Dr. Frestes—Cornelius Frigon, as the pirates knew him—had a vision.
The old academic publication was dead. Its scholars had vanished. Its research had stopped. But the infrastructure remained. The printing presses. The distribution networks. The reputation, such as it was, that still lingered in academic circles.
What if, he proposed, they revived it? Not as a dusty journal read by a handful of professors, but as something new. Something that combined the pirates' talent for gathering intelligence with the academics' talent for analyzing it.
They would study cities. All cities. Every city they could reach.
Samuel Blackwater would handle the scholarly side—the theories, the frameworks, the academic credibility that would make their work respected.
Captain Jack would handle the operations—the missions, the data gathering, the boots-on-the-ground intelligence that no academic journal had ever had access to before.
Isabella Tidecrest would handle the social side—The Broken Meridian would become a hub for information exchange, a place where contacts could be cultivated and rumors could be verified.
And Dr. Frestes himself would synthesize it all. Would turn raw data into insight. Would answer the question that had begun to obsess him:
What conditions factor into a vertical push—office and residential development reaching for the sky—in any central business district?
They called the publication Urbanicity. Part academic journal. Part intelligence operation. Part pirate venture.
The mist had brought them three hundred years into the future. Now they would chart its cities, one skyscraper at a time.