The very center of Aeropolis, luckily for the village of Podunk, was the least populous area. A large spire-shaped building, known as the Palace, was the center of administration on the island; the surrounding areas were massive estates held by the city's various lords and magistrates. A lifetime of wealth, and the prevalence of magical carriages, conspired to make most of them obese; a fact that the Podunkians now greatly lamented.
However, in the top of the spire lived a strange individual. He was not a particularly wealthy or privileged person; rather, Artemis Q. Blatt was a genius. He was the architect who had designed and built Aeropolis. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of its workings, he understood the mechanics that kept the city balanced, and he had several contingencies planned in case of any emergency.
Despite his genius, however, few people listened when he advised them to tether themselves to the ground. He designed an attractive, jewel-studded elastic harness which would have held even a portly Aeropole to the island, but he was able to convince very few people to install them. "If the worst should happen," he said, "your ceiling is not intended to hold you and your belongings."
Still, it gave Artemis little satisfaction to dangle from his former floor and watch the inhabitants of the city tumble into the dark valley below. A weakly mumbled, "I told you so" was drowned out by thousands of terrified screams.
He had been keenly aware of impending disaster; he went to the windows after every gust of wind, checking the horizon nervously for storm clouds. The object, whose path he'd followed through a spyglass from the upper atmosphere all the way until impact, was now resting in a smoking heap below him. He would have retrieved his spyglass again, for closer inspection, but his roof had snapped off when the object impacted. Most of his old blueprints and diagrams and tools had fallen into the town below.
The town below...
"Oh. You fool. You fool, you foolish fooling fool."
When the Great Storm came, and the island broke its anchor and drifted away, Artemis thought that the island was lucky to find such a convenient pocket of mountains in which to rest. The air was refreshing and cool, the scenery was lovely, and the hills provided some cover from future windstorms. "There's no chance that the island will drift away," he had told the Council. "In fact, I've concluded that it would take a great deal of force to even move the island from here. There's just no probability of flying off again. However, ah... there is the slim, indeed miniscule, possibility, that, should a Great Storm level force approach the island, that it will, er, roll a bit, and then sort of tilt, and then sort of... flip upside-down. It is rather top-heavy, you see."
The Council had laughed, then. They unanimously approved the motion to leave the city where it lay; after all, any effort to move it now was likely to cause disaster.
Artemis didn't laugh. Artemis designed a tether.
Now, hanging from it, he saw something he had never considered to be possible. Directly below him were buildings. Over there, what appeared to be a farm... but it grew nothing. Over there, something that looked like a ranch, but he saw no animals; just a sheer brown surface that undulated curiously. Over there, the wreckage of the peculiar object that hit the island. But everywhere, people. Not just people falling from the sky and crashing into buildings and splattering on the ground, but people dodging those people. There was a farming village beneath his city, and he'd ruined their lives.
The wheels turned in his head. And he knew what had happened.
"W-W-Why didn't anyone tell me? Why? And now, and now THIS happened! They, they, they built a bomb! They built a bomb in the sky! And they crashed it into us! To destroy us! They knew what would happen, the bastards! Those poor, mud-caked farmers are actually master weaponsmiths, genius-level engineers who destroyed my city from space! It makes perfect sense!"
Artemis, with fury in his eyes, scrambled up his tether and opened a secret compartment in his former floor. From it, he removed an odd cylindrical machine and a book of matches. He lit one match and placed it into a tiny stove; the machine spurted and choked before beginning to billow steam. A propeller extended from the cylinder. Artemis strapped it on before extricating himself from the tether and falling. The propeller kicked and finally spun rapidly, and Artemis flew sloppily through the streets of the ruined city.
When he came out from beneath the island, he pulled a map from his coat, and steered himself toward the city's birthplace. There had been an attack by a previously unknown enemy, literally lurking in the shadows.
It was time to declare war on Podunk.