Day 690

A waterfall ran between the narrow gap where the two mountains had collided from the quake of 1805. Land's End, they called it and it was the last place anyone wanted to be. Though the cargo blimps still sailed through the space between they'd been adapted - waterproof fabrics, narrower structure, heavy duty harpoons aimed directly below etcetera. Made things safer for the most part but never enough for a crew to sleep soundly at the halfway refuel station.

It was one of those automated places, set up as shoddy as the fuel but enough to get you to the other side which was all that mattered. The automatons that served as cleaners, ship handlers, mechanics and defence when necessary were officially called OmniJacks but more commonly known as Getters. Strangely they named themselves that, constantly muttering under their breath about humans telling them to "get this, get that, get over there and shoot the blighter before it gets any closer." Nowadays they refuse to answer to anything else.

Still, compared to the things that lived at the depths of the waterfall, the Getters were saints. Anything was preferable to the fates that befell stray cargo blimps, unaware cargo blimps, never-seen-again-the-funeral's-on-Tuesday blimps. The plaques at either side of Land's End used to be updated on a regular basis but when they looked to be growing to ridiculous sizes from the ships gone missing, they were replaced by a mechanical scroll. Every morning it would update the names of ships gone down and every night the surface would be wiped clean ready for the next day. Bets were held for every ship that departed - it was a fairly lucrative business.

Some blimps went through Land's End specifically to document the species unique to the falls and cliff. You'd think that a 5,000 foot tall waterfall wouldn't be home to much more than bacteria but surprisingly fish have adapted to live constantly swimming upstream and along the rapid current, among several species of bird with wings more like parachutes than the traditional feathery structure.

That was in the higher regions, the shallows as they were called. The depths were for much larger beasts, the ones that led to harpoon-covered hulls becoming standard for cargo blimps in the area. Few people have managed to get a glimpse of them and survive. The most we know of them is that their limbs are something between a squid and a vine, every inch covered in thorns-like spines that dig into cliffside and blimp alike. If there's any more to them, we haven't seen it.

The base of Land's End is part of a large hourglass shaped lake running between the mountains and out either end. It's uninhabited by humans and the local wildlife is something we prefer to spectate at out of fear and common sense in equal measure. With all the ships that go down there I'd imagine the lake to be swimming with a treasure trove of cargo, ship-parts and corpses but perhaps not enough to risk death for.

Still it does draw people down, of course they're only seen again on the Death Board the next day or so. I hear they'll be expanding that too after Her Majesty's latest vessel the "HRM Indomitable" went down with millions of pounds worth of precious stones inside. We're expecting a lot of new blimps.