When I came to, inertia was back to normal, and we were in space.

“What,” I said, not moving as the stars slowly spun around me.

“We’re going to the planet!” Star said, excited.

“Just like you wanted,” Fire said.

“What,” I said again, sitting up and staring at the crystal, and then at the planet as it rose above the moon’s horizon. I had my faceplate calculate our orbit, and sure enough the low point was several miles underground – we were going to hit the planet.

“Breeze managed to make a new warp crystal, so we’re going to start a new lair on the surface,” Star explained.

“They thought you were more likely to be able to control an untrained crystal than Enny, so you were volunteered,” Fire added. “Normally you would have been asked, but then you might have said ‘no’.”

“I told them that there was basically no chance of that,” Star said, rolling their eyes. “But you know how they get.”

“The trip was a test, to make sure we could work together,” Fire said. “We also used it to sound you out about the idea without giving it away. If you’d been against it we could have called it off.”

“Just the three of us, though?” I asked.

I grabbed onto my ears and tried to process this. On the one hand, I’d been forcibly removed from almost everyone I knew for an indefinite period – there was no way a raft this small would have more than a mini-printer on board, and it would take a while to work up to a transmission tower that could reach the moon. Also, the planet was full of dozens of different kinds of intelligent creatures and hundreds of kinds of monsters, so we might not even survive to that point. What if I never saw Spots again?

Wait, that was supposed to be a negative, so why did I feel relief?

So, yeah, on the other hand the moon was about the most boring possible place for a kobold colony to land, with ridiculously accessible resources and no enemies at all. I’d originally signed up to explore new and dangerous worlds, and this…

…was a lot of new and dangerous for three kobolds. “Why just the three of us?” I asked.

“Well, it’s kind of dangerous,” Star said. “Once the eggs hatch and the first generation is old enough they’ll be able to risk a full size team. I’m kind of surprised they’re risking a warp crystal! Making it couldn’t have been easy.”

“Huh,” I said. “The moon was recharging the crystal’s mana at a crazy pace, so we don’t need generators to recharge it. We could probably mass produce them.” I hadn’t thought of that angle, but in retrospect it was pretty obvious. “I still don’t see why we have to be in such a rush, though.”

“Luna said we couldn’t land on the planet,” Fire said.

Star’s mouth went all jaggy. “Nobody liked that. We’re going to show her how far we can go, without her permission.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Count me in.”

“You are in,” Star said. “You’re in the shell with us.”

“She means she won’t sabotage the mission out of spite,” Fire said.

“I don’t think I would have been spiteful enough to get us all killed,” I said. “I mean, killed sooner. We’re probably all going to die.”

“I promise not to kill either of you, no matter how much you tempt me,” Fire said.

“We could make a game out of it,” I said. “One point for each of us that one of us gets killed. Five points if it’s permanent.”

“Shouldn’t we be trying not to get killed?” Star asked, faceplate showing a spinning spiral.

“Right. Points are bad.”

“No no no no no, points have to be good,” they said. “We start with ten points and lose a point each time we get one of us killed.”

Fire shook his head. “If we’re going to make a game out of it, we should use the combat tracker.”

“What’s a combat tracker?” I asked.

“We used it to make a game out of our combat training,” he said. “Here, I’ll copy it over to your rig.”

I accepted the app and let it run. It added a few menu options, reminding me of the warp crystal’s control interface, and also put Fire’s name and level over his head. Apparently he was level five. I opened my own status.

Wave – lv 1 [NO CLASS ASSIGNED]
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 14 INT ?? WIS ?? CHA ??
ATK 11 DEF 8 HP 24 REP 0
Weapon: [EMPTY]
Armor: [EMPTY]
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1

“RPG stats?” I asked, as Star apparently also installed the program, given that ‘Star lv 1’ appeared over their head.

“It should have physical stats based on your biometrics,” Fire said. “Mental stats will be assigned once you’ve demonstrated how smart you are.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with what we were talking about,” Star pointed out.

“REP is reputation I’m guessing?” I said. “The rest might be fun to play with if we actually have to fight stuff.”

There was a context menu when I focused on Star and Fire, so I had a look at their stats.

Star – lv 1 [NO CLASS ASSIGNED]
Kobold – 40% cybernetic
STR 20 AGI 10 CON 8 INT ?? WIS ?? CHA ??
ATK 21 DEF 11 HP 18 REP 0
Weapon: [EMPTY]
Armor: [EMPTY]
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: [EMPTY]

“You didn’t bring your impeller?” I asked, noticing that in fact their tail was empty.

“Those things are useless,” Star said. “They do what, a tenth of a G? We’re not in space anymore.”

I looked pointedly out the window.

Their faceplate showed the image of them sticking out their tongue. “You know what I mean.”

Fire – lv 5 Hunter
Kobold – 2% cybernetic
STR 8 AGI 16 CON 13 INT 8 WIS 14 CHA 7
ATK 33 DEF 31 HP 43 REP 36
Weapon: Holdout Taser
Armor: Combat Harness
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1

“Don’t put too much stock in the hit point value,” Fire warned us. “It’s really only useful if we’re play-fighting. It will try to update the current value based on any injuries you take but the value is just based on your level and con and you don’t actually get that much tougher in real life.”

“Is zero dead or unconscious?” I asked.

“Unconscious,” Fire said. “Dead is negative con. Completely dead is negative fifty.”

“Reset your rep to zero,” Star said. “If we’re using it keep score we should start on an even footing.”

“Or we could just remember to subtract 36,” Fire said.

Star put their hands on their hips. “Or you could reset it.”

Fire shook his head. “I got those points fair and square.”

“We didn’t get points for all the things we did,” I said. “Besides, no one’s going to see them but us.”

Fire wasn’t having any of it. “Only until we set up a communication tower. Then everyone will wonder how I managed to lose 36 points!”

Star wasn’t impressed “So instead we should just mentally adjust the score every time we look at it? Does anyone else even care?”

They argued for a while. I played around with the combat tracker interface a bit and found a utility to apply custom temporary modifiers, and sent Fire a mod to give himself a ‘stranded on a lost planet’ modifier that erased any previous reputation gains, but would bring them back as soon as he was ‘rediscovered’.

“I didn’t know you were a programmer,” Fire said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know the first thing about writing code but my main hobby is designing virtual avatars. This is way less complex.”

Star’s faceplate showed a rotating octahedron. “I thought your main hobby was sex?”

