Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

“Please vacate the premises within ten seconds. Please vacate the premises within nine seconds.” 

A modulated voice greeted Yuriko as soon as she and the others exited the portal. She barely had time to blink—everyone else was as disoriented after coming through the portal. There was also a rather strange and ominous feel around her, enough so that her attention was quickly scattered. She rallied her strands of consciousness and realised that the countdown had gone down to five seconds. Beneath their feet was a large circle painted a different colour from the rest of the area. It was a bright yellow and was about five paces across. The strange thing was that there were no portal rings behind them. Anyway, she assumed the voice meant the circle, and she extended her Animakinesis to pull everyone from the area.

“Thank you for your prompt response,” the voice said. Yuriko still didn’t know where it came from. She expanded her perception range but froze when she actually saw where they were, and what she could see in the distance. 

They were on a platform roughly half a longstride wide, though she couldn’t say the exact measurement since her perception couldn’t reach that far. There were hundreds of circles over the black surface, but she wasn’t clear what that was made of. Every few seconds, one of the circles lit up with a pillar of light, and when it receded, a group of people emerged. In the middle of the platform was a tall, crystalline spire. 

She discovered where the voice came from: it was a small box on top of a pole about a pace high. A couple of seconds after Yuriko and the others vacated the zone, a pillar of light covered it. A moment later, it receded and revealed a couple of people, clad in colourful clothes that looked reminiscent of Imperial fashion, appeared. 

“Please vacate the premises within ten seconds,” the metal box said.

The new arrivals didn’t hesitate, though one of them, a pretty woman whose hairstyle was to have a centre strip of hair that was sticking upright while the rest of her head was shaved bald, gave Yuriko and the others a glance. A look of dismissal followed simply because they were still clad in their desert robes.

“Bumpkins…” the woman muttered. 

Yuriko didn’t really care, having allocated just a couple of consciousness strands to her vicinity. The rest of her was looking at the city that was arrayed before her. At least, she thought it was a city? She could see tall, bone white mountains in the far distance, but in between those and where they ended up, were impossibly tall structures, very few of which looked alike. They looked longstrides high, and there were bridges that connected to each and every one of them. Those bridges ranged from narrow passages, to broad structures that looked like streets. There were also hundreds of winding walkways suspended in mid-air, and she could see things moving along it. She was too far away to really see what those were, however. She slowly spun in a circle and soon found out that all around them were those tall structures, as well as those white mountains. 

“Is this the Eternal Tower?” Yuriko gasped. 

Before a memory could unfold, someone else answered.

“Sure is, sweety. But only the ground floor.”

Yuriko’s perception aura slid off a void behind her, and when she turned around, it was to the sight of a small entourage standing behind what could only be a royalty. A prince, or maybe a young king from the crown on his head, and the royal mantle.

“First time here?” he drawled as he and his group, about a dozen people clad in strange clothes or armour, stepped out of the circle. 

“Yes, this is our first time here,” Yuriko answered, somehow feeling chatty with the man’s open attitude. Odd for someone dressed like that. He had a small golden crown on his head, though maybe coronet would be a better label. He had platinum blonde hair, was clean shaven, and had mesmerising emerald green eyes. He was just a little bit shorter than she was, and something was stopping her perception aura from touching him or his companions. It was as if he was covered in glass and unless she pressed, her aura wouldn’t make contact. She didn’t push since there wasn’t much of a reason to and he didn’t feel hostile. He actually felt really friendly, and she saw his eyes widen in surprise when she turned around to face him. 

He smiled and extended his right hand to shake, the left, she noted idly, was gloved. For all his finely tailored clothes, the only parts of him that showed any skin was his face, a bit of his neck, and his right hand. Yuriko heard someone in his entourage gasp.

“Mathias Agner, a prince of the Edrium Republic.”

“Yuriko Mishala Davar,” she returned as she shook his hand. “Republic with a prince?”

“A relic of older times. The royal family is more of a…symbol of the country’s prosperity,” Mathias answered easily. He tilted his head, “Your group fe…looked lost so I took the initiative to help. Since it’s your first time here, I can guide you to an information centre so you can get squared up.” 

“Squared up?” Yuriko mimicked. She abruptly realised that he had spoken not in Wojan, but in Old Imperial. Well, a variant of it, with a strange accent and some mispronounced words. She had replied in the same language instinctively. 

“Your Dawnspeak has an accent I’m not familiar with,” he observed. “You must be from farther away than usual.”

“Ah, yes,” Yuriko said, “From the west, the border.”

“Oh, fascinating.” He paused and looked at the others behind him. Yuriko could feel Heron’s guarded emotions while Gwendith was a bit peeved. Ah, he was still holding on to her hand.

“We will gladly take your offer,” Yuriko said with a smile, and she felt his pulse jump. She held in a smirk as she felt her Mien touch his Anima, though she prevented it from entangling him.

He finally let go as he arched his eyebrows at Devotee and Fluffington. Then he gestured towards his right, “The lift to the levels below is over there. The squares that are marked with a white line.” 

