Day 1000

Day 1,000. Lucky stared at the number in her journal, almost disbelieving it. Had it really been that long? The days and weeks had seemed long, sure, but it still felt like yesterday that she got here. Then again it also felt like a lifetime ago, so maybe the number wasn’t so ridiculous after all. Besides, she had more pressing matters to attend to at the moment. Romanticizing meaning into arbitrary numbers was not on the schedule. It was Thursday, and Thursday doesn’t care if it’s your thousandth day of being stranded in a parallel universe with no hope of rescue. It’s still just Thursday.

It was the crack of dawn on this particular Thursday. She always got up at the crack of dawn. Thinking back, that had probably been the most difficult transition for her after being stranded here. Lucky had always been a night person. Sleeping in until noon was more than a hobby, it was a passion. But, in a world with no electricity, the days were ruled by the sun and the sun alone. The locals got up at the crack of dawn every morning, and that meant so did Lucky.

Lucky put her journal back on top of the stack of journals she kept piled next to her bed. Keeping a record of her experiences and observations here was important, in case anyone from home ever found them. Doubtful, but it still kept her sane.

After pulling on a wool shirt and a pair of wool trousers (god how she missed a proper textile industry), Lucky dragged herself downstairs to get the shop ready. She would more likely than not have a customer waiting diligently outside. Some enterprising locals liked to get up before the crack of dawn, much to her chagrin.

Opening the blinds to the shopfront window, she saw that lo and behold there was someone waiting patiently on a bench across the street. This morning the culprit was one Fredrick Richter. He was an older gentleman, at least given the local mortality rates. She waved at him through the front window, and trudged off to unlock the front door and flip the Closed sign to Open.

The village in which Lucky had resided for the majority of the past thousand days was called Homm. It was located on the western continent of planet Earth in the universe designated Mu 449. Lucky had lived and operated her shop in Homm for just over two years now.

Mu 449 was a far cry from the splendor or wildness of many of the Earths she had seen in her travels. For one, it was a technological backwater. These people had barely invented gears, let alone electricity or space travel. They had had just as much time to do so as any of the other Earths, but hadn’t gotten nearly as far. Lucky had seen just over a dozen worlds before she had been stranded, all with various levels of technology. Aside from the two Earths on which humanity was long extinct, this was by far the lowest level of tech. Upsilon 314, for instance, had achieved miraculous breakthroughs, going so far as to solve the secrets of aging entirely. Nanite technology from that world had given her and her crew mates effective immortality. The locals of Mu 449 had achieved... well, they were decent farmers.

The bell over the shop door tinkled as Fredrick Richter strode inside. Lucky gazed at him through bleary eyes from behind the counter. “Good morning, Mr. Richter,” Lucky said, mustering as much pep as she could. “I’ve got your order right here.” She reached underneath the counter and brought out a parcel, wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with a thick twine. “Everything should work like a charm, sir,” she said, as he took the package from her. He was polite, but he looked at the parcel as though it might come alive go for his face at any moment.

“Thank ye kindly, miss. I know Ronald’ll be happy to have this contraption back. Can’t say as I blame’em, I wouldn’t wanna go back to sowin by hand neither.” Ronald was Fredrick’s brother, the two maintaining a farm not far outside of town. Frederick tended the farm itself, while Ronald took care of the house and the business side of things.

“I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten how to sow the old fashioned way. You’re sure you don’t want me to make you something like that? Give me a few weeks and I can whip up a gadget that could till your fields in half the time. Wouldn’t even need your ox.”

The old man scoffed. “And then what would old Abel do? The poor animal would keel over if I took away his life’s purpose like that! No, miss, I’ll pass yet again. Your tools are good, very good. But I’m an old man. I’ve done things a certain way all of my life, and I don’t intend to change just when I’ve finally started to figure things out.”

With that, Old Man Richter paid and was on his way. Daylight was burning, after all. The three copper pennies he gave Lucky barely covered the cost of the parts she had needed to fix the mechanical sowing machine, let alone the labor involved, but she didn’t really care. The shop was really there to give her something to do, not make money. She had about a half-dozen clients from the nobility that she charged a ridiculous amount for her services, there was no need to bleed the townsfolk dry.

