"There were quite a few... agents on the Black Ship," Mercy comments, "so I expect there'll be room for all of us."

"Shall we go see what's there?"

"Oh, while I don't have a problem calling it The Black Ship, do you think it has a name? Do we want to keep calling it that, if it does?"

"If we want to maintain the fiction of being Vril ourselves as long as possible, I think we had best find out the ship's official Vril name and drill ourselves in using it." Grimsby suggested.

Marian outright laughs at Dash's words. Made you uncomfortable did it? she chuckles. I thought it rather marvelous myself.

Later, seeing Maybelle's reaction, she smiles warmly back, taking her response for interest. Anyone who appreciated a good book would do just splendidly.
Her attention is diverted by Mercy's question though. The black ship is a dreadfully dull name, so I do believe we should call it something else. I suppose Mr. Baskerville here is right about using its official title, but if there isn't one we should come up with something wonderful instead! Something like...the thornbird! Or....maybe the storm raven...hm that might be a bit too dramatic. But something interesting! Knowing our luck it will be named something dull like, black ship number one hundred and twelve or something like that. She rolls her eyes.

In reply to Marian Holroy (msg # 36):

Grimsby remarked, "I rather like the 'Storm Raven' --it reminds me of the Viking raven-banner they still tell tales of in the north. But as a matter of deceiving the Vril, I am afraid we had best stay with the Vril name, even if it is as boring as 'Black Ship 112.'"

"You were on the black ship, Dash," Mercy says. "You, too, Bellgrove. What'd you see?"

"Since they were getting ready to leave, they must have resupplied already, right? We should check that out."

"Did you find any charts?"

"Oh, and do we really want to take Professor Cavor with us? That's what they were trying to do--should we really do what they wanted?"

Marian gives Grimsby a warm smile. She knew she could be a bit silly at times but it was kind of him to indulge her.

In reply to Mercy Kincaid (msg # 38):

Grimsby remarks "If Professor Cavor is left on his own, I fear he might fall back into the hands of the Vril. He is a brilliant scientist, but unworldly. We must either keep him under our protection or arrange for him to be kept safely elsewhere, and the latter might not easy."
This message was last edited by the player at 23:39, Fri 01 Mar 2019.

Maybelle, meanwhile, had finished writing her letter, and had it sent off. She listened to the chatter about what would the ship be called, and she personally thought that the "raven" might do.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:03, Fri 01 Mar 2019.

Rosabelle, too, wrote her letter, enclosed within a note for her assistant, explaining, vaguely, her sudden departure. They would all be shocked at her taking off, though she wasn't, strictly speaking, a proper lady. As someone who had worked around men her entire life, having to constantly prove herself and her abilities, Rosabelle was well used to being thought odd.

She was glad that there were other women along, although she realized that she was actually more comfortable with men at this point. She and Mercy, at least, seemed to have much in common. Rosabelle looked forward to getting to know her better.

Once her letter was written, Rosabelle finally made her way to the deck of the airship to retrieve her clockwork creation. She called the creature to her when she was within range and he lifted on leather-webbed wings to come to rest on the pad on her right shoulder. Rosabelle returned to the others to formally introduce him around.

In reply to Rosabelle Descant Tinker-Plumist (msg # 42):

"Uh...a few last moment things on the floor of the hangar barn, maybe, but otherwise the Vril all sounded like the zep was ready to leave at a moments notice, Mercy." Dash answers the diminutive mechanic, "And yes, I took all the charts from the Captain's room.  I've been going over them for the past little while--which is why I needed to speak with the Professor."

Alex turns to the older man, "Professor Cavor, could you tell us why the Vril kidnapped you, and what is so special about the ore you found in Lord Kentigern's mine?"

"I expect it will have many amazing properties, some of which we may not discover for centuries!" Cavor answers Dash's question.

"Kentigern insisted on calling it cavorite, which I suppose is appropriate since I discovered the ore while I was looking for prehistoric fossils in the bog. The layman, of course, doesn't usually distinguish between the ore and the raw element."

