With Vra’ta’s astounding speed at their disposal, Momo and crew reached Morganium by week’s end. The trip up north was unexpectedly sentimental for Momo, flooding her with nostalgia from beginning to end; it felt like piloting a sports car past all of her memories: villages, cities, and forests blurred by like hazy imitations of the real thing, haunting relics of the past.
They traveled through Mole City, tall and gleaning, past Drachenheim and its dramatic peaks, past the woodlands where Kami’s outpost once lay, until they were finally greeted by a sight Momo had only heard tales of — Morganium’s Great Wall of Nether. The city’s greatest tool of defense against holy and necromantic interlopers alike.
The "wall" was no ordinary wall; instead, it formed a colossal sphere encircling the city. It looked quite like a soap bubble, shaded faintly black, extending from the banks of the surrounding rivers to the peaks of the city's numerous steeples. At its base, ominous Nether flames erupted amidst the grass. The fields where the spherical barrier met the ground lay in ruins, scorched to a crisp and smelling like burnt toast.
As they approached the wall, Vra’ta heeled. Momo leaped off his side and treaded through the grass, feeling it tickle at her feet through her clogs. The grass was much taller than it was when she left, untrimmed, left like a tangled jungle. Momo wondered idly what other changes awaited her inside the fortress of a city — what people and places she wouldn’t recognize.
She stepped up to the barrier, hovering her hand just above the Nether. She felt a repellent force from it, like a polarized magnet acting against its other. The more she pushed down on the barrier, the greater the resistance became. The Nether sizzled with energy, flecks of black dancing on its surface like electricity flaring from a plug.
“Sumire never mentioned how we’re actually supposed to get inside…” Momo realized, stepping away to rake her eyes up and down the sphere. It was decidedly impenetrable.
“We’re dokkaebies, Momo,” Nyk said, sighing. “How many times do I have to remind you?”
Nyk effortlessly slid her foot through the barrier, the Nether repelling itself around her. When she was all the way through, the sphere made a pleasing thwop sound as it re-sealed itself.
Momo stared at her in awe. Speechless, she tried poking it with her own finger, but she felt the same repelling feeling.
“I can’t do that. Whatever you just did,” Momo said. “The barrier just yells at me for trying.”
Nyk raised an eyebrow. “What? That makes no sense. We’re made of Nether. The very material of our skin is Nether. It should not repel you, but attract you. It’s a molecular thing.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m a fake dokkaebi? Like, not homegrown?”
Nyk rolled her eyes.
“That would make no difference. This is a material problem, it’s not about your upbringing.”
Racking her brain, Momo thought of the true Dokkaebi form. Maybe that’ll do it?
“[Polymorph - Dokkaebi],” she muttered.
By now, the transformation felt no more unusual than putting on a pair of pants. After letting her new skin settle in, she reached towards the barrier once more. To her surprise, it let her pass without complaint. Her hand sunk through it like it was sinking through water. She grinned.
“I did it!”
“That you did,” Nyk observed dryly, then craned her head. “But what about him?”
She had her finger pointed at the silent Grimli, who was standing, blinking, and looking terribly unsure of himself as he gripped the now pocket-sized Vra’ta in his sweaty hand.
“Oh it’s fine, your highness, I really don’t mind waiting outside,” he chuckled nervously. “The green grass, the blue sky, it’s all really a lovely destination for a rest—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The grass is wet and itchy, Grimli, plus, it could be dangerous out here,” Momo said. “We’ll get you in. There’s gotta be a way. I can’t imagine they’ve just cooped up every resident of Morganium in there permanently like some kind of prison.”
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She paused, a shadow of doubt crossing her mind.
“Well… that would definitely be Valerica’s sense of humor. And seeing how she’s running the System now…”
Momo’s mind trailed off.
“Sumire will know,” she finally said, clearing her throat. “Just wait here, try not to get attacked by bandits or necromancers or holy knights, and we’ll get you inside, alright?”
Grimli nodded, laughing nervously. He dusted off the bed of grass beneath him as if it was a fresh mattress, then sat, spreading his legs out. His badly stained Momo Campaign T-Shirt rippled in the wind.
—
Just as she feared, the city was nothing like she remembered it. It was a completely changed ecosystem, come alive with artificial light, rampaging chickens, and the… elevated societal status of skeletons? For whatever reason, the last part was somehow the most shocking piece to her; with most of the construction work completed, the undead had not only become the main menial workforce, but they had pivoted to becoming Morganium’s new small business owners—the chefs, baristas, bookstore associates, artisanal bakers, pet groomers, fitness coaches, accountants, librarians, to name a few.
