Axy Stormforge and her Journey to the Edge of Reality

Chapter 4: C-Crew

At the end of her long, contemplative sunset walk though the city, just as the red light faded completely and the helix began to sparkle a vague facsimile of starlight, she made it to the endcap, where she strapped into a pod and got a ride through the nexus to the next few cities. Some dark and industrial, some quiet and residential. Apparently, night and day are decided by the station's hemispheres. Her journey took her deeper into the "night" side, exhibiting a variety of different nighttime moods... some with false stars, some with nebulaeic clouds illuminated by directional light, even one with localized rainstorms!

Eventually, she ended up in an inner cylinder, this one full of storage facilities, densely-packed hotels, and a much dimmer orange glow accompanied by a gray haze at the lowest visible level. Unlike the outer cities she had just visited, the roads and city blocks were not arranged in a beautified helical pattern, but in stark straight lines slicing all the way down from one endcap to another. Perpendicular to them were these tall warehouses that formed almost complete rings through the city, like baffles in a fuel tank. A few slowly rotated, as though indexing to certain locations, making an exchange, then returning.

Her pod did not drop her off on the ground level – there seemed to be an absence of inhabited spaces there anyway, other than some industrial catwalks around machinery. Rather, it descended below the ground level, into an almost underworld beneath the storage warehouses. The ceiling was still two or so stories tall, but it still felt cramped with the bustling masses she had to push through to make headway toward her next waypoint.

Each city "block" down here was a dock port, with an open front for passenger traffic, and an open ceiling to the rotating warehouses above their heads. Skyscrapers above them would move until doors in their floors aligned with the open ceilings, interfacing elevator rails to deliver stored cargo. Each ring she walked through seemed to have its own designated color.

She entered a dark green clad port as her HUD directed.

[Dock 30 - Waypoint achieved - please stand by for contact - ETA 3 minutes]

Era had arranged for one of the crew, Jym, to meet her here.

She took in her surroundings while she waited. The room was very industrial - plenty of steel and carbon fiber columns and exposed equipment everywhere, not the plastic facades and LED advertisements she was used to. The ceiling inside was tall with a massive window, and the metallic floor beneath was an almost rust red.

The three closed walls were full of what looked like vendors... hot food being cooked and served by table-top robots in one shop, automated biometrics screening booths at another... and over on the street side of the far wall, a barbershop - perfect! With all of mans technology, hair was one thing still done by humans. Barbers also did tattoos (functional and aesthetic), cybernetic implants, HUD contact lens fittings, etc. But human hair grows faster than circuitry rusts, so hair care was the primary time consumer. And Axy liked to keep her hair silver.

In the center of the room stood a massive elevator, obviously capable of holding a crowd of people or heavy freight. She could see - though a few slit-like windows in the floor - endless miles of networked infrastructure piercing down toward the center of Anaxon. Within this network were hundreds of cargo ships and thousands of transports, and from most of the inner cylinders, like the one she was on, she could see batteries of long tethers reaching down to the docked ships, like a monsters tendrils feeding on underwater prey. Each time the cylinder rotated, she could feel this sinking feeling in her gut when she looked at the endless expanse beneath her... that's a long way down!

But what amazed her the most was just the sheer amount of PEOPLE everywhere! Just... out and about! Most of which were either walking from one destination to another, or waiting in seats doing business or entertainment behind their eyes. A select few in the crowd were definitely NOT from this side of Freespace – some covered head-to-toe in dense fur, some with breathing apparatuses on, some with naturally pale blue skin and – are those webbed hands? It reminded her of just how diverse the galaxy was outside of Illumount. Humans have made colonies on in countless thousands of star systems, including hundreds of colonized planets. A few ancient planet-side civilizations adapted to their environment though genetic engineering, body modification, and even some natural selection, and diverged from there. Regardless of the diversity, though, she was feeling far too antisocial for this much traffic.