Joy pondered the train standing before them as seeming very strangely mundane for a world of beastfolk and stats screens and the casual use of magic spells.
Elgin, Texas did indeed have a rail line, but there had been no passenger trains on the Austin Western Railroad in Joy's lifetime. The train stopped before her at Takasane- Elgin Station wouldn't have looked terribly out of place on the Yamanote line in Tokyo or the Metro North line along the Hudson River in New York or any number of places on 21st century Earth, if not for the weird aura shimmering ahead of the locomotive, or the fact that the train seemed to fit more people and cargo than physically possible.
Oh, dimensional shenanigans, Joy thought nearly aloud, and Yoshiko had to stifle a giggle at the sheer amount of amused snark in Joy's tone.
As they boarded the train, Yoshiko felt a psychic tug as a small bit of her mana went to help power the train's mana engines, and the train's cabin seemed to expand into almost a miniature station of its own within. Instead of a one-abreast aisle like Joy was expecting, this felt like walking into a moving hotel, with lobbies in each of the cars filled with small fully-kitted restaurants and even a gastropub. Everything was bedecked in high-quality wood paneling, mana-strengthened loblolly pine wood, accented with Texas ebony and Texas persimmon, or so the identification screens told them. The train exuded rustic charm, but the smells of the foods betrayed a much more cosmopolitan atmosphere, with breakfast tacos and kolaches competing for sensory space with more diverse offerings like kitfo and bun bo hue.
If this was merely the train to Austin, then Joy was suddenly very excited to see Austin proper, or at least its incarnation in this Ascended Earth.
Yoshiko seemed amused about Joy's ruminations, which she could feel buzzing in her mind.
Joy, you never took the train here?
We only had one tiny light rail line that didn't even go to the airport! It was mostly useless until they built the soccer stadium, and even then you could only go to downtown one way and Leander the other. Oh, and there was Amtrak, if you had a whole day to get to Dallas. Everyone just drove or took planes for long-distance travel.
Oh wow. Wait, all your travel options must've been fossil fuels back then ... the pollution must've been off the charts!
Honestly, it wasn't that bad unless there were temperature inversions, certainly not like Los Angeles or New York smog when I was a kid. The cedar fever was always the worst, though. Is that still a thing?
Yeah, but not when you control plants! I can just tell the pollen to buzz off!
Oh, that's cool!
Yoshiko opened a side door into a cabin that felt more like a full-sized hotel room than a train cabin, but the tall wall-length windows revealed that they'd already begun to ease out of Elgin station, they passed a variety of homes ranging from stately neo-Victorian and more perfunctory bungalow and pseudo-ranch styles, interspersed with a few Japanese-style tiled roofs. Joy was even surprised to see a miniature Mayan-style pyramid, domiciles organically sprouted from live oak trees, and even a set of interconnected hovering geodesic domes tethered to the ground.
Pickup trucks and passenger cars shuttled by in no great rush, but also never seemed to actually stop, weaving improbably through a herd of white-tailed deer walking right the middle of town. Joy could even pick out planes in the distant sky and drew an inward sigh of relief at that bit of familiarity.
So, to be honest, I didn't really go to Austin much because the mana toll used to leave me so drained, so a lot of this is gonna be new for me.
Oh, cool, I can't wait to say what I still recognize!
Joy wasn't prepared for the populated part of Elgin to abruptly stop about a mile from the city center. It's like the vast swaths of suburbs from her time had somehow been geographically condensed, and instead, they sat at the window watching the landscape roll by, low hills with copses of live oak, surrounded by lush prairie and a few farms. Bluebonnets grew in profusion along the side of the tracks; Joy could pick out winecups, firewheels, coneflowers, and sunflowers, and even some morning glories and passionflowers as well.
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It wasn't just a floral landscape, though. The prairies were suddenly alive with great herds of mammals. Joy recognized bison and longhorn cattle, but the giant long-horned bison were something else entirely. And then, charging right at them ...
A mammoth thundering right through the prairie ahead of them on a collision course with the train, and Joy belatedly noticed that unlike their Texas, she hadn't seen a single barb wire fence. It effortlessly breached the threshold of the tracks and-
-phased harmlessly through the train as if it wasn't even there. Or more accurately, the train phased through the mammoth, which they could no longer see as it had presumably passed through to the other side.
