Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

It took an hour for the metro to reach the L5 station. It was only twenty-five longstrides as a straight line, and Yuriko certainly knew that the monorail train she and the others took had a speed that was much higher than what she was used to. It moved at nearly a hundred longstrides an hour, as far as she could tell, well below her flying speed, yes, but with the strange barrier across the canvas of reality, she couldn’t exactly fly anyway. Not that there was nothing else flying around. She’d spotted a few floating ships and automation flyers that were probably no longer than her arm.

No, the reason it took so long to cross the distance from Gate Consortium Tower and L5 Station was that the monorail stopped at every station they reached. Each of those stations were located in one of the mega buildings, and the stops took roughly three to five minutes each. Then, it snaked across the districts, which were labelled on the map inside her Autotab. After a spate of boredom, she started exploring her Autotab’s functions and Gwendith directed her to the REI-space Walker app, which allowed her to access an incredible knowledge repository. All she had to do was input a question, and answers would populate the viewscreen!

She explored and eventually found the city map and read up on it. Ten minutes on and ten minutes off, reading and observing everything around her as well as what happened above and below. It wasn’t only underneath the monorail that had vehicles. She was also sure there was a monorail in the levels above. She saw ribbons when she looked down from the roof, after all. Although her perspective might be off since she didn’t look from the edge. She was also surprised to realise that the mega buildings weren’t only high rise structures in the city. There were narrow skyscrapers scattered on the area, though she felt it was a bit of a misnomer. The narrow yet tall buildings barely breached past the two hundredth floor, and with the at least five hundred storeys tall mega buildings, how could they call them skyscrapers?

When she looked down from the windows, she thought she was looking at the ground, but apparently, she was wrong. The actual earth where the city stood was hidden beneath a concrete plate, and underneath that was another deep warren of corridors, maintenance tunnels, and sewers. Only past that was the actual earth.

There was not much information about that, at least not without having to pay in ACsto get it. And after the first time she paid, the page turned out empty, and their Sando REIsec software blared out warnings of an intrusion attempt. Yuriko shut that down by the simple dint of snipping the connecting thread. It made her Autotab fizzle out, but after a couple of minutes, it managed to turn on again.

So…tapping on every button she saw could lead to drastic consequences. Yuriko shook her head. This wasn’t something she could easily see, or easily fight. She checked the shared bank account and realised that while nothing else had been lost, the initial ACs she used to pay for seeing the blank page had been released already. She saw a button she could press to dispute, but it led her to an extra long page filled with tiny words and letters that just made her dizzier the longer she looked at it.

She nudged Gwendith through her mental link, relayed what happened, then said, ‘Perhaps we should hurry up and create separate accounts as soon as possible.’

‘Alright. But we shouldn’t rush. Don’t let anyone else go to those dubious spaces.’

Yuriko nodded and relayed to the others, who agreed. Then, she spent the rest of the journey reading through as much information as she could without hurting her head.

The city was divided into thirteen districts. There was Central, which was the area within five leagues on the Gate Consortium’s tower. Then the first through twelfth districts, which were arrayed like the numbers of a clock. District twelve was directly north, District three was east, District six was south, and District nine was west. These districts spanned all the way from Central to the edge of the city, a hundred leagues away, in an ever widening cone. Then, the districts were further subdivided by the league marker from Gate Consortium Tower. So the address they were going to. Tower 1D-L15-12, was the mega building in District one, fifteen leagues from the consortium, and was the twelfth mega building in that band. Seemed simple enough, really.

It took them another three hours after they reached L5 station to get to L15. They were in tower one. However, so they had to go to the twelfth one in the sector. Thankfully, they didn’t have to walk. There was another metro station specifically for traversing the sector, so they paid for the tickets, which was about 2 ACs per stop for each one of them, and boarded the monorail. It took them half an hour to get to Tower 12, and by the time they finally alighted from the monorail, they were all tired, sweaty, and hungry.

The station wound up on Floor 175 so they actually had to descend nearly twenty-three floors to get to their new apartment. The map app showed them where the lift was located, though the one nearby would only take them down to the 165th floor.

The station looked almost identical to the ones they passed through, at least in the layout. It had its own character though, in graffiti, posters, and the kind of people who were just off the platform. If she thought that the people walking around in that first station were grungy, the people entering and leaving this station looked bone tired, and just plain apathetic to hygiene. Her nose twitched at the miasma of sweat, dirt, and oil. A few of the passersby gave her group a look, but most casually dismissed them, though some stares lingered over Fluffington. Gwendith and Heron had flanked her and kept her out of easy sight, and she also pulled up her hood.

