Captain’s Log, Space Date 2456915

Character: Captain Matus T. Manks of the Venture, boldly going where no gnome has gone before
The day began very usually. We read through the “nightly” shift’s mining reports and prepared for our work the following day. I must say living on a world tidally-locked to its sun can wreck one’s sense of time quite well. This red dwarf is stuck in eternal sunset and no matter when you wake up or when you go to sleep, you will always see the same amount of light, and our bodies are set to identify how tired they are by the amount of light in the environment. After spending a month on the duty of protecting the grav miners here, I find myself lying awake in bed for the whole time designated as “night” on our timetables, and then feeling completely tired for the whole “day”. But that was by far the least odd thing that happened to me yesterday.