Tier 3 Talent:

Primary Effect: All aspects of cultivation now have a minimum baseline of ability regardless of allocated essence. Baseline grows with Tier.

Secondary Effect: Can heal when exposed to flame. Healing grows with stored memories.

After reading the message once, twice, thrice, then over and over again countless times, Solace could only think a single thought.

That’s not good…

Well, the Talent itself was good, fantastic really. But that was the issue. For him to get something this exceptional meant that the challenges he would face to retrieve the Token would be that much harder. He really wasn’t looking forward to it.

Fortunately, that was for future him to deal with.

He spent a few moments considering the implications of his newfound abilities. The primary effect meant that he was now able to put far more essence into his desired allocation without worrying about the rest of his body being unable to keep up. At least, he hoped that was the case. For all he knew, the baseline was abysmal. It was something he’d have to test.

Solace set down the water bottle to free up his hands. He tapped on the monitor several times to open his planner and look over his schedule, altering several things. The amount of time he spent at the gym was cut by an hour while the scheduled delves were kept the same so he could practice fighting monsters, though he knew it wouldn’t be good enough.

He also sent a voicemail to his new… partner. An arrangement to spar set in a few days from now with details on what it would entail. It was time to take advantage of their deal.

Once done, his eyes flicked to the clock in the corner of the computer. There was a bit of time left in his scheduled day.

With a few taps on the screen, he pulled up and purchased information packets on biology, physiology, and anatomy. There wasn’t an excuse to put off practicing hyper-specific allocations anymore now that he had some level of a safety net with his Tier 3 Talent, so he began to dive into the material immediately.

After less than an hour of going through some of the material, however, he quickly realized how difficult the task at hand truly was. In a reality with interplanetary travel that spanned galaxies, the genetic diversity between individuals was astronomical. Paired with the fact that spirits could interact and alter the physical body after Tier 15, and that those changes could be passed onto their children, one would be hard pressed to even describe two individuals as being of the same species under some definitions from other realities.

Simply put, the textbooks weren’t immediately useful to someone like Solace, not when two “humans” could have the same anatomy but different physiologies, or vice versa. And reading too much into them wouldn’t do much good in helping him prepare for the Exhibition. It would just take too much time.

So, he decided to adopt a more organic approach. At the moment, his Talent had a mental interface which helped him visualize and safely allocate the essence. In the remaining three weeks before he had to leave, he’d focus on trying to use that interface better instead of trying to deconstruct it.

Leaning back in his bed, Solace closed his eyes and focused inwards again. Beyond the compressions to break through to Tier 3, it looked the same as it always did. A flick of his will caused his “view” to focus on the physical core, and then the seven available allocations. Another bit of effort, more than the amount needed to focus on the core, brought him into the deeper suballocations for strength. There were only half a dozen options at this level, far less than the actual amount of muscles in the body. More effort brought him one layer deeper, but it was getting far harder. When he tried to push even deeper, he found that his concentration was all but slipping, threatening to kick him out of his internal view entirely.

He quickly retreated to the third level and began experimenting there. At the moment, trying to move things in and out of any suballocation was difficult, requiring too much mental focus to be doable in combat. But, if he practiced, worked on it—

An alarm sounded from his monitor, signaling that it was time to sleep. Immediately, Solace opened his eyes, turned off the lights and the computer, and laid back down.

The one good thing about working himself so weary everyday was that it was really easy to fall asleep when he wanted to. Well, that and the fact that every night was now blissfully dreamless. In less than a few minutes, he was drifting into slumber.

—

The next day was a mad rush of testing. Solace first went to the gym to find the limits of his physical baseline. Over the course of the two hour session, he determined that it was as if half of his cultivation had been equally split between both cores and in each section. And at that baseline, he was able to almost comfortably put all of his essence into strength without too much risk of tearing his muscles. With his breakthrough, new Talent, and the results of his muscle building, he was now much, much stronger than the average Tier 3, perhaps able to match or outright beat a peak Tier 3.

But that was only scratching the surface of what this new development allowed him to do.

The now familiar sirens blared as Solace popped out of the Tier 3 rift’s safezone, sprinting down the halls after analyzing the variation.

The new alterations to his armor granted him far more freedom of movement. His strides, enhanced by all of his allocation into strength, flexibility, and durability, ate up the ground at a rate that would have left even him unbalanced if it wasn’t for his Talent’s new baseline effect.

