The rest of the journey through the Ruins was rather tame. Tonya hummed happily as she steered, and the Child's engines whirred as contentedly as they did in the open blue. Clarissa, left without something to do and a dearth of excitement to witness, found herself in a rather unexpected state of mind, under the circumstances.

She was bored.

The novelty of watching swirling white mist bounce off the window had worn off about fifteen minutes ago. Seeing the mists part to reveal the endless blue wasn't accompanied by the joy of surviving peril, and more to do with the relief of having a task.

"Mind if I help the deck crew come back down?" Clarissa asked Tonya.

Tonya shot her a knowing grin, as if reading Clarissa's thoughts. "Rather think there's something of a thrill seeker in you, kid. Tell me with a straight face you didn't have fun."

Clarissa tried, but she couldn't even look at Tonya without breaking into a grin. "I won't even try," she said.

There was something about the light that caught the ribbons in Tonya's hair; gold-coloured thread glimmered every time she moved her head. It didn't take long before Clarissa could see numbers every time she blinked, and nearly every number was one.

Nearly every number. "That red ribbon, the one dangling off the back of your hair. Is there a story to that?"

Tonya reached behind her head and turned the red ribbon to face Clarissa. "Sixth place during the Shardwall Run," Tonya said.

"I thought you said you won that race," Clarissa said, confused.

"The purse was good money. The amount of money the bookies paid me to fake engine trouble and lose was a lot more."

Clarissa's mouth hung open, and she stared at the older woman, both awed and appalled. "But, that's cheating! I thought you liked racing."

"I love flying, but the races always left a bad taste in my mouth. I had too much at stake every time," Tonya said. She glanced at the door, then pointed at it with her thumb. "The deck crew might appreciate something warm. Especially since we can't run a bath until we reach Idlewind."

"Will do," Clarissa said. She walked towards the door, moving her harness clip from one rail to the next. She reached the door and pulled the latch before Tonya said anything more, but what she said made Clarissa as happy as she ever remembered being.

"And kid, if you ever find the Monastery ain't the life for you, let us know," Tonya said.

Clarissa smiled and waved in thanks, before she opened the door and made her way to the mess hall. Finding herself alone, she stepped into the kitchen for the first time and stared at the collection of equipment without touching any of it.

She was afraid to. She had no idea how to make tea in a zero gravity environment.

The kettle looked fairly easy. The electrical connector doubled to affix the kettle to the wall, it wouldn't fly off. Clarissa took it over the sink and used the sink's hose tap to get the nozzle deep inside the kettle. She tucked the end into a corner as much as she could and turned on the water slowly.

The water clung to the inside edges of the kettle, and held together even as Clarissa managed to fill it halfway. She gave up at the halfway mark, not willing to chance filling it any more than she had. She set it back onto the power connector, switched it on, and went to hunt for some kind of container people could drink tea out of.

She managed to find a couple of cups, but nothing that looked like it could hold water in microgravity. But barely a minute into her hunt, she turned back to the kettle to realize she and made a terrible mistake.

The kettle was working, but without gravity, there was an expanding bulb of hot air rising up from below the water, pushing it up.

And out the open spout.

"No no no," Clarissa muttered as she ran over to the kettle. She turned it off, but not before a stream of thankfully tepid water was pushed out and spurted into the air.

Clarissa grabbed a cloth and chased after the drifting stream, even as it travelled up and threatened to climb out of her reach. She lunged for a dishcloth and threw it after the stream.

The rag hit the stream and broke it into marble-sized droplets that shot about the room.

"Bollocks," Clarissa muttered.

And, just because it would embarrass Clarissa more for it to happen exactly then, the door opened and Leslie was hit by a cannonball sized bulb of water directly in his face.

"Ah, what the blackened grease stain is-" Leslie wiped his face, scowling indignantly.

"I'm sorry," Clarissa said quickly, staring down at the ground.

Leslie's scowl vanished as he looked from the water he had managed to wipe off his face and onto his hand, to the nearly empty kettle, and laughed. Long and loud and hard, slapping his knee and nearly falling off his magnetic boots, Leslie laughed like nothing funnier had ever happened in his life.

"What happened?" Mercy asked, stepping around Leslie and inside. "Those knocks to your head from your boxing career finally caught up with you?"

"Clarissa tried to make tea," Leslie wheezed between laughs.

Mercy tried valiant to stifle the fit of laughter that erupted from her mouth, so it only came out as a giggly sputter. Clarissa nearly tried to hide behind the kitchen bar when the captain walked in after Mercy, but he only smiled kindly and poked at a nearby water bubble.

"She made it further than the first time Anita tried," Captain Locklear remarked. "Clarissa actually got the water in the kettle."

"Fair point," Leslie said. Clarissa finally noticed the man was drenched, his sleeveless shirt so water-logged he might be carrying the kettle's worth of water on his person. Mercy was in a similar bad way, her normally billowy sleeves clung to her arms like frightened children, and her pants might be more water than fabric. Mercy's hat, however, had weathered the mists with aplomb, and even the raven feathers were still perfectly arranged.

But of the trio, the captain had weathered it the best. His pants from his knees to his nearly knee-high boots were wet, and both his coat and boots still had beads of water clinging to it, but asides from his hair he was dry, and strode over to the bar with ease and comfort.

"Now, results aside, I do approve of the sentiment," the captain said, as he took something else out of the cupboard. It looked like a teapot, with a lid and a very large handle, only slightly larger and with a tiny hole near the top where a spout would normally be. "And this dilemma has come up before. Trying to make tea once we leave the pull of the inner isles has resulted in a litany of comical disasters."

