Still feeling groggy, Locus opened his eyes and yawned. While he was sleeping, the two women in the room must have moved his head up onto the pillows. On the wall above the headboard, the landscape painting of the volcano, Mount Saint Glenice, dominated his vision. He rolled off the bed and staggered into the kitchenette.

Grace slid a steaming cup of coffee across the counter and asked: "How did it go?"

"I've decided to join the team," Locus said.

"Shocking," Sweets said.

"And it seems that Lucrezia has given you a Dream Elemental," Grace said.

How did she know that? he wondered. Aloud, he said: "She said you could teach me how to use it."

Grace sighed. "Presumably, you will need to be able to access cyberspace without using a deck. That is, unfortunately, an advanced ability. At this point, you won't even be able to communicate with a Dream Elemental, let alone formulate commands."

Locus took a sip of his coffee. "Why would I need to access cyberspace without a deck?"

"Because it makes you nearly impossible to track," Grace replied. "Furthermore, it grants a great deal of independence. You will be able to hack security cameras while walking down the street, for example."

Being untraceable would be nice, Locus was forced to admit. "What's so special about communicating with these things? I could understand your commands well enough."

"Dream Elementals are relatively young," Grace explained. "They were created about thirteen hundred years ago, when Ingrid and Vaska bisected the Sixth Goddess into two opposing forces, Dreams and Spirits. Because they are so young, they do not really understand human language very well. Older Elementals can translate between languages."

"Wait," Sweets said.

She froze. Her face appeared determined. Her eyes flickered with artificial light, transitioning from brown to blue to red.

Finally, Sweets said: "Shit! She has been talking in Imperial-era Heyl this entire time."

"You caught me," Grace said.

"What do I need to do?" Locus asked.

"How did I not notice before?" Sweets grumbled.

"You need to talk to her," Grace said. "Speak to her like she is an invisible friend. Once you are able to understand each other, we can move on to other things."

Locus continued to sip his coffee as Grace wandered off to fetch something from her bags. She returned with two strange glass boxes. Each one was a little smaller than his coffee cup, and each one contained a small ball of magenta lightning. As Grace moved her finger near one of the boxes, the lightning arced out against the glass.

"Woodsman," Grace said. "What's your status?"

The little magenta orb flashed, and then it spoke with Woodsman's voice: "The truck is loaded. We are waiting in line for the ferry."

"Excellent, I will send Sweets and Locus ahead. They will wait for you at the new site."

When she removed her finger, the little orb dimmed and went silent. Grace slid the other glass box across the counter to Locus.

"Keep this with you," she said.

"What exactly is this thing?" Locus asked.

"Colored Orb," Grace replied. "It's a type of minor Lightning Elemental. Unlike full Elementals, small sprites like this don't bond with people. They are not intelligent. You need to physically carry them around, usually in some sort of vessel."

"Like a street sorcerer."

"Exactly. Now, unless either of you need anything from me, I've got a virtual queue for my favorite ride."

----------------------------------------

Just as the foothills south of the city were dwarfed by Mount Saint Glenice, so too were the skyscrapers of downtown Saint Ingrid dwarfed by the corporate megastructures in the city center. Through the canopy of the air taxi, Locus was able to look down upon those skyscrapers for the first time in his life. He was surprised to discover that many of the roofs featured entire parks, complete with lawns and trees and fountains.

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

As soon as they boarded the craft, Sweets admitted to a dislike of heights. She was still wearing one of the on-board simstim rigs, occasionally twitching and muttering to herself. As the taxi descended into the river of fog between two skyscrapers, Sweets suddenly seemed to come to life. She removed the crown of electrodes and sighed.

"What kind of simstim was that?" Locus asked.

"I was on a farm," Sweets said. "I was brushing horses. There was a cat hiding in the rafters."

Locus felt the upward G-forces as the pitch on the propellers changed. A dull red landing pad materialized in the fog just a few seconds before the skids touched down. Sweets scrambled from the craft as soon as the canopy unlocked, but Locus took his time to appreciate the bulbous porcelain machine before leaving.

The air taxi station was located on a concourse of sky bridges between four skyscrapers. They rode a glass-walled elevator down to the "street" level, which Locus quickly discovered was not the street at all. It was a false ground supported by yet more sky bridges. They transferred to a second elevator, walled with scuffed and stained plastic, and as they descended further, they seemed to enter into another world. The thick fog vanished, replaced by obnoxious neon.