"An ore is often a mixture of rocks and sediment that holds compounds or raw minerals, such as gold. The concentration of the mineral is not very great, so the ore has to be refined to extract enough mineral to be usable... which often means profitable."

"Panning for gold is a good example. Unless you get lucky and find a nugget or two, it's mostly dust that you find. So it takes a lot of gold dust to be useful."

"I myself have taken to calling the mineral within the cavorite wonderflonium. I like it. I think it captures the spirit of the new mineral. I daresay the International Board of Chemistry won't approve it. They'll probably call it eustacium or unobtainium or something equally ridiculous."

"The only property I've been able to determine is its anti-gravity property. I didn't have enough of a sample long enough to do much with it, but I suspect it might be the substance in liftwood that gives that its properties."

Grimsby remarks in a tone as close to excited as his traditional British phlegm permits, "If Britain could develop this chemical and discover the secret of employing anti-gravity independent of liftwood, the entire economic -- and political -- structure of the human-peopled solar system would be revolutionized!"
This message was last edited by the player at 20:33, Sat 02 Mar 2019.

In reply to Grimsby Baskerville (msg # 45):

"Dammit!" Dash spits out angrily--then sheepishly looks up at the group, "Oh, I apologize for the language, Ladies.  It's just that, in the Black Zep Captain's papers I brought back, it said their next stop was the tiny island nation of Lakshadweep, in the Indian Ocean, south of the Indian Sub-Continent--and Bellgrove ..." Dash gestures towards his fellow American.

"Bellgrove brought to my attention that Lakshadweep was known for the submersibles which make up it's defensive fleet.  Now, maybe I've been trying to out-think these Vril rascals for too long, but when Bellgrove mentioned submersibles, I had this sudden thought of the Vril trying to plate one with the gravity-defying cavorite-or-whatever, and I realized that they would then have a ready made aerial ironclad at their disposal."

"I don't know for sure that this is their plot, but since they have separated Professor Cavor from the ore they took when they kidnapped him--and the Professor says he heard them talking about the ore going to a different location than he was--I assume from that that they have the knowledge of how to correctly process the ore for the ... the wonderflonium it contains.  So we are then presented with the question--if they didn't need the Professor to process the ore, then why was he being taken to Lakshadweep?"

"Were they going to try and coerce him to use his knowledge to work the wonderflonium for them?  Were they going to trade him and his knowledge to someone in Lakshadweep in exchange for something?  Maybe a submersible?"

"So never mind the question, should we take Professor Cavor to Lakshadweep, better we ask ourselves, should we go to Lakshadweep or should we try to recover the cavorite ore?  We have the Professor, if we recover the ore, we can head back to Scotland, having both foiled several Vril plots as well as accomplishing the mission we promised to perform for Lord Kentigern."

In reply to Grimsby Baskerville (msg # 45):

My goodness! Maybelle thought, upon hearing this. No wonder he had been kidnapped!

"Ha-ha-ha! You are so funny sometimes, Dash!" Mercy laughs.

"To be honest, I made the same mistake a few times when I first started. You are mixing apples with oranges."

"There are two separate facts that you've linked together, yet you don't have enough information to truly know if they are linked."

"Fact One: the black ship's next destination was to be Lakshadweep."

"Fact Two: the cavorite and Professor Cavor were being taken to another location."

"We don't really know if that location was Lakshadweep. Just like he was taken to Graustark and on to Bourbony here, neither of those were his final destination. We don't know that Lakshadweep is the final destination either."

"You also don't know that this wonderflonium needs to be applied as plating to a ship. It may sound reasonable, but perhaps it will work like magnetism."

This cavorite, or wonderflonium, sounded like a fascinating substance. It could have any number of applications in her own work. Rosabelle glanced at Thorn out of the corner of her eye, wondering how many components used to keep him aloft could be replaced with such an anti-gravity substance.