With Richter gone, Lucky busied herself tidying up the shop. She usually kept things in good order anyway, so all this really consisted of was dusting and being careful not to knock over any of her displays, which she almost did on a daily basis anyway. She’d even gone so far as to bolt down the animatronic butcher she used as a main window display, after an incident that had almost cost her both the robo-butcher and the window.

The other knick-knacks she kept around as examples of her work were less impressive, though she was still proud of each and every one. One wall was lined a multitude of clocks, ranging from simple designs to coo-coos covered in intricate filigree. Another counter was devoted to wind-up toys of different animals and characters out of local folklore. On one pedestal rested a toaster, which she had been particularly proud of until she realized that sliced bread had yet to be invented here. The more you know.

Finally, in one corner of the shop’s display room was a large player piano. This she wound after she finished dusting, and a simple melody began to drift its way through the shop. It was almost, but not quite, to the tune of Bicycle by Queen. It had been years since she had heard the song, and couldn’t quite get the chorus down. Still, it was a small taste of home. On warmer days she would throw open the shop windows and let the music draw people in, but it was still just the beginning of spring, and the mornings were still too cold.

Most of her machines ran by clockwork, you just wound them up with a key and watched them go. Recently she had been experimenting with some rudimentary batteries as well, and had had some limited success with them, but the chemicals she was working with could vary wildly in quality, so progress was slow on that front.

The dusting finished and the sun finally to a reasonable height, it was time to actually get to work. Lucky passed behind her desk and through the curtain covered doorway set in the back wall, fastening the curtain to one side so she could still see into the shop. The back room of the building was her workshop. She had been meaning to take out the wall separating the storefront and work area for a while now, but never seemed to find the time.

The workshop was about a third larger than her front store room, and three times as cluttered. Not messy, per say, but flat surfaces were a hot commodity. Work benches lined each wall, except for the doorway into the shop and the door that led to the alley out back. Each workbench was occupied by ongoing projects. Some were analog, just built from gears and springs. Others used rudimentary electronics, an area she had just begun to experiment with in the last few months. A few of the pieces were commissioned, but most were tinkerings of Lucky’s own design. She had gone from being the chief engineer on a starship to being stranded on a world that barely had water pumps. Keeping herself busy was priority one.

The various tools Lucky had at her disposal were far more organized than the projects they were used to produce. Hammers, wrenches, files, tongs and more hung in neat rows on the walls above the workbenches. Some were made for her by the local blacksmith, but some she had had to craft herself. The locals hadn’t had the need to invent a soldering gun.

Bulkier pieces of equipment were scattered throughout the workshop as well. One corner housed an oven and gloryhole for glass working, and in another sat a half-constructed kiln. She was getting tired of paying the potter next door to use hers.

She was also finally getting to the point where she had tools that ran on electricity, which she generated using a hand crank attached to a rudimentary battery. The battery was huge, but it was the best she could do with the limited chemistry she knew. No lithium ion setups for her, sadly. None of the tools she had made to run on the battery were particularly elegant, but they still reminded her of home in a powerful way.

There were three jobs on the docket at the moment: a simple hand mixer for Otilia Erickson, the local baker, a lantern commissioned by Delilah, the head priestess of the town’s temple to Sol Invictus, and a wind up toy dog for the Baron of Dresden’s two children. She didn’t feel like filing down gears this morning, so decided to put the finishing touches on the lantern. The only thing left was the lightbulb. Easy peasy.

First, though, she wanted to do some tinkering. At any given time there were at least a half-dozen incomplete projects scattered around. A lot of them were focused on building successively more efficient technology. Eventually she hoped to work her way up to a computer, but nothing she had at the moment was anywhere near precise enough for the job, not to mention the lack of certain raw materials.

Today she decided to focus on the next step in power generation: a stationary bicycle she could use to recharge batteries. God was she getting tired of the hand crank, and it had only been a few months. Lucky often lamented the fact that her shop was not closer to the river that flowed past town. Hydroelectric power would have been a godsend. She made a mental note to investigate the possibility of running a power line between her shop and the river.