I shrugged. “What do you think I use the avatars for?”

It was a long trip. We did a little play-fighting with the combat tracker, and got up to level 2 – which gave us five hit points and basically nothing else since we hadn’t picked a class. It also gave us a little more idea of how to actually fight.

We didn’t have sex. I was still a bit burnt out from the Nyx, Star was never in the mood, and Fire didn’t bring it up. Also, zero-G sex is terrible. If you’ve never tried it, don’t.

We didn’t want to unpack anything, but we took inventory of what we’d been sent with. The expected mini-printer, and a battery to run it with a couple days’ charge, but also a cybernetics repair station (meaning it could print up new cybernetics but didn’t do the surgery to implant them) and a food processor. They’d also sent another matter compressor full of soup – lots and lots of soup. We weren’t going to be able to lift it in full gravity, but it had the antigrav harness attached and we did have a warp crystal.

There was also a note telling me where to look for the instructional program on how to train a warp crystal, and I decided to get started on that right away because if the momentary-inertia-reduction-on-impact wasn’t actually instinctual we might have a pretty short mission.

Luckily, it was, but I spent time with the warp crystal anyway, planning to teach it how to manipulate inertia. Communing with it the first time was strange – I tried to imagine it as a dragon, like our other crystal, but it didn’t work. Do you know how weird it feels to fail to imagine something?

I eventually managed to get the mindscape to stick with it as an egg, and I clutched it to my chestfluff and rocked it back and forth until it hatched into a tiny little dragon that sat on my shoulder. Then, like the instructions recommended, I started teaching it physics. Warped physics. There was no point teaching it to warp reality to work just like reality actually did.

After a few hours, we all felt our internal emergency power supplies whirr into action as the crystal started generating the standard warp field. I still hadn’t gotten to the point where I could teach it to *change* physics… but I was out of time; we were entering the atmosphere.

“Strap in,” Fire said. We’d found the crash harnesses earlier, and I put the crystal back in its secure location in the very middle of the raft.

Star had a control panel by the seat they’d claimed. “Opening –”

“No!” I said. “No parachutes yet!”

They trusted me enough to pause. “When, then?”

The raft started shaking, and flames licked over the transparent shell.

I tried to remember my brief training on manual parachute operation that I’d never expected to need since our original raft had automatic parachutes. “I don’t know, but I know it’s after the flame part.”

The flames didn’t last long, and after a bit we were definitely in a sky instead of in space, so Star popped the chutes. The raft jerked painfully, then continued falling, as the parachutes tore free and floated off into the sky.

“Oops?” Star said, embarrassed. “And it just gave me -1 REP. Thank you combat tracker.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “This is fine. The warp crystal should save us.”

“Would it help if you went and –” Fire started to say, but then we smacked into the water and didn’t die because the warp crystal saved us.

Instead, we bounced. The crystal panicked on the second impact as well, and we bounced again. We spent some time skipping over the surface of the ocean until we’d lost enough speed that the warp crystal let us splash into the water and eventually float to the top, bobbing in the deep ocean waves… upside down, at least until we unstrapped from the crash harnesses.

Fire stared through the floor into the depths of the ocean – and it was deep ocean, we couldn’t see the bottom. “This is not exactly what I was expecting.”

Star joined him. “And yet statistically, it was quite likely. The planet was something like eighty percent ocean.” They paused. “We probably should have planned for this.”

I headed straight for the crystal to praise it for saving us – imagining petting its scaly skin and gently brushing its wings. Good crystal. Such a good crystal. Don’t worry about what those other two were saying, you did fine.

The good news was we wouldn’t die of thirst. Star siphoned some of the seawater into the food processor, and it was able to output drinkable water without any trouble which was good because that was literally the simplest possible thing it could make and if that hadn’t worked we would have had to print a new one.

Unfortunately, the waste from that didn’t do anything useful if we fed it into the mini-printer because there weren’t a lot of things to make out of salt. There was salt, chlorine gas, and metallic sodium. Yay.

“So, which of you can swim?” I asked.

“Not it,” they both said together.

“Also, I don’t know how and I’m not buoyant,” Star added. “I figured if I needed to swim I’d install some water legs.”

I climbed on top of a box so I could get my head above the water-line, and looked out across the relatively still water for any sign of land – nope. “I’m not buoyant either but I brought some rope so you can pull me back up. We need to find something else to put in the mini-printer.”

“I wish I could print you an air can,” Star said. We had the boxes, but there was surprisingly little material involved and the quality was low. Everything else was useful equipment that we might need.

Oh well. “I’m not going to inhale water or anything, so just pull me back in if I pass out I guess.” I opened one of the panels that was above the waterline and jumped in.

So, attempt number one. It turned out I could hold my breath for a long time as long as I didn’t move… until I sank out of range of the warp field and my internal power supply turned off, then I suddenly needed air. I saw a couple of fish that quickly swam away before I could get in arm’s reach, then I yanked frantically on the rope and they took the hint and pulled me back up before I went unconscious.

I felt very heavy as I pulled myself up over the edge and back into the raft. Kobold fur holds a lot of water. At least we were near the equator, and the water was relatively warm.

“Okay I really need an air can,” I said. “We’ve got to have something we can recycle.”

Maybe I let them bully me, or maybe it really was the easiest stuff to reprint, but we ended up using my adventuring gear – the extensible rod, the grappling hook, the climbing spikes. They were all made out of sturdy material and the rod even had some springs which Star said would help a lot making a valve. They worked up a custom air cannister that used exactly the materials we had, and we waited around for a bit while the mini-printer assembled it.

Once it was ready, I attached it to my faceplate – I had it make a hole for the air valve, but left it otherwise sealed – and jumped back in the water to try again.

Attempt number two was longer, but not any more productive – the rope was only about fifty meters long, and that wasn’t long enough to even see the bottom. I drifted around at the end of the rope for a while, but didn’t see anything slow enough for me to catch. When the air can ran out, I climbed back up the rope for some rest while Star recharged it.

“We’re not in any hurry,” Fire said, as I lay puddled at the bottom of the raft, exhausted. “We’ve got plenty of soup and water. You should wait until we see something before going out again.”

On day three I caught a fish.

We still hadn’t seen anything, but I was making a daily trip into the water just for fun because sitting around in a tiny raft was pretty boring and we’d already run out of things to say to each other before we’d even left the moon. It turns out that dragging an edible lump of meat on the end of a rope is one way to catch fish in the deep ocean.

