Chapter 7: Chapter 7

Dinner was so close. Jacob and Pip's just reward for going through all this trouble to brutalize magical bats was just behind these majestic, looming doors.

Even the noise-insulating walls that Sir Huxley so loved to brag about were having a hard time stifling the party within. After all, dinner was being served not at the dining hall, but in one of the exhibits...which was probably being trashed right this minute by wild, hard-partying aristocrats.

It was enough to make a cautious prince shiver. His caution gave him a decent excuse to quiz Pip about her latest horrible upgrade.

"Here's the description," Pip obliged. "'Summons the Ironing Board weapon. When used properly in tandem with Iron, yields double EXP.' That might be cool, actually!"

Pip had a point. Back in that part of the ship she and Jacob had started to call "the sewers," she'd Ironed one bat against the inner wall of a refrigerator, to significant EXP gains. Though one would assume that only Ironing clothes and other fabrics would give good EXP, it seemed that one only needed to be pressing an object (or a being) against a flat surface.

But... Pip claimed that as a maid in the castle, she'd experimented with Ironing random objects on flat surfaces, including jewelry, leaves, a worm, and a bucket of water. None had worked, and the bucket of water had splashed terribly.

Jacob said, "What if it was the fur? Fur might equal fabric, in the system's mind."

"I'm pretty sure I did Iron the bat on the hairy chest," Pip said thoughtfully.

There was still plenty to experiment with in regards to Pip's system. What could Fold do, assuming it wasn't limited to paper and fabrics...and if it was limited, could those limits be pushed or surpassed? Was Discretion like Toadie—little more than a placebo—or did it have more objectively measurable effects?

And this Ironing Board. Jacob wouldn't permit it to be summoned this close to a big posh dinner party, so a handful of nagging questions would stay with him for a while. What was it made of, what was its length, width, weight? In more practical terms, would it serve as an effective sudden roadblock in a high-speed chase, and would it catch on fire in a hurry, releasing any noxious fumes?

Jacob sighed it all away for the time being. "Well, Pip, I guess it's time to go eat something..."

Looking at the frosted-glass windows in the doors almost made him queasy.

"We'll go through to the suites, and I'll get room service."

Pip burst into huge, incredulous laughter. "BA HA HA! You seriously can't manage a dinner party!? It's just people, dude—I mean prince! Are they that scary to you?"

"Uh," he said, feeling a vein bulge on his temple, "yeah, they do scare me, for obvious reasons."

"It makes sense that you're the least cool brother." Pip counted the reasons off on her fingers: "You're the third son down the line, you only have like one friend, you work alone like some hard-boiled hero and yet people still think you're just a freak, and I'm not even sure you've had—" But then she stopped herself, covering her mouth with one hand.

A bit of a blush spread on her face, but her eyes were sly, still mocking him.

"Sorry, I must've gone too far."

"No, go ahead," Jacob said. Better to have guards talk shit about you openly than behind your back and over a knife.

She averted her eyes, looking at the floor. "No, never mind, sir."

"Alright, then. It's settled. We pass through the party, I find Malcolm, maybe I satisfy a few other questions on my mind—"

"Urges?" Pip chirped.

"No."

"Oh, I'm sure the only urge you'd claim to have are urges for blood and knowledge."

Jacob restrained a groan. Better not to add any fuel to this fire. "Sure... Just come with me and act natural."

"Wanna link arms?"

Jacob nodded. "You asked before I could command it. That's touching."

Pip noted the sarcasm, but grinned radiantly as if she hadn't.

They pushed open the doors to what, during normal Known World's Fair hours, would be an exhibit titled, "Prehistoric Life Reborn!"

Stepping inside, the two went from darkness to light, from lifeless steel to blazingly green ferns and palms, from whirring magic to richly painted scale models of bygone beasts. Recordings of what their cries might have been played on the loudspeakers, but were drowned out by the seismic sound of a hundred waitstaff and three hundred guests decked out in their finest, flashiest, most rustly garb, plucking turkey legs from intermittent tables.

Jacob could tell by Pip's body language, a stiffness and twitch in the shoulder, that she was experiencing a rare wave of fear.

"What is it?" he whispered while looking ahead and crowd-watching.

"Oh, sorry," she said, "it's...it's the noise. It feels wrong."

He paused and really listened, making sure he understood what Pip was referring to. Aw, he really did care...about having an effective bodyguard.

"Those are electronic recordings. I'm not one-hundred-percent sure how it works, but...aetham is used to inscribe sounds in a surface, and later those sounds are remade when the inscriptions are read by a machine."

"But it doesn't sound right. It's like the voice on the suite radio, it's not true to life."

