SAILORS OF THE STARRY FIRMAMENT 2: SOME PLACES

If I wanted to kill you with my mind, I could. So consider that next time you disagree with me online, butthead.

But that's neither here nor there.

The Upper Seas may be a sparse frontier, mostly untouched by Earth's nations and unformed by human perception, but there are landmarks and settlements nonetheless. If you want to view the stars or stay out of the reach of the law, there's no better place to be.

Fort Kunosoura. A fortified monastery built on a fragment of a meteor that would have surely brought the end of days had it not been skipped off of the Upper Seas like a stone on a pond by the Knights Gravitational, who built the fortress in ancient times as a monument to their victory and as a means to more effectively practice their astrological studies. Their successors are still here, diminished in number and growing old, but still an influential military force of the Firmament. Their heavy armor allows them to hover in the air, as the Knights forge it from meteors they call down from the stars and, through clever magics gleaned through gazing at the stars, enchant the armor plates to reject the yoke of gravity and instead move as the wearer wills. Each suit is a work of art, passed down the ages; the scars of battle are mended over and filigreed in meteoric gold.

Fort Kunosoura is the best place in the Upper Seas to have armor and weapons forged, although the Knights Gravitational won't give you any of their gravity-defying masterworks unless you join their number and prove yourself to be a worthwhile investment. Expect to spend years as a novice, adjusting telescopes and fetching star-charts for crusty old astrologer-knights before you can so much as touch the armor.

Bloat. You'll smell it before you see it. Raw meat, bile, and ozone carry on the wind for miles around, an odor so strong you'll taste it. It's a floating mountain of flensed meat, covered in tentacles, frills, fins, and all manner of biological possibility, twitching in the saltwater; it was something like a leviathan, once, but now it is orbited by a ring of ships and bristled with tents and shacks like scavengers and parasites of wood and sail. Welcome to Bloat, a town that quite literally lives on the products it renders; the stench never goes away, but basically everyone in Bloat smokes something or other to smell anything but atmospheric sea monster flesh. It's a habit worth taking up, even for visitors. Bloat has to relocate to a new kill every few months, but it is rarely hard to find the town even if you aren't sure where it's moved; just follow your nose.

Do you want meat that doesn't spoil, even if it tastes like wet pennies and twitches on the way down? Potions and the reagents to make them? People who are passively suicidal enough to hunt monsters that are large enough to be considered geographical features? Bloat's the place to look.

Life Preserver. Let me know if you've ever heard this myth: the Gods get mad and decide to kill everyone with a flood. A man is warned, and told to build a massive ship to survive the coming deluge. It's happened many times before.

A long time ago, this myth-cycle happened to a man whose name was lost before we rediscovered fire. He built a great ship, a floating village of solid timber, and he did it all alone even when everybody he ever knew doubted him; so, when the rain came down in rivers, this Ancient Mariner sealed his ship against the world and left his fellow men to their fate. Forty days and forty nights sailing over a drowned world, then forty one, forty two, and further on; he came up, but never came down. He had gone all the way up to the Starry Firmament, and there he would stay forever with his menagerie of animals. He aged and aged, shrivelling and twisting as centuries passed, but he never died, even when he tried to bite his own wrists open or dash his brains out on the deck. The Mariner wanted solitude, so the Gods of his time saw fit to let him have it forever. He actually ended up outliving those Gods, one of the few things he takes solace in, but he's still immortal, horrifically aged, and miserable.

So, why would you seek out this crusty prehistoric bastard? Well, the Ancient Mariner still has a bunch of animals on his ship, and even if they're all sickly and inbred, a lot of those things are nowhere to be found back on the surface world. He could also point you towards an unimaginable amount of lost civilizations- he talks about them in the present tense. Atlantis is just some worthless distant fishing village. His only asking price is conversation, rambling old man conversation. He can speak for days; the pain of starvation and thirst died long ago, but the ravenous urge to speak and be spoken to burns through his mind like wildfire. And if you try to abandon him before he is satisfied, you will discover just how horribly vindictive an infinitely old selfish bastard can be. He fears isolation more than death.

He'd also like clay tablets to draw on. His fingers are too stiff to scratch into the timbers these days, and he ran out of room a couple thousand years ago.