The frame of the bike was already complete, and she had finished the last of the gears several days prior. She set to work putting together the gear mechanism, and was soon lost in the work. Eventually, the gearbox was done to her satisfaction. Several times she had been forced to file down some rough patches on the sides of gears, but otherwise it went smoothly. Now she just needed to forge the chain, and a belt to generate charge. Problems for another day. For now, the gearbox was enough. She set it aside and moved on to Priestess Delilah’s Lantern.

Lucky approached a large chest that sat near the back door. It was four feet long and made of thick sheets of iron covered in insulating clay. Underneath the chest was a tray for burning coal to heat the inside of the container. The coals she had placed there last night had faded to dull embers. This device was an annealing oven, used to slowly cool any glass components she made. If she left the glass cool in open air it would almost certainly shatter, especially something as fragile as a lightbulb.

Even with the oven, this was her third attempt at a lightbulb for this project. Like many of the tools she had bought or constructed here, the oven just wasn’t as precise as the computer regulated stuff she had back on Earth. Her Earth. She sighed, and cracked open the lid of the oven, preparing herself for the worst. She was relieved, however, to find that the bulb laying at the bottom of the chest was whole, and after a thorough inspection of the glass she was satisfied that there were no blemishes or cracks. With any luck this lantern wouldn’t burn out for a long, long time. Of course, presumably she would still be around to make another lightbulb. She wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Shaking this thought aside before she could dwell on it, Lucky set about sealing the base of the bulb to the glass itself. The fat tungsten filament was already fastened to the base, so the only thing left to do was attach and vacuum seal the glass. Creating a vacuum inside the fragile bulb was a little risky, but the filament would last much longer in vacuum than it would in open air.

As she worked, she steadily became more annoyed at the inefficiency of the whole project. The glass had turned out well, but there were other improvements that she just didn’t have the facilities to make. She had a crude battery powered vacuum-pump on hand to create a nice air-free environment inside the bulb. She would have preferred to fill the inside with a nice non-reactive gas instead, but there was just no feasible way to refine the gas. The vacuum environment would drain the efficiency of the bulb needlessly as the filament slowly disintegrated with use. The filament itself was another concern, as it wasn’t anywhere near the purity of tungsten she would have liked, lowering the effective lifespan of the bulb even more. Finally, she was being forced to seal the glass to the bulb with lead. She hoped this wouldn’t lead to any problems down the line. The last thing she wanted to do was give the priestess Delilah or anyone else lead poisoning. She hated using the stuff, but with the level of technology on this world, it was lead or bust, especially for a vacuum seal like this.

Just as she was lugging the battery up onto the table next to the vacuum pump, she heard the bell above the front door to the shop give a jingle. “Be there in a second!” she called, and hurried to the front to tend to her customer.

It was not a customer. Seated at the piano with her back to Lucky was one of the friendlier locals, a young woman by the name of Gitta. Gitta had turned the player part of the piano off and was playing the tune of a local folksong. Or trying to, at least, as she wasn’t having much success. Lucky could barely recognize the song at all. It was still kind of impressive in a way, thought Lucky, since she was fairly certain that that was the one and only piano in the universe. Each world tended to evolve its own spin on musical instruments. Earth Mu 449 did have a large stationary instrument that you played with a series of keys, but to call it a piano would be rather disingenuous. Gitta had taken an interest in the piano a few months ago, and Lucky had done her best to teach her, with varying levels of success.

Lucky waited in silence until the song concluded before remarking, “Next week’s lesson was going to be on composing, but it looks like you’re already a master.”

Gitta spun around on the stool and returned the grin. “What can I say, I have a gift.”

“Clearly! In fact, I’d venture to say you’re the third best piano player in the world.”

Feigning indignation, Gitta said, “I’m at least second best! You and I are the only ones who can play this thing, after all.”

“You’re forgetting the piano. It at least has the fundamentals down.”

“That may be, but I find it totally lacking in the creativity department. Why, it only knows one song!”

“Something for you to aspire to.” Before Gitta could fire back a reply, Lucky said, “What are you doing here, noisy fool? I’m trying to get some work done for once.”

Gitta crossed her arms. “I’m here because you said we’d have lunch together and I got tired of waiting!”

“Lunch? But it’s...” Lucky trailed off as she glanced over at her wall of clocks. They each showed half passed one. She couldn’t believe it. On second thought, yes, she could. She had skipped breakfast and now realized that she was starving.