The shark – it looked just like a real shark – swam up out of nowhere all mouth and teeth, so I kicked it in the face with my cyber leg. It managed to avoid the kick, but when it retaliated it bit down on the cybernetic part which was pretty well armored, and I decided that that had been intentional.

With it relatively immobilized, I was able to grab it by the gills and dig my claws in until it stopped thrashing around. It wasn’t a very big shark.

That left me blinded by a cloud of bloody water, but Fire and Star saw the other sharks closing in and dragged me (and my catch) back inside before they could bite down on a less metallic limb.

Once I was out of danger, I started to notice just how much pain I was in – see, only the upper part of my leg was metallic and the fleshy part below it had gotten pretty sliced up by the teeth. I twisted my leg off at the joint – shark and all – and then Fire helped me pry its jaws loose so we could see the damage.

It was pretty gruesome, but nothing had actually been bitten off or anything. Fire had some antiseptic spray in one of his pouches, and Star was able to make bandages out of the crappy box material, and we sprayed and wrapped my bleeding foot and hoped that would be enough because we didn’t have any real medical supplies. Then I put my leg back on, despite the pain, because it wasn’t going to heal if it didn’t have a blood supply.

“The good news is, if your foot dies we have the cybernetics station to make a replacement,” Star said.

“Out of what?” I asked.

Star’s faceplate turned into a rotating box. “Yeah, that’s the bad news. Probably out of shark guts.”

Making things out of shark guts wasn’t completely facetious – the shark was made out of something pretty close to normal flesh, which meant it had everything we’d need to make plastic. Star thought we could probably set up a sail, so we moved the matter compressors to the bottom of the raft for ballast and deactivated the antigrav that the one had, which made us sit a little lower in the water but not actually sink.

Star went to work designing and printing a sail, thin but strong, and a mast sturdy enough that they thought it wouldn’t snap off which we could affix to the raft’s hull. It took a full day to print on the trickle of power from the baby warp crystal, and didn’t do much when they set it up, since there wasn’t a lot of wind. We’d seen gusts on previous days, though, and figured it was just a case of being patient, but maybe slightly less patient than before.

For good or ill, it also made us more visible.

We’d just gotten a little wind, and were finally making headway towards *somewhere*, when Star, who was up on the pile of boxes we’d stacked so that they could see while working the sail, spotted something on the horizon.

That something quickly turned into ‘a giant sailboat’, and all of us clumped together on the narrow perch to get a look.

I used my faceplate to zoom in and get a better look. The ship was made out of wood, with cloth sails and some metal fixtures, including what looked like guns of some sort poking out the side. The crew were a bunch of colorful feathered bipeds, complete with beaks.

“Are they friendly?” Star asked.

“They’re smiling,” I said. “I think. Their beaks aren’t quite as mobile as Shadowfright’s.”

Then one of their guns fired, and sheared off our sail with a bunch of spinning chains. It might have sheared off our heads, too, but the chains that were low enough to do that clattered off our hull instead.

“Not friendly!” I squeaked, ducking instinctively while Fire slid the hatch shut.

By the time they pulled up alongside, wrapped our raft up in chains, and hauled us onto their deck, we had plenty of other evidence that they weren’t friendly. Their laughter and jeering had a lot of malice, they had scars and various missing body parts (with very crude prosthetics, if any) which meant they did a lot of fighting, and the little flag on top of their mast was a skull.

“Open up, ye scallywags, or I’ll open yer throats!” shouted the leader – or at least, the pirate with the biggest hat – rapping their curved sword against our hull. This attempt at diplomacy came after five minutes of futile attempts to pry it open with crowbars, or bash through it with sledgehammers.

“And if we do open up, you’ll let us go?” Star asked.

The pirates laughed. “Aye!” the leader said. “Over the edge, into the briny deep, with only a slashed gut to draw the sharks.”

Fire said, quietly, “If we melt down the impellers, I bet I can make some tasers for you two. Then at least we’d all be armed.”

“We’re a little outnumbered,” I hissed back, looking around at the dozens of colorful birds brandishing weapons in our general direction, albeit somewhat lackadaisically due to the transparent walls between us.

“We just need to make it to the edge,” Fire said. “We can jump in the water and think of something else from there. Unless you have a better idea?”

I did not, but I did have a worse idea. I turned to the pirate. “Let us join your crew!”

They put their hands on their hips. “And why would I let a bunch of scurvy sea dogs join my proud parrots?” I think they said parrots. I mean, that was the name for their species, we found out later. They might have said pirates though.

“Because we’re the only ones who know how to use our stuff,” I said. “It’s just junk to you otherwise.”

“I see at least one shiny gem,” they said, looking at the warp crystal.

“It’s a *magic* shiny gem, but I’m the only one here who knows how to use it,” I said. I kicked the mini-printer. “And Star’s the only one who knows how to get full use out of the printer. They can make it make stuff out of other stuff.”

The pirate looked interested. “What kind of stuff?”

“I made the sail you broke,” Star said. “Out of a shark!” I think that just confused the pirates. *I* thought it sounded impressive.

“What about the third?” the pirate asked.

“Oh, he’s useless,” I said. “Toss him over the side.”

“I can fight!” Fire snapped, slapping me on the side of the head. Which I thought was unwarranted – hadn’t he wanted to go over the side?

“Can you,” the pirate said, looking down at him suspiciously. The parrots were a lot bigger than us – twice our height, although not as solidly built. “I’ll let you fight one of my crew, then. If you win, the three of ye can join our merry band. If you lose, you go over the side, and the other two will be our slaves.”

“Could she get more cliché?” Star whispered to me.

“You’ve got a deal,” Fire said. “Back off, I’m coming out.”

The parrots formed a circle around us, and Fire clambered out of the raft and stood on the deck, waiting.

“Bosun!” called the leader, and a gigantic parrot lumbered through the crowd to face him down, carrying a giant metal hook on a chain as a weapon. “Lay out this ‘lubber for me, will you?”

The parrot twirled his hook over his head, making a sinister whistling noise. Fire watched it cautiously, and when it slammed down – faster than I could even *see* -- he dodged to the side and punched the giant parrot in the crotch.

With his taser.

That was the end of the fight. The bosun jerked and twitched for a bit, dropped his weapon, and then – once Fire stopped tasing him – collapsed in a heap. The crowd cheered, and we were welcomed to the crew of the Filthy Feather. More or less.

