"There's nothing here. No gin, no copper."
"That's alright. Smithen, can you show your gentler side and help me carry this broken, old phonograph to my chamber?"
"Certainly. Anything else, sir?" Procul glanced to the chair. He stared for a few seconds, then turned back to Smithen.
"No, the phonograph will do."

****************

Procul lied flat on his back in his bed. The matress, while a remarkable improvement over the crewmen's cots, still left muched to be desired; the down filling was uneven and the wood frame gave a crack whenever one rolled a certain way. Luckily, Procul was not one to toss in his sleep. This night, however, he couldn't quite shut his eyes. He felt the gentle rocking of the ship in the wind. The soft forward momentum. The hum of machinary below the deck.

Carefully, from his bed and meandered to a small, rectangular window above his desk. The moon cast a silver shadow over the ground below, and the stars shone brilliantly in the heavens. Procul, for the first time that day, felt a subtle lift from deep inside his gut. He remembered what it was to be free now. It was the perfection in the off-white. It was the knowledge of imperfection and the sensation of it's irrelevance to the individual. Freedom, he pondered, was the state of being so devinley far away. Almost instantly, the rough texture of the white daisies was lulled into submission by the brilliant music of the orbs. Procul retired himself to bed and quickly fell asleep.

*************

The next day, Procul awoke to his ship decelerating. He stretched his neck back, and stepped out of bed, throwing his robe over his unwashed shirt. He opened the door onto his deck and strolled to the yolk (currently manned by a crewmen whose name he had already forgotten) and peaked over the edge to see the Royal Aeronautical Force's landing-tower rising high above the trees a few thousand yards away.

The RAF had its main station in South Shropshire, and all zeppelins were to dock above the landing-tower, a skyscraper with a flat roof that spilled over the edges of the tower itself. There were office buildings on the inner levels which were accessible from the roof, and, although all capitans were theoretically required to perform "land duties" around the RAF airbase, Procul had long ago blackmailed one important aristocrat or another and now is exempt from these duties. In fact, he outright refused to go lower than the top floor cafe where he would have a gin and meet with his superior officers.

Procul's relatively meager craft made its way about seventy feet above the platform, and ropes dropped from the corners of his ship along with a battered rope-ladder. Procul climbed over the edge of the ship and on to the rope ladder and made his decent on to the platform.