#wakes up to his men yelling about a dragon seen in the skies LOSING it over purple scales (starspire) and he’s like ✨😏 oh interesting | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shofics · 3 years

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So tumblr ate the ask (thanks! I hate it!) but @knifemartin sent the prompt 13. pirate au but make it... sky pirates with Earhart, Zolf, Sasha, and Wilde! This got frighteningly long so I had to put it under a cut, I hope you enjoy my ramblings. <3 They’re going to kill a dragon!!

I think I genuinely might clean this up and make it into a proper fic. Watch this space.

Zolf Smith is a miner. Zolf Smith dreams of the sky. Zolf Smith kills his brother. Zolf Smith takes flight.

The Meritocracy doesn't have air forces- don’t really need ‘em when you’re a huge fuck-off dragon who can fly- but they’re worried about the increased presence the separatists are having in the skies above their lands, so they’re building one. Zolf leaps upon it like a life raft.

When the ship goes down, there are two reasons he doesn’t die; his past, and his god.

The Reliant answers the emergency call, and that surprises Zolf- a known separatist vessel, making an attempt to save the crew of a ship in the Meritocratic Air Force- but a lot of things surprise him about Captain Earhart. It’s not the Reliant’s fault that he is the only survivor. It is due to the Reliant that there is an only survivor at all.

His family were Harlequins. Captain Earhart recognises him, visits him in the sick bay as her medics do their best to save his legs, asks after his father, asks after his brother. Gives an understanding nod when he refuses to speak about them. Offers him a job, because he desperately needs one.

It’s a lot all at once, and they can’t save his legs, but he finds he doesn’t need them. Dwarves don’t have the build that most of the Hermes lot have, but he’s never let not fitting in stop him. The feeling of the wind in the rigging is like wings on ankles he doesn’t have anymore. He’s freer than he’s been his entire life.

When he is thirteen years old, Brock Rackett successfully makes it out of Other London and out of the clutches of the Rackett clan by chopping off his ring finger and escaping on the first air vessel that will take him. At least, this is what Sasha believes. She’s sad he left without her, but she knows well that when an opportunity comes, you take it. She hopes he made it out safe.

Nine years later, at twenty-two, Sasha’s opportunity finally comes. She heads for the aeroport. Maybe she’ll be able to find him.

Barrett’s men are following her, she can feel them on her tail all through the crowd like a bad smell; she needs a cover, needs somewhere to hide. There’s a drunk in the corner of the bar, some once-foppish-looking dandy, and Sasha decides to make him her cover.

She slides into the seat next to him and tries to be as inconspicuous as possible, but the drunkard starts and leaps to his feet, swaying. “Keep your trousers on,” she hisses, jumping up to pull him back down in front of her- he’s tall enough, he should provide good cover.

The man staggers out of her grip and produces a dagger from nowhere. He tries to fend her off with it- poorly- and then his eyes roll up and he collapses. Sasha just barely manages to catch him before he hits the ground.

Wilde knows the Meritocracy is crumbling. He can feel it in the air; something big is coming, something very bad, and he really doesn’t want to be here when it finally arrives.

Though maybe the sense of impending doom he’s getting is just from lack of sleep. But he’s sure that’s fine. It’s fine. He’s fine.

So he puts his bardic talents and his espionage training to work, following the trail of the odd orders and the disappearing agents, and realises quickly that if he stays, he’ll probably end up disappearing as well- or worse, become one of the people giving the odd, conflicting orders. He doesn’t know what that’s about. He doesn’t want to find out.

Wilde fakes his own death in the hopes it will throw off the scent, and decides, like so many others seeking the separatists, to head for the Americas.

In a bar at the aeroport he is accosted by a mugger, and he knew he was being conspicuous, but with everything blurring and the ringing in his ears he’s in no shape to properly defend himself. Instead of killing him, though, the dark figure hauls him up and runs.

He’s not lucid enough to take in the scene of the room she drags him into, and so he doesn’t resist as someone snaps something cold around his wrist, and he at long last sinks into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Earhart knew the look of people like Zolf Smith- lost, angry, needing. She’s seen plenty of it, in her years as an airship captain, because there are only a few reasons why people set out for the skies. And so she took him on, and he proved a fantastic first mate, knew his stuff inside and out and indulged her more reckless tendencies.

Plus, he’d been fleeing the Meritocracy. That automatically put him in Earhart’s good books.

Famous (and infamous) Harlequin airship captain Amelia Earhart was, by that point, becoming famous and infamous enough to become a thorn in the Meritocrats’ sides. They decided to target her. The fact that they tried to take down the Reliant was not her fault. The fact that she turned the whole ship around to attack back, causing a wreck that killed almost all of her crew and blew the Reliant into unsalvageable bits… that was.

The only reason she hasn’t drunk herself to death by this point is her ‘fantastic’ first mate (she’s regretting that now, in an angry way), who for some unknowable reason is unwilling to let the guilt swallow her whole.

Zolf Smith was an airman. Zolf Smith dreams of gods and wings and roads not taken. Zolf Smith is given a choice. Zolf Smith chooses no.

Zolf Smith loses his magic.

Earhart is trying to die, and he’s doing his best without access to his healing magic, but it won’t work forever, not when she’s this determined to let herself waste into nothing. He’s not good at talking, and that’s what she really needs- someone to talk to. Someone to listen. But he’s got no legs, and he’s got no magic, and he’s got almost no hope left, and nowhere to go.