The captain – Pareto, they introduced themself as – wanted a demonstration of my ‘magic gem’ because they suspected I was making that part up.

“It’s young,” I said, holding it to my chest and imagining the mindscape from last time – a mountaintop nest, with a tiny dragon perched on my shoulder. “It can do a few tricks though.” I hoped.

“Show me one,” they said.

I pointed to one of the pirates – not the captain! – and asked the warp crystal to make their matter more firmly attached to its current position and momentum. “Inertia,” I whispered to it. “This is called increasing inertia.”

The pirate staggered, gave out a pained chirp, and collapsed. I had the crystal let them go before they had time to suffer serious injury. The looked pretty angry, though.

“I’ll make it up to you later?” I said, grinning.

They pulled out a little gun, and pointed it at me.

“Do the opposite to me!” I quickly told the crystal, and when the bullet smacked into my belly, it didn’t have enough kinetic energy to penetrate my fur, let alone my skin. I pulled it out and held it up. “Good enough?” I asked the leader.

“I’ve seen unicorns who can do more than that,” they said, not particularly impressed. They did wave the pirate off, so at least he didn’t shoot me again. “Could you knock down more than one at a time?”

“Anything or everything within range,” I said. “Um… about ten meters right now I think.”

They frowned. “What is that in hooves?”

“I’m about a meter tall,” I said.

They eyed me a bit. “So thirty hooves. And you can make everything inside that range immune to bullets?”

I nodded. The warp crystal hadn’t had any trouble understanding the command, and it wouldn’t be any harder for it to get everything instead of just one thing.

“What about cannon fire?”

I frowned. Wasn’t that just another word for gun? “Are those are the big guns?” I guessed. They nodded. “It should work on those too.”

“If we put you up in the rigging, you could protect the sails and most of the deck,” they mused. “Won’t help with solid shot if they’re trying to sink us, but ponies usually try to cripple us first.” They slapped me on the shoulder. I think it was supposed to be friendly, so I smiled a little nervously. “I think we’ve got a battle station for you, at least. Go below deck and find a berth.”

I’d just gotten to the bottom of the stairs when someone grabbed me and slammed me against a wall, grinding my faceplate against the wood. “So,” they snarled in my ear. “Make it up to me, you said. How do you reckon you’re going to do that?”

Ah, it was the pirate I’d demonstrated on.

“I didn’t expect you to be that mad!” I whimpered. “I could… suck your dick?”

This worked a little better than it had on Luna, which wasn’t saying much. They turned me around and slammed my back into the wall, holding me up off the ground so that they could stare me in the eye-spots. “Do I look like a man to you?”

“I don’t know how to tell on parrots,” I squeaked.

“I have breasts!” they – I mean, I guess ‘she’ – shouted at me, before shoving them in my face.

“Okay okay,” I said. “But I mean it didn’t hurt that much, did it? I figured a little pleasure could make up for the pain.”

“Fuck the pain,” she snapped. “You humiliated me in front of everyone! But you know what? Fine. You can make up for it by licking my snatch.”

“Yay?” I said.

“On the deck, in front of everyone,” she sneered.

“Okay,” I said. Then, a little belatedly, flattened my ears to try to fake embarrassment. My expression was jaggy enough that I didn’t have to fake not being happy.

She dragged me back up the stairs – carrying me over her shoulder like a sack of dust – and plopped me down on my tail in the middle of the deck. Before I could stand up, she grabbed me by the back of the head and shoved my face into her crotch, her other hand loosening her belt and letting her pants fall around her knees.

“Lick!” she shouted, getting everyone’s attention who hadn’t already been paying attention.

I cracked my faceplate, and buried my tongue in her feathers.

I’m not going to say she was perfectly clean, but she was a lot cleaner than I had any right to expect given how filthy the rest of the ship was – although come to think of it, all the pirates had had bright, well-maintained plumage. At any rate, there was a bit of her scent but not enough to be unpleasant as I slipped my tongue through the downy feathers and along the vent I found beneath. I teased it a bit and was rewarded with a firm shove to the back of my head, prompting me to slip it inside.

Bird genitalia are a little weird, but it’s still a sensitive area that you can get a good response from by licking over the surface gently. I didn’t find anything like a clitoris, but she gave me enough prompting from her grip on my head that I could tell which parts felt especially good, and I focused there for a while. Kobolds have pretty long tongues, so I was able to explore the entirety of her little pocket, and delve a bit into each of the opening that led further inside her…

“Fuuuuck,” she said, her grip loosening briefly, before her ‘snatch’ convulsed around my tongue. “Fuck yes,” she said, dragging my head away and shoving me onto my back in front of her. My cock – always aroused by oral sex – jutted up into the air, but she ignored it, having had her fun. And I guess her humiliation, although I’ve never been able to figure out why people are embarrassed to have sex in public.

“I’ve got next,” said one of the spectators, taking a step towards us.

She shoved them back. “Fuck off, he’s mine,” she said.

And that’s how I acquired a pirate girlfriend. Or vice versa, I suppose.

It wasn’t a terrible relationship. There wasn’t any privacy on the pirate ship, and she *was* a bit embarrassed by public sex, so my main ‘boyfriend’ duty was being a big fluffy pillow for her to cuddle while she slept. Sometimes she’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and we’d have careful, quiet sex.

Sometimes she’d joke about lending me out to the rest of the crew, which I would have been fine with, which is probably why she never actually did.

And she wove me a lanyard to mount the warp crystal in, so that I could wear it like an amulet. That was nice.

So why the fuck did being her ‘bitch’ cost me -5 REP?

At any rate, while I was making peace with one specific pirate (and spending most of the rest of the time training the warp crystal because there wasn’t a lot else to do on the ship except clean), Star was doing her best to get the parrots hooked up to the virtual world. Part of this was because the virtual world was peer-to-peer and with only our three rigs running it it was pretty bare-bones, but I think most of it was because they were bored.

The ship had plenty of organic waste, and they only needed small amounts of silicon and gold to do the circuitry itself. The pirates sacrificed a giant ruby – seriously, it was the size of my palm – and a few gold bits (the coins were literally called ‘bits’) and that was enough to make three dozen of the headsets like we’d given the Nyx. We didn’t have a brain scanner, or Dot around to do the scanning, but parrot brains were pretty normal and the default settings worked.

