Lionsgate

Introduction

"...if you EVER call me Liu again I will slap you, Alice!" I snarled. The girl, Alice, looked at me. "I'm sorry, Li---Xinyu, but you belong with the rest of everyone else like you in the Soft Meadows Mental Hospital," she said. I rose an eyebrow. "Excuse me?! What did you just say?!" I snapped back.

"Xinyu Chen. I don't have time to restate myself. Go rot at Soft Meadows Mental Hospital," snarled Alice, her eyes rolling in time to the haunting music I liked. A statue of Tyrochus, the sphinx me and my family worshipped, stared Alice in the face with unblinking red, rotating, grim eyes. "How's it feel to be disrespected by the Goddess herself: Tyrochus?" I asked, raking my nails down the leatherwork of an old patched-up pillow.

"May Liquaxis find peace with your soul," Alice said, referring to the Water Elemental most Lionsgate citizens believed in. My family lived on the Outskirts (just beyond the gate leading into the City) for the same reason Alice's grandfather had: we didn't believe in Liquaxis. We believed in Tyrochus the sphinx Goddess.

     "Hey, Xinyu," mom called, "could you come here, please?"

I was like most people of my family line: brave, good-natured, and a healer. A HEALER?!  I know, it stinks. But, turns out I was also most like people on my father's side more; I was snappy and rude sometimes, like my father. It all went to show that I cared little about Alice, my only friend here in the Outskirts. Since in the Outskirts there are no shops and no ways to allow passage into Lionsgate, we had to grow our own food. Alice opened the door and headed outside as I got up and found my mother in the back, near the garden gate. "Yes, mother?" I asked.

"Please go and till the garden. We should be ready to trade at the Market for some new clothes in a week," my Mother replied. The Market's going to open the gates of Lionsgate? I thought. Since there was only one school in all of the Outskirts, they never mentioned the Market's sole purpose: allowing traders from both inside and outside Lionsgate to trade at the Lionsgate Commonplace, also known simply as Liquaxis Square. Mother handed me a hoe (gardening tool, people!) and I went outside to work the garden. Why again was Alice in the Outskirts? I asked myself. Her parents committed a crime against the Lionsgate's former Mayor, Arte, the Bloodmage. That's what Alice's mom said! Being a Bloodmage wasn't easy for Arte; even I wished we didn't know that! "How was the Nagasaki child?" asked Mother, popping out from behind.

"She was fine, Mother dear," I replied, ignoring our maid Lilac coming outside to wash what little clothes we had. As she started to hang my dress on a rack so she could let it dry from the rain earlier today, Mother tapped her. "That one is not to be washed with the whites, remember that!" she said. "I heard that the Market opens itself tomorrow for the Lionsgate Mayor's family to begin trading with the caravans that come," Lilac said. My older brother, Liang, came outside now; I passed off the tilling hoe to him. I went inside, not just because I was hungry and tired, but because I had to iron the School's required uniform.

"...in all," the newscaster was saying, signing off, "that's a wrap! Have a great day, and don't forget to pay taxes, Outskirts!" Mother entered the room and turned off the TV. "I think that's enough TV for today. Go get some rest, Xinyu."