Tales of PulchraGea, Vol. 1

Chapter 7

  I would say it feels like I've been here before, but you already know. But I've found another keystone and my first gate. It hurt like hell, skidding across the grass. I tucked and rolled at the last second, bleeding off most of the kinetic energy before I mess myself up like last time.

  I checked my Scroll and it was working again like nothing ever happened. I key in Robin's frequency.

  "We have three keystones and a gateway. A green stone, a gold stone, a red stone."

The group sat around the Robin's Law Office headquarters the next day. I'd thought about the evidence and found some correlation in the data.

  "I believe each stone and gate correlate to a kono, a tribe," I explain. "The keystones have been scattered randomly, but the gate I found was actually fairly close to Silva. The corresponding stone was miles upon miles in the wrong direction, and farther in."

  "I still don't understand how your Scroll's signal was blocked," Robin puzzled. "They're quantum entangled."

  "Well, fortunately the cartography function was going, or we might never have found that gate again," I sighed.

  Crystal spread some papers on the counter, along with a map. Possible locations were labeled in red, while our positive locations were marked in black. Two spaces indicating the two known gates were marked in gold.

  "I believe the gates are within a few miles of each town," I extrapolated. "I think I can rely on you guys to find those, but..."

  I explained my theory about the tests of the stones.

  "Shepherd's journal said that only the King of PulchraGea can recover the stones."

  I pulled out the silver key on the crimson ribbon. Even if I bodily threw it away, it always returned to my pocket or around my neck. I now kept it around the right front-most belt loop.

  "The key is required to open the altars, first off," I said. "In order to get close enough to use it, you're required to let go of yourself and allow God to take over. No ordinary mortal can get the stones, just like he planned."

  "And if that's true," Katy continues, "we can assume that there are seven gates total."

  "Six," corrected Crystal, "if we don't count the Sky City gate we're looking for."

  

  "Right," I said. "So we need to split up into teams. One team looks for stones, the other for gates."

  "So how are we dividing this up?" Crystal asks.

  "I want to take someone with me," I admit. "It was kind of a close shave in Silva. I went alone and it almost ended in disaster."

  I ran my hand through my hair.

  "I'll leave it up to you guys to decide who goes with me."

  I pored over the travel logs. Shepherd's final trip before his death was to a mining facility within the Capitol valley. A geological marvel, the mines consisted of various precious stones and metals in a row deep below the eastern face of the Northern Barricade range. Each mine is a solid perfectly pure floe of each respective material. Each separate denomination of PulchraGean currency coincides with the materials that can be found there; a bright crimson ruby, a deep cerulean sapphire, a crisp green emerald, a flawlessly clear diamond, a stunningly reflective silver, a sunshine-yellow gold. There were other mining facilities in PulchraGea to be sure, but they operated in much ore mundane volume by digging ores from the ground the old-fashioned way.