A dozen motorcycles, driven by children wearing rags, roared by as the elevator came to a halt at street-level. A pack of mangy dogs sniffed through heaps of rubbish that had accumulated on the sidewalks. The foul water in the gutters was corrupted with the oily sheen of some industrial runoff. A one-hundred foot tall hologram of a nude woman, rendered in explicit detail, danced across the rooftops. Locus was certain that that hologram was watching him.

He lost his sense of direction as Sweets led him through the back alleys of downtown Saint Ingrid. He checked the compass on his phone and it reported that he was moving to the south, toward the megastructures. Indeed, not long after, they came across what Locus assumed to be the base of a megastructure. It was a wall, as high as a skyscraper, composed entirely of massive metal pipes.

They passed a squad of Tacticals guarding a barricade. The Tacticals wore reflective orange vests over drab green uniforms, and they were all armed with assault rifles. The smoke from their grenades seemed to glow pink in the neon light. There was a corpse on the street beyond the barricade, or at least what was left of a corpse. It had been shot so many times that it had been transformed into a vague smear of blood and meat radiating away from a pair of black boots.

They came upon an east-facing escarpment, where the skyscrapers opened up to reveal the three districts east of downtown, nestled under the fog. The northernmost district was green and blue and filled with nature. In the center, huge white monuments marked the holy site dedicated to the Elemental Queen of Light. The district to the south featured the department buildings of the city government, mostly constructed from steel and glass. The southernmost district featured huge gardens surrounding Saint Ingrid's Cathedral, with its six high towers crowned with onion domes. Each of the six domes featured a swirl of two colors: red and blue, teal and brown, metallic and pale yellow, green and indigo, gold and black, cyan and magenta.

At the end of the escarpment they came to a brutalist concrete structure hanging over the void atop a steel platform. Locus followed Sweets through the rusty iron doors into the darkness of a tavern.

"It will be a while before Woodsman get's here," Sweets said. "Do you want to grab a drink?"

"I'm not in the habit of drinking," he replied. "You never know when somebody will ask you to fly a fighter jet through cyberspace."

"That's fair. Sorry I asked. I always take for granted that I've got the cybernetics to instantly filter the stuff from my blood."

As they made their way to the bar, Locus realized why it was so dark. Everyone in the room had slightly glowing eyes. They're all chromed up, he thought. Even the bartender looked full cyborg in the dim light. Sweets took a seat at the bar beside another woman with bright red eyes. As the other woman raised her neon blue drink to her lips, it cast enough light to reveal an unzipped fur-lined aviator's jacket. She was otherwise bare-breasted.

"Hey Sweets," the woman said.

"Hey Twist," Sweets replied.

"Who's your friend?"

"He's our cowboy."

"Oh! Are you working with Woodsman again?"

"Yeah."

"Got any room on the team?"

As the two women continued chatting, the bartender arrived and activated a small lamp on the bar in front of Locus. This had the effect of fully illuminating the woman's impressive bosom, though Locus thought it would be impolite to keep staring and ignore the poor bartender. Locus discovered that his initial impression of the man had been correct. He was not only chromed up, but completely jacked, with muscles the size of tree trunks.

"Are you going to order something?"

"Something virgin," Locus replied. "Maybe with coffee. Can you do that?"

"Absolutely," the man said.

"I wouldn't be able to survive," the woman named Twist said. "Hey cowboy, you don't have any chrome in your body at all?"

"Nope," Locus said.

"I want to see!" Twist announced.

"See what?" Locus asked.

"Your body! Let's go upstairs and find a room. You can take your clothes off."

"Sure," Locus said.

"No!" Sweets said. "He's off limits, Twist."

"Says who?"

"Our contact. Woodsman's boss, Selucia Grace. If you really want Woodsman to bring you on to the team, then you need to follow the team's rules. No fucking the cowboy."

"That seems oddly specific," Twist protested. "Is this Selucia character a woman? I'll bet she wants to fuck him."

"I don't doubt it," Sweets agreed.

"You think so?" Locus asked. That would be nice, he thought.

"With certainty. I would be weary of that one, though. I think she's much older than you think."

"She can't be older than twenty," Locus said. "I don't think she was wearing any chrome either."

"There aren't many twenty-year-old women in the world who exclusively speak a language that has been dead for a thousand years. She's also capable of using some extremely advanced sorcery. She also refers to the Lady Ghost and the Consort Eternal by their first names, Ingrid and Vaska, as if she knows them personally. For all we know, she could be Saint fucking Glenice."

As he sipped his coffee cocktail and waited for Woodsman, Locus could not get the image of that damn volcano out of his mind.