It was January 3rd, 2049, a few days after the New Year, and filled with new hopes for a new future.
It was a big day.
Mark stepped out of the hovervan and onto the bare organizing fields of the settlement project. He felt an immensity within his heart, his soul, his everything, as he took in the sight of the hovership that would be taking them to Daihoon.
The ship was massive and grey, looking much the same as all the ships that flew up and down the Mississippi all the time. It was a thing of steel and turrets, twice as long as it was wide, and with a gigantic, bright silver ring around the back end of the ship that was magically locked around the ship, but not actually touching the ship at all. Those rings were the same things that existed inside private hover vehicles, and even inside hoverbelts, but the incredible size of a hover ship necessitated having multiple rings, and one really big one. Those rings were the shielding rings that determined what gravity did inside of the protected space, and a hovership needed a big shield.
The ship was called Grey Whale.
Mark turned his head to the side, and took in the vastness of the operation up ahead. There were many warehouses and thousands of people moving stuff out of those warehouses and into the ship. Behind the warehouses were offices and housing for all of the itinerant people from Daihoon and Memphi, who were setting up this whole thing. Many people housed here during the organization, but not Mark and his people.
Sally breathed deep the frosty air, setting down her two giant luggage bags. She wore her battle leathers and her twin swords held at her back, while her gaze was wide upon the ship. “Hooooly shit, that’s a high class ship!”
Isoko stood tall on Mark’s other side, holding one bag in her right hand, wearing her Paladin breastplate and chainmail on her body. Her sword and shield was on a scabbard and holder on her back, unlike Sally, who simply TT’d her weapons to her body. Isoko smirked a little, saying, “Surely you have seen a ship before. You went to Daihoon and back multiple times.”
Sally started walking forward, saying, “The ship I was on had, like, four guns, max.” She briefly looked back. “I really hope that all those guns aren’t necessary!”
The guy who had driven them here spoke up, “You all got everything out of the vehicle?”
“Yes, sir! Thanks for the ride,” Mark said.
“Now you just gotta go past the other checkpoints. Good luck!”
The guy driving the hovervan was just a guy who worked for the settlement project, who was ferrying people back and forth to the site. Mark had gone over his credentials with the guy before he had been allowed to board the van, and so had everyone else, but that was just part 1 of a whole lot of checkpoints they needed to pass. The doors to the van closed and the hovervan took off, back out there to pick up the next set of people, whoever those people might be.
Mark turned back toward the ship.
Isoko and Sally were already walking down the hill, toward the next check-in zone, while to the left and the right other hovervans dropped people off onto the entrance field. There was a line a hundred meters away, all of the people in line to pass under a large arch of silver plastic and metal that glittered and glowed. Snow did not gather on that archway, though snow had gathered on most things out there. The day was still clear, but weather was coming in tomorrow and for the next two weeks, according to forecasts, so the ship was setting out tonight. It was a few days ahead of schedule, and some people simply could not come on this first ship because of that schedule adjustment, but Mark, Isoko, Sally, and especially Eliot, were not people who could put off departure. Eliot was essential personnel.
Mark tried to relax, but he was wearing his webweave underarmor and his ceramic overarmor, and his spear held to the side. He always felt ready for a real fight in his armor, but hopefully there wouldn’t be any real fights for the next few days, and he could at least take off the overarmor. He had two bags with him, filled to the brim with clothes and the pure essentials, which included three more blank phones for Quark, if he should need one. Quark held inside an adamantium case on his back, while an arc of cameras and a speaker and receiver, all smaller than grains of rice, were wrapped around his left and right ears. He could talk to Quark and Quark could talk back, if needed.
Mark expected to be watching movies that he had downloaded for the next week of travel, though Quark would also connect Mark to the ship’s systems, to inform him if he needed to be deployed, and where. Seeing kaiju on a crossing was supposed to be rare, but, like… Really. Mark knew he would see at least one kaiju in the passage. Maybe more than one.
He wouldn’t be directly fighting, but he would be providing Union for as many people as possible, right alongside all the other priests and paladins of Freyala on the ship… Mark felt his heart ache a little, because Lola was not coming on the trip with them. She had once spoken about doing exactly that, but she was staying in Memphi. Mark and her had had lunch a few times, saying goodbye, for now, but maybe, in the future, she’d come to the settlement.
When they got the portals set up, then travel between worlds would be easy, and you wouldn’t need a week-long trip to get between worlds. Lola had told Mark that she was looking forward to seeing what he made of himself out there, on Daihoon, and Mark was looking forward to that as well.
Mark breathed deep the frosty air, blew out a cloud, and marched forward, walking behind Sally and Isoko, toward the next check in; the arch of illuminated silver pipes. The archway was an extension of Emilia Ramirez, the Mayor of Memphi, and she was personally clearing people, it seemed. There was a line though, so she was using a subroutine, for sure. Her direct presence would have made things go very fast. Sally and Isoko spoke of travel between worlds while they walked forward, one step at a time, with ten or so seconds between steps—
There was some confusion up ahead and a pair of guards quietly spoke to a guy trying to get through the archway with the crowds. That talking got real loud, real fast.
“My wife is on that ship!” yelled the man, trying to get through. “I have a ticket through her!”
The guard got insistent, blocking the guy from getting through—
“I don’t give a fuck what that mayor’s subroutines think of me! I have a right to get on that ship!”