Yuriko just noticed it then. The travellers who exited the portal circles all headed towards a large square that was usually in the middle of a bunch of circles. She nodded in acknowledgement. She started walking towards it, with Gwendith and Heron taking their place beside her…or that’s what they should have done. Instead, they fell a step behind her and to her left, allowing the prince to walk next to her.

‘What are you up to?’ Yuriko mentally said suspiciously to Gwendith.

‘Just letting this play out.’ Gwendith’s voice was thick with amusement.

Yuriko had not turned her head, nor made any motions that she had been speaking with someone, but she noticed Mathias’ eyes dart towards Gwendith. Curious. 

Still, he didn’t speak of it, and they strolled towards the lift. “I’ve been to Dragon Fall City many times over my life, and I must say I always look forward to coming here. It’s an incredible place, full of wonder and advanced technology. Heh, I wish I could bring it back home, the idea, the verve! But alas, technology of this level is millenia ahead of most other nations.” 

“It certainly looks beautiful, but what do you mean, technology?” Yuriko asked. “I’ve not heard of the term without a qualifier.”

He paused, then his eyes flicked over to her attire. “And what do you normally hear, Miss Davar?”

“Arcana technology was the latest.”

“Ah, of course. Tool creation using the principles of Arcana Weaving. Technology is simply the catch all term for application of knowledge, whether through Arcana Weaving, Information management, and computers.”

“Computers? Arithmetics?” Yuriko looked at Mathias, her head tilted in an expression of sincere curiosity. 

Mathias froze for a long moment, and Yuriko stopped with him. His skin was only lightly tanned, so the heat in his face was quite obvious. He coughed, “You are a dangerous woman, miss.” 

“Hmm, I’m usually considered as such.” Yuriko said teasingly. 

“Ahem, yes. So, you’re from a low tech nation, I should have suspected as much from your garments. I apologise.” He chuckled, “But I think you’ll find many of the answers you seek at the place we’re headed.” 

“Alright, that works for me.” Yuriko chuckled. 

“I sense you are a person of great power, Miss Davar. You must be a powerful Magi.” He said abruptly. 

“I guess you can call it that,” Yuriko said with a shrug.

“Curious.”

He left it at that since they were already entering the white square. A few dozen groups were already there, with a few more incoming. They walked over the edge of the square, and waited for a minute, then a metal box on a pole shot up from the ground and said, “This lift will proceed to the Immigration 34 level, please remain within the borders during the trip. We will depart in ten seconds.” 

Sure enough, once the allotted time expired, the entire square sank down so fast that for a long moment, she thought she was falling, but some force held on to her feet and she wasn’t quite thrown off. She instinctively spread her Anima to catch herself, but the hooks she normally used to cling to the canvas of reality slid off as if it were glass. That feeling of wrongness she sensed earlier magnified, before leaving off when she removed the hooks. 

‘Does that mean I can’t fly here?’ She thought furiously. How inconvenient considering how high things here were. Well, she'd have to explore all the possibilities, but for the others, nothing much should have changed. The atmosphere was thick with Elemental energies, and there was just a tiny bit of ambient Chaos that was locked inside some compound motes. 

The lift went down, but didn’t continue in that direction for long. A few moments later, the walls turned out to be made of something translucent. Not glass, she was sure, but a metal that one could see through. Or perhaps they were crystal screens that revealed moving pictures? Her Anima penetrated a bit into the material, and it wasn’t completely made out of metal, but also of some weird substance that made the alloy more flexible than anything else. There was also nothing behind it but the lift’s passageway, and it wasn’t all up and down either. It reminded her of the Siderious, she realised, if the planar fortress had been in proper shape rather than what it was now. 

“These are viewscreens,” Mathias said. “They project pictures and videos of things recorded in the server memories,” he explained as if that made any sense to Yuriko. Or maybe they did, but couched in terms that were unfamiliar. She assumed servers were artifact spirits of some sort, perhaps of the entire building, and the screens showed its memories? But the images were of landscape…oh, there was some text there, but she couldn’t quite read it. It looked like it was written with Wojan letters, but the contents sounded like nonsense. 

It took a few minutes, but eventually, the lift platform stopped and the walls sank down into the floor, revealing a large room that probably occupied the entire floor space of the building level. The place was bustling with hundreds, if not thousands of people waiting in lines. The counters stretched the width of the room and divided it in two. Those who passed the counters continued past them and then, outside. She saw one of the floating road strips adjacent to the building, and she finally saw what those things that were moving along it were. Landcraft. Oh, but they didn’t have wheels. Instead, the entire thing hovered a couple of inches above the floating road,and when people went inside, it zoomed off faster than any landcraft from back home did. 

“Well, it’s a bit of a long wait to get through immigration, but it shouldn’t take that long,” Mathias chuckled. “Do you mind keeping me company? I’ll tell you more stories about the city while we wait.” 

Yuriko glanced at him and shrugged. “If it pleases you,” she said absently, but she only dedicated a few strands of consciousness to his chatter. Instead, she spent the rest of the wait going through Damien’s memories. And the troubling thing was that the old pervert didn’t remember anything of this sort at all.