Are the Vril aware that they are no longer in possession of the professor? If not, keeping him out of sight might be enough to keep him safe if he travels with us. I would think his knowledge would be invaluable.

Grimsby remarked "The Vril who were with Professor Cavor when we freed him certainly knew they had lost him, but most of them were not in a position to report the loss."
This message was last edited by the player at 01:50, Wed 06 Mar 2019.

In reply to Grimsby Baskerville (msg # 50):

Dash casts a frown over at Mercy,

"I assure you, Mercy, it was not my intent to amuse you." Dash replies, "And I was only repeating facts as I understood them--although I will grant you the possibility of that information being either distorted or misunderstood by myself, as I gained it from the Professor rather shortly after having been blown across a blimp hangar by an explosion, and the Professor was just coming out of a drug-induced heavy sleep!"

"At that time the Professor said that the ore had been sent along to 'somewhere else', and he was fairly insistent that he was being 'taken' to Lakshwadeep, not that it was just the next stop."

Dash turns to the Professor, "Professor Cavor, sir, could you please clear this up for us?"





"I wouldn't be too sure about that, Grimsby, my friend." Dash answers with a grin, "While most of the Vril crew of the Black Zep were killed or rendered unconscious by their own blast, Bellgrove, Connor and myself recovered quickly enough to get aboard the zep, search it, and find the Professor before the Gendarmes showed up in force.  We snuck him off the zep, out the back door of the hanger--from whence we'd come in--and took the long way getting back to Remi's ship.  And we hid him there while he recovered from the drugs they'd given him to keep him docile."

"The Gendarmes don't even know Cavor is here--so, unless they were watching their own zeppelin from a distance, I'm pretty secure in saying that the Vril don't know we have him, either.  However, they do know we want him, and if they can't find him, it would only be logical for them to assume he is with us."

"I could have been mistaken," the Professor admits.

"The cavorite ore was sent on another ship. It could have been going to Lakshadweep. I don't honestly know where they were taking me. I overheard them say they were going to Lakshadweep; I naturally assumed that's where they were taking me."

"It was only after that I found out they were coming here to Bourbony and wanted me to help with the bomb."

"The professor was still unconscious in the black ship when the hangar doors were blown open," Connor explains.

"None of the crew of the ship that survived the explosion have been back on the ship. I believe there were only two survivors anyway, and they have been incarcerated. Add the other two Vril agents we stopped, both of which know that we used the black ship to remove the bleachers from the area."

"They might not know who we are exactly, or that we've interfered in two previous instances."

"We also need to keep in mind that the Vril women might have some ability to find out what happened from the men. On the other hand, we also have some indication that the women don't know what the men do. And, for that matter, don't care."

"So, the real answer to whether the Vril know that we have Professor Cavor is: we simply don't know."

Grimsby concluded, "Mr. Holmes is probably correct in the strict sense that the Vril do not know for a certainty that we have the professor, but I fear Mr. Hawksbury may be correct in suggesting that the Vril do have good grounds for suspecting that he is with us --in which case, the sooner we depart, the better."

All this talk of anti-gravity, it both fascinated and mystified Marian. For one, she kept imagining that it would make you float off the earth into space, never to be seen again. It was a silly notion but the idea terrified her. Listening to the conversation though, she finds herself nodding. I'm ready whenever the rest of you are. I'm not keen on encountering the Vril again any sooner than I have to.

"Okay, then. We have a plan and a consensus, right?" Mercy added.

"Any reason to delay further? Other than taking that first step."

"It just occurred to me that we might be able to keep one step ahead of the Vril by moving quickly... don't give them a chance to act against us."

"So, all aboard!"

With that, Mercy heads for the hangar where the black ship has been parked.

Fortunately, all the dead bodies have been removed, and much of the debris has been cleaned up.

Maybelle followed Mercy to the ship, and climbed on board, lifting her skirt out of the way slightly.

Grimsby followed the ladies, still alert in case any other Vril had reached the black ship's hangar.