Chapter 28: Chapter 28 – Arrival in the Sky Kingdom

When the flash of white clears, we’re standing in a grand plaza.

There’s no endogenous disorientation, no feeling of whirling about or dizziness. Nothing about the transition is uncomfortable or nauseating, not from inside me, and still I almost throw up just out of sheer stress and nerves, and because of one other thing.

Which would have been really bad, because we’re in public.

Amber’s hand on my shoulder interrupts my train of thought, and she pulls me along as she moves briskly away from where we fetched up. There’s someone chanting “Keep it moving, keep it moving! Gawk on your own time, keep it moving, keep it moving!” vaguely in our direction, and as my feet take me on autopilot towards a set of benches, there’s a sort of blip sound, more of an impression in the air, and another set of people appear across the way. The chanter, very obviously a guard or policeman of some sort, turns towards them, and I sit heavily on the bench, breathing hard.

The sky is without end, and I made the mistake of staring at it. I tear my eyes away from the oppressive and shockingly clear blue, closing them to rest my face on Amber’s shoulder as she stands between me and the rest of the square.

“Is something wrong, my lord?”

“No. Yes. No, it’s just…” I grip her sleeve tightly, breathing in deeply, and then open my eyes again. “I’m not used to the sky,” I tell her.

“Not… used to the sky?”

“The ceiling on a Worldship’s honeycomb level is cleverly-disguised metal and lighting panels,” I say quietly. “The tallest ones are about fifty meters tall, which is plenty, you can even fly a kite, but that’s still only… a bit over a hundred and fifty feet? And they don’t look like this.” I muster enough emotional stability to grin at her. “I feel like the atmosphere is going to vent out, honestly.”

“Tis only a pale mirage, next to the true sky. Perhaps your reaction will distract me from mine, come the day.” Zidanya’s tone is gentle, I think, despite the teasing words, or maybe that’s just her hand on my other shoulder. “Focus on the structures and people, and you may find distractions betimes; for this place is a puzzle, and one we must solve swiftly. A scenario this complex is… unusual, and betokens the ire of the Temple and a challenge concomitant with the same.”

She keeps talking, but her comments are directed at Amber and are more about how they might have to adapt the overall strategy, so I tune her out - hey, that’s just not part of where our magisteria overlap, okay? - and look around the city square.

It’s an interesting view. I don’t know very much about grounder cities, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone, so I don’t know if this is typical. Everything is … not immaculately clean, not no-speck-of-dirt level of clean, but well kempt and tidy, with even most of that dirt and dust being swept into little gutters running under the frontage of each of the buildings. The plaza, or I guess the square, given that it’s a square, is maybe two hundred meters on a side, long enough that even just the frontage would be a long span of staring to process.

And there’s so much more than the frontage. People aren’t exactly thronging, but it’s hardly empty; there’s four ten-meter-square areas in the center of the square where people keep blipping in and as quickly vacating the area, and the square is lined with stores and shops, about two thirds of which are selling some kind of food or another, and a handful of buildings that look to be neither; one is clearly some kind of administrative facility, one has an enormous Art Gallery Grand Opening, Tomorrow Night! banner that makes clear what it is, and the one with signage declaring it to be the Church of All Gods is pretty self-explanatory, but the fourth one, spanning about fifty meters on the opposite side of the square from us, is just plain white stone without signage or ornamentation. The occasional person enters or exits one of the seven doors, but there’s no tell or indication about who they are or why they’re there.

There’s a lot of that white stone around. Most of the buildings, and all of the buildings that reach more than a couple of stories high, are made out of it, with colorful trim and solid-color cloth lying flat against the stone from windows, undisturbed by any breeze. The square is tiled with it, in a geometric series of squares and triangles that leaves no single gap, perfectly tessellated and with the seams between the shapes filled in with color. Blues and purples and reds, primarily, but also some greens and teals and the occasional splash of turquoise; the pattern made by the colors itches at my brain, but I put it aside. Now is not, I tell myself, the time to treat architecture as a puzzle to be solved. Later, I promise myself. Maybe even soon. Just not now.

