text: The Spirit of Speed-IF is universally regarded as the most formidable dirigible battle platform in East Africa, if not the world; its india-rubber gussets alone cost half the annual revenues of the Ottoman Empire. Its recent loss to the French, therefore, can scarcely be countenanced.
  
  Headquarters had little option; the Escadrille Patissiers Volants will rendez-vous by dawn, at which point the Spirit will be irrevocably lost. They didn't like it, but they had little choice but to send you in.
  
  A Speed-IF by Sam Kabo Ashwell
  
  Type ABOUT for SpeedIF details.
  
  The Ergomatic Wing crash-landed (it knows no other variety) amid a clump of wilted-looking thornbushes and unaccomodating rocks. Sun-bleached grass extends in every direction, but the southern prospect is improved by Fort Yaourt-Framboise. And floating above it, the sublime bulges of the Spirit, cruelly tethered by French guile.
  
  A fearsome goat crops the grass nearby.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  a Hennings-Jobson Sophical Discombobulator (loaded with waggishness)
  
  > discombobulate the goat
  You carefully size up the savage brute, brush four or five clockwork range-finders and optical scopes out of your line of sight, and pop the bugger square between the eyes. It bleats plaintively, and there is a satisfying clunk from the Discombobulator's fluid reservoirs.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  a Hennings-Jobson Sophical Discombobulator (loaded with fearsomeness)
  
  > look at the goat
  A feral Eritrean scrub-goat, if you are any judge, and six years of handing out blue ribbons at the All-Sussex Caprine Fanciers Exposition has to count for something. A pretty poor specimen, all things considered; it stares fixedly at the horizon, expressionless.
  
  > examine Spirit
  Beyond the descriptive powers of the era's finest poets, the Spirit of Speed-IF is the most terrifying engine ever to grace a battlefield. If its dozen Maxim-gun turrets (operated, it is rumoured, by monkeys endowed by vivisection with unholy powers of intelligence) do not sweep all foes before it, the Strauss-Gorvinsky Patent Optical-Precision Grip Extender may, from the secure heights of the stratosphere, pluck unsuspecting enemy commanders from their tents and bring their plans to ruination.
  
  Lamentably, at this distance such details cannot be discerned; you shall have to savour them after the Spirit's rescue.
  
  > Go south
  There are no legionnaires in evidence, so you stroll unimpeded through the fort's front gates.
  
  Good lord, standards in the Foreign Legion have finally outdone the rumours. No gate guard, no military police, that distinctive smell from the latrines that invariably means every man jack of em's lousy with the clap.
  A rope-ladder leads upwards, into the underbelly of the great dirigible.
  
  > Up
  In theory, this vast hangar should house the dirigible's support biplanes, but the theft was effected during a sortie and all are absent. Its other role, as general storage shed, is more apparent. A series of ladders and gantries lead up into more habitable regions of the airship.
  
  > Up
  Thanks to automation, the Spirit of Speed-IF may be fully controlled in the fiercest of conflicts by a single trained pilot, leaving the remaining one hundred and seventy-two flight officers to observe the battle from the comfort of the Observation Lounge Bar (west).
  
  The controls are powered down. To blazes with those conniving cheese-eaters! You'll have to find some other way to gain control of the ship.
  
  > go west
  No battle-platform worthy of the name lacks an officer's bar. The Spirit was intended to be the crowning glory of the superplatform class, outdoing the British Lady Spankingleigh and even the Tibetan Vengeful Yak. Military analysts may quibble over their relative superiority in battle, but when it comes to the bar, they'll pick the Spirit every time. Gangways lead east and west.
  An immense T'ang ashtray dominates the room's centre. Formerly there was an ornamental fountain, but it kept getting choked with cigar butts.
  
  A military waiter - crew-cut, moustaches, khaki fatigues, sneer - regards you with utter contempt.
  
  > look at the ashtray
  A frankly monumental ashtray, a scattering of cigar-butts barely covering its dish. It must serve some kind of function as ballast. It must have been a gift of some kind from the Dowager Empress, judging by the T'ang bas-reliefs. Some temple in Guangdong is short one incense-burner, by the looks of it.
  
  > shoot waiter
  With Gallic stubbornness, he hangs onto his vital essences. Hang it all.
  
  > examine the gun
  In appearance, the Hennings-Jobson Sophical Discombobulator resembles an elaborately decorated carbine, bristling with antennae, hydraulic tubing, miniature gyroscopes and similar improbable attachments. You have as yet been instructed in the use of only three controls: the trigger that performs discombobulation, its recombobulating partner, and the screw that, tightened appropriately, primes the recombobulation barrel with stored essences.
  The fearsome essential fluid is currently chambered.
  
  (You may discombobulate objects with the command DISCOMBOBULATE, abbreviated to DIS, and recombobulate them again with RECOMBOBUBLATE or REC.)
  
  > Rec waiter
  Fwoosh.
  
  With a bestial howl, the waiter springs upon you and rips off  your limbs like so many soiled serviettes.
  
  > go to the west
  It takes a massive power source to locomote the ship's phlogiston turbines, power the anbaric conduits and keep the brain of Babbage's Automatic Aeronaut Cognition Engine wound; deep within the heart of the seething, cacophanous engine lies the 9-dimensional aitchgeewellsium crystal that generates all this vigour, through the miracle of radioactivition.
  
  > examine the crystal
  Aitchgeewellsium is a rare element, invariably warm to the touch and with a luminescent quality. It is also known for its receptivity to fluid essences - this particular crystal has been imbued with 9-dimensionality.
  
  > Dis crystal
  Clenching your teeth, you level the Discombobulator at the crystal, mutter a brief prayer to nobody in particular, and fire.
  From every direction, unseen machines sigh, rumble and wheeze to a standstill. A chilling silence, broken only by the flap of wind against the envelope.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying:
  a Hennings-Jobson Sophical Discombobulator (loaded with 9-dimensionality)
  
  > examine the crystal
  Aitchgeewellsium is a rare element, invariably warm to the touch and with a luminescent quality. It is also known for its receptivity to fluid essences - this particular crystal has been imbued with Mundanity.
  
  > examine Discombobulator
  In appearance, the Hennings-Jobson Sophical Discombobulator resembles an elaborately decorated carbine, bristling with antennae, hydraulic tubing, miniature gyroscopes and similar improbable attachments. You have as yet been instructed in the use of only three controls: the trigger that performs discombobulation, its recombobulating partner, and the screw that, tightened appropriately, primes the recombobulation barrel with stored essences.
  The 9-dimensional essential fluid is currently chambered.
  
  > Turn screw
  You give the selection screw a half-turn. The essence of waggishness rises into the firing chamber.
  
  > Turn screw
  You give the selection screw a half-turn. The essence of fearsomeness rises into the firing chamber.