"Like that time you tried to bake a perfectly round cake in the oven?" Mercy asked.

"Now now, that worked the fourth time."

"The four hundred Volante talons you spent commissioning a coffee maker that still didn't work out here?" Leslie asked.

"Important discoveries were made, regardless," the captain replied, and he exaggerated his indignation with a shrug and a hand over his heart.

"Your attempt at a Calmoori pudding?" Leslie asked.

"With or without gravity?" Mercy interjected.

"Are we recounting the captain's culinary blunders?" Anita asked from the doorway as she and Yannick stepped inside. Clarissa was surprised when she smiled so quickly, seeing the navigator again. His pouf of curly hair was half-matted to his scalp, and he had sweat so much that his clothes might as well have been outside in the mist with Mercy and Leslie.

"Don't think we have enough time before we reach Idlewind," Mercy said.

"Anita, would you show Clarissa that marvellous little device of yours?" The captain asked, as he stopped by the sink and carefully began to fill the pot with water. "Clarissa was trying to make us tea."

"She tried to spray water into the kettle and made a mess?" Anita asked as she passed around the captain. "Leslie did that once."

"Judging by the steam, it looks like she managed to fill the kettle," the captain replied. "Just she didn't realize that without gravity, a conventional kettle behaves like a canon."

Anita laughed as she drew out an odd-looking device. It had a long metal hoop, and beside it, a small fan. She threaded the cable at the end through the lid of the pot, set the lid on the pot, and plugged it into a wall port.

Anita flicked a switch at the wall, and the propeller whirred to life. The captain held a cloth over the end of the small hole and turned to Clarissa. "To fix that problem of the water turning to gas, the fan inside stirs the water about. Pressure forces water and air out of the hole, but quite a bit more air than water, since the air is expanding."

"Okay," Clarissa said, as she watched the water churn and steam billow out in irregular puffs from the hole.

"You're going to lose some water, though. Else the pressure builds up and breaks the container," Captain Locklear said, as the steam kept puffing up into the air. He then picked up a metal rod with a small ball at the end. The ball was perforated with dozens of tiny holes, like a sieve the size of a ball bearing. "Now, here's the part I am going to beg you to never reveal to the Volante navy."

The captain then opened the lid, and set the ball inside the still churning water.

"Captain!" Mercy said in a dramatic drawl. She put the back of her hand against her head and pretended to faint. "You're stirring the tea while it steeps? You scoundrel."

"My etiquette instructor in officer training school would have me keel-hauled if he ever found out," the captain admitted. "The navy takes tea more seriously than most places take religion. Or the Vaschetti Cup."

The captain then turned to Yannick, who despite now sitting down was perched as if ready to leap into action. "Now, the real discovery that made having tea possible out here was a happy accident Yannick made, when he broke my model of the first ship I served on. Go ahead and grab the cups."

Yannick nodded and kicked off the side of the table. He drifted over the kitchen bar and used his hands to scramble up to where the shelf met the ceiling. Setting his feet against the metal bulkhead above him, upside down, he gently collected a half-dozen odd looking glass ornaments and somehow stuck them to a wrench he had taken out of the tool bag at his leg.

He pushed off the ceiling with his hands and landed rather neatly beside Clarissa. She grinned at him, impressed at his comfort with microgravity.

"Showing off, Yannick?" Anita asked from the table. "Can't remember the last time I saw you that eager to do anything."

Yannick blushed and hung his head, which would have worked better in gravity, when his mess of curly hair would hang over his face. Clarissa smiled, pointed to the ornaments stuck to his wrench and asked, "what are those?"

"They're cups. Shaped for sky without pull. For when we're past the big isles," Yannick explained, and he pulled one off the wrench. He extended it to Clarissa, and when it was about a foot away, let it go.

It was a clear glass ornament of some kind, Clarissa could see that much immediately. Shaped much like the hull of an airship, with a rounded back end, the front was almost a straight wedge, with a lip that widened right at the nose. It had a round handle at the side and a fat base of glass that encased what had to be a magnet.

Clarissa took it by the handle and was surprised to find the top of the ornament was open. "This is a cup?" Clarissa asked.

"It is," Yannick said. "I designed it, when I broke it, the captain's model. It was of the first airship he served on. When I broke it, we scooped excess water into it. The shape manipulated water into flowing out the bow of the ship, with a little suction."

"So, we can have tea? In zero gravity?" Clarissa asked.

"Yes," Yannick said simply. "We can. Would you like to?"

"Is the sky blue?" Clarissa asked, holding out the cup in her hands towards where the captain still had the pot.

Mercy reached into a drawer and carefully removed a long tube with a rubber ball on an end. It reminded Clarissa of a turkey baster. She dropped the device into the open pot, sucked up some tea, and brought it over to Clarissa's cup.

Mercy pushed the tea in carefully until the cup was half full. She took another cup from Yannick, added some to it, and handed it back to him. She took the rest of the cups from him and turned back to refill the baster.

Yannick lifted his cup up, and smiled a slightly lopsided, awkward smile. "Cheers?" He asked.

"Cheers," Clarissa said, and she raised the cup to her lips, suddenly realizing she had no idea how to drink out of it.

Yannick, however, didn't have the same trouble. He turned the cup to where the bow widened into a wide lip, blew on it once, then sipped.

Clarissa mimicked the motion and found she could drink with astonishing ease. Almost too much ease, and she puffed air through her mouth to cool the tea.

Yannick laughed, and so did she, as Clarissa drank a cup of tea in the far reaches of the endless sky.