“Funny how time slips away from you. Fine, you caught me. Lunch it is. Let’s go before you scare away any customers banging away on that piano.” For this, Lucky received a friendly punch on the arm.

As soon as the Open sign was turned to Closed and the store locked up, they were off in search of food. Homm was not a large settlement, but neither was it particularly small. The streets were cobble, rather than dirt, and most of the buildings were two stories, at least in the commercial part of town. It was no bustling capital, but neither was it a forgotten backwater. It had been built to take advantage of the trade passing along the Rain River, and it didn’t do too badly for itself.

Lucky and Gitta made their way up the street, which opened out into the main town square, a broad plaza surrounded by shops and dotted with vendors selling food and other goods. One of the vendors sold them each a sausage on a crusty bun for a penny each. Lucky paid.

The one edge of the square that was not bordered by shops instead had a nice view down to the bank of the river. A short street wound downhill from the square to the docks, where several boats were moored. A small park overlooked the scene, not much more than a plot of grass for people to let their goats graze, and some trees. The two women found a patch of grass in the shade of a large oak tree and sat to eat. A pleasant breeze swept up from the Rain.

The two chatted idly in the afternoon shade. Gitta was doing most of the talking, as was their usual arrangement. “...and so I said to her, I said ‘Misses Benson, I know for a fact that you ordered the peonies.’ And still she insisted she ordered roses! Wanted a full refund! I had to dig through the back and dig out her receipt! And even then she seemed pretty unhappy about the whole thing. Threatened to never come back. I give her a month.”

Lucky gave a sly smile. “Willing to make a bet on it?”

“Depends on your terms.”

“I have two silver pennies that she won’t last a week.”

“Done. The woman has more dignity than that.” The two shook on it.

Finished with her sausage, Lucky leaned back against the tree and stretched out her legs. “After all, she has a party coming up next Friday which I’m sure she’ll want some fresh pansies or something for.”

“Cheater! That’s insider information!” Gitta hit her again, and the two laughed.

There was a lull in the conversation as the two of them watched some activity down at the docks. Another boat had just arrived from downriver, and sailors and dockhands were busy tying it to the wooden pier.

Watching the sailors work, Lucky suddenly said, “Have you ever wanted to travel, Gitta?”

“Well, I suppose. I went upriver to Ubiorum a couple of times when I was a kid, but running the shop keeps me pretty busy these days. It would be nice to see it again if I could ever find the time off.”

“Ubiorum isn’t traveling, that’s practically a day trip. I mean have you ever wanted to travel. See the ocean, or even past the ocean?”

“Nobody knows what’s past the ocean.”

“Yes but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? To see things you haven’t seen before?” The peoples of this Europe had yet to discover the New World. Lucky wondered how the Native Americans were getting along as a result. Pretty damn well, she suspected.

Turning to look at Lucky, Gitta said, “Well... how would we get across the ocean?”

“Forget across the ocean! It was just an example.” Lucky drew up her knees and rested her head on them, still watching the boat. Now securely moored, its crew were unloading crates, animals, and other sundry cargo onto the docks.

“I suppose traveling would be fine. But I don’t know if I’d want to go as far as the ocean. I’d miss home.” The breeze came up off the river again, still cool. Gitta shivered. “For now though, let’s travel out of this shade. Summer can’t come fast enough.”

The women walked across the square, arm in arm. The sun was indeed much warmer, but it did little to quell the sense of unease that had been building inside Lucky all morning.

Lunch had long since finished, and the square was mostly empty. The two friends parted ways at the edge of the pavilion with a quick peck on the cheek, before running back to get the flower shop open again for the afternoon crowd. Lucky supposed she should do the same for her own store.

As she walked back down the street away from the square, Lucky started a mental checklist of the things she needed to get accomplished with the second half of her day. Delilah’s lantern just needed some finishing touches, and she really ought to get started on the wind-up animals, and... and...

She stopped and let out a deep sigh. Was that really it? Not just the lantern, but everything? Sure, she had the shop, but what was that even. Something to do, but she couldn’t just do that forever.