"I know. They never sound right."

Maybe this was Pip's phobia... It certainly reminded Jacob of the night terrors his younger self had to get used to. Kind of annoying to deal with at this late age.

"It'll be fine," he said half-heartedly.

"I know that," she said. "And it's my job to deal with it, prince."

Good—he dragged Pip on.

Speaking of childhood nightmares, this exhibit was actually full of them. The recreations of beasts with names like “iguanosaur” and “ceratodid” were uncanny, not like anything still living, with glassy eyes and eternally snarling expressions. They were painted with shining, extremely fake carnival gloss.

Jacob shoved his way to the side of the crowd, near the wall. Easier to get a decent look at everyone that way, and easier to watch his own back. He found himself by a table of punch and a truly unbelievable array of bacon-wrapped objects. (Who knew you could eat acorns?)

Just behind the table, and behind thick glass, were artifacts that were truly incredible. Fossils, all lined up, most of them from the sky islands. Fossils in sediment, in amber, in chips of stone, fossils of rearranged bone. His gaze lingered on the bones of a twenty-foot-long dodo with four legs and a beak like a hatchet.

"The elmu lived around 40 million years ago and was apparently endemic to the Federline Islands," read a placard. "While no human remains were found on the islands which this flightless behemoth inhabited, it must have made for a tasty snack!"

"No human remains on this island." They killed Jacob with that. Such a pathetic form of denial, like saying, "There are no ghosts in this house." As if people had discovered, and empirically proven the existence of, ghosts in thousands of other households.

...Okay, fine, so Pip did have a system, against the laws of his known world. Humans could have lived up here in the sky. He just didn't appreciate the way sky island explorers phrased it like an advertisement for their next big expedition, as if this time they were guaranteed to unearth it.

A finger tapped him on the shoulder and he showed the finger his knife.

"Woah!" the tapper cried.

"You poked the lion," Jacob said.

Pip snorted. "Try-hard."

In front of them was Malcolm, wearing a black-and-gold suit that evoked medieval royalty (the most egregious of all royalty, Jacob noted). Underneath the sleeves and collar, his skin looked a bit scuffed and cut. He was holding his hands up in surrender, a smile on his face.

Jacob put the knife away. "I'm glad to see you, though. You tired?"

"Not at all. I had a good workout shoving wild animals off the stern. It wasn't nearly as hard as I expected."

Claws had scratched him a few times, clearly, but he seemed perfectly chipper. He had a hunter's sense of fair play: it's never the animals who make the wrong move, it's the humans.

"Did the maid help?"

Jacob replied with a coy smile. Pip, liking the attention, came out of her fear-funk.

Changing the subject something fierce, Jacob leaned in and said, "Listen, I have an object I'd like you to appraise."

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Reaching into his pocket, he half-revealed the golden ball.

"Please, Jake. Nobody's watching."

After a quick look around, Jacob rolled his eyes and held the ball up nearly to Malcolm's face.

Malcolm frowned, studying it, gesturing for Jacob to rotate it with his hand (he did), and then concluded, "It's not even worth anything."

Jacob's reaction was instant. "Come on! You haven't even felt it."

Malcolm put the very tip of his finger against it. Glared at Jacob. "It feels exactly the way I knew it would."

"Malcolm. It's round, like a pearl, like it was at some point supposed to be a polished jewel."

"It's light," the shopkeeper said.

"It's not any material I can name."

"That's because it's an alloy," Malcolm said, as if Jacob were the stupidest kid in the schoolhouse. "None of it is even gold."

Jacob was still a bit flabbergasted and angry, but calming down. "Can you at least date it?"

"Not except to say it's fairly recent. Not much wear and tear. Maybe a hundred years ago?"

"Well, break it open."

Pip's eyes widened, almost like they had when he threatened to cast the ball's spell in the hallway. (Which he'd tried in the sewers, by the way. Didn't work.)

Malcolm's eyes widened too, but his expression was fiercer.

Jacob pointed his knife at Malcolm's face like an accusing, casual finger. "Ah," he said, "so it is worth something."

"Yeah. It's worth about ten bucks, and it's not worth scattering shards all over Ralphie's food, or into our faces."

Was Malcolm so against this because, as the runner of a curiosity shop, he couldn't stand to see any old object destroyed? That'd make sense to Jacob. He'd seen him look sick over broken vases.

"If you're gonna act like that over it," he said, dropping the ball into his pocket again, "I'll just crush it myself, someplace far away from here."

Malcolm said, "It's okay, I won't cry."

Sensing a current of fresh awkwardness between these two, Pip said, "We'd better get going and...eat food, so, it was great getting to meet you for the very first time, Malcolm, sir!"