He moved so quickly that the ambush waiting for him around the corner missed, bolts and lasers whizzing past his fast moving form as he turned on a razor’s edge and rushed his assailants. And though his enemies were still Tier 3 and wielding weapons more than capable of killing him with one well placed bolt or blow, it was hard to take it seriously.

Not when his spiritual senses had a radius nearly thirty percent bigger than before without needing to put a single drop of essence into mental cultivation to handle all of the sensory input. Not when his limbs were so light that it felt like he could walk on air. Not when his mana core’s baseline mana pool was expanded enough that he could temporarily walk on air with his [Skill].

The projectiles came, and he sensed them well before his body needed to react. His keen ears listened to the movements and his eyes were able to track them as they flew. It seemed so easy to just…

Solace leapt, using his [Skill] to get a bit of extra height. Some extra allocation went into dexterity as he soared through the air. He flicked a foot out to step onto a crossbow bolt flying below him, using it to propel himself forward towards the three creatures before him.

For a brief moment, Solace’s mind wandered, back to Edison's question weeks ago about what he did for “fun.” And though he would never admit it aloud, this moment was enjoyable. Not being powerful or being able to do fancy maneuvers, but to be able to exert himself at the edge of what his body and mind were capable of doing. To work towards something and suddenly find out one was able to do it after all of that effort felt… nice.

And then gravity asserted itself and Solace plummeted back down onto his opponents, onto consequences and dangers that required a level of anxious focus that prevented enjoyment.

His blade sliced through gaps in their gear nearly as quickly as he could swing it through air. When one of the orcs pulled out a dagger to try to stab him through a chink in his armor, he twisted out of the way with inhuman flexibility.

The whole engagement took less than seven seconds, and by the time it was over Solace wasn’t even winded. With a flick of his blade to clean off the blood, he continued onwards to finish the rift.

Before, it would have taken him over five hours to complete the rift. Now, he found himself standing over the boss’ corpse after three. The reward distortion, white to his spiritual senses, yielded five Tier 3 mana stones. It was below average, but that was fine by him. He had come here to test his abilities in private more than anything else.

Speaking of which…

While he had tested out the primary effect of his Tier 3 Talent, he had yet to learn anything about the secondary. But that was about to change.

He moved to retrieve his two bags lying near the entrance to the boss’ room. One had his gear while the other was stuffed with the weapons he had looted from all of the monsters within the rift. From the first bag, he pulled out a pocket lighter.

Without hesitation, Solace stripped off the armor from his left arm to expose a bruise from his fight against the one of the cybernetically enhanced orcs. He then placed then flicked the lighter on and shoved it towards the bruise.

Trembling arms, shaking knees. Scrabbling for every scrap of anything that could help. A statue buried in rubble stood before him, made of some strange blue crystal.

Solace growled in pain as he pushed the memories to the side, drawing the lighter away from his arm as he did so. He examined his limb critically. The bruise was gone, but the place where he had come into contact with the fire was singed, and his flesh was a bit blackened at where the hottest point had been.

His Talent healed him, but it didn’t give him any resistance to heat.

It was an unpleasant bit of information, but not unsurprising. Solace took off the rest of his gear, inspecting bruises and light gashes on other parts of his body. They too had healed, but only somewhat, meaning that proximity to the flame mattered.

In an effort to confirm his findings, he flicked back on the lighter and placed a fist into the open flame.

With his weary hands he moved rocks, his soft flesh meeting sharp stone and tearing as he tore through to what lay underneath. It was bigger than he expected, a relic of the Spire. A figure of a raven mid flight, with eyes of inlaid pearl. One was shattered, but the other? The other stared right at him.

The lighter was turned off, the memories ignored. With how they seemed to be getting in the way, he probably wouldn’t be able to heal in combat unless he raised his mind allocation enough to deal with them and still be aware of his surroundings. But that wasn’t important right now.

Solace looked himself over, noting how the injuries closest to his now slightly stinging and burnt fist were gone while the furthest were all but faded. Some of the scars he had accumulated from all of his delving had disappeared too.

So, it’s confirmed.

For a moment, Solace considered leaving it here. To make a note of what he had already discovered and learn the other limitations of the ability through combat rather than doing anymore testing. His injuries were gone and he didn’t enjoy pain.

