"Don't be a fool!" Miliana helped the man clamber awkwardly out from the reeking wine barrel. "What on Toril were you doing in there?"
"It's a rescue! You know… we've come to save our lady fair!" Lorenzo and Tekoriikii both puffed themselves with pride. "Well you are a princess. You have to come to expect this sort of thing."
"But the gates are closed! The walls are guarded!"
"All taken care of!" Lorenzo took a swift stock of the room, still holding Miliana in strong, adoring arms. "Good! The box is here. Now all we have to do is get the thing outside." The man reached behind himself and produced a large package from his hidey hole. "We brought this! Now get your notes and start looking for a feather fall spell!"
"Feather fall?" Miliana unwrapped the package and discovered her own dear pointy hat, a hat well stuffed with her own handwritten spells. "We can't jump from the walls! They're slick marble-there's no way up!"
"It's all taken care of… now just find the spell!"
Miliana clamped the hat across her head, and instantly felt her spirits soar! A grand princess once again, she flipped through her curling lists of spells, feeling sure that she could cobble together the spell effects required. She had never cast the spell before-but she was Miliana-Miliana the sorceress, mistress of her own destiny!
At this precise moment, the kitchen door burst open wide. The headmistress stood framed in the doorway, roaring in alarm.
"So! We have uncovered your perfidiousness at last!" The titanic woman somehow moved aside to reveal a squad of home economics tutors armed with rolling pins and knives.
"Slaughter the male, but keep the girl for punishment.
"Attack!"
With a bloodcurdling scream, a dozen shrieking female tutors charged in through the door, plunging through the lake of spilled red wine. Unconcerned, Lorenzo took the terrified Miliana and hoisted her up onto the table. Tekoriikii joined her, sitting atop a fruit bowl while Lorenzo dangled his own feet high above the ground.
"It's fascinating, isn't it? Magic creates natural forces, but it takes science to actually study them…" The artist touched his rapier to the pool of spilled wine, pulled the trigger, and watched as the teachers squealed, performed little somersaults, and crashed-unconscious-to the ground. "Electrical force, for instance. Blue dragons have it, magicians make lightning bolts, but did anyone ever bother to study the phenomenon of conductivity?"
"Oh, shut up!" Miliana leapt down to the floor, treading on a weakly moving domestic skills tutor. "The headmistress is still out there trying to fetch more help!"
By the shuddering and rumble of the floorboards, it seemed the massive headmistress had charged off into the academy's heart. Miliana and Lorenzo each took one end of his extremely heavy box, and with Tekoriikii helpfully perched in the middle singing songs, they struggled their burden out into the school's open courtyard.
Lorenzo flipped open the box and unshipped a pole, some boards, and a set of gigantic paddle blades. He began to busy himself unloading miles and miles of bundled rope, glancing briefly up the towering walls.
"A hundred feet tall, would you say?"
"One hundred and twenty-five… and faced with marble!" Miliana was almost making handstands with fear. "Will you just hurry up! There're teachers guarding this place night and day!"
"We're working on it as fast as we can-just prepare your feather fall spell!" Lorenzo began mounting a series of brackets down the courtyard's marble punishment post. "Tekoriikii? The pulleys, if you will?"
The bird flew off with a series of pulley wheels dangling from his claws. While Lorenzo happily tested his brackets and frames, the firebird fixed a pulley high atop the curtain wall.
Yells and screams rebounded from the school corridors. Up atop the battlements, a tutor with a crossbow took aim at Lorenzo's back. Tekoriikii swooped down, plucked the weapon from the woman's hands, and sent her tumbling back in terror down the stairs.
A pole well wrapped with rope formed the centerpiece of Lorenzo's collection of parts and pieces. Lorenzo slid the pole down into his brackets, then topped it off with a ring of gigantic birchwood propeller blades. He checked the fit of the rotor assembly, then attached a pair of free-moving rings to the pole to act as handholds and a support for the passengers' feet.
"The principle is based on a flying sycamore seed." The artist began feeding excess rope off to one side. "The rope is wound about the drive shaft; a weight is dropped from a height, pulling on a rope, and the rope whips free, accelerating the rotor blades to high speed. Lift is produced; we stand on the lower ring and grip the upper while the shaft turns between us, and the whole assembly will fly up into the sky!"
"Brilliant!" Miliana was utterly impressed. "So we fly over the school walls?"
"And we'll then join Luccio in an escape-out through the city's river gate-to freedom."
Miliana watched Tekoriikii threading the pulley ropes and checking the fastenings one by one.
"So how do we drop a weight?"
"Aha! There we must trust to science once again!" Lorenzo rubbed his hands together with glee. "A feather fall spell is used to slow the descent of a falling body through the air. How does it achieve this? By reducing the specific mass of the target of the spell."
Miliana blinked. Lorenzo lectured on:
"Well, don't you see? A pound of feathers falls slower than a pound of iron, yes?"
"Um…" The girl felt a fallacy somewhere in the offing. "Well, yes, I suppose…"
"Right! So lighter objects must fall slower than heavier ones. The feather fall spell make objects lighter in order to slow their fall." Lorenzo made a proud gesture at Tekoriikii, who sat puffed like a canary beside the magnificent new flying machine. "We have with us the heaviest anvil in the kingdom-the perfect counterweight. All you do is throw the spell; Tekoriikii carries the weightless anvil up aloft across the walls and ties it tight to the rope. When the spell wears off, the anvil falls… and we have our motive thrust!"
The girl fixed Lorenzo with a heavy-lidded stare.
"You brought what with you?"
"An anvil! A gigantic anvil!" Lorenzo stuck his thumbs beneath his arms "A great big anvil we left just outside the gates…"
Miliana wearily hid her face inside her hands. Lorenzo bit his lip, and sensed that he had made a slight faux pas.
"Look… um… We invent a new type of acid that can tunnel through the school's wall-"
The girl hit him with her hat; it seemed the only thing to do.
At this juncture, the forces of the headmistress inevitably came racing back into the fray. Massed squads of teachers armed with rocks, meat cleavers, and school benches held like battering rams charged into the courtyard, whipping themselves into a lather of righteous rage.
A hundred enemies surged into the courtyard. Miliana and Lorenzo somehow shot up the marble punishment column, where they perched aloft like monkeys shaking fists at a storm. The tutors ignored the flying machine and instead tried climbing up each other's backs to reach their prey. Miliana stuck the point of her hat into one woman's eye and cursed angrily at Lorenzo's rear.
"Use your lightning sword! Knock them all out!"
"I only have one charge left!" Lorenzo brandished his rapier, parrying weapons left, right, and center. The whole column shuddered as battering rams struck against the base. "They'd all have to be wet-unless we can somehow convince them to all join hands?"
The column shook, and Miliana ended up perched upon Lorenzo's back like an ungainly crab.
"What do you mean you came here with only one power charge?"