Oh, yeah, that startled me too, the first time. I'm not an engineer so I don't know how it works exactly but there's some anti-collision barrier that protects trains and those within from harm.
We definitely didn't have that in my time!
Well, yeah, or Joy wouldn't even be here, they thought to themself with only the slightest bit of edge. Isekai yay, mother trucker.
They brushed past a cluster of country homes and a platform labeled "Littig", and Joy smirked as they noticed what looked like an Old West ghost town in the distance. A few minutes later, the train slowed and made a brief stop at Manor, where Joy saw the old water tower from What's Eating Gilbert Grape, still somehow around, or maybe it was a replica or rebuilt, and took a moment to think about whether or not a rebuilt water tower was still the one Leonardo di Caprio had once seen and then smiled at having mulled the idea of Theseus's Texas water tower.
A small group of people walked into the cabin at this stop, an adventuring party who Joy and Yoshiko quickly gathered from overhearing their conversation were looking to challenge the Castle Hill Dungeon. Sitting in the far corner, an androgynous rabbitfolk in all dark leather and denim, repping what looked like some heavy metal band neither of them knew, and covered in bandoliers full of small throwing knives. sat holding a sketchpad, lines of charcoal magically streaking across the paper out of thin air. A scale-armored and well-muscled elandfolk gunner with a minigun strapped to her back, whose horns abruptly ended in some colorful ornament that she adjusted to reveal was some kind of dimensional scrunchie, her impressive arms covered in some sort of dermal implants or perhaps ritual scars. A tanned wood elf girl, in a red shirtwaist Cherokee tear dress, accented in turquoise and gold rectangular patterns, happily ruffling the feathers on the nape of the red-shouldered hawk perched on her left wrist. A batfolk in flannel and corduroy, who would've looked completely normal on the 6th Street of Joy's time but for the halo of crystals orbiting the air around of his body. A dignified young woman in sheer silk Vietnamese ao dai, dark skin and striking white patterns along her cheeks and the straight horns, also protected by a dimensional scrunchie, revealing her as saola-folk; the calming scent of medicine permeated the air around her in a paradox of gentle strength.
Yoshiko seemed content to glance at the lively party occasionally while staring out the window at the megafauna, listening to their banter as they got psyched for their dungeon adventure.
Gonna say hi?
Nah, dungeons really aren't my thing, unless it's something overhead like the Lost Pines, and ugh I'd rather not test my directional skills there ever again. Besides, beast taming doesn't work on dungeon monsters, and if you're subterranean like most dungeons, you really need a fungus mage, not a plant mage. I'm lucky to find algae in cave dungeons, if there's anything at all!
Yoshiko shuddered, remembering the time she'd gone training with her parents in the Three Oaks Mine Dungeon, and found out to her horror that plant mages couldn't actually do jack or squat with lignite cause long-dead plants no longer counted as plants!
Sounds like you don't really do adventures.
It's not that, really, I just don't like the idea of hurting things to get what I want.
Oh, that I can relate to.
I mean, I know they don't really die, they just respawn, but that still feels like feeding into a violence cycle and I don't want any part of that!
Oh my God, you are a little cinnamon bun.
Um, no, I'm not a bunny?
Yoshiko smiled as the prairies began to give way to oak and juniper-covered knolls, and watched as the train buzzed past several giant ground sloths trundling about a field of penstemons. And then they were approaching Austin. As this was an express line, the train passed a few platforms by: Daffan, Colony Park, Walnut Creek, Govalle.
As the train passed the eastern neighborhoods of Austin, Joy saw that the city seemed to have sprouted numerous giant antennas ... no, these were moonlight towers, seemingly identical to the surviving few that stood in Joy's time, but so many more! What Joy did not expect, beyond having so many more, was the odd violet aura they gave in the day.
Oh, "violet crown"!
Originally, the once-obscure nickname had referred to the appearance of the western hills at dusk. 21st-century light pollution made that phenomenon difficult to perceive, but gracklefolk mages in Austin's civil engineering department had come up with a novel way to honor the ancient name, which they insisted had absolutely nothing to do with the violet iridescence of their own feathering.
Joy could only marvel at the violet light playing off the dizzying array of skyscrapers as the train slowed down to approach Downtown Station.