And then he thought about the memories shoved to the front of his mind, the efforts he had gone to in the past to try to retrieve his memories. It made his decision very easy.

His blade sang as it slid from the scabbard.

An hour later, he emerged from the rift. Over that time, he had learned a lot. The surface area in contact with the flame mattered, but not its temperature. He could choose not to be healed, so he didn’t have to worry about being mentally hampered when attacked with fire in combat. In addition, healing was slower the more allocation he had in durability and still accrued healing cooldown. Finally, anything could be healed, as far as he could tell, but outright regenerating a digit or eye took longer.

His testing had also yielded an unexpected benefit to his Talent, giving him another memory to store inside his spirit. But he wasn’t going to intentionally repeat the experience to get more memories. That would almost certainly lead down a much darker path.

As Solace stepped out of the dome protecting the rift, he checked the hour on his business phone. It was just a bit past noon, meaning that he had enough time for a meal before the sparring session.

All of that healing had generated a large appetite, so he set off to go find a place to eat. After that, it was time to properly train for the Exhibition.

—

“This one thought that Senior Brother had forgotten him,” Tarnish said.

“No,” Solace replied. “I have just been busy getting ready on my own.”

“This one can tell!” Tarnish said with a smile.

But it looked like Solace wasn’t the only one preparing. Tarnish himself was now Tier 4, despite being only mid Tier 3 when Solace had last seen him. It was a blistering pace that not even Solace could match in the given time and all but confirmed Tarnish’s Talent made it easier to cultivate somehow.

It was something to keep in mind for the future, but not immediately relevant. In fact, depending on how good of a fighter Tarnish was, the Tier difference might end up being a benefit for Solace.

“Follow me,” he said as he led the way into the gym.

It turned out that the building had places to practice with weapons and even a few AI controlled machines to act as opponents. Unfortunately, the machines weren’t that helpful. The AI itself could be easily tricked and was slow to learn; even if he increased the simulated Tier, he would just be fighting an opponent that was stronger rather than more skilled.

That was why he had brought in Tarnish, who was hopefully more competent than the machines.

“A private practice room, please. A small one,” Solace said to the employee sitting behind a desk near the entrance. He placed a thumb onto the essence detector attached to the counter, registering his identity and membership. “And I have one guest with me.”

“Alright,” they responded. “You know the rates for a small practice room?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Sign again,” they said, gesturing to the essence detector.

Solace did so.

“And your friend too.”

He nodded, turning to Tarnish. “You need to place your thumb on the scanner,” he said.

The man frowned. “Why?”

“So they can know who was in the room if anything breaks, I imagine.”

“Is it necessary?”

It was clear that Tarnish wasn’t eager to have his essence scanned, so Solace had to convince him. After a few minutes, the man begrudgingly placed a finger onto the detector.

“Room eight,” the employee said impatiently. “Another detector is at the door, make sure to tell your friend that.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

They were waved off so the next person could approach the desk, receiving a few glares from people in the line which had formed while Solace had convinced Tarnish. He ignored the looks, of course. As far as Solace was concerned, being paranoid about detectors in a world where information was extremely valuable was completely understandable.

The two made their way into the back of the gym and towards their designated room. After another brief session of convincing, they were inside.

The interior was a simple one, empty and twenty by twenty strides big. The floor and ceiling were modular, composed of tiles while the walls were covered in sheets of Tier 5 metal that reflected everything within the room.

Solace stepped inside, his spiritual senses examining everything. It became immediately clear that the place was enchanted, though the specific enchantments were hidden behind obscurement runes—modules in enchanting used influence with what spiritual senses could see. The runes served as both protection from people trying to copy an enchantment as well as a way to stop spiritual perceptions from spying through the walls.

He didn’t doubt that someone specialized or of a high enough Tier could peer through the obscurement runes, but they would stop anyone below Tier 4 and that was most of the population on the entire Tier 5 planet.

“Where is everything else?” Tarnish asked, also stepping through as the door automatically closed behind him.

“What do you mean?” Solace asked.

“This is a training room, yes? Where are the weapons and other tools?”

“Good question,” Solace said. His eyes scanned the room until he spotted a monitor embedded into the wall and close to the entrance. He walked to it and tapped it awake. What he saw was a simple interface with various buttons for various amenities—all for extra credits, of course.

