The Kingdom of Orenda

Chapter 11: Finally in Glassop

In the morning the elderly couple were nice enough to serve them breakfast. Lidya had two chocolate chip muffins with a glass of cold milk. Not the healthiest, she was aware, but she reasoned she deserved it after the ordeal that had just happened.

After breakfast they asked around the town how they could get to Glassop, and they found that Arkala had a tram station that led right to Glassop and would take them there in under a half hour of travel time. The gorup sighed with relief at this knowledge and went to the station to get their tickets and wait for the tram to arrive.

"Finally we won't have to walk." Axle joked.

"Yeah, we were supposed to be on the tram station since we left Gale town." Acer told him.

"I hope Glassop is a nice city." Eryd mumbled to herself.

"I just hope they'll allow me to use the archives." Cerise added.

Lidya sat and listened to them all talk and recount the things that had happened and thought about how close she was to going home.

She was thinking about how exited her aunt, uncle, and cousin would be to see her ok, and their faces when she told them about the adventure she just had. Then she felt herself grow sad. Inside she knew she had to go home but a part of her, one that was very hard to ignore mind you, wanted to stay. To continue exploring. To keep adventuring and spending time with this odd group she had formed along the way and was really attached to despite only knowing them for some days. She wanted to see the other kingdoms, she wanted to see the rest of this kingdom. She knew she had to go home, and she should be more excited to see her family again, she shouldn't be feeling this sad about leaving.

Conflicted, she started tracing the birthmark on her shoulder as she waited for the tram to arrive.

When the tram did arrive the six of them got on and sat near one another. They got a few curious glances from the other passengers, but not due to the odd aray of people in their gorup for the passengers on the tram were their own sort of strange. Lidya saw people with colorful hair and skin she had never seen yet, people carrying animals she hadnt seen, and people holding objects she had no clue as to what they were or did. No they glances had to be due to the disheveled appearance of the group, which was no surprise due to how they had been in the same clothes for multiple days, if not longer in certain people's cases.

The seats on the tram were pleasantly soft and the tram itself was air conditioned at a comfortable temperature. Out the window Lidya saw towns zoom past her, towns that she realized she would never get to see or know about after she got home. The tram only made one stop before arriving at Glassop, just as the towns people of Arkala said, they had gotten there in less than half an hour.

Lidya and her group of friends stepped out into the Glassop tram station, it was very pretty and clean. People stood here and there chatting about this and that. Most of them were wearing very pretty clothes, that appeared to be well made of high quality materials, at least thats how they appeared to Lidya. The clothes were bright and richly colored, the majority of them, she noticed, were colored magenta.

The group went up to the ticket booth, behind which worked a short and pudgy man, with a receding hairline of black hair, a white shirt with a magenta vest, black framed glasses, and black pants that had multiple papers sticking out of the pockets.

"Hello and good day, are you all arriving or leaving?" the man asked.

"We've just arrived." Acer told him.

"Ah, welcome to Glassop- we hope you enjoy your time here. They're maps over at that display stand." he pointed to a wall with a rack full of maps of Glassop.