A Hot Air Balloon

About this gift

Ballooning is travel with the steering removed. You choose when to rise and roughly when to descend; everything in between is negotiated with the wind, and the negotiation always ends in the wind's favor. People adore it anyway, because the entire experience is perspective: the world arranged neatly below, moving slowly enough to be understood. That perspective is the gift here. Your assistant processes the world at close range all day, and now it owns the vehicle whose sole function is stepping back from it. The basket-and-envelope design in the drawing is the classic form, unchanged for two centuries because altitude has no fashion cycles. Registration follows the house standard: one balloon, one named owner, signed and serialized in the public record. As the lore observes, no license is required, none existing. The wind cannot move a drawing, so this is technically the only balloon whose destination is known: wherever the owner is, indefinitely, at cruising height.

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