Tales of PulchraGea, Vol. 1

Chapter 6: Fear the Pink Mist

She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Purple paint, cerulean highlights, Trion engines, retractable laser cannons, my ship was the whole package. And best of all, free. Galileo had said he was honored to make a fighter worthy of a king. No king had used his services before, relying on more public forms of transportation. I was so excited to try it out.

  Robin White stood hugging it with her cheek pressed against it, while Clair Vendum stood at a holographic console from which was running a diagnostic program. She was lecturing me about proper maintenance of the energy shield emitters and why it was a bad idea to activate them while I was on the ground. I half-listened, instead puzzling over the next destination.

  "Are you paying attention?" Clair shouted at me from below.

  "Yeah!" I returned absently.

  "OK! I'm going to charge the shields' capacitor array then drain them and allow them to self-charge," she shouted. "Ready?"

  "Yeah!"

  An electrical hum filled the air, followed presently by a loud snap. Claxons rang throughout the cockpit, startling me back to the current situation. The part of my HUD that displays the charge of my energy shields blinked bright red for several seconds, then slowly returned to its normal shade and began filling bath up with blue light. When full, the bar turned green.

  "Everything's green!" I called.

  The first flight with my new ship, the ride home, was fantastic. It was so unlike anything I'd ever experienced; the sim did no true justice to the abilities of this design. It floated on the wind like a balloon, but could fall like a falcon at the drop of a hat. It could sit in midair thanks to the hover-panels on the underside of the wings, or fly like a shooting star. It was equal parts Zephyr, the gentle north wind, and Typhon, Titan of the storm.

  Inside, the seats were supple dragon leather, soft as silk. Every control was analog, as opposed to the more common holographic facsimiles. There was a second seat behind the pilot's seat in the cockpit, as well as a storage space behind that that had inertial dampeners and gravity pads to keep everything in place. On either side of each seat was room enough for weapons, which were also inertially compensated to keep them from hitting you in the face while you do barrel rolls.

It was so beautiful!

We landed at the launch, Robin and the rest of the gang only minutes behind me. The sun was beginning to go down, even though there were several hours of daylight left in other parts of PulchraGea. Since Argentum is settled inside an enormous valley which is itself settled at the western base of the the largest mountain on the planet, and also because the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, days were shorter in Argentum. Everyone went home except me. Though our adventure at Mount Spilmor had only lasted overnight, it felt like a week. Still, I needed to discover the locations of the other stones and the gates themselves. I pored once more over the evidence collected by Katy and Crystal. It was truly ingenious to use travel records to track his movement, while then cross-referencing to find the locations of keystones.

Alex Shepherd had made several trips to Silva before his death. His trips had actually had him on the forest floor far below, in the Forest of Illusion itself. I was convinced that he'd hidden a stone somewhere there.

The Forest of Illusion was so named because of the hallucinogenic spores of certain flowers that grew rampant there. It's home to many different animals, including several highly dangerous species of dragon, like the Tyrant Zilla, the pygmy zilla, and the Kildragoon. Tree-dwelling mammals like torch-monkeys and Lutee were not uncommon. All in all, a dangerous place to visit and thus why the city of Silva hovers above it on enormous and archaic hoverpads.