Tales of PulchraGea, Vol. 1

18: Sky City (Final/3737)

  "That's it," Katy said. "That was the last stone."

The four of us stood around the table. Each stone lay in its respective socket. I slipped the last one in its place and waited for a reaction from the table, the portal, or both. Nothing. Crystal and Katy began to produce books and journals, pored through them in search of an answer.
  "Got it!" Crystal shouted after several tense minutes. "I thought this was going to be more complicated."
Katy stood over Crystal's shoulder, her lips moving as she read silently to herself. After she confirmed Crystal's findings, she rushed over to the stone table and began slapping various combinations of stones. Each time her fingers touched one, it glowed briefly.
  "We have to activate and calibrate the stones and table!" Katy slapped the black Master stone, then the white stone we'd just retrieved. "Then we can activate the p-"
  Katy was cut off as the portal activated. Unfortunately, I was standing right in front of it. The liquid light enveloped me, pulled me in. As it did, something grabbed me and refused to be shaken off.
  It took several minutes to wake up. The tumble had been as painful as the one that had first brought me to PulchraGea. My right arm was in pain, trapped between the walkway and some sort of railing. The path was all white metal and organic shapes. The railing was about waist-high on both sides, with nothing but open sky beyond them. Ahead of us was a huge a huge city lain out like a three-leaf clover. Each 'leaf' looked like a separate district, multi-tiered and covered with a glassy dome. In the center of these was an ornate, multi-story palace.
  Behind us was the gate.
  The gate was dead.
  "You okay?" Katy asked. She knelt down and help me free my arm from the railing. It was bruised and sore, but not broken.
  I looked around.
  "So this is Sky City, huh?" I said.
  "The superstructure is made of risilium," Katy noted. She ran her finger along the rail. "Memory shape metal. It can repair itself and regain it's shape if it's damaged."
  "Wow, that's gotta be super rare," I replied.
  "Super rare," Katy parroted.   "Apparently because it's all up here."

  Katy and I made our way down the walkway towards the palace. In the middle of the path was a large coppery gate that was tarnished from disuse. On either side was a path leading to one of the clovers. One looked agricultural. The other looked commercial. We chose that one.
   The path we took was in the open air with only a thigh high railing between us and several thousand feet of air. We were edging carefully toward the clover when a claxon sounded nearby, followed by pressure on our knees, not unlike riding an elevator. The city was rising. The air began to get thinner and colder quite quickly. We leaned on the rail and made our way to the clover just a little faster.

  We reached what looked like an airlock just as the air was beginning to get frigid. It was getting very hard to breathe. The control panel was written in old PulchraGean, a dialect even a polyglot like Katy didn't know. She focused desperately even as our vision began to swim. Her eyes brightened for a second and she pressed her lips into mine, then fell as she realized that last time was kind of a miracle and I can't make air at will. In one last desperate attempt, Katy began pressing random buttons. with every failure, a heavy, deep-toned beep resounded. What were they all even for? Finally, Katy must have pressed the right combination of buttons, because claxons rang from the door as well and it opened. She rushed in. I stumbled along behind her. The door closed as I passed out.

  Some time later, we came to. Fresh, sweet air filled our lungs.
  "Well, that's twice today," I moaned.
  "You're telling me," Katy gasped. "You gonna be okay?"
  "I think I'll live," I confirmed.
  Katy stood up and looked around. It was a small round airlock with two doors. One was the one we came in and the other seemed to lead out into what looked like an alleyway. Katy tapped in the same code and the door opened. The cool air from the air lock was instantly replaced by warm and dry. The air smelled like food. There were sounds people shouting, bargaining, and enjoying their lives just down the alley. It was so unlike PulchraGea that Katy and I were both taken aback.
  The men were dressed in flowy trousers in more neutral colors. The women were dressed in brighter colors. Bared arms and midriffs were the norm, as were decorated cloth masks over mouths. The skin tones, eye and hair colors were all extremely bright and varied. Body types were much more varied as well, much less uniform than in PulchraGea as well. All were Thaliel'ai.
  A heavily tattooed woman walked by the alleyway. She was wearing essentially briefs with almost chaps-like strips of cloth hanging off that showed the glowing geometric patterns of her ink. She even had a flourescent design on her chest that drew the eye. She noticed us gawking.
  "Lashika naena," she said as she passed by, then winked at Katy. "Tahto na vanash."
  She gave a melodic giggle as she passed by. Katy blushed a little.
  "That's not any language I've studied," I said.
  "Me either, " Katy agreed. "But they've been cut off from PulchraGea for hundreds of not thousands of years."
  She peeked out from behind the wall towards where the woman was walking, but she was gone.
  "I kind of liked the colors she had going on though," Katy sighed. "Oh hey, they have hologram signs though!'
  We stepped out into the street, where we immediately stuck out like a sore thumb. The buildings were squat and overarchingly single story that we could see, with neon bright holographic signs in their language.
  "Ai! Vali! Akhal nun vash!" A voice shouted behind us. Two large, bearded, angry-looking men were drawing swords from their scabbards as they began heading our direction. We didn't know who they were, but it was pretty obvious they weren't happy to see us.
  Katy grabbed my hand and began towing me behind as she ran.
  "I don't think they're fans of ours," she shouted.
  We deftly avoided people and stalls as we made our way through the increasing crowds. Our guards didn't bother. They just rammed their way through everything and everyone.
  Katy made a hard left into a side path with me in tow, but it was a dead end. It was too late for her to back out and try another route. Our pursuers had caught up to us. They pointed and shouted at us with their weapons drawn. In a few seconds, four more had poured in to back them up. At first I was terrified, but then Katy and I noticed at the same time that they didn't seem to have any real training, just big muscles and loud voices. We put our hands up to placate them, but from their look they seemed to be the type to gang up on people and beat them into submission.
  The initial two were closest and lunged first. Katy ducked past the one on her side and use the flat of her foot to kick the side of his knee, breaking it. I opted to use one of the narakh-jut moves I learned to disarm mine. A sword pommel to his jaw put just enough torsion on his brain stem to knock him out completely. I didn't want to kill them unless they gave us no choice. The four new guards didn't know how to react for a split second, which was all Katy needed to take another down.
  One slashed at her with his sword, but she grappled another in between herself and her attacker. So it was on. More attackers started pouring in to the alley. The hacked and slashed like they were using hammers instead of swords. It was no effort for Katy and I to dispatch them with their own swords, but it was quickly becoming untenable
  One moment there were a dozen more guards, them suddenly their rear ranks started to fall as if out of nowhere. No more were replacing them, which gave Katy and I the edge we needed to fight through until only a woman cleaning her dagger was left.
  Her skin was tanned as if she spent a lot of her life doing laborious jobs. Her hair was dark brown with traces of cornsilk and braided close to her scalp in small rows on the right side. Her eyes were the color of coffee with honey being dripped in. Her face was stern and she waved for us to follow her. Since we didn't have any better options, we trailed along.