A guard, who had been calm, now got loud, roaring at the man, “I don’t give a shit what you want. The Mayor says you’re disallowed, then you’re disallowed! You got a problem with it then call your wife and get a secondary clearance! And you better hope that your story is true, because this right here was just a warning. You think we haven’t had to kick a thousand other hopefuls away? Stowaways and shit! Well we have! Now LEAVE, before we force you to leave! Or do you want to get thrown in the brig?”
Stolen story; please report.
The guy was startled and fearful, but he was furious, too. At the mention of ‘thousands of other hopefuls’, and the guard directly calling the guy on his bullshit, Mark could tell that the guy was grateful that he was being allowed to leave, instead of detained.
The guy still put up a front as he walked away, yelling, “I’ll have your job over this!”
But the guy was walking fast to get away.
Sally watched the guy go, asking Mark and Isoko, “Stowaways are possible?”
“Oh yes,” Isoko said. “But they’ll get kicked off before we leave. They’re doing Transit Protocol.” She pointed at the ship up ahead, at little floating diamond-like things that hovered slowly around the ship, pulsing with light. “Those are shipping sensors. They can detect anything and anyone.” She thumbed at the line, saying, “But I can tell myself that there are at least four attempted stowaways in line with us.”
Mark had sensed those people, too, and said, “They could just be nervous.”
Isoko shrugged.
Sally nodded a little, trying to understand what Mark and Isoko were talking about, and then she asked to confirm, “Unionsense?”
“Yes,” Isoko said.
“Yup,” Mark said.
“I don’t get anything like that unless they go against me directly.”
Mark made conversation, “You’re a big target, so it’s not that hard to direct aggro your way. That helps you, right? Or rather, it was helping you, when we went out yesterday, yeah?”
The three of them, and even Eliot once, had gone outside the walls for emergency deployments over the last few days. They hadn’t accomplished much except for everyone to get some small experience with each other in a group. There would be an adjustment period, for sure, and that adjustment period hadn’t even really begun. They’d become a real party on Daihoon, Mark thought.
“There’s some sort of interference between the monsters and I because you’re acting as, like, relays…” Sally shrugged. “I can overcome it, I’m sure, but I need more practice.”
“I need to work to make it cleaner, too,” Mark said, “Some problems come up when I’m doing multiple-direction Unions at the same time, and I still need to learn how to cross currents. Lola says it’s hard, though, and I’ll get there.”
Sally asked, “What’s the problem, exactly?”
Mark said, “I want to give you ‘aggro’, which puts you into a group all on your own, with me taking from everyone and giving you that aggro… Which is something I am still trying to understand because it’s complicated because monsters react weirdly and… Well. Aggro is a negative, primarily. But I want to give us all resilience and give the monsters weakness, while doing the reverse to the monsters, which is its own flow, and that flow is more important than aggro, since we’re all frontliners…” Mark hummed. “The currents get crossed.”
Isoko was looking a little smug as Mark spoke, but she was polite enough not to speak on that emotion.
“Isoko does it just fine,” Sally said.
Isoko smirked, and couldn’t help herself, “Maybe you should become Chosen, Mark!”
Sally nodded, both sarcastic and serious at the same time. “Paladin party.”
Isoko nodded back. “Paladin party.”
Mark scoffed.
Isoko said, “It’s a mental switch for me, of course, but I believe I managed it by using ‘visibility’ as a vector for aggro, and then just standing behind Sally and letting her take most of the visibility before it got to me.”
Mark hummed, thinking.
Soon they reached the archway, and the conversation died under the piercing gazes of the guards in green army fatigues.
Mark stepped under the arch first and a mechanical voice spoke, “Scanning for credentials—”
Pop!
… Mark looked up and watched as the archway dimmed, the bright lights in the silver plastic turning to something almost unseen. Low power mode, maybe? The guards tensed.
Mark raised an eyebrow at the archway. “Did it pop? I think I heard a pop.”
The two guards looked at Mark just as much as they looked at the archway, rapidly making danger assessments—
A female voice floated into the space, “Oh dear me. A little malfunction. It appears someone tripped some particular scanners— Ah! Yes. That makes sense. Hello, Mister Careed.”
A holographic vision of Mayor Emilia Ramirez appeared. She was a little shorter than Mark and with bouncy brown hair, and wearing a pantsuit. She smiled. “I thought it might be you. I wish you and yours a great fortune in Daihoon.”
“Thank you, Mayor.” Mark bowed.
The Mayor nodded a little, and then she turned and vanished, her voice transforming into something less female and more neutral with every word, as she said, “Farewell! And yet I hope to see you soon. I expect good things. Now let me fix... this…”
The archway flickered, the lights reasserting themselves in a more normal manner.
The two guards stood at absolute attention the whole time, and then they bowed to Mark when Mark went by. Mark tried not to hear the words ‘dragon’s brother’ on their lips, but he heard those words anyway.
Sally and Isoko came through the archway next, Isoko looking professional and Sally with a raised eyebrow, looking at Mark. Mark just shrugged, and that was the end of that particular intrigue. Maybe. People in line were staring. Three of the potential stowaways all quietly ducked out of line and walked away, one of them running as he went.
Mark, Sally, and Isoko walked on, down the stone path toward the next checkpoint that led into the ship itself.