point several of the soldiers were walking toward us, and I was starting to panic. When Kewyn helped her father – who looked a little worse for wear – out of the hatch, I waved to get her attention and pointed at the incoming trouble.
The blonde whispered something to her father, who whipped his head around and yelled, “Get back, you! This is a highly dangerous area!”
Frightened by the man’s gruff voice and the fact he had just emerged from something that flew from the sky, they stopped but did not retreat. They watched as we helped Aenlilea down from the ship and onto his feet. The man straightened his clothes, slicked back his white hair and walked forward as though nothing had happened.
“Is there a problem?” I heard him ask the guards smoothly before I turned to the kin.
“You should probably make yourself scarce,” I whispered, to which he nodded. He stepped into the approaching crowd and disappeared.
Luckily, Aenlilea was doing a fair job distracting the soldiers by telling them all about his flying ship and the wondrous feeling of crashing into the ocean. After a few minutes, the guards had forgotten that they might have seen a dragon kin standing on the dock. Aenlilea managed to get them to walk away without too much trouble.
“Well, that was fun. A successful flight, if I do say so myself,” Aenlilea muttered to himself before walking up to us. “Let’s get this thing back on its trolley and fix the landing system. Ship’ll be done in no time.” With that, the man walked up the dock and through the now dispersing crowd.
“Who wants to fetch the trolley?” Rio asked cheerfully, and was responded to with despondent stares. His smile faded and he muttered, “All right, I’ll get it,” and dashed after Aenlilea.
The rest of the evening was spent creating a pulley system to get the ship back onto its wheels, then hauling it uphill toward the Aenlilea residence. It became very apparent early on that this had not been thought through.
Yet, after we returned the ship to its greenhouse and flopped on the furniture in the living room, it felt somewhat worth it.
“That was pretty amazing,” Rio muttered happily for what must have been the eighth time.
I hummed in agreement, not enough energy left to make a complete sentence.