With a sigh, Solace found the switch for training weapons and flicked it on, clicking yes on the prompt acknowledging an additional charge. The moment he did so, one of the sheets of metal on the wall slid to the side, revealing an extensive rack of wooden weapons.

“Excellent,” Tarnish said with a grin. The man immediately rushed over to inspect everything.

Solace took it as a chance to gain some measure of his… partner. He noted which weapons Tarnish approached first, followed by how he actually tested their balance and other qualities. When all was said and done, Tarnish walked back to the center of the room with two butterfly swords.

Interesting.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had fought someone else that used two blades. Well, there were the marionette spider bosses, but those things weren’t very good and had inhuman physiology. To fight with two weapons as a human required a certain level of dexterity and understanding of a fight to make them more effective than a sword and shield or a two handed weapon.

Solace moved to set his bag to the side, leaning against a wall. From it, he pulled out two wooden swords of his own. They were shortsword models he had made himself of the real blades he used.

“Let’s begin,” Tarnish said, visibly eager. His fighting stance was an aggressive one, blades out, leaning a bit forward.

“Yes,” Solace replied. But rather than enter his own ready position, he held his own two swords aloft and to the side. “Copy this stance for me, please.”

“...What?”

Most people assumed that practicing with weapons meant nonstop sparring, just fighting with nonlethal versions of the weapons until they improved. But that, as Solace had come to learn, was highly inefficient, especially for someone like him.

“Copy my stance,” Solace repeated.

Tarnish frowned, but complied.

Solace then moved towards the man, stopping a single step away and then put himself in a stance that briefly resembled a lunge, his swords out of proper position and a portion of his back exposed to Tarnish. In a real fight, this would have been a terrible spot for Solace to be in.

“Begin,” Solace said.

Though confused, Tarnish attacked without hesitation. The wooden swords came down as Solace twisted to the side, barely managing to keep his balance. He used a shortsword to catch one blade and then the momentum of his move to force the same hand and sword to block Tarnish’s other weapon. In the brief moment Tarnish struggled to clear his weapons for an attack, Solace was able to recover into a proper fighting stance.

“Stop,” Solace said. “Reset.”

Tarnish halted mid-stride towards him. “Why?”

“That sequence is the one I want to practice,” Solace replied.

Tarnish remained silent, but did as he was told. Solace moved back into position as well.

“Begin.”

He had them repeat the exchange thirteen more times. Halfway through, Solace began to experiment with alternate allocations, finding the perfect balance and seeing what he could get away with in terms of swapping mid-fight.

Solace wasn’t worried about Tarnish seeing his Talent in action, since he had gotten quite adept at veiling his spirit after six weeks of practice. The process involved holding a “curtain” of unallocated essence at the periphery of his spirit to conceal everything behind it. All he had to do was mask any overt changes to his capabilities, holding himself back enough to get a feel for what he could do but not give the extent of the changes away.

Once he was satisfied with the first exchange, he had them start off in other odd positions and angles, simulating situations in a battle that were technically possible but only seen once in every hundred or so fights. These were the things he needed to prepare for, not the typical positions that he had decades, possibly centuries, of experience with and could easily practice in a rift.

Unfortunately, despite everything going smoothly combat wise, he hadn’t accounted for his sparring partner to act out.

They were in the middle of the fifteenth form, interlocked blades between them. Though the beginning went normally, a brief struggle to disengage followed by a proper recovery into a neutral position, Tarnish refused to reset.

“Stop,” Solace said, but the man continued surging forward.

He was forced to bring one model shortsword up or be struck in the head by a piece of heavy wood. Tarnish caught the shortsword with the crossguard on his own weapon and twisted, forcing the shortsword out of Solace’s grasp.

Solace let the sword fly away, opting to let himself be disarmed in order to step forwards and deliver a heavy punch straight into Tarnish’s jaw using his other hand. The weapon still in it added extra weight to the blow. As Tarnish stumbled back, dazed, Solace bent down to retrieve the shortsword.

“Stop,” he said again.

“No,” was all Tarnish said before he ran back in.