‘We should probably buy clothes that fit in.’ Yuriko sent to both Gwendith and Heron. They were the only ones in desert robes here, for all that it wasn’t uncommon in Gate Tower. People here were clad in clothes that showed off a bit more skin, or in most cases, metal. The fashion was reminiscent of both Bresia and Karcellia, but none of the women wore any floofy skirts or dresses. They were more often than not, wearing trousers, shirts, and sweaters, but a few were clad in dresses so skimpy that it left nothing to the imagination. Then there were some people, men and women alike, who wore suits that looked like they'd been painted on. There was fabric there, but it clung to the body that they might as well be naked. Those were the minority though, and those that dared had aesthetically pleasing physiques.

They followed the crowd towards the lifts, but when Yuriko saw its size, she pouted, “Fluffers isn’t going to fit.”

“No, he won’t,” Gwendith said.

There were almost no Elemental Beasts like Fluffers here. Most of the denizens were humanoid, or maybe they weren’t here because of the inconvenience of not being able to use lifts. How much was the rent for the apartment again?

“Stairs are that way,” Saki said. She’d taken to wearing her visor so her map application must be right up in her sight. Her handmaiden led them down the warren of corridors. They were narrow, barely three paces wide. Fluffington almost took up the entire walkway, and they had to walk single file, to the angry mutters of the others walking in the opposite direction. The rule of thumb seemed to be to walk on the right-hand side of the corridor, so at least they didn’t get tangled up with anyone.

The corridor was littered with brightly lit signs, most of them regarding one vice or another. The enclosed space stank worse than the station, and the ceiling was stained with something blackish brown. She saw a few people slouched in the hallway, back against the wall. Some were smoking cigarettes, though she thought some of those sticks were made out of metal. She refrained from extending her perception, not all that keen on sensing more than what her nose was already protesting about.

The stairwell was absolutely filled with graffiti which made it nearly impossible to determine what the walls’ original colour was. Her eyebrows lifted at the subject matter, and she shook her head ruefully when she realised most of the artwork was of male genitalia. That, or some weird symbols that weren't runescript, Old Imperial letters, or Wojan.

She realised five flights down that the same symbol repeated every few paces of wall. It looked like half of a circle that had been divided in two by a sinuous line, with the pointy end downwards. The upper part of the inside had a lidless eye that had three lines running out of it, only to converge at the pointy end.

Five flights down and they had to move to another stairwell since this one ended right on floor one hundred and seventy. The next set of stairs was towards the center of the building, some three hundred paces inwards. Oh, the map labeled the floor, and the four below it as a commercial center. Sure enough, the corridor ended up in a large hall that wrapped around the building’s center, which was an opaque square roughly a hundred by a hundred paces. It was the same for every floor they’d passed through, according to the map application, and there were no doors or passages into it.

The commercial center’s hall was basically five floors of shops, stalls, and lounge areas, and given that it was almost five in the afternoon, there were more than a few people bustling about. They easily found the stairs and headed all the way down to the area’s bottom level, then they headed back to the periphery to take the stairs that would lead to the lower floors. This time, the stairs lead all the way down to the hundred and fifty second floor, and when they entered the hallway, somehow, it looked much worse that the floors immediately above them.

Trash littered the hallways, vagrants were laid out across the floor. Passersby simply stepped over unconscious figures, and the stench of sweat and urine clung to the air. There were also more of those symbols plastered all over the place.

Presumably, the apartment they looked to rent was in the tent block, and Gwendith’s map application had started growing a bit fussy the moment they stepped into the levels under the center. It still held the map, but it no longer showed their position on it as they moved. It wasn’t difficult to figure out, and their block was just a couple of intersections left of the stairs.

From the distance between doors, Yuriko figured that each apartment was likely five paces wide, and it would definitely not fit all of them inside. When she said as much, Gwendith nodded and checked the application that allowed them to find the apartment in the first place.

“The neighbouring doors are empty. We could get those too.” Gwendith said.

“I guess that works.”

It was when they turned around an intersection that trouble found them. Yuriko squinted at a group of five…thugs, which is what she’d define them as. All of them had automata arms, black metal plating with silver highlights. The lead thug was a beefy man that was taller than Heron, and nearly wide enough to block the corridor. He wore nothing by a vest over his torso, and it was more steel studs than cloth. He had a gun on his hip and a curved dagger on his waist.

The entire group swaggered down the hallway, and as soon as they caught sight of Yuriko and the others, vapid grins adorned their faces, and their swaggering steps turned into a menacing stalk.

Yuriko eyed them for a little while, then sighed. Weak.

“Heron. Take out the trash, please.”

Her lover glanced at her with a raised eyebrow, then shrugged. “Sure thing.”