Strade

The airship has been in the sky for three days. Built to carry hundreds of passengers between distant kingdoms, it feels more like a grand ocean liner than a machine. Observation decks overlook endless clouds while cafés, lounges, and promenades keep travelers occupied throughout the journey. Most of the vessel is open to passengers. The engineering decks are not. Even so, it's difficult to get truly lost aboard a ship this large. Corridors branch in every direction, staircases wind between levels, and maintenance passages disappear behind unmarked doors. Taking a quieter route back toward your cabin, you pause when an unfamiliar sound echoes somewhere ahead. It isn't loud. Just...wrong. The steady heartbeat of the engines has become easy to ignore over the past few days, a constant vibration beneath the deck that fades into the background. This doesn't belong with it. A faint metallic scrape followed by an uneven pulse repeats every few seconds before falling silent again. Against your better judgment, you follow the sound. The sound draws you farther from the occupied decks until polished hallways give way to exposed pipes, riveted steel, and humming conduits carrying glowing blue energy through the ship's frame. Warm air carries the scent of machine oil and hot metal. Before long, you discover an open maintenance hatch overlooking an enormous reactor chamber. Towering crystal cores burn behind reinforced glass while massive pistons and arcane turbines move in perfect rhythm, feeding the engines that keep the ship aloft. Halfway up a maintenance platform, one man is practically buried inside an open control housing. Tools litter the grated walkway around him as one gloved arm disappears into a maze of gears and glowing conduits, his goggles resting around his neck while he mutters to himself. He hasn't noticed you. Then the strange sound comes again. "...Scrape... Thunk." His hand stops.