They fought for roughly another thirty eight seconds, an eternity for people at their Tier. It was a testament to how good Tarnish was with his chosen weapons. The man fought with a viciousness that even monsters would struggle to replicate, and was more than willing to take glancing strikes to try to deal more painful ones of his own. He also fought with everything he had, using his legs to try to trip Solace up occasionally.

But once Solace had gotten the feel of Tarnish’s fighting style, once he had made a few adjustments to his allocations, he was able to match the man despite their Tier difference so long as he never tried to directly challenge Tarnish’s strength directly. By the end of that thirty eighth second, Solace brought Tarnish to the ground by catching the man’s kick with a raised leg of his own and causing him to trip. As Tarnish fell, Solace brought to bear his swords to strike at the back of his head, hard. He then took several steps back, breathing a bit heavily.

“Why?” Solace asked once he had caught his breath.

After a moment, Tarnish sat back up, looking mildly shaken but otherwise fine. Apparently the man had put a decent portion of his essence into durability. “It was my turn.”

Solace frowned, confused. “What?”

“The first hour was spent doing something that only truly benefited you,” Tarnish said, noticeably dropping the appellation. “So, this one decided to spend the second hour doing what would most benefit himself.”

That made Solace pause. He supposed he had been treating Tarnish like a trainer more so than a sparring partner, and that the sequences they had been practicing were more for himself than with Tarnish in mind.

“You could have said something, explained your motivations,” Solace said.

“This one explained his intentions as much as you have,” Tarnish fired back.

There was a much longer silence as Solace took that in. It was another fair point, one that he hadn’t really considered. He had been so used to doing whatever he needed to do without sharing his thoughts that he often hadn’t bothered to explain or gave loose details at best. It looked like he’d need to change that habit for this agreement to work.

“I apologize,” Solace said. “I will try to explain things from now on. The things I had you do at the beginning were practice for odd situations that were important to be prepared for but not common enough to find in a traditional spar.”

Tarnish nodded thoughtfully, seemingly mollified. “Were they strict forms?”

“No, just situations I had imagined and felt like I needed to work on.”

“Then, are there any exercises that this one could benefit from?”

Solace thought about it. “A few. Is that what you want to do next?”

Tarnish nodded once more, gradually getting to his feet. “This one would appreciate a few pointers, Senior Brother.”

“Very well, give me a moment.”

He moved to the monitor on the side, opening a panel and turning a slider. Immediately, the floor changed from a hard surface to a softer one, causing his own legs to sink just a bit into the surface. It was a special feature of the training rooms and part of the reason Solace had wanted to practice in one.

As he returned, he had to remind himself to explain. “We’ll be working on your footwork first. I have changed the floor to be softer because you may be falling a lot.”

“Perhaps Senior Brother will be the one who falls,” Tarnish said.

“Maybe,” Solace said honestly. “But enough talking, let’s begin.”

“Yes.”

And for the rest of the time in the training room, the two practiced. They fought without conflict.

—

Over the course of the next two weeks, Solace settled into a new routine. An early morning workout, breakfast, and then sparring against Tarnish. Afterwards, he’d spend a good chunk of the day working at Edison’s in order to keep up with the demands of his contract. It wasn’t that hard, especially since he ended up staying late anyways to work on the new gear for the Exhibition.

Based on his research, the place was a sprawling city that thrived off of the unique amenities offered to tourists by Talented business individuals that lived there. The place was dense in terms of population normally, and that would only get worse as people who intended to try at the Exhibition arrived.

It meant that he couldn’t realistically walk around in armor, not when it would heavily hamper his ability to navigate a crowd. In addition, choosing to bring any gear that he couldn’t easily wear or store was just begging for it to get stolen somehow. Who knew what kind of Talents and [Skills] were out there?

Well, he did somewhat after a lot of reading, but there was no way he could prepare for everything.

Thus, altered pieces of gear or outright new ones. Solace decided that the cloak was fine, though he had to remake it from scratch in order to accommodate the same runes but better versions now that his enchanting skills had improved. He had also replaced his modified plate armor for something more akin to splint, allowing for him to have it neatly folded and tucked snuggly in the one backpack he was planning on bringing. His shield wasn’t going to fit, so he ended up trying to make bracers made of metal as a substitute

As he sat in Edison’s workshop, hammering out the Tier 4 steel into the shape that he wanted, he heard Edison’s footsteps behind him.

“Need something?” He asked, his eyes still trained on the piece before him.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, right?” Edison asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Are you prepared?”