Malcolm nodded at her, then muttered to Jacob, "Seriously, though, I'm impressed you got her this long. No offense."

"All offense totally taken, but it's fine."

Malcolm walked off, and then, just as Pip's rumbling stomach hoped Jacob was going to go for a plate, he proposed another change of direction.

"Bullshit," he said. "I'm gonna get a second opinion."

"Aw, but he's your friend," Pip said sulkily.

"I know. This wasn't a friendship-ending disagreement. He just got greedy and thinks he can con me. Onward."

"But sir! Food! Hunger!"

"...Okay, you're right. I'll get a plate, but I won't sit down."

Pip didn't let the full depths of her satisfaction show. She'd just convinced Jacob to change his mind about not dining here! Take that, pride and ego of the royal intelligentsia.

Once they'd both piled food on their respective plates, Jacob began the arduous task of mingling.

A wise and suspicious man once said, "Never get drunk at parties." A wiser one said, "Get just drunk enough at parties." The wise man was Jacob and the wiser was Malcolm. Pip had no informed opinion, being perpetually a little bit drunk. (Hey, drinkable water was rare. The housemaids gotta have something to look forward to.)

Anyway, the saying illustrates the fact that "mingling" to Jacob simply meant "existing in the company of possible assassins and/or jerks you don't care about." At this point, he barely registered the jokes, chiding, and general insults that followed him as he moved through high society. Sure, they didn't always have obnoxious feathered masquerade masks that brushed him as he went, and drinks did not, in fact, always spill on his pant leg—and Pip wasn't always there to greet every single solitary being—but, minor changes.

What he paid more attention to was the scenery. And not just the ferns and fossils. The floor in the center of the room, that was truly different too. Underneath glass with air holes poked through, a tangled den of pythons slithered, each one at least as wide as Jacob's arm. Obviously he knew that a snake face couldn't convey emotion, yet he got the sense that they hated having to endure so many dancing, teetering feet.

He watched as a sudden spark blasted the glass. Part of the shower trailed through the air holes and onto a snake's hide. The snake below reared up and hissed. Not that it had any effect, not that the snake could even be heard.

The sparks had come from the magically enhanced high heel of an extraordinarily self-satisfied young woman, a socialite Jacob was sorry to note that he recognized.

"Nice shoes!" Pip cried, and with impressive tact didn't mention "deadly" or "hazardous."

"You're a doll!" said the young Ms. Weatherly. "And you, Prince Jacob, you're...the same as ever." She extended a black-gloved hand. Jacob didn't smile and didn't shake. Ms. Weatherly left and, within minutes, would forget that this exchange had ever happened.

Pip shouted out and started having a conniption. "I had a chance!" she cried. "Next time, Jacob, could you at least let me shake her hand if you won't!?"

He was already walking off, already back to scanning the crowd for faces he might consider useful. "You're into her?"

"So what if I am?"

"Don't be. She's even worse than the papers say."

"But she has money."

"...Point taken."

The model of the iguanosaur came into view, framed spectacularly by palm trees and cheese platters. The first iguanosaur fossil had been unearthed from Kittrick Island, the very first sky island touched by earth-human feet.

"Found among tiny fragments that may have once been human finger bones," the description misleadingly stated, since studies had shown that the bones in question had the composition of boring old rocks, "these swamp-dwelling monsters were big enough to give their human companions quite the ride!" Man, fuck off, these guys probably didn't even live in swamps.

Here, before them, was the centerpiece of the exhibit, far bigger than the sketch in the hall had led them to assume. It rivaled whales. Its slickly shining green body could've fit an entire tavern.

...That gave Jacob an unappealing hunch.

Sure enough, there was an opening cut roughly into the iguanosaur. Two, actually, in equally unappealing places.

This whole exhibit smelled like wine and horse piss, but the iguanosaur's insides even more so. He couldn't deny his curiosity, though.

Let's see, would he rather stick his head in a urinary tract or in an anus? Probably the anus, since he had a lower chance of getting his head or face stepped on Pip-style. Jerking the cheese table closer, he pulled himself halfway into the cavity and commanded Pip to stay nearby.

His first impression of the iguanosaur's innards was "wretched." It was actually amazing how Sir Huxley had found a way to recreate the pestilence of a real digestive tract.

A wiser man, or just a normal person, would say it looked like a bunch of drunken revelers with flasks and blazing lanterns had found their way into a whale's stomach and a storm had sloshed them around.

Yet Jacob didn't turn away. In fact, he was quick to find one face that grabbed his attention, one that actually stunned him with surprise—pleasant surprise—amazed surprise.

It took a moment for him to manage to say, "Prof. Federline!"

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