Touring Kesata on a Serious Speedboat

We've been touring around Kesata for a few days now. In fact, as I'm writing this I'm sitting on a boat headed for my next island. These Kesatan boats are much better than the big slow Xala transports I travelled in on Jed. They're pretty compact and lightweight, so they can get up to some pretty fast speeds. They barely touch the water when their cruising, there's just a couple of "feet" under the water with the back just barely in the water. When you get up like that, I could swear the thing can speed at over a hundred miles per hour.

Not that the Kesatans really have a mad desire for speed. Along the way we often pass Kesatans riding on big, serpentine fish, kind of like giant eels. They have special harnesses so they can lay on top of the thing and guide it with something like the reigns. I'm told that they raise those things like we do horses, and they ride them a lot more than humans ride a horse in modern times.

But to get back to the boat, I've been asking the operator (through a Xala translator team, since the operator is a Kesatan) how everything on it works and where it comes from. According to him, it's a sort of hodge-podge of stuff from several different planets. The body of the boat is made up of lightweight metals provided by the Xala. It uses a small jet engine for propulsion, which is set up to run on an fuel cell brought in from another world. (He tells me the best engines come from a planet that my translator is calling Gojat.)

Anyway, looking at his controls, I see a few manual levers as well as a big purple crystal, definitely from Jed. The levers kinda move by themselves, which I'm told is because they're only a backup in case the crystal blows unexpectedly. The front windshield is a Xala force-field, which actually extends itself all the way to the back when we get up to full speed. whenever a bug hits the force-field it kinda sticks to it, thoroughly squashed, and drifts toward the rear before it falls off into the sea.

Meanwhile, there's a little screen by the controls that shows where we are on a map with a line to show our planned course. The location information comes from a network of satellites. Jed has a similar system, which I figure is a lot like a GPS, but I never got to see the control room of any of my transports there. The whole system is actually based on one they found on another planet, though neither the ship pilot nor my translators knew which one offhand.

I think the most "Kesatan" thing about this ship is that it's shaped kind of decoratively. There are some little decorative figures built into the inner walls of it, and the whole thing is painted with line designs and such. I've seen this kind of artwork everywhere I go on Kesata. All of their buildings are partially underwater and are filled with statues and little figurines as well as some wall paintings and such. They also like to make some decorative plant arrangements for both above and below water. I haven't seen the underwater areas much, but most of the above-water parts of their buildings have interesting arrangements of different colored ferns and some flowers and such. They even use some imported plants.