It took three days for the leader to notice parrots zoning out and ban ‘hallucination’ on duty. I was mostly busy with the crystal, but I peeked into the virtual world they were building and the main part was a much larger pirate ship that flew through the air with giant propeller blades. I suppose you didn’t select a pirate crew for their imagination.

The headsets had a little flip-down eyepiece in case the pirates wanted a HUD (or to use the zoom function or read messages without going virtual, or whatever), and Fire decided that meant they should be running the combat tracker… which meant all of them could look at my stats.

Wave – lv 3 warp magician
Kobold – 6% cybernetic
STR 10 AGI 7 CON 14 INT 13 WIS 8 CHA 17
ATK 23 DEF 15 HP 34 REP -3
Weapon: steel dirk
Armor: padded coat
Rig: Standard Explorer
Accessory: Personal Impeller Mk 1, Warp Crystal (lv 2 – juvenile - MP 14)
Spells Known: Power Field, Crush, Feather Shield, Brittle
Titles Earned: Shark Bait, Pirate Bitch

“Why does it keep calling me that?” I complained to my girlfriend, sitting in her lap as she rested on her hammock. “I’m not even a dog.”

Polly stroked my back, then pushed my head to her chest. We were relatively alone at the time with only a few parrots around, none of them paying attention, so I pulled her shirt to the side and started fondling her breasts and licking her nipple, since she enjoyed that.

“Probably because you come like a bitch whenever I call,” she said, groping my butt. I gasped as her fingers found my pussy and started playing around. “Come on,” she said, resting her thumb on the base of my cock as two of her fingers slid inside. “Scream for me.”

I moaned, and shuddered, and, well, had to go wash off my clothes again.

Polly had been intrigued when she first noticed I had a pussy. “Are you a guy or a girl?” she asked, poking at it. We’d just had sex, so we were whispering to each other in her hammock in the dead of night.

“Neither really,” I told her. “Kobolds are kind of both.”

“So you don’t mind if I keep calling you a boy?” Her hand slid up to stroke my flacid penis instead, all slimy with our juices.

“I don’t mind at all,” I gasped, still a bit sensitive.

Overall, the pirate crew was only a little different from a kobold crew. It was a collective, mostly, although they voted on things if they couldn’t immediately reach a consensus, which I guess made sense if you couldn’t easily split the crew (Polly said that the crews would split on the rare occasions they stopped in port). The captain, who I’d been calling the ‘leader’, was only in charge for emergencies and the rest of the time people only obeyed when the orders were obviously correct (like ‘don’t spend your lookout shift in the virtual world’). That’s why the ship was so dirty – the pirates weren’t especially filthy people, but their cleaning tools were terrible and painful to use, and it was a repetitive, thankless task that kept having to be re-done because the waves would occasionally wash over the deck and get everything dirty again.

Captain Pareto also owned the ship as personal property, and could toss people off if she really didn’t like them, but unless they tried to mutiny or something she at least let them off on land. Not that that happened while we were with her. Yes, she was a girl, as Star had figured out instantly but I needed to be told.

They were also mostly explorers. All the actual freight traffic was handled by airships – we saw a few fly by overhead – and a wave-bound pirate ship wasn’t going to be taking many prizes. Aside from very lost travelers like ourselves, the only people they expected to run into were other pirates. The tradition when we saw other pirates was to fire a few broadsides at each other from extreme range, where we were unlikely to actually hit, and with me up on the mainmast protecting the rigging and the deck there was even less risk than normal. For us. The one pirate ship we ran into lost their rear mast, and I saw ponies tumbling from the ruined rigging into the ocean, some of them missing pieces because we’d been firing those nasty chains.

No, our actual job was to sail between the thousands of tiny islands that dotted the seas and search them for treasure.

There was a lot of treasure to be found. The world had seen disaster after civilization-ending disaster, and each of them left artifacts behind in scattered ruins. The islands in particular were a popular place for survivors fleeing the disasters to run to and hide away their valuables, before inevitably dying out or degenerating into mere monsters. Or, you know, not doing that and just continuing to be civilized people, but those islands were known so they were easy to skip.

So in the dead of night, we sailed up to an island with a creepy glowing skull face the size of a mountain, lit from within by what looked like lava, and dropped anchor about a kilometer offshore. Pareto stood proudly on the aftcastle, looking at her map. “This is it, girls!” she said. “The lost treasure of the Arimaspi is ours for the taking!”

I raised my blade and cheered along with everyone else, I mean maybe a half-second late because I hadn’t been expecting it.

“We may get scorched by fiery demons, or torn to shreds in the claws and teeth of the gargantuan beasts of old, but we’ll do it with shiny treasure in our claws!”

She paused for more cheering, then continued with a serious look on her face. “A single idol from the Arimaspi was enough to lift the mongrel griffon hordes to a century of glory. If we find half of what is rumored to be buried here, we’ll put their empire to shame! Parresia will rule the waves forevermore!”

“At least she dreams big,” Star sent to Fire and me.

I sent back a shrug. “There’ve been pirate empires before. The hive mind probably thinks we’re one of them.”

“If she really wants to rule the world she should give us an island and let us build one for her,” Fire said. “Nothing we’ve seen here compares to our tech.”

“That wouldn’t be *her* empire though,” I noted. “Some people consider that the important part.” After a second, I added, “Also, remember the moon. Throwing the moon at us compares to our tech pretty favorably.”

The ship, surprisingly, had enough little boats to ferry everyone to shore in one trip, except for Star and a couple of the parrots who volunteered to stay behind and guard.

On the beach, we split up into small groups to comb the island for treasure. I teamed up with Fire and Polly and the three of us headed for the lowlands on the far side of the mountain from the giant skull.

“You really think we’ll find the treasure here?” Polly asked.

“I think Wave and I are low status enough that if we found treasure in an obvious place someone else would take it away from us,” Fire said. “I don’t know why you came.”

“She’s worried you’ll fuck me so hard I’ll forget about her,” I said.

“I’m worried you’ll get hurt,” Polly snapped. “Little guys like you need a big strong parrot to protect you.”

“Not going to argue,” I said, holding up my hands. “Fire?”

He laughed. “I’m not in this for the glory. She can steal all the kills she can handle.”

