You Broke It. [Tab | Emine | Mackenzie] (Open)

They simulate the weather in Novus. In one of the big spires there are about a hundred engineers who control steam boilers, de-humidifiers, Co2 scrubbers, and the like. They try to simulate the weather outside, as best they can. The reason is that if they schedule a sunny day, and God schedules a rainstom, there is a deafening din. Raindrops and hailstones rattling on the Dome reverberate endlessly. It's like living in an upside-down stockpot surrounded by a pair of happy babies. You could watch great black stormclouds roil, spitting lightning at each other and at the Dome. Meanwhile inside it was dry, and hot, and brightly lit.

On just such a day, Tab Bachman was in his back lot breaking ground on a new garden plot. Victory gardens, he called them. He'd purchased some tobacco seeds from a scavenger. They'd been kept in a storage facility in some science lab, deep underground, and were supposedly still good. Tobacco was expensive, since there were no big plantations anymore. Anyway he was stirring the pale tan soil with a hoe, wondering if these plants would do as well as his corn was doing. They were tall and green, now, just peeking over the brick walls around his lot.

While he dug, he became aware of a droning sound. An engine, a combustion engine no less. He stopped and looked up. Aha, it was that airship he'd seen a couple of times. A red-and-white floating contraption. Some kid, probably.

"Is it supposed to be smoking like that?" he muttered around his tarry cherry-briar. It was not, he surmised, when it gently settled down on his rooftop and made a sound like a horse backfiring. "Well, crap." He turned about a few times, looking for his tall ladder, and used it to clamber to the roof, muttering fearful oaths about children, and what they should do with themselves. The balloon was still flying proud - which was good, because the cabin was big enough to collapse his pub if it had landed hard.

"Anyone alive in there?" he shouted.