I went ahead and stocked up on AE3 just in case, strapping two jerry cans to the sides of my bike. My destination wasn’t too far away from the city, so I should be good with just this much fuel. Sure, I could’ve used the canteen and saved the Rayn, