When the Aviation Club next met in the old workshop, the tables were cluttered with the construction materials they had collected throughout the week. There were very long beams of spruce from the White Chasm shipyards, unprocessed logs of ash wood, iron ingots, a type of loose-woven cotton fabric used in women''s underwear, ship''s rigging and glue, and buckets of an extremely flammable lacquer made from nitrated cotton.


    Seth and Bjorn began constructing the boom and the wing spars using the spruce beams, Vince began sewing the cotton into larger sheets, Irene began preparing the ship''s rigging, and Quinn himself began preparing the ethermancy weave used to cut the ash wood into wing ribs. Kiera Blaine observed silently from her cushioned couch. Claire Aden had complained that she was tired, before she cuddled up with Kiera and fell asleep.


    If Quinn had one advantage over the other students, it was that he was a voracious reader. Introduction to Floramancy was the less useful of the two books. Most of the chapters focused on weaves designed to aid the growth of various types of flowers. There was one chapter near the end that focused on trees. However, the weaves only worked over the course of many years, and Quinn didn''t have a lot of time to wait around. There was just one section that Quinn found very useful, because it described weaves designed to bend and reshape ash wood. Cutting Ethermancy was by far the more useful of the two books. It featured a weave designed to repeatedly cut arbitrary wooden logs into uniform shapes. However, this left open the question of how they were going to work the iron ingots, both into joints and into the jackscrew.


    Quinn went to Kiera, and whispered, "Princess, would you be willing to help us with the metalworking weaves?"


    "Claire can help you when she wakes up," Kiera whispered. "She will not nap for long."


    Quinn realized that the high price of auras was perfectly justified. The weaves were quite large, such that only one weave could be supported at a time, and Quinn found himself making repeated trips to the aurascribe in the professor''s office to change between them. Even after they devised a reliable strategy for minimizing the number of trips to the aurascribe, Quinn suspected that having a larger aura would have saved a lot of time and effort. Thankfully, Irene was adept at working with ropes, so she finished the rigging task quickly and started helping Quinn instead.


    Levitating above the table, shining with a faint green light, Quinn''s weave activated, cutting clean through the log of ash, pulling the wood apart into the last of the wing rib planks. Irene continued the process with her own weave, bending it into a cambered shape. Seth hammered the last of the ribs in place at the end of the spar, thus completing the wooden frame of the second wing. With the different components of the kite spread out on the workshop floor, it looked, to Quinn''s eye, not unlike the kite they had constructed for the circus, except with the addition of the boom, rear wing, and rudder fin.


    Quinn helped the other students as they stretched the fabric across the various surfaces. When the students began painting the cloth with the lacquer, the workshop began to fill up with the noxious fumes. Unfortunately, Claire Aden did not stir from her nap, and using a life-aspect weave to make herself stronger, Kiera carried the child away from the workshop to avoid the poison.


    The next day, they dragged the components out of the workshop onto the lawn where Professor Atlas often held his ethermancy class. It was foggy, but thankfully it was not raining. Kiera and Claire were up bright and early, looking refreshed and beautiful, and to the delight of the students in the club they came with pitchers of steaming coffee.


    "I''m sorry," Kiera said. "We had a hard day training yesterday. Claire should be able to help you now, if it''s still needed."


    "It is still needed," Seth said. "Thank you."


    Quinn offered the young princess a handful of diagrams depicting the metal components that they needed. The most important component was a heavy jackscrew that allowed the angle of the rear wing to be reconfigured.


    "Is this all?" Claire asked.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    "Yes princess," Quinn said. "If it''s not too much trouble."


    Claire stalked forward to the collection of iron ingots in the grass. The ingots began to levitate, up toward her chest, one at a time, where she struck each of them in turn with a bolt of cyan lightning. Right before Quinn''s eyes, the ingots seemed to turn into a liquid, like black mercury, shifting and wobbling as they reshaped themselves. Once each component had formed into its final shape, Claire zapped it again to harden the iron.


    "That was well done," Kiera said. "I must be an excellent teacher."


    Armed with the metal components, the members of the Aviation Club began to assemble the kite in earnest. They assembled it upside-down, so that Irene could add the rigging that would support Seth''s weight. She used a type of sturdy knot common on ships, which involved making a loop at the end of the rope, spiraling the end of the rope around the loop, then slathering the whole thing with glue. Quinn tested every single knot, but he found no imperfections.


    Seth was dressed in warm clothes, a fur-lined leather cap, and brass-rimmed goggles, just in case he decided to fly. However, that was not the immediate plan. First they needed to test the thing.


    With a wind-aspect weave loaded into his aura, Vince provided a strong headwind. Quinn lit a chemical flare, which had been originally designed to create emergency light on a ship, but which now served the purpose of creating smoke. He held the flare in the wind, while Seth and Bjorn held the craft aloft, carefully observing the flow of the smoke over the main wing and down across the rear wing. Irene made tiny changes to the jackscrew in the tail to change the angle of the rear wing until it met Bjorn''s theoretical calculations relative to the observed airflow.


    With a long rope attached to the apex of the main wing, Seth and Bjorn began to run against the wind, dragging the kite behind them as they went. At first the kite slid across the grass, but once the wings caught the air the nose pitched up, carrying it aloft. The wind ethermancy and the tension on the rope were enough to keep it flying a few feet above their heads.


    Seth shook the rope, causing the nose to bounce a little bit. Then, boldly, he grabbed the apex of the thing and violently yanked it down toward the ground. The rear wing entered into a nosedive, which triggered the exact seesaw behavior Bjorn had calculated. The nose pitched up, quickly recovering from Seth''s shove, except at a slightly lower height away from the ground. Next, he jostled the tail, and at that exact moment Bjorn released the tension on the rope. Like a weathervane, the tail wobbled a few times and straightened out on its own.


    "It seems like we''ve solved the major problems," Quinn said.


    "It''s certainly an improvement," Seth said. "But there is one more thing I want to try."


    He reached up and violently shoved one wing tip upward. The other wing drooped, and then the whole kite tipped over and began to accelerate toward the ground. Thankfully, Seth was fast enough to catch the opposite wing and shove it away, which helped to stabilize the thing.


    "Wait," Bjorn said. "Do that again."


    After they got the thing fully straightened out, Seth leapt up and did it again. This time he was ready for the result, and he effortlessly caught the opposite wing as the craft attempted to "nosedive" onto the wing tip.


    "I think I know what''s happening," Bjorn said. "I see two things. First, the straightforward problem that you also likely noticed, the propensity of the craft to tip over and slide out of the sky. However, I saw a second problem, and it is much more subtle. The nose of the thing actually descends faster than the rudder."


    "Perhaps because it''s heavier?" Quinn asked.


    Bjorn shook his head. "No, the rudder fin is too big. Far, far too big. We need to redesign the rudder so that it won''t catch the air and twist the nose around as the wings slide side to side."


    Irene did not look happy with this assessment, but she said nothing.


    "So how do we fix the first problem?" Seth asked.


    "Maybe the wings should be more like bird wings?" Vince asked.


    "In what way?"


    "Bird wings are angled up quite a bit when they are soaring. The wings on our kite are straight."


    "I think that might help," Bjorn said. "Think about it this way. When the wing is perfectly flat, it creates an upward force when the wind strikes it. When both wings are angled upward slightly, then the amount of upward force is reduced, but ultimately balanced. Now, let''s say Seth disturbs this balance, and one wing rises while the other falls."


    "The lower wing will produce a greater force," Quinn offered. "Because it is straight with the ground."


    "Exactly so," Bjorn said. "At the same time, the higher wing will be further away from the flat configuration. The upward force on the higher wing will be modified by a trigonometric function which depends on the angle, but it will generally be a smaller force. In other words, with a slight upward slant to the wings, this type of rolling motion will self-correct over time."


    "What will we need to change?" Quinn asked.


    "We will need to take the wings off and create a new central beam that allows them to be installed at an angle," Seth said.


    "I will try to calculate the optimal angle," Bjorn said.


    "I guess we need to start taking it apart," Quinn sighed. But this is certainly better than the alternative.