I snuck a peek at her stats…

Polly – lv 1 Pirate
Parrot – 0% cybernetic
STR 10 DEX 14 CON 8 INT 8 WIS 12 CHA 14
ATK 21 DEF 20 HP 18 REP 1
Weapon: cutlass, smoke grenades
Armor: padded coat
Rig: basic headset
Accessory: lucky charm
Titles Earned: Kobold Lover

…which were probably not a fair assessment of her combat experience, since it had only started tracking the pirates recently.

We spent some time carving our way through the underbrush with our blades. The island was pretty jungly, but not very dangerous – the plants had thorns but nothing that could get through even the cheap pirate clothing we were wearing.

“So are we actually going to look for treasure, or are you just leading us into the middle of nowhere so we can finally have some privacy for a threesome?” I asked, when we stopped for a rest. I was already in Polly’s lap, because she wanted to pet me.

“Why not both?” Fire said, crouched near the exit of the little cleared out space we’d found inside a bush, keeping watch for the monsters that were taking their sweet time finding us.

“Mmm, okay,” I said. “Who gets to be in the middle?”

Fire shrugged. “Polly’s the only one without a penis. You want her cunt or her ass?”

“It’s the same hole on parrots,” I said, with the benefit of my considerable experience. “Why don’t you take her mouth?” I opened her shirt to start fondling her, and snuck my tail into her pants, tickling her vent with its fur.

“Guys?” she said. “Are you seriously –”

I silenced her with a kiss, cracking my faceplate to snake my tongue over her beak. She tilted her head for a closer seal, and leaned into it. When I pulled back, she was still silent for a bit, distracted by my other ministrations.

“He likes having his dick sucked,” I stage-whispered to her. “So you should probably lick his pussy.”

So I was a bit surprised when Fire yanked my tail out of her pants, and rammed his cock into me from behind. I lost my grip on Polly, and fell back into his arms as he thrust his hips to shove himself deeper inside. “Oh fuck…” I moaned – he felt so good, after so long without a cock inside me.

Polly leaned down – way down – and took my shaft in her beak, gripping it with the surprisingly gentle edges and slurping at it with her tongue. It was… different, but pretty much any oral attention feels really fucking good, especially with another friend pumping away behind you. I barely had time to enjoy it before shooting off in her mouth…

And of course, neither of them were done. Fire shoved me down on my back and spread my legs to take me more conventionally, while Polly sat on my face for some somewhat distracted licking. She combed her claws up my belly until they hooked under my chestplate, and used the leverage to smother me underneath her feathery behind. I couldn’t breathe, at all, but with the warp crystal hang around my neck I didn’t really need to – my emergency power supply gave me enough energy to lie there twitching around Fire’s cock, and even to stroke Polly’s feathers and squirm my tongue around inside her. That didn’t leave me a lot of energy to think with, and I drifted along in a half-conscious daze until the two of them finally finished.

I came to to Polly poking me with a stick. “Is he okay?”

“She’s fine,” Fire said, stroking my foot.

“She?”

“We always called her a girl. I don’t think she actually cares.”

“I don’t,” I said, taking a deep breath, and slowly sitting up as I switched back to my oxygen metabolism. “I’ll be your boy, your girl, your tentacle monster if we’re in the virtual world and that’s what you’re into.”

“You don’t have to be a boy to use your penis,” Fire said.

“Whatever,” I said, taking a few more deep breaths, and fixing my clothing so that it mostly covered me again. I probably wasn’t going to get clean until we got back to the ship.

“I’d rather have a boy,” Polly said. “Besides, his lights are all blue. That’s a boy color.”

“Then as a manly kobold I will declare myself recovered,” I said, standing up. “Let’s go find some shinies.”

We eventually found some giant ants, which were a good match for us. One of them bit me and tried to drag me away, but I stabbed it in the head until it stopped moving. Dying didn’t make it let go. By the time I pried its jaws off of my shoulder-plate the other three were also dead, having failed to land a hit on either of my companions.

I poked at my shoulder display, shattered and dark. “Ow,” I said.

“Did you break something?” Fire asked.

I shook my head.

Fire sighed. “You need to stop doing that. Dodge the attacks.”

“I know, I know, ‘learn to play’,” I grumbled. “Maybe I just need to start wearing armor.”

We ran across another giant ant a few minutes later, and Fire made me fight it by myself. I grabbed the warp crystal and had the little imaginary dragon crush the life out of it with inertia.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Let it up.”

“Ugh, fine…”

I tried asking the dragon to take away the ant’s inertia if it looked like it was about to bite me, but I wasn’t sure it understood. At any rate, when I was expecting the attack my dirk was long enough to keep the thing at bay, and we danced around each other for a while until five more ants showed up, heading right for us, and we decided running away was the better part of valor.

“Or you know,” I said, as I stumbled through the brush trying to keep on Polly’s tail. “I could just crush them all with the warp crystal.”

“Don’t train the warp crystal to kill things!” Fire shouted back from in front of her.

That was kind of a good point.

The ants stopped chasing us, eventually. I tried to use the warp crystal to get them off our tail a couple times – making some trees brittle so I could kick them down behind us as a barrier (but ants are very good climbers), and lessening our inertia to let us make huge jumps (this took several tries to get right; the key was to bring the inertia back just after we left the ground so we didn’t get swamped by drag) – but I think they just gave up once we were out of their territory.

“What did you do to those trees?” Fire asked me.

I grinned. “I can’t quite turn wood into cake, but I can weaken it a lot. On the ship I was able to pull it apart with my hands like it was cotton or something.”

Fire gave a big jaggy frown. “But that only works on rock.”

“I only had wood to train it with, so with my crystal it works on wood.” I frowned a bit too. “I hope I can still teach it to do stone.”

“Does the wood get strong again when you stop weakening it?” Polly asked. I nodded. “Then I’ve got an idea.”

I weakened a smallish tree – all the trees around here were pretty small, but this one was arguably in bush territory – and she stripped off some branches and braided them together into a long pole, then took my Dirk and tied the ends of the branches around the crossguard to hold it in place. Once the wood was un-weakened, I had a workable spear. I gave it a few practice stabs into the ground, and the blade didn’t wiggle or come loose.

“You looked like you needed a longer reach,” she explained.

I grinned. “I like it! We should go back and find some ants to try it out.”

“We’re here for treasure, not ants,” Fire said.

“I know,” I said, “But I was thinking… ants like to drag everything back to their nest, right?”

Polly nodded. “Everything they think they can eat, at least.”