The change was immediately obvious. She didn’t even have to glance inside the mom and pop shops to tell you who was running them now; all it took was a quick look at the signage. It was immaculately constructed, precise to the very inch, but the … creative … names of the businesses painted upon them were a dead giveaway. They were like something a zombie might gurgle. An insane butchering of the language beyond the capacity of mortal man.
Some examples, to illustrate her point: the bustling coffee shop in the fifth ring of the city, aptly named Caw’w’wafae; a cozy bookstore called Bueeeks; a bakery called Bababa-brot. The only sign that Momo could read without inspiring a migraine was This is Pizza, her and Sumire’s regular Italian spot. It was owned by a skeleton, too, but one who was at least smart enough to outsource the reading and writing tasks to those with more advanced mental faculties.
What was even stranger, somehow, was how the living, breathing residents of Morganium had begun to adopt the undead’s naming conventions and habits of speaking. As she walked the streets, Momo heard a raven ask a goblin if he wanted to get “booouks at the booouukstow,” to which the goblin replied, “no, I don’t pay mun-y for my booouks ever since the liberry opened.”
Momo wasn’t sure how to feel knowing that her necromantic takeover of the city had unwittingly created a regional dialect. Mostly, she felt like her ears were bleeding.
Only a few residents actually recognized her as she strolled towards the city’s central ring. A few of the younger children asked for autographs, but most of the city’s populace just sneered and spit at her. Some particularly incensed townies tried directly assaulting her with tomatoes and other varieties of anti-royalty vegetables, but Nyk quickly made them regret it.
A true politician’s welcome, Momo thought.
While the commercial rings had mostly remained unchanged when it came to electrical infrastructure, the city transformed as she inched towards the residential sections. Sumire hadn’t been lying—the electricity, or, sorry, chicken electricity, had absolutely revolutionized the housing quarter. Where most of the city’s high-falutin rich people used to have elaborate mobile housing contraptions in the street, those same people now lived atop the concrete jungle, in penthouses and floating homes, neon lights hanging from their terraces.
This left the apartment’s former tenants, Morganium’s poor and middle class, to flock to the streets, adopting the old mobile homes which lay there abandoned.
Look at that. You give people earthly electricity, and they recreate earthly poverty.
The city now looked a lot like her home of San Francisco, only with a whole lot more chickens running up and down the block. And it wasn’t just the block that the chickens were running; they were practically the city’s mafia. Ginormous billboards and tapestries, once painted with the cephalopod faces of Jarva and his son, now all displayed pictures of Baryte, Viktor’s old chicken and the face of the continent’s new favorite religion.
A development which I very much encouraged publicly, she reminded herself miserably.
The billboards were, of course, only a sampling of the fowl derangement which had overtaken the capital. Churches had sprung up in the city’s every crevice, giant towers of stone painted yellow like the fallen feathers of their undead god. Queues looped around the block for services and prayers, opportunities to kneel at the altar of the holy poultry. Momo recognized a few of the priests working the entrances, collecting tolls and donations; they were Brother Hencrest and Brother Cluckfeather, the devout who had introduced Momo to Mole City when she first arrived.
“This is your capital?” Nyk said, hiding none of her disdain.
“Well,” Momo mumbled. “It was a little different before I left.”
They entered the second ring, and encountered the casino, which had been rebranded away from seafood and towards – you guessed it – chicken. All the prizes were chickens, either live and squawking, or stuffed and made of cotton. Children held the stuffed animals close to their chests as they left, their spending-happy parents carrying cages upon cages of birds.
“Alright. This is my stop,” Nyk said, halting by the casino’s door. “Valerica gave me a bit of Aloysian spending money, and I also stole everything you won off that goat-pirate. So I’m going to go have me a good time. Cheers.”
Nyk turned towards the casino, knocked out the doorman when he asked for an entrance fee, and disappeared into a sea of people.
Momo didn’t mind the solitude. She kind of needed it. Seeing the city like this was a lot to process, and on top of everything with the Wraith Box, and with Sera, and Kami, and Valerica… her gerbil-powered heart was already running on overdrive, at constant risk of sputtering out.
But nothing, not the threat of death, or all-out planetary destruction, made it beat faster than when she knocked three times on Sumire’s door.
…
“Coming!”