Maybe she had been in one place for too long. Seeing the ships today had stirred something in her. She started walking again, and as her shop came into view she was overcome with the sudden urge to run, but there was nowhere to run to.

She could explore every inch of this version of Earth, but she would still be stuck here. She supposed she could wait around until technology improved enough to let her escape the gravity well, but who knows how long that would take. It may never happen. After all, it was the same year here as it was on Earth Alpha 001, and the technological differences were staggering. Her home had achieved almost total colonization of the solar system. The people of this world were still pouring buckets of shit out the window every morning. A leap in technology may never come to these people, for whatever inscrutable reason.

This all wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t effectively immortal, barring some freak accident. The nanites in her blood allowed her immune system to fight off disease, would heal all but the most severe injuries, and even repaired errors in DNA replication. When she and her crew mates had first been given the nanites on that other alien Earth, it had seemed like the greatest blessing. But now, faced with the prospect of living here forever and a day, it was almost soul crushing.

Reaching the front door of her shop, she unlocked it and went inside, but instead of turning the sign back to Open, she locked the door again behind her and went to sit at her front desk. Elbow on the table, she rested her chin on her palm and just let her mind drift. Why not? She had literally all the time in the world.

She remembered when she first came to this world. Day 1. Now that had been a shitty day.

Day 1 was when Miranda had gone apeshit. Trent had gone down in all the shooting... Not even the nanites had been able to... No, she couldn’t think about Trent. She felt the bile churn in her stomach, threatening to rise, but the nanites atomically detected and suppressed the reflex.

After the feeling had passed, Lucky sighed again and pulled up her left sleeve. Her forearm was wrapped in think white bandages, which she slowly unwound. Underneath them was a wound, of a sort, not of the flesh, but still just as painful. A small, square screen was implanted on her forearm, it’s edges disappearing beneath her skin at its boarder. Her Bracer. The front was marred by a jagged crack.

Somehow, in all of the chaos of the shooting, and the fire, and the ship going down, her bracer had been damaged. The device had allowed those implanted with it to travel to infinite worlds, infinite parallel universes. Somehow when it was hit, it had thrown her to a random destination. This world. She had caught a glimpse of the address right before the screen implanted in the flesh of her forearm had gone dark forever, Earth Mu 449. She thought she was fortunate to be alive, then. Now she wasn’t so sure.

She sat up straighter in the seat and willed away the tears that were threatening to form. Ever obedient, the nanites triggered the release of some mood stabilizing hormones, and within seconds she was in control and logical again. Crying wouldn’t do her any good. She had done plenty of that when she first got here, it was not time to start again. If she was unhappy, she needed a change. Positive action. A plan.

Somewhere on this world, or more likely in space orbiting it, was a satellite. It had to be there. The bracer couldn’t have brought her here if one didn’t exist here, it was like a homing beacon. If she could find it, she could...

She wasn’t sure. The bracers and the satellites were alien tech. Nobody really understood them, at least not three years ago, and certainly not her. She took care of the ship. She knew human technology backwards and forwards, but she had no hope of fixing this damn thing.

No. That was defeatist thinking. She was an engineer, dammit, and she had limitless time. Well, she had until she was caught in an accident that the nanites couldn’t heal her from, at least. But statistically that was almost forever. She could do it.

But first she had to find the satellite. Goddamn it this world didn’t even have guns, let alone rockets.

Again, no, that was defeatist. Infinite time. She could guide them. If this world didn’t want to make technological leaps, she would just have to drag it kicking and screaming to the space age. If she had to rule this place to escape, so be it.

A knock on the shop window brought her back to the present. There was someone standing with their face pressed against the glass, a young boy that Lucky could remember seeing occasionally around town. Curious, she got up to see what he wanted. The boy rushed around to the door to meet her.

Opening the door, Lucky started to say, “Look, kid, I’m kind of having a rough morning. Shop is cl-“ but stopped when she saw his worried expression. “Is there something the matter? Are you ok, kid?”

“Are you Lucky, miss?” the boy said, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“The lady said to come and get you!”

“Slooooow down there kiddo. What lady?”

“The lady with yellow hair and a pretty hat! Down by the docks, she said you could help!” He was almost shouting now.

Gitta. “Is the lady ok? Is she safe?”