“But the one that jumped us went right for my shoulder plate. That’s not edible – its shiny. I think these ants were collecting shinies.”

“That seems like a leap of logic,” Fire said.

“It’s easy enough to test,” I replied.

I twisted my shoulder plate to unhook it from my chestplate, and tossed it back towards ant territory like a frisbee. The three of us crouched down to wait… and sure enough, before too long, one of the giants ants came and dragged it away.

Fire shook his head. “It probably just smelled you on it.”

“And now you’re down a shoulder plate,” Polly said. “Being asymmetrical is more pirate, I guess.”

I frowned at that notion. But no, this was temporary. “We can track it to their nest, and I bet we’ll find some of the arimaspi treasure we’re looking for right there with it.”

“I don’t want to fight through an entire ant nest,” Fire said.

“Oh, right,” I said, pouting. “That’s fine, I needed to train my warp crystal to work on dirt and rock anyway. We’ll dig our way in.”

We headed back to the ship to get some supplies before starting that, of course. The main thing we needed was a matter compressor. Mine was empty, since Star had been handing out soup to the cooks and had finished it off before starting on the new one, so we swapped the antigrav harness over to it and let it float along behind us.

“Bring it back full!” they said, eager to get some new materials to work with.

We also picked up half a dozen more parrots. A couple of other groups had come back to take a break from fruitless searching in the foothills and were eager to see if my plan would pan out. Since digging and fighting ants were both easier with more people, I was happy to have them along.

Polly was a bit pensive.

“I know, I know,” I said, patting her butt. “No more private time.”

“Actually, I was thinking about lending you out to them,” she said. “Watching Fire screw you was hot.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t follow through with that. Everyone was pretty focused on the treasure, anyway, so I don’t know how well it would have gone over.

We had a carpenter with us, who told us about shoring up our tunnel so it wouldn’t collapse – he recruited another parrot and they started chopping down trees while I taught the warp crystal to weaken dirt and rock, which turned out to be really easy compared to the wood. After that we were digging at a kobold pace, the four parrots with hoses sucking up liquified material and feeding it into the matter compressor, while Fire stood guard and I made sure the leading edge of the tunnel stayed soft and the compressor’s antigrav harness didn’t drift out of range.

We were fifty meters down – and maybe two hundred meters laterally – by the time the carpenter was ready to set up the first crossbar to shore up the first three meters of tunnel. We’d had a few collapses but not actually on anybody’s head, and it was easy enough to backtrack to soften and slurp up the fallen rubble. I will say that the first twenty meters or so was more of a trench than a tunnel by that point.

It still took hours to break through into the ants’ midden. Or what we’d expected to be the ants’ midden. What we actually found was a bit different.

“I just broke through!” Polly shouted. “Careful, everyone!”

The pirates quickly cleared away a hole in the bottom of the tunnel. I firmed up the rock, and one of the ones I didn’t know leaned down to get a look – and squawked, and vanished, as something grabbed her and dragged her through.

Fire shouted “Ambush!” and drew his sword, then leapt down after her, followed by the other pirates. There was a scuffle, some clanging of metal on metal, and then a quiet ‘zzzt’ as Fire resorted to his taser, which he’d been trying to use sparingly as more of a secret weapon. That was enough for me to join the fray, or at least to peek over the edge to see what was going on.

Hulking, doglike creatures, plated in metal armor with full-face helmets, had Fire and the parrots tied up in nets, and were dragging them away as they struggled. They had one of the giant ants hooked up to a cart, with my shoulder plate sitting in it alongside a few of this world’s gigantic gemstones.

I gripped my warp gem and focused. “Just the armor,” I imagined telling the little dragon. “Their armor is too massive to move.” Once they’d stopped moving – for the ones already in motion, this involved toppling to the ground first – I hopped down and started untangling the parrots from the nets.

There was one dog who hadn’t been wearing armor, and while he was only about my size and unarmed, he pointed at me and whistled at the ant, which unharnessed itself and charged in my direction. I stabbed at it with a spear, and maybe it was only a draft ant and not a warrior ant because it was a lot slower than the ones we’d fought on the surface. Eventually I managed to wedge my spear between its jaws and shove the blade up into its brain, and it wiggled for a while before going still.

By that time, the little dog was long gone. I finished freeing Fire and the parrots, grabbed my shoulder plate (and the gems), and we got the hell out of there.

“Diamond dogs!” spat Pareto when we reported back. “Those mangy beggars’ve probably looted this whole island by now. No wonder we didn’t find squat.”

“They seemed pretty civilized,” I said. “Does this mean we move on?”

“What, and leave my treasure in the paws of those thieves?” she snapped. “They aren’t arimaspi – they’ve got no more claim to this island’s treasure than we do. They’re competition, and I won’t let them grab the lion’s share of the loot.”

“They kind of kicked our butts,” I noted. “They’ve got some serious armor for this tech level.”

“Taser didn’t even work,” Fire added. “That armor’s insulated and grounded.”

“And they’re faster than they look,” Polly chimed in.

“Buncha canaries,” Pareto said. “They got the drop on ye, that’s all. Next time we’ll be ready. Call everyone back! We go out in force and take what’s rightfully ours!”

Fire and I went to talk to Star about options, since it seemed like fighting these guys was inevitable.

“Stretchy nets, maybe?” they suggested. “There’s plenty of raw material on the island, and nets don’t care how much armor you’re wearing. And I’ve got a pattern for net guns; it’s standard.” They turned from the mini-printer to the food processor. “Napalm’s probably out if you’re fighting underground, since you want to breathe. Poison gas?”

“Risky,” Fire said.

“Glue bombs,” Star said. “That’s kind of redundant with the nets but should probably work.”

Pareto was in too much of a hurry for us to re-arm everybody, but we made net guns and glue bombs for ourselves, and Polly, and a couple of the other pirates who’d been with us on the dig and didn’t want to face down dogs in full plate with just cutlasses and cloth armor. As it was, we were near the tail end of the column that marched out to do battle.

“So just to be clear,” I said to Fire and Star as we marched to our doom. “This was not part of my idea. I’m not taking credit for getting us all killed.”

When we got back we found our tunnel had collapsed, but we didn’t even have to dig it out – the collapse was narrow enough that I could get all of it with the warp crystal in one go, and then the loosened mud (too much water in the area for it to be dust) slid down the rest of the tunnel on its own. It barely slowed us down.