“No smells.” Amber and I turn to Zidanya, and she shrugs. “Even a meager crowd would smell, and normally I’d say I’m fain to flee a city square, but not the bare hint of an odor.”

“Huh.” It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about it, but she’s right; as far as my nose is concerned, we’re… nowhere, really. There is air, but it doesn’t smell like anything at all, not like the clean pure clarity of tanked nitrox, not like the recycled staleness of most statics, not like the wild sensory affray that people describe planets as being, and which I didn’t really remember well enough from the two times I’d been down surface-side. “What’s that mean?”

“Parsimony or a message?” Amber turns to Zidanya. “Can you tell?”

“As yet, I’d not favor a guess.”

“Um.” I look at the two of them. “If I follow right, you’re saying that either there’s no smell because the smell doesn’t matter and the scenario is cutting corners and reducing the number of potential red herrings, or there’s no smell because the lack of smell is some sort of critical message in its own right.” They nod, and I sag backwards onto the bench, practically flopping. “This puzzle is underconstrained.”

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Zidanya laughs at my grumbling complaint, and Amber pats me on the head, transforming my grumbling into a contented murmur. We sit there for a moment longer, watching, before I sit bolt upright, my attention caught by something. One of them says something, but I don’t hear it, my attention completely focused on … something.

On what? I let my brain unfocus and my eyes roam. The not-exactly-pressure is rising inside me, the mote of excitement that comes with figuring out the trick, the a-ha moment almost at hand.

“They repeat.” I say it, the joy hitting me as I understand what it was I recognized in that flash of insight. “They repeat, this whole square is a cycle on repeat. The same people walking the same patterns, the same blipping teleports in, possibly even the same conversations.” The same faces walking through each doorway; that’s what twigs me to it, staring at the unlabeled doors across the way and the people walking in and out.

“A cycle of what length?” Zidanya’s voice is intent.

“Maybe fifteen minutes?”

“Good.” She sounds pleased, and I cock my head at her and raise an eyebrow, a move that I’m hoping conveys well? Tell me more. She smiles at me, some sort of gleam in her eyes, a bit of coiled tension leaving her neck. “A cycle means we’re to gather information,” she says by way of explanation. “One such as this, particularly; we should speak only once to each person, and only one person per cycle, by propriety. This is … for background.”

“A longer cycle means it’s more plot-relevant, and a shorter cycle means we can’t get as much information anyway so it’s sort of a cue not to bother?” Zidanya nods at me. “Then the lack of smell sounds like it’s more the latter. Parsimony, instead of a message, like you said. Right?”

“It could still be a message, or part of a puzzle.” Amber cuts in. “Just not a puzzle that anchors itself here, to this square.”

“There’s something else here, though.” I nudge the colors lining the squares with my foot. “The colors of the mortar are a pattern, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know if it’s relevant, though, is the thing.”

“E’en so, one need not solve each and every puzzle, and few puzzles are solved at once.”

“So it could be that this is just… a puzzle component. That would make sense.” A dozen possibilities immediately run through my head, each not exactly discarded but casually - carefully, for all that it’s casually - set aside for later, the likeliest of which is that the colored lines between the stones has some sort of relationship with the square’s status as a teleportation point. “Any reason I shouldn’t pull the Visor out to take a recording?”

“We’ll begin ere you finish, we three speaking to one each.” Zidanya smiles at me, and I get the feeling that she’s wise to the thing I had been about to say.

I say it anyway. “You don’t want to start talking to them while I record, then?”

“Visor up, my lord.”

Amber’s dry voice, so deliberately wielded for humor value and paired with that quirk of her lips, goes a long way towards resigning me to the challenge to come, and I pull up my Visor as I grumble good-naturedly about it. I’m mostly kidding, anyway. Talking to people is fine. It’s when they want to dance with me that I get worried, and I have empirical support for that position.

I tell Zidanya that, and get the laugh I’m looking for, and square my shoulders.

“Alright. Time to socialize.”

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