“Standish? Standish? It’s Nielenoss. I got your message.”


The dragon fanned his earfins out and turned his head from side to side, listening intently for a response from the depths of the biped building. Three blocks away, a group of bipeds and hatchlings, all newly Gifted, were walking towards the Dome and marveling at the small gifts and wonders the Wishgiver had bestowed on each of them. Nielenoss had no problems hearing them, so it should not be at all difficult for him to hear a gnome in the building next to him offer a greeting, an explanation, and perhaps a bit of shiny something as tribute in gratitude for not being eaten.

Nielenoss drummed his right foreclaws on the street, scowling. Standish wasn’t the sort to be rude, but, like all gnomes, he was easily distracted. Nielenoss stuck his head inside the doorway and peered into Standish’s workshop as best he could. Standish’s desk was sitting at an angle and the cellar door, usually hidden under the desk, was standing open. Oh, yes, easily distracted alright…

“Standish!” It wasn’t quite a full-volume bellow, but odds were good that most of Tazoon heard it. Nielenoss heard a shrill “Warrga!” from down in the cellar, followed by a loud crash of wood on stone and at least four dull thuds. Dust and displaced air swirled up through the cellar door, followed by a very rumpled looking gnome.

“Why do you still look like that? You’ll never fit down here that way. You really should scratch that rune off your horn and redo the kooty-whatsis ritual with gnome essence instead of Sslik. It would give you a 287% increase in volumetric efficiency…”

“It’s called Khutit, as you well know, and I’ve already explained why gnomish essence wouldn’t work three times. Now, why did you send for me? What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until after I see the Transportation Committee?”

Standish poked Nielenoss right between his nostrils. “Your new disk, that’s what! How did you manage to get an approval hearing? My disks have never been granted a hearing and they’ve been in use for years! Your disk’s performance parameters are functionally identical to my Deluxe model, and yet you get a hearing immediately! I smell draco-favoritism…” The gnome’s voice was drowned out by a deep, earthquake-like rumble.

Nielenoss’s chuckles turned into room-shaking guffaws as he withdrew his head from the building and sat down in the middle of the street. “He wants to know why he never got a hearing… Tell me, Standish, why is that you skip the whole fact-finding portion of the investigative process and leap straight to making it a dragons vs. bipeds issue? Give me an honest answer and I won’t tail-whip you over the Water Wall, I promise.”

“It seemed like a logical possibility, given the facts at hand,” Standish snapped. “Any reasonable explanation deserves to be explored.”

“Agreed, but the value of ‘reasonable’ you’re using can’t be measured in whole integers.” The dragon chortled again, silently congratulating himself on how well he had studied Gnomish conversational idioms. It seemed to have worked; Standish had been reduced to staring and muttering. Nielenoss immediately pressed his advantage. “I got the hearing because I filed the transit application and requested an expedited hearing date, that’s how! A hearing which, I might note, is in less than an hour. You’re welcome to come with me to the hearing, but I doubt you could get a transit application of your own filled out, even if you had one.”

“But I did,” Standish said. He threw his hands up in frustration. “I did fill one out, and was never granted a hearing. Nobody ever told me why, either.” He gave the roadway a disconsolate kick. “All I got was a run-around. Nobody had my form, my form must have been lost, I couldn’t file a replacement form while there was an investigation into the whereabouts of the original in progress. Eventually I just gave up. Besides, I heard that Tarbash had paid off the Transportation Committee.”

“That’s a bunch of gas and ash, and you know it. Look, this is simple. Find your records copy of the transit application & bring it to the committee meeting. They can’t penalize you because Imperial Recordkeeping lost your application.”

Standish sighed. “That’s what I was doing when you arrived. Can you spare half an hour in Khutit to help out? I’m sure I have my records copy filed somewhere.”

“You mean piled somewhere…” Nielenoss muttered as he stood up to invoke the transformation. “Are you sure you didn’t forget to fill the form out and wind up using the back of it to plan a steam-powered muffin maker or something?” Standish pretended not to hear the question.


Although Khutit form was smaller than even a young hatchling, the cellar seemed cramped and close. This was due in large part to the countless number of boxes, chests, and crates, most stacked floor to ceiling, forming a maze of narrow, unstable edifices that loomed over the gnome’s head like canyon walls. Nielenoss chose his footing carefully, as a single wayward tail movement might summon an avalanche of dust-covered esoterica down on top of them.

Standish was digging through layers of forms, proposals, and design notes stored in a Trandalaran sea chest large enough that a dragon hatchling could have rested comfortably inside it. Alas, there were no dragons inside it, only form after form after form, filling the chest two-thirds the way to the top. Nielenoss sighed & started digging.