“As much as I can be,” he said. “Though there were a few things that I wish I could have made or gotten.”

“Like some sort of protection when you weren’t wearing armor.”

“Yes,” Solace said. “Why?”

There was no reply, so Solace turned around. Clutched in Edison’s hands was a thin black shirt, closely resembling the clothes she had given him when he had first started out.

“What is this?” He asked.

“Underarmor,” Edison said. “Made of aramid fibers, if you know what those are. Take it.”

“Only in passing,” Solace replied, doing as she said. The thing was light in his hands, though textured such that his Talent enhanced senses could feel all of the interwoven fibers.

“Well, the basics is that it’s highly resistant to being punctured or slashed. It normally wouldn’t protect you from any sort of bludgeoning force, but I put in an enchantment to disperse force throughout the whole thing before it even gets through.”

“But isn’t that a complicated enchantment?” Solace trailed off as he looked at the thing with his spiritual senses. Tier 5 material, [Skill] crafted rather than by hand, based on the way the fibers were woven. But what shocked Solace was the obscuring rune neatly wrapping around whatever enchantments lay within the item’s spirit.

This wasn’t just any Edison crafted item, but the type that she made only on commission. It no doubt had runes of durability and lightness, perhaps some kind of inbuilt mending feature as well. Enchantments each complicated in their own right, skillfully crammed into such a thin thing.

“I can’t afford this,” Solace said. “Not even with the employee discount and everything I have in my account right now.”

“Then pay me back later,” Edison replied. “When you get back. Alive.”=

“But—”

“Look at me, Solace,” she said sternly.

He did so.

“You’re about to go off and try for something really foolish in a place that’s going to be really dangerous,” Edison said. “And I don’t just mean physically. Elindor is a city that is home to the headquarters of the most influential Corporations with stakes on the planet. You’ll be in a place that will constantly try to take your money and potentially your freedom with contracts and amenities a low Tier person can only dream of outside of the place. Nothing is simple there, not even basic healing services. So, you’re going to take this under-armor and make sure that you’re able to come back, okay?”

“Alright,” Solace said.

Edison spent a moment staring at him, perhaps searching his face for something. After a moment, she nodded. “Good. And remember that you really don’t need to become a Chosen. With how you’ve been learning everything that I’ve been teaching you, you’ll be able to become an excellent crafter in a few decades. With that sort of skill, you could go almost anywhere you wanted in the Corporations, have your choice of the contracts offered. Don’t throw it all away for some kind of pride or desire for the spotlight.”

“I understand,” he said.

Another pause, another searching look by Edison. And then she moved away. “Then I’ll see you in three or so weeks. When you get back, Chosen or not, I expect you to finish the backlog of work you’ll have.”

“I will,” Solace replied. “Thank you, Edison, for everything.”

There was no reply to that, just a swift exit, leaving Solace in silence.

A few decades…

It was nice to be assured of a guaranteed way, a slow way, but the idea of spending that long in a single reality chaffed at him. He’d take Edison’s advice, of course, but there was no way he wasn’t going to try his best at this Exhibition, whatever was thrown at him.

Solace turned back to the bracers he was making, hammer in hand and the under-armor carefully folded and placed onto a pile of other things he would be taking out of the workshop tonight. He began to finish his final preparations for this event.

—

The next morning, Solace and Tarnish arrived at the train station bright and early. It was a different place from the one he normally took to work. The train here would be an eight hour transit across the continent to one Elindor city.

“Is Senior Brother ready?” Tarnish asked loudly over the crowd, his own bag on his back.

Solace mentally reviewed everything, checking for anything crucial that he could have forgotten. Everything was in his bag and all of his duties with Edison fulfilled. He had even tried to give Xu Wei one final homework assignment for when he got back, but hadn’t been able to talk to the boy much in these past few weeks. Solace was simply up too early and came back to the housing complex too late. So, this morning he had left the thing with Gao Xieren to give to Xu Wei whenever she could.

Beyond that… nothing.

“I hope so,” Solace said to Tarnish honestly. “I hope so.”

That was when they could hear a little trill from the speakers nearby, indicating the arrival of their train. They quickly stepped on, pushing through some people to find a seat for themselves.

The doors closed, and the two began the first step on their journey to the Exhibition