“Yea but there’s a ship on fire! And she grabbed me and told me to run and get a lady named Lucky cause she could help!”

“Ok. Got it. Ahh why don’t you run back and tell her I’m on my way.”

The boy nodded and ran off in the direction of the docks.

A ship on fire was serious business, especially if it was still attached to the docks. If the wood structure should catch fire too the whole town might go up, and it wasn’t like these people had a fire department to speak of. She would have to put her existential crisis on hold.

Lucky sprinted into her workshop. She had just the tool for this, sitting out and ready to go: the vacuum pump. She had needed it this morning to finish the lightbulb, but she had designed it with some more powerful settings. It could pump water out of the shop if the river ever flooded, but she supposed it could fight fires just fine too. Right now it was hooked up to a battery, but that was attached to the store and couldn’t be moved. Thankfully, it was one of the few machines she had been experimenting with gasoline power for, so moving it wouldn’t be a problem. Or at least, it was capable of being moved. The pump was rather bulky.

Soon she was lugging the machine down the street, along with a coil of hose and a container with what little gasoline she had thus been able to refine, a few gallons. It was all much too heavy to carry all the way down to the docks, so she had loaded the supplies onto a dolly. Unfortunately, the dolly was little more than a board with four wheels attached and she was finding the whole apparatus rather difficult to control. The wheels didn’t seem to want to roll straight on the cobblestone streets.

Just then she felt a sickening shift in the momentum of the pump. She was going too fast, it was tipping. Frantically she scrambled to stabilize it and keep the only hope for controlling the fire from smacking to pieces on the cobbles, when she felt it begin to right itself. She looked around the pump to see that Old Man Richter had grabbed onto the other end, and was keeping the whole thing upright.

“Are you heading to help with the fire too, Miss Lucky?” He nodded his head in the direction of the docks, where a pillar of smoke had invaded the horizon.

“That’s where I was headed, yes sir.”

“And is this going to help?” he said, this time indicating the pump.

“Yes sir, this is a gasoline pump. It takes water from the river and-“

“Alright, alright don’t waste time on explanations. You say it’ll help and I believe you. Let’s get ourselves there before the whole town is a cinder.”

Lucky simply nodded in response, and the two of them steadily marched the pump toward the town square, and the pillar of smoke rising from the docks beyond.

Much as Lucky wanted to watch the obsidian pillar of smoke as they walked, they were forced to keep their eyes on the ground, navigating the best path over the rough stones. It was a breathless trip, taking all of their confrontation just to keep moving. Even with Richter’s help, the pump was almost toppled twice.

Finally, the two rounded the corner off of the square and began escorting their charge down to the water. They were probably too late to save the ship that had caught fire, but they might at least be able to keep it from spreading to other ships, or even worse, the harbor itself. Lucky spared a glance up from navigation duty to take a quick survey of the situation. What she saw, however, astonished her.

There was a ship on fire, yes, but it wasn’t a roaring blaze. There were clear scorch marks on the deck, and thick black smoke poured from portholes in her sides, but it was nowhere near the towering inferno Lucky had been fearing. To Lucky’s surprise, a line of people, both sailors and townsfolk, were already working to control the fire. The line began with people in the water, filling buckets and handing them off to people on shore. People passed the water along, up the dock and onto the ship, where it was either splashed onto the still smoldering deck, or passed below to fight the fire that still burned there. The empty buckets were then thrown overboard to the people in the water, and the process started again.

Someone in the middle of the line spotted Lucky and started waving her over. It was Gitta. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “There you are! All hands on deck, so to speak! I don’t know what that thing is, but get over here and help! You too Mr. Richter, no slacking!” As she yelled she was passed a bucket, and dutifully handed it off to the next person.

Lucky was still for a moment, then she was off running with Richter close behind, the pump abandoned. Gitta was right, they didn’t need it. Unless something changed, the fire was under control for now, especially on the deck where the pump would have been most effective, and trying to get the relatively short hose to be of any use belowdecks sounded impossible.

Richter climbed onto the boat itself where the line was thinnest and became part of the bucket passing chain. Lucky saw that Ronald was already there, passing water down the stairs into the hold of the ship. Lucky waded into the water and began filling buckets as they were thrown overboard. The work was quiet and professional. No one was shouting, everyone was just working with grim determination.

