The Adventures of Clara and the Gang

Part One - Forming A Group

Clara was tired. The queue in front of the Cliffport wall was always long, but today, it stretched longer than usual, and she had been standing for thirty minutes before she could even see the arch that held up the gate in the wall. She had come back to Cliffport because she wanted to see her hometown one last time before going on the biggest trips of all. Jack had allowed her to meet her parents for a farewell but she didn't actually feel like she needed to tell them anything. After all, she has been "missing" for five years now and even before that she didn't have any meaningful connections with her family, except maybe the love for clocks and watches. Her family had been in the watchmaker business for nearly five generations now and so every child of the Oswald family had been raised as a future watchmaker.
"Please hand your weapons over to the officer ma'am," the man in uniform said, gesturing to his colleague, as Clara entered the small passage room between the outside and the inside of the city. She sighed and said: "I would, but I'd need a surgeon for that."
He looked at her in surprise. "Do... Do you have an ID, ma'am?"
She nodded and showed him her right forearm. Although - wasn't exactly a forearm, but more of a robotic add-on to the rest of her body, which she had invented when she was on the streets with Jack and one of her mates got into a big fight with two officers. He had lost his forearm and a part of his foot because he couldn't draw as quickly as the two policemen. He turned out to be too proud to take it so Clara modified the "watchgun" to fit on her forearm. Later on, she added a few more features like the ID of most of the big cities or a map of the world.
The officer scanned the display of the watchgun with his device and waved her through the metal detector, as she couldn't have been scanned because of her modifications.
When she finally sat in the nacelle, she thought about the things she would be doing when she came in the city. She didn't want to do anything big, just maybe walk through the streets she had known growing up. The door of the nacelle opened again and in came a small man with a kind of hollowed face. He was guiding a van that was driven in.
Clara had never understood how such a big cabin was held by only two or three ropes. She had seen a whole circus coming in the city in one go.
The van didn't look like a normal van. It had a sniper on top and smaller guns on the sides. When it was fully inside the cabin and parked, the old man vanished inside it and the officer who had talked to Clara came out. He grinned when he saw her and went back to his position outside of the nacelle.
Clara didn't care about the man in the van. She just wanted to go to Cliffport.
When the nacelle was full with people and finally started moving, she looked out of one of the big windows. There it was. The Lyx, the green fluid that filled most of the hollowed out regions of Pandora. It was the reason why Clara could go through gunfire without even a scratch. The workers who had first discovered this liquid decades ago couldn't know what effects it had but over the years the villages near the exposed Lyx became more and more divers through mysterious mutations from having skins as hard as metal or simply not looking like humans anymore but like creatures from made up stories. More and more babies were born with those kind of mutations and some time later, it became common to call the mutants like their fairytale counterparts. There were orcs, elves, dwarves and trolls - all respectable human beings of course, but it was just easier to give the most common and strongest mutations a name to call them by.
When Clara was little, she didn't know about most of the mutations. Growing up in the neighbourhood of the wealthy people, she wouldn't see any strongly mutated people just walking around, because they weren't allowed to enter the inner ring of the city, just as people without the right identification and known criminals couldn't pass the guards in the wall.
The first strongly mutated person she had ever seen was the orc her father had once worked with. Her father had taken her and the rest of the family to dinner in a very fancy restaurant not far from their house saying, they would meet up with a colleague of his there. Clara's mother became very excited when she heard that and dressed very nicely, since she expected a successful, charming and completely normal man. The man they were then introduced to, however, was not at all like that. He was a very tall, very grim looking orc, who shook hands with first Clara's father, then her mother - who looked at him with equal surprise and disgust - and then Clara's older brother and herself. She of course was very surprised too, it was after all the first strongly mutated person she had ever seen. The whole evening she and her brother bombarded the poor man with questions, which brought them disapproving looks from both their parents and several bystanders. The Orc however just laughed at the curiosity of the two children and answered them patiently.
Around three years later, the orc hired an apprentice called Jack who showed Clara the wonders o
Now Clara just glanced over the Dwarfs, Elves and all the other creatures who greeted her at the entrance of the transferring bay.