Time seemed to crawl by as Nielenoss examined and set aside a bewildering array of parchments, scrolls, blueprints, and development logs. For a few moments, Nielenoss wished – not for the first time – that he could add research documents to his hoard. Ah, well, perhaps someday… Nielenoss sighed and went back to digging. He could give Standish ten more minutes, but that was it, even for a friend.


The sheen of dark leather caught Nielenoss’s eye, gleaming darkly below a monograph entitled ‘Pale Wisps and How to Enrage Them’. He set the monograph aside and carefully extracted the leather-bound folio. Gleaming gold letters on the cover declared the book to be ‘Project X Development Log, Volume 17’. Flipping it open, he found every page filled with meticulous notes detailing every aspect of the project on an hour-by-hour basis. There were several more volumes under that one, and at least two more stacks which were still partially buried.


Grinning, Nielenoss made a space on the floor and quickly pulled the rest of the journals out of the sea chest. NRRI and the Imperial Army would be very happy to go over the records, looking for useful information that might help in the war against the undead legions. He reached back into the sea chest to make sure he had gotten all the journals, and touched cold metal – a case or lockbox of some kind, perhaps? He explored a bit further, pushing scrolls and folios aside, trying to get an idea of how big the object was. His fingers closed around a heavy handle, bolted into the metal surface. It took him only a moment to locate a matching one on the other side of the object. He planted his feet, muttered a prayer to Drulkar, and heaved.

The object that emerged was a locked mithril security case, about the size of a large human tome. The cover bore the markings of the Rachival War Council and the Rachival Research Institute’s School of Intentionally Destructive Devices. Nielenoss stared at it for a moment before speaking. “Standish, come have a look at this.”

“What did you…? Oh, my gears and whiskers…” Standish ran his hands along the edges of the case. “There should be a release around here somewhere.” A metal cover popped open on the side, revealing a row of combination dials.

“Very clever. It’s going to take ages to break that combination, though.”

Standish gave him a grin. “Not really,” he said. He quickly spun the dials to read 5432112345 and pressed the release. All four lock plates snapped open. “That code would take just as long to break as any other ten-digit code, and it’s really easy to remember in an emergency.” Nielenoss snorted, but didn’t argue. Carefully, Standish opened the case.

The object in the case was rectangular, about the size of a large gnomish tome, and appeared to be made of adamantium. Twenty sliders ran across the face of it, each one marked with tiny scribbles denoting exact gradations of some kind. Tiny rubies at the top and bottom of each slider channel were glowing brightly. Nielenoss didn’t need to see the inscription ‘Locked’ next to each one in order to understand what they signified. He looked instead at the engravings above each slider.

“Ambient Repulsive, Meridian Balance, Transition Octave, Bi-Phase Harmonic – these are all operational parameters for cargo disks, and they’re all set at the exact baseline optimal. I just went through tweaking all of these on the cargo flyer to get the flight speed balancing.” He set the object down very gently. “Standish, what is this thing?”

“It’s, ah, it’s the Speed Limit,” Standish replied. He touched it gently, pulling his hand back as if burned. “It maintains the master connection to the Realm of Expanse, the one that all cargo disks operate off of. When cargo disks were first invented, there was a lot of concern that if they moved too fast, the localized interplanar connection to Expanse might become unstable and either collapse or explode. As a precaution, the Speed Limit was set to a very restrictive mode of operation at first. After a few years of operational safety testing, the plan was to slowly reduce the level of restriction. It didn’t work out that way, sadly.”

“The humans were in civil war, the Withered Aegis was gaining power, and the fiends were looking for ways to make Kirasanct stronger and stronger. It was a mess. All of them wanted the secrets of the cargo disk for movement of war supplies and such. We couldn’t stop them from reverse engineering the cargo disk eventually, but we could keep them from developing a battlefield version. The Speed Limit was hidden away, and all records of it were destroyed. Only the Master Tinkerer and his or her successor knew the truth. It was presumed lost in the fall of Rachival.


“So how is it that you know about it,” asked Nielenoss. “Versanto is the Master Tinkerer…”


Standish paled a bit. “Oh, I, uh, I only know about it because… Well, never mind how I know about it. I just do, alright?”

Nielenoss smirked, then the clock above Standish’s desk caught his eye. His meeting would begin in five minutes. He closed the case and picked it up. “We have to hurry,” he said. “The meeting starts in just a few minutes.”

Standish shook his head. “No, no, we can’t just walk in there and give this to them...”

“Yes we can,” Nielenoss said firmly. “This device needs to be protected by the Empire, and the Transportation Committee is the perfect group to turn it over to. It’s a transportation issue, after all.”

Standish sighed. “You’re right. Do you think there will be a reward in it for us?”

Nielenoss chuckled. “You mean like getting transit approval on your disk? Could be, my friend. Could be…”