Eventually, the smoke pouring from the inside of the ship thinned, and finally stopped altogether. Once it became clear that the danger had finally and truly passed, people began to wander off, returning to whatever task they had been doing when the emergency began. Some stayed to talk amongst themselves, and the sailors. The boat was all but ruined, but no lives had been lost, only cargo.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to gossip, Gitta materialized from the thinning crowd. “That’s a job well done then. The ship is done for, I think, but all in all that’s no great loss.”

Lucky nodded. “Do they know what happened?”

“Only hearsay. Consensus seems to be that someone went belowdecks to sneak a smoke. They nodded off, dropped their pipe, and you can guess the rest. But the crew’s all accounted for, so whoever it was obviously got out just fine.”

“I’m glad no one was hurt. I thought I was going to have to put the whole fire out myself, and had myself half convinced I was going to be too late to be of any use by time I got down here.”

Gitta nodded toward the dolly and pump, still sitting halfway down the street where Lucky had left it. “Is that why you brought that contraption? I just sent the kid cause we needed all the help we could get. He wasn’t strong enough to carry a bucket, so I sent him along to find anyone I could think of that was.”

“Yes, well. Sometimes I forget that machines aren’t the solution to everything.” Lucky blushed. It had been a silly concept, now that she thought about it. The pump could handle a flood in her shop, but putting out a burning ship single handed? There was no way. And of course the locals had a plan to deal with this sort of emergency, even if it wasn’t a proper fire department.

She scanned the crowd for Mr. Richter. Finally she spotted him. Already he was halfway down the street to the square, probably to go finish whatever errand he had been on before Lucky had grabbed him. She would have to remember to thank him later. For now, though, she turned back to Gitta. “Hey, help me get this thing back home, will you? It’s a chore to push.”

Gitta laughed. “Is that why you were forever getting down here? You practically missed the whole thing. No help at all, you were!”

Lucky just rolled her eyes in response, and the two women began guiding the dolly back to Lucky’s shop, this time taking the time to move around errant cobbles.

The rest of the day passed with pleasant boringness. Gitta went back to tend her shop, promising another lunch with Lucky soon. Lucky got to work putting the finishing touches on the lamp, which was finally ready to be delivered to Delilah in the morning. The light it produced was clear and bright, much to Lucky’s satisfaction. It should fill whatever needs the sun priestess had for it quite nicely.

Finally, night began to encroach upon the town of Homm. The sun ruled all, here, so Lucky drew the curtains on the front window and secured the locks just as the last rays of light disappeared behind the roofs of the buildings across the street.

As she ate a late dinner and got ready for bed, Lucky found that the idea of getting up tomorrow and running the shop wasn’t as repugnant as it had been earlier in the day. The fire had been... humbling, in a way. Her pump had been totally useless, it was her hands that had made a difference.

She realized that she had been looking down on the people of this world, subconsciously. Even Gitta. The entire time she had been here, she had felt a small sense of superiority, because she had the technology and they didn’t. She had been thinking of herself as... apart, from everyone. This place was temporary for her, she would get away, she would be rescued, so why bother getting emotionally attached to the backwards natives?

But realistically... she wasn’t leaving. Probably not ever. And the natives weren’t backwards, they just didn’t see a need to invent a new way of doing things when the old would do. Buckets of water and a line of helping hands had done just fine.

Before the fire, she had been prepared to take drastic measures to escape this world, up to and including ruling it. But that was wrong, not to mention a little disturbing that she had come to that conclusion. Artificially speeding up the technological development of this world would be a mistake.

She would be better, Lucky decided. She needed to be better. Actually talk to Gitta, not just listen. Maybe even attend one of Delila’s worships, see what that whole Sol Invictus thing was about. She realized that she had never actually asked the priestess what she was planning on using the lantern for.

And she should pay a visit to Old Man Richter and Ronald. Maybe take a day off from running the shop and see if the old farmer would show her how to till fields the traditional way. It might even give her some ideas.

Lucky pulled the blankets tighter around her as she prepared for sleep. She had a feeling that day 1001 was going to be a pretty good one.