The Cloud Bubble
The Cloud Bubble is Tixxi's airship. She is its captain, and all of its residents are loyal to her alone. It is capable of space and air travel, but it is mainly for aquatic traversal.
Size: Extending a full kilometer in length, this ship is almost excessively massive. For reasons that're yet to be determined, its interior is double the exterior size. Its weight is disproportionately low for its size, but it's still immensely heavy.
Quarters/Storage: There are twenty big, luxurious rooms (one for each crewman, the smallest and most study-like for Len, and one extra), and there's one captain's room that's like a mini-mansion. Calling it a single room is only correct architecturally, as the portions of it don't really have permanent walls between them, but any parts of the floors can be brought up remotely by mental command to the room's central control panel to section the “room” up as Tixxi pleases. The whole ship has all the utilities and amenities, a bathroom connected to each residential room, big, roomy closets, and a huge mess hall/kitchen area. With all of these big rooms, one wouldn't think that essentially the entire center of the ship is clear of anything but Shiva's Heel, and one wouldn't expect the ceiling to actually be only about 9 meters high at its lowest. Then, there's the Aquarium.
Underneath everything, there is an area that is filled totally with water. Salt water and fresh water is segregated by airtight walls, and within these waters are schools and shoals of fish, along with everything else that makes up an ocean. Because it is much smaller than the Abyssal Sea (albeit quite large), many more hostile fish are either kept separate from others by walled areas or not kept at all. There is a single, massive area along the bottom of the Aquarium to hold fish that have been caught in the Abyssal Sea, so that they can be kept fresh until killed on-the-spot and sold for the galaxy-renowned freshness that the ship is known for. (present contents: $3,000 worth in fish)
Way in the back, behind all the rooms, there is a massive storage vault. Within it, there are some miscellaneous treasures of the crew's (Tixxi's treasures mysteriously vanished one day. Everyone's clueless to their whereabouts.) and some supplies:
Submerge Mk-IV- Designed to mix a torpedo with a merperson, these machines encase bodies to form. . . well, torpedoes with merperson tails that have propellers on them. The heads contain fuel, evidently, but no one ever told us what fuel. Each head is enough fuel to move one 2 kilometers (aquatic travel only). The Submerge Mk-IVs operate without any effort of the user but steering with two joysticks, but allow physical stamina to be spent for manual swimming. They provide air with the linings of windspirit crystal on the inside, protect from attacks with the linings of Damascus steel on the outside, and are made primarily of aquamarine and Zingu Pearls. They have hatches which open up to provide “snack rings” (12 per side, made of fish). These all came with the ship, but we refill the snack rings with our own fish. (20 Submerge Mk-IVs, 30 replacement heads)
Zora Tunics (10)
Zora Armor suits (5)
Zora Flippers- They're hydrodynamic, they're tough, and they fit to your feet. (20 pairs)
Mermaid Suit- This lower body suit magically makes your respiratory system work like gills, allowing you to dive indefinitely! (1)
Iron Boots- They're good for sinking, and that's about it. They have aluminum coatings to render them immune to rust, but they're still only good for being heavy. (25 pairs)
Stainless Steel Boots- These are actually decent for a little defense, since they're tougher, but they still don't make much of a difference and aren't much worth their weight for wearing. They're still good for sinking, though! (15 pairs)
Provisions- We have enough food (especially fish!) and drinks (especially alcohol!) to last three months, excluding Tixxi and Len. They'll take five days' worth of provisions with them, while this is what the crew has.
Medical Supplies- We have supplies just beyond first aid, enough to supply about 25% tissue damage for each crew member, Len, and Tixxi.
Composition/Mechanics: Though the exact proportions are unknown, it is known that the base of the Cloud Bubble is some combination of aquamarine, einherjarium (a kind of incredibly tough metal with veins of potentized skystone), Water magicite (NO idea whatsoever how magicites were worked in), sapphires, lapis lazuli, waterwyrm crystals, windspirit crystals, stormsoul crystals, Crusite alloy, Mysidia alloy, ancient turtle shells, mirror scales, Zingu Pearls, some scales of various liliths, stradivari (a wood that's a fusion of strawood and divariwood, ideal for making musical instruments), waltwood (a wood that's naturally impregnated with tar, making it resistant to water), oak, birch, aspen, tsuga wood, ironbark, larch wood, spruce needles, lotus flowers, unpurified ether, Crusader Tonic, healing water, wyvern wings, windslicer pinions, phoenix pinions, dragon hearts, orichalcum, abyssian, Damascus steel, meteorite, ultimite, and even scarletite. The base is 10 meters thick at its thinnest. Apparently, no one knows what the 3-inch thick overhead bubble is made of, but we can guess that it's similarly complex. The same can be said of the propellers and thrusters. The interior machinery (everything that one would expect in a ship, all in one control panel at the front) is made from an odd, ice-like, crystalline material. The buttons, levers, and knobs are made of melt-proof ice. At the tap of an ice button, the entire structure can coat itself in seconds with an armor shell, the whole process costing a disproportionately low amount of fuel. Its materials are also unknown, but what is known is that it's never been necessary yet; the entire ship seems to be invincible, and since scarletite is in its list of materials, it'll probably regenerate if something manages to harm it. However, in case an attack is somehow capable of phasing through a given amount of resistors, the shell is composed of twelve layers, each twelve inches thick. What the crew is unaware of is that the overhead bubble also has a property that dispels almost any magic that hits it, as though the massive resistance of the shell layers wasn't enough. Also, any teleportation into the ship results in an inexplicable force teleporting a unit back to wherever it came from. The front has some bubble-like pods on the front (noticeable in the shelled pic) that act as escape pods. An entrance can only be made if the eye-like design at the front is open (It folds down like a drawbridge.), which is a moot point when the shell is in the way.