There was an ant ambush at the bottom of the tunnel where we’d run into the diamond dogs – they’d sprayed some foul-smelling chemical that attracted the ants from the hive proper, and the parrots had to fight them off before we could move on. Cutlasses and handheld guns were enough to take care of the ants, although one of the parrots got a deep gash in his thigh, down to the bone, and the pirate doctor decided to amputate, right there in the dirt. Fire broke out his antiseptic spray to at least attempt to prevent infection, although the others didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. One of the other parrots left with the new amputee to head back to the ship and fit him with a proper peg-leg.

The rest of us moved on, following a set of tracks deeper underground. Pareto was in the lead, keeping an eye out for traps, and she marked several before stumbling over a pressure plate disguised as a rock, which opened a pit three meters behind her. The mechanism was slow, and most of the parrots managed to jump to safety, but one went tumbling into the darkness, her scream cut off with a sickening squelch. I glanced down in the pit as we passed it and saw her gruesomely impaled on a bunch of spikes. Yeah, the diamond dogs had set out the good traps for us.

Their maze was short, though, and not very maze-like with the tracks leading us right to a wide open cavern in the center. Of course it opened onto a killing ground, a cleared area doubtless riddled with traps, where the enemy crouched with crossbows behind two rows of metal barriers.

“Charge!” Pareto shouted, aiming her handgun and expertly placing her bullet in the gap between one of the crouching dogs’ helmet and breastplate. The parrots without ranged weapons cheered and rushed forwards past her, while the other gunners lined up next to her and completely failed to repeat her performance. She took out another dog with her other barrel, but before she could reload the walls burst open to either side and the ambush squad descended on the rear.

…not the very rear. Fire and Star and I, and the parrots we’d armed, hadn’t wanted to charge forward into such an obvious deathtrap, so we were ready in reserve when the surprise was sprung. Nets and glue bombs rained on the ambushers, quickly tying them all down – but not quickly enough. Pareto and the others had been standing in the narrow entrance, immediately in range of the dogs’ spears, and most of them were dead in seconds.

“Come on!” Fire said, running up to the struggling, netted dogs. “They left us a back door!”

Sure enough, the ambush squads had tunnels that led around behind the barricades, and our special squad lost no time hurrying down the one on the left. We came out behind the second set of barricades, and before the crossbow dogs knew what was happening they were netted and glued. The first set of barricades was a messy melee of half a dozen pirates who’d made it past the traps, and ten lightly armored dogs without any real melee weapons. It was too mixed up for nets or glue, but Fire and a couple of the parrots with us headed over to help out with their swords (and taser).

“I think we might actually win this,” I said, looking up at Polly, just in time to see a massive crossbow bolt shunk into her forehead from above.

Her eyes crossed, and she collapsed at my feet, convulsing and pissing herself. I looked up where the bolt must have come from and saw the diamond dogs’ leader frantically reloading his weapon. I barely even had to think to touch the warp crystal and have it help me leap ten meters, kicking him in the face. He clawed at my thigh – my cybernetic thigh – and then coughed up blood with my spear wedged in his sternum. A firmer thrust shoved it right through him, into the roof, and he stopped moving.

After that, it was just mopping up. Pareto was dead, along with most of her crew, and the survivors showed no mercy to the dogs who threw down their weapons, or to the dogs trapped in nets or glue. Every last diamond dog was put to the sword, and I would have helped them if I hadn’t been sobbing over Polly’s corpse while Star explained to me that even for a kobold they would have needed a lot more equipment to bring her back than we had.

And she wasn’t a kobold, so she couldn’t just shut down and wait until we had the things we needed – she was a parrot, and dead parrots stayed dead.

To add insult to injury, we didn’t even find much treasure – as far as we could tell, not having any prisoners to ask directly, the diamond dogs who’d looted the arimaspi were long gone, and this group was just a bunch of ant-tamers combing the island for dregs who’d set up camp in a long-abandoned underground village.

So morale was very low when the fifteen survivors – most of us badly wounded – met on the deck of the Filthy Feather to decide what to do next. The consensus was to head back to Free Haven to offload the wounded and take on new crew, but Pareto and her second were both dead, and the chain of command hadn’t gone any deeper than that. Who got to keep the ship?

“We should stay here,” Star said. “Kobolds were never meant for boats. Our tech barely works on the open ocean.”

“It’s a lost island,” I said. “No one will come to visit us here. We’ll be almost as bored as we were on the moon.”

Fire shook his head. “The diamond dogs got here somehow. I bet this pack won’t be the last.”

“Besides, we could use some boredom,” Star said. “We need to build a stable colony – raise some eggs for the specialties we’re missing, build the rest of the fabricator, maybe even put a comm tower up on that scary volcano? If we’re still lonely after that, we can build boats of our own and find friends that way.”

“So you’re ditching us and taking your tech?” Phillip complained. “You’re the only good thing we found on this trip. And you said you’d make me a better peg-leg!”

Star cringed as some of the other parrots chimed in with similar complaints.

I held up my hands to pacify them. “Look, you don’t have to leave right now. Give us a few days and we can finish off Star’s outstanding orders… in a week she can have a new mini-printer for you to take with you, and train one of you to use it. Right?”

Star nodded. They’d done as much with the Nyx, so it wasn’t an impossible task.

“And what about your magic stone?” Pirra asked.

“It’s still a baby,” I said. “It’s going to be a long time before I can duplicate it.”

The vote was nine to six to let me stay on the island… and that’s with the three of us voting in my favor. But they could hardly argue that I wasn’t enough of a part of the crew to vote during a vote about whether to let me leave it.

They ended up staying for two weeks, which was honestly a big help setting up our new home – a cave we dug out ourselves in the foothills, far from the diamond dogs’ lair. Phillip – one of Star’s chosen apprentices – wanted to stay longer, but after two weeks the vote was ‘leave’, and the vote to let him stay behind with us failed almost unanimously (I voted to let him, but Star and Fire both wanted him gone).

I was also extremely pregnant by that point. Apparently, Fire had knocked me up. Two weeks had been plenty of time to set up a hatchery, though, and the laying went smoothly this time. I set the networked egg-caps -- basically headsets for eggs... eggsets? -- on each of the eggs myself, and the diagnostics verified that the accelerated learning software was online and ready for the embryos to develop brains.

When I headed out to the shore after finishing up, the Filthy Feather was already a dot on the horizon.