She did not, of course, take Fluffington with her. Not because she didn’t want to, but the lazy mutt took over the newly delivered bed and mattress and refused to leave. While she could have forced him, the emotions he sent through their link, warmth, comfort, and love, pretty much melted whatever resistance Yuriko had. Grumbling to herself, she took her revenge by ruffling his fur the opposite way it normally sat, and made long spiky fur stick out along his spine and sides.

He merely grinned happily at her and licked her cheek. Then he went back to sleep.

Snorting in a mix of amusement and derision, Gwendith pushed Yuriko out of the bedroom and bid her farewell with a passionate kiss. The heat in Yuriko’s loins threatened to burst into flames, but her lover pulled back and winked teasingly at her.

Pouting, Yuriko huffed and left the bedroom. Elsie was looking at her and Gwendith, her forehead wrinkled. She was quiet when they left the apartments and headed towards a lift lobby.

“I didn’t expect your tastes to swing that way,” Elsie said quietly as they travelled down the lift.

“Oh, what do you mean?” Yuriko asked, her head tilted sideways.

“That girl, Gwendith? Your lover?”

“Hmm, yes, for a few Seasons now,” Yuriko said absently.

“That man, Heron, loves you too.”

“I guess he does.”

“You’re his lover too?”

“Yup.”

“So you like it both ways?”

“Not so much that.” Yuriko chuckled. She supposed there was little reason to hide her proclivities. “It’s more who they are as people that attract me.”

“I see.”

There was an undercurrent of unease and clear disappointment in Elsie’s emotions. Regret and yearning. Did she…?

“You like Heron?”

“Eh! Ah, he’s certainly attractive…” Elsie shook her head. “You all are, strangely enough.”

“Training and healthy living,” Yuriko said absently. “And perhaps that Mysticism you dearly desire.”

“Oh.”

Yuriko grinned. “But don’t make that your reason to seek it. The Anc…Mysticism isn’t an easy path.”

“I know. Otherwise, not just the ultra-rich elite would have easy access to it.”

The lift brought them all the way down to the shopping district, and from there, they made their way to another lift lobby. This one was near the interior zone and was also nothing more than a camouflaged blank wall. Elsie’s pupils displayed a swirl of gold, and then the wall opened up.

‘You do that so easily,” Yuriko remarked. She observed the REI-space threads connect and exchange pulses of light.

“The lift’s counter-intrusion is trash,” she looked at Yuriko’s watch and a thread connected from her neck directly to it. Yuriko let it go for a second before she moved her Anima to snip it. Elsie blinked in surprise. “Your software isn’t as trashy but that’s a basic model that has many weaknesses. I don’t know how it managed to eject me.”

Yuriko sniffed, “I snipped the connecting thread, of course.”

“Oh.” Elsie blinked. “But you don’t have ‘chronian eyes.”

“So? I can still see it,” Yuriko pouted.

“Stop doing that,” Elsie grumbled while her cheeks reddened. She whispered to herself, “I don’t like girls that way!”

Holding in a giggle, Yuriko eased up the pressure her Mien exerted. She wasn’t out to Charm the other girl, merely to monitor for possible betrayal. But she wondered if knowing the other’s emotions as they flashed across their minds was fair…

Well, it wasn’t, but any advantage not used became a disadvantage. Besides, she quite liked how her Mien was so obedient now.

“Tsk, we’re only on the tenth floor, again. The ground floor is hard-locked since the incursion is ongoing. We’ll have to take the stairs.” Elsie looked calm, but her emotions were fluctuating. Yuriko patted the shorter woman’s shoulder. She simply shrugged.

She took the lead this time once they found the stairs. Or rather, that’s what she intended at first, but it turned out that the first ten floors above ground were laid out in such a way that they needed to cross a good bit of distance between each set of stairs that only went down one floor. Grumbling to herself at the long walk, Yuriko started marching only for Elsie to stop her.

“We can take the outside access to the low road. I think that’s faster than going down here.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Yuriko nodded, recalling that roads were connected to several levels of the building, just that it was difficult to parse the complex intertwining ribbons from high above, so she didn’t know which levels were connected.

Elsie seemed to know where she was going absent any signs, so Yuriko walked beside her. Soon enough, they reached the side of the building and she could perceive a large opening, roughly ten paces wide. An elevated road, fifty paces long, was connected to it and that, in turn, connected to an elevated highway. That highway maintained its altitude for the most part, but there were a few ramps that allowed travellers to go up or down.

But what was stopping the Scourge from using these places to enter the tenth floor of each building? The mega building was the only one in the league-wide block, but there was no lack of smaller, regular-sized buildings. In fact, the view from the tenth floor was severely hampered by dozens of such buildings, many of which were just a few storeys taller than the road.

It was also raining. Not quite torrential downpours, but a persistent drizzle that also produced a modicum of fog. The height of the mega building and the fact that they exited on the west face, meant that they were in its shadow. It produced a deep gloom that made everything around them dark. If not for the fact that the sides of the mega building were a bit reflective rather than completely matte, the shadows would have been more pervasive.