Dynamics: Due to its crazy composition, this ship has no wind resistance ever, but actually moves more quickly as it absorbs air, so it's faster in the sky than in space. This is magnified much more with water (It has not been tested in other liquids.), allowing it to travel with very low fuel expenditure at a decent rate when fully submerged.
Fuel: As mentioned in its dynamics, the Cloud Bubble absorbs wind and water. It performs this feat from all sides when static, then expels elements (whichever it is in, air for space) from its rear while absorbing them from the other sides. This acts as a jet propulsion method while generating a vacuum for the ship to naturally fill, so this is actually quite effective, and it's apparently performed for free! Of course, as effective as it is, this is a massive ship; it takes more than this alone to get it really moving along.
The overhead bubble acts as a giant solar panel and lunar panel, so it provides some energy during the day or night.
The whole thing absorbs electricity, so, if a lightning bolt hits it, we have free fuel.
Inside, there is a Mist engine, which grants the ship some energy for movement as long as it is surrounded by Mist, which is found throughout Houcm's and Guild World's atmospheres. It's not efficient enough to let the thing move on its own, but, with everything else, it's what gets us by without using fossil fuels. It can store enough Mist to give us some distance without being constantly fed, but the main asset when crossing space is the air and electric jet propulsion; the water propulsion can give the ship a good start from the water, then the air and Mist can take over through the planet's atmosphere, at the end of which the Mist begins to run on its storage. After that's up, it's up to the non-Mist jet propulsion to get the ship into the next planet's atmosphere.
As for how much of the elements it can absorb, that has yet to be measured, but we've been known to get from Houcm to Guild World on nothing but solar/lunar energies, air, electricity, and Mist.
There are also engines that burn all sorts of fossil fuels. The mysterious lack of waste is kinda' cool, but also vaguely disturbing. The present stock hasn't changed in a long time because we don't generally need extra speed when not in space, and we don't generally go into space for very long. (100 barrels of oils, mainly whale oils and petroleum, 10 metric tonnes of coal, 100 cubic meters of natural gases; WAY more than we'll ever use)
Finally, there is another engine. We don't know how it works or anything, but it's always working to provide some energy, so we're not arguing with it. It's kinda' creepy, though.
Propulsion: In addition to the jet propulsion method of water/air, thrusters can be deployed from the back for some additional speed at the cost of stored electricity/fossil fuels/Mist. Propellers can be deployed (up to three per side) to help with turning (though that can also be done by one side ceasing to absorb elements and in stead expelling them, but that's not as fast as propellers), but aren't really very efficient, so we'll only use these to turn the ship around when it needs to rotate immediately. So far, we've never encountered anything that we've had to immediately turn away from.
Weapons: It only has two launchers on the bottom (They're pretty much torpedo launchers, but they work with different missiles, too.), but they're big, and they're strong. We have some completed missiles, each of them being high-power explosives of high aerodynamics and higher hydrodynamics. (10, also in storage)
Features: The interior of the ship somehow maintains a moderated pressure level, so it feels the same at all altitudes. The ship absorbs wind quickly and stores a lot, so it provides the interior with constant air in addition to its propulsion. Just the same, the entire ship can fill itself from top to bottom (or from controlled portions, of course) quickly. The ship somehow ignores atmospheric pressure, allowing it to get in and out of planets easily. Finally, the floors, walls, and ceilings can all be shifted inward in selected sections to act as walls, stairways (great for helping Len into the Shiva's Heel), and other block structures by control of the frontal control panel (most of the ship) or captain's control panel (everywhere).
Shiva's Heel
Don't worry; this one's much simpler. It can be manned by one pilot or two, thereby making the management of the turrets easier. Its material composition is 100% Shivite (very hard, absorbs ice damage, takes 1.5 damage from fire, incites much speed and some power) except for the crystallized orichalcum engines, all twelve of which are Mist engines. It's as aerodynamic as it looks and is twice as hydrodynamic as its structure implies. Its SPD, granted by hover technology that's based on its Mist engines, is the average of the aquatic SPD of the units inside plus an above average amount for its normal Mist expenditure, and it can't store Mist, so that's it. The material makes it so that its contents can't be targeted or damaged as long as it is intact, but it's not
that tough. Its RES is equal to its DEF. Its two turrets, one on the front and one on the back, each have a power factor of a slightly above average weapon and rapid-fire 3 shots per second. It's a bit harsh to handle, though, and it will fail when it's in a low-Mist area. In fact, when it's in a low-Mist area, an on-screen alert will be presented to anyone who's inside, and it will not fly. If it's flying along and it's approaching a low-Mist area, it will identify that ahead of time, alert the pilot, and slow to a stop if the pilot doesn't make it turn around.