They take refuge in a seedy bar in the closest aeroport and report the crash; two survivors, him and Earhart. They’ve been there a month and a half when the door to their room bursts open and a terrified kid with dark shaggy hair and an enormous jacket practically falls through the doorway, lugging an unconscious man in a blue and green waistcoat.

For a split second they all just stare at each other- everyone except for the unconscious man, of course, being as he is unconscious (and bleeding, from the nose and from the ears, and Zolf may not have magical healing but he has medical training and he knows that’s bad)- and then the kid drops her charge like a sack of potatoes, slams the door closed, and dives under the bed.

“Are you in trouble?” is all Zolf asks, and the kid nods, petrified and utterly silent. “Fine. Stay there.”

The unconscious man begins to shake and cry out as Zolf manhandles him into his bed, as though having a nightmare. He wakes with a scream, eyes wide and terrified. Someone bangs on the door. “Do you mind?” Zolf yells. “Little busy in here!”

The door bursts open a second time- those poor hinges- and two men of the kind who aren’t holding knives until you look at them from the right angle, and then they definitely are, and they’re pointed right at you, appear in the doorway. They take in the sickroom and the man with the two prosthetic legs, look nonplussed for a second, and then one nudges the other and tells him to “get a move on, she’s in here somewhere,” and they disappear down the hall.

Zolf pulls the door shut behind them and goes back over to the man in the waistcoat. It takes a bit of figuring out, but eventually, in desperation- the man is obviously dying- Zolf fishes out the anti-magical handcuffs issued to him as soldier and medic in the Meritocratic Air Forces, and clips one around his wrist. He goes limp.

He turns around to find the dark haired kid staring at him with eyes as wide as saucers. “Were they lookin’ for you?” he asks, and her eyes narrow.

“Why do you want to know?” she asks defensively- as though they could be looking for anyone else. The kid has ‘runaway’ written all over her.

“‘Cause I’m tryin’ to save your life,” Zolf snaps, and that seems to shock her, “so if you could work with me here, that’d be great, I’ve got enough on my plate tryin’ to save her life-” jerks a thumb to Earhart- “and apparently this one’s as well-” to the now asleep man taking up his bed. “Who are you? Who’s he?”

“I dunno,” says the kid, “he just kind of fell over.”

Sasha does not make the decision to trust him then. She doesn’t even tell him her name. She makes the decision to trust him when he tells her, a day later, as they sit against the wall and watch the man in the waistcoat mumble in his sleep, that he used to work on an airship.

“I’m Sasha,” she says. “Can I come with you?”

The white-haired dwarf named Zolf Smith- he looks too young to have white hair, but Sasha knows not to judge from appearances- grimaces. “I mean,” he says. “Dunno why you’d want to.”

“I want to see the sky,” says Sasha, who has spent her entire life underground. Zolf looks at her and seems to see something in her that pains him.

“I dunno where I’m goin’,” he warns her mournfully, looking back at Earhart, who is also sleeping. “But you can come with if you want. ‘S your choice.”

He doesn’t ask Sasha’s surname. She decides to trust him.

The name of the man in the bed next to her is Oscar Wilde, and Earhart starts frantically reaching for a gun, any gun, forgetting in her automatic fury that Zolf had taken them all off her weeks ago. A Meritocratic agent-

“Ex-agent,” says Wilde politely. “Please don’t shoot me, Captain, I’ve almost died once this week and I’m not really eager to repeat the experience.”

Earhart feels more lucid than she has in ages as she listens to him describe the strange series of events that brought him there, how sure he is that something is brewing within the Meritocracy’s upper ranks, the disaster that is coming. She can feel Zolf’s eyes on her as all her grief and guilt and despair and boiling anger calcify inside of her.

Wilde is like her, like Zolf, like Sasha- lost, angry, needing.

Wilde has information she can use.

“Mr. Wilde,” Earhart says, her voice hoarse with disuse but filled with more fire than she’s felt since the crash, “you are going to help me kill a dragon.”

She didn’t like him at first- he talked down to her, and his posh affectations grated on principle- but Sasha has to admit that Wilde is smart. She stares in disbelieving wonder as he produces a bag of holding full to the brim with more gold pieces than she’s ever seen in her life. His Meritocratic funding, he tells the spellbound group, because he can spellbind even without his magic. He liquified as many assets as he felt he could get away with before leaving.

“Pick a ship,” he says, “any ship. We can buy it. No need to steal.”

“We’ll need elementals,” Earhart says. “At least two.”

Wilde turns to Zolf. “You’re a cleric, aren’t you?” he says. “You can summon elementals.”

“Not anymore,” Zolf bites.

“Why?”

Zolf makes a face. “I don’t- when- okay.” He sighs. “Look-” and casts Spark into the fireplace. He jumps back in shock.

“I… don’t see the problem?” Wilde says after a good minute of silence, looking from the roaring flames back to Zolf. Sasha gets up and goes to dry her hair by the fire; the weather around the ports has been awful lately. Zolf stares into the flames in surprise.

Zolf Smith was a cleric. Zolf Smith dreams of a new ship. Zolf Smith finds a team, full of people who need healing, the kind he can now provide. Zolf Smith has hope.

#my post #answered #prompt fill #my writing #knifemartin #rqg #rqg fic #rusty quill gaming #rqgaming #sasha rackett #zolf smith #rqg wilde #wilde rqg #rqg earhart #earhart rqg

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