The two of them walked out onto the road, but Elsie stopped as soon as they left the overhang. “Do you have a vehicle?” She shook her head. “No, what am I thinking? You probably don’t, right?”

“No,” Yuriko said simply, leaving unsaid that she could probably fly faster. Well, she couldn’t exactly fly here with her normal methods, but she remembered the other means she had developed. It would be more ostentatious, such as by producing golden wings and using them as birds did, but she was not strictly landbound.

“I get it. I’ll call for my ride.” A connecting thread shot out from the woman’s neck and connected to the wall. But nothing else happened. “We’re just waiting for a bit.”

“Where are we going anyway? Where and what is Junktown?”

“Junktown is down there,” Elsie said flatly, pointing towards the ground. “It’s where things aren’t in the shadow of the mega towers, where all the filth and discard the corpos don’t want to bother recycling or are deemed too expensive to collect. It's where those who don’t want to live under their bootheels stay, but are too afraid to venture out into the outskirts of the wastes outside the city limits. Junktown is the entire ground level of the forty league-wide Dragon Fall City, that’s not underneath the towers.”

Yuriko nodded, somewhat impressed by the tightly controlled anger inside the other woman’s heart, all while none of it showed on her face or voice. “You grew up there?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Who are we looking for?”

“...Tiger Lao.”

“Alright? Who’s that?”

“Lao is…well, he used to take care of street kids. Gave us scraps, taught us how to fight, to survive. He likes tinkering with junked chronian gear too. He’s almost fully converted, far beyond the threshold of Blessedness.”

“What does that mean?” Yuriko asked.

“Blessedness? Or do you mean the threshold? Well, either way, they’re connected. Replacing limbs, implanting gear into the body, there’s a limit. Every piece stresses the system and pushed far enough, well, people go crazy. The only way to resolve it is to submit and devote themselves to the Temple of Autochron. But…that essentially means you surrender your Will to the Great God.” Elsie stopped and sighed.

“I see. So push too far and you become mindless.”

“If one does not submit as soon as one pushes the boundary, one becomes worse than the Scourge.” Elsie shrugged. “Then the Lawbringers come and put them to rest.”

Yuriko was about to ask who or what the Lawbringers were, though she could guess that they were a police force when Elsie’s vehicle arrived. It was a two-wheeled contraption with handlebars and an elongated seat that the other woman could straddle. The thing arrived via a lift that opened up near the exit. It moved next to them and Elsie grabbed the handlebars.

“This is a motorcycle. It runs off refined oil and can travel at more than a hundred longstrides an hour. As long as we’re on the roads, anyway.” The wheels were narrow, Yuriko noted, and it wasn’t all that much different from two-wheeled vehicles she spotted in Karcellia. She never rode one of those before, though. “Hop on.”

“Alright,” Yuriko agreed and straddled the seat behind Elsie. There were footstands where she could rest her feet, and Elsie started the engine. It roared to life then settled into a rumbling purr.

“Grab on.”

There was more than an undercurrent of glee and Elsie jerked the handle. The motorcycle took off, and Yuriko might have been thrown off if she wasn’t an Ancient. As it were, she had to brace and spread out her body weight to prevent the thing from tipping backwards, and she had to match Elsie’s shifting centre of gravity as she drove them down the low road.

The winds and the drizzling rain would have made for an unpleasant ride, but Yuriko’s coat and her condensed Anima prevented both from affecting her. Water didn’t even cling to her and sloughed off. Elsie’s outerwear did something similar, and she could see water droplets clinging to the fabric of her coat.

It was an exhilarating ride, even if it was ultimately limited to the ground. There were other vehicles on the road, of course, boxy, four-wheeled cars, bigger haulers, and other motorcycles. Most moved at a slower pace. Comparatively, Elsie’s ride was moving nearly twice as fast. She also wove in and out of the lanes, bypassing the slower-moving cars, and cutting them off with only inches to spare. She also had the widest grin on her face.

Yuriko hummed in delight, enjoying the woman’s happiness as much as the thrill of the race. Soon enough, they got off the low road and went down a ramp that turned into a tight spiral, going down half a dozen storeys before they found themselves on one of the lower roads. This one was actually set on the ground instead of columns, Yuriko couldn’t see where the mega building was, and the rain had tapered off. They soon found themselves in the middle of a maze of middling buildings, each one four or five storeys tall.

Elsie drove the motorcycle into one such building, where the entire floor of fifty or so paces in width, was just a large open space with parallel lines painted on the floors. There were a few other cars and haulers resting between those lines, but they didn’t do the same. Instead, they headed to one end of the floor and into another spiralling ramp that brought them down the rest of the floors and finally, into the ground level.

They trundled out of the vehicle parking building, and Yuriko realised that the rain had stopped falling. The clouds were a bit difficult to see right where they were since above them were several ribbons in the sky: roads and monorail tracks. She spread her perception around them and hummed while thinking that for a place called Junktown, it wasn’t exactly all that filthy.

Where were the piles of scrap metal? Garbage heaps? Trash mountains? One couldn’t call a place Junktown and have none of that!

She didn’t voice anything though, and Elsie brought them deeper into the district, which was to say, far away from the mega buildings.