Essentia Animus

12-Logging Complaints

Passing at last through the hills, the magnificent presence of Windvale City glowed before the arrival of the transport vehicle. All three girls invested their full attention as more and more details came into view.

Vwyx had completely put away her small trinket of an instrument by this point, her mouth slack wide in complete amazement of the extent of instrumentation standing in plain view. Skyscraper buildings surrounded by a vast expanse of lesser buildings, each project far beyond anything she could have dreamed to be part of. The city was even lit up bright despite the partial departure of the sun with a vast array of street lamps, bright windows, and other luminescent marvels. Sryine felt like she had fallen into a fairytale from one of her stories, comparing everything in sequence to the city scapes of Terran Myths.

They approached a sign, itself dark and dim, but once close lit up with red signal lights. Fhyernx approached the intersection after it at a reduced speed, the street lights in the path also going from dark to red. Traffic in the perpendicular direction was given passage under similar conditions of a sequence of darkness and green lights. Eventually, the lighting situation inverted, presenting their side with green and leaving the previous green in a red glow.

Fhyernx got their vehicle going again, proceeding to a path going under a bridge. Passing over them on the bridge was a strange sequence of vehicles that Sryine could recognize. That was a train from her books, it was so plainly identifiable even from her back seat. Her enhanced elven eyes could pick up the presence of small unidentifiable shadows of people seated at the windows of the train as it continued past them along its track. Vwyx couldn't figure it out to be anything more than some sort of transport instrument, and with its 5 cart length that made it plenty impressive by itself.

Khyzae was stuck somewhere between seeing things she never recognized, and seeing things she felt she should be totally familiar with. The strangest feeling was that such was true in both cases for absolutely everything around them. That combination of feelings left her even more disappointed, a combination that left her feeling naive, taking away the value of wonder she might have had otherwise. The fact she couldn't recognize the lights they had just passed, that explained how stupid she actually was. The fact the stop and go patterns for the lights only dawned on her as an afterthought, signs of just how slow her mind really was. She had not actually known why they had stopped and gone at the times they had, but knew instinctively after that such was exactly what the colors had been telling them. This whole mental conflict was quickly starting to leave her with a pounding headache.

As Fhyernx started making seemingly random left and right turns at various streets of the city, the three girls lost all concept of where they were. Various buildings were scattered along the sides of the street during their travels, some places of residence, some places of business. They continued driving along until they reached a large business with a massive stockpile of wood in some gigantic shelters. Fhyernx pulled into the yard and got out. Khyzae was surprised at Vwyx going right back inside, not having caught Fhyernx telling her to deal with the wooden chairs as promised. Khyzae stayed back with Vwyx to watch her work as Sryine caught up with Fhyernx. He had made contact with an elf and a human, two guys who worked at that facility. They both arrived to evaluate the wood that had been delivered to them.

"I don't know if this is worth the full 5,000 that was promised. I mean, it's still the requested thousand logs like normal, but some of them have been battered quite something fierce. I really don't think we can put full worth on their durability, I'm not even sure if they are worth the usual 300 Qeld transit fee, not with this level of damage. Best I could probably get you is 4,000 Qeld and a 200 Qeld fee." The human staff was shaking his head in disappointment, generally worried about the wood present. With the chairs in the back, a large number of the wood had been warped or damaged in the process, only made worse by Vwyx's inexperience in loading the vehicle. Vwyx knew right away that this mess was her fault, and that her negligence might have cost Fhyernx quite a sizable sum.