“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”

Those were the words painted in gold cursive on the side of Dedalus Dirkstrom's telescope. He licked his thumb, smoothed a wayward lock of hair, and peered through.

In the distance, below the skyline of a foreign port, a pack of sea dragons circled in the water. Their dark silhouettes churned and coiled, but for as long as Dedalus watched, their backs never broke the surface.

He was seated on the deck of his dirigible, miles from home and alone but for the company of his flying donkey.

"Tinker?" he said. "I have a job for you, but you're not going to like it."

The donkey brayed its disapproval.

The contraption Dedalus cinched to Tinker's back was comprised of a basket, a knot of gears, and an iron bit. When Tinker chomped on the bit, the gears would turn and the basket would open, releasing its contents to whatever waited below. Thus equipped, Dedalus smacked his donkey on the rump and sent him with a load of half-rotten fish to fly over the spot where the sea dragons swirled.

Ready again at the eyepiece of his telescope, Dedalus waited. Tinker dropped the bait, and in a flurry of seafoam and tarnished-brass scales, the dragons burst from the sea.

Fins flashed and serpents snarled, and Tinker escaped their ravenous jaws only by the hairs on the tip of his tail. As he flapped back to the dirigible, braying accusations at his master, Dedalus was filling his sketchbook.

A fin here, a wing there, an arch of precisely this degree. A lever, a hinge, a length of rope, and a whole lot of paint and silver and gold. Oh yes; by the gods and the heavens above, this was his greatest project yet.

When he returned to shore and home, Dedalus Dirkstrom had twenty-two pages of scribbles. With barely a stop to hitch his donkey and dirigible, he ran to the royal court, raised his sketchbook over his head and, out of breath, cried "I've done it."

The king, bemused by the spectacle of his exhausted-yet-overenthusiastic court engineer, stroked his beard in contemplation. "Oh? What have you done?"

"I've designed a new dreadnaught," Dedalus wheezed. "With fins and oars and ironclad sides, and it spits foam and fire from its bow." He shuffled through his papers, holding schematic after ink-smudged schematic before the king's nose. "Every detail is here, from the curve of the fangs to the silver-foil glint on its reinforced scales; a man-made sea dragon, built to command an armada."

The king folded his arms. "Well, it certainly sounds impressive," he mused. "But what of the enemy catapults? The ones on their sea wall, the ones I asked you to reverse engineer?"

With a moment to re-collect his breath and thoughts, Dedalus remembered the foreign port he'd journeyed out to see. "Ah, those," he replied. "I'll get to them tomorrow."