“Well, this was an interesting voyage, though a self-propelled barge isn’t the usual way to reach a new stopping point. Still, the Ameera is pulling together the remnants of her lost realm and, having been contacted, I am here at last.” Piper mused to himself as he piloted his oddly quiet barge through the dark night toward a sandy bank on an unoccupied segment of New Babbage’s coast.
Grounding the barge in the wet sand, Piper pulls a few levers and the controls and the motor and propellers tuck themselves away into various hidden compartments on the barge. “Ah. We had some good times, haven’t we old girl? But it’s time to tuck you away for now.”
Turning his hand a direction not normally acheivable by any variant of Homo Sapiens, Piper did … something that caused the barge to start folding itself in ways that would have hurt the eyes of anyone watching. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be anyone in sight that would have been harmed by the view. Once the process was done, Piper was holding something roughly the size of a small paper-bound book. Sighing, he tucked it into an inner pocket and walked away from the shore up to firmer ground. Seeing a cat shivering on the ground, he knelt down and, murmering soothing noises, stroked the cat for a few moments until its quaking quieted. Smiling at it he headed in toward the main areas of the city.
“Now where exactly is The Brass Bottle? Bianca said something about Babbage Square. I need to be there in time to set up for my show. I wonder if she has room for my Chai machine?”
Bianca sat upon the roof of the Brass Bottle, kicking her legs and rocking back and forth as if trying to cut the chilled air with her legs. Her mind whirled as she listened to Obadias and Akidami snap at one another in the room below, but her eyes where focused on a little leather tome she was holding. The book that she had discovered in the trunk “he who shall not be renamed” left behind upon his death, was a bible of ideas, concepts, and technological drawings regarding the desert home she had fled. Stories of bronze colossus buried in the oceans, electrical circuits and gas-lamp ideals that made her shiver despite the frost that was settling about her.
Her ears perked as she thought she heard someone someone in the alley below and looking over her glasses she almost fell from her perch as she saw the figure come into the view of the lights.
“Akidami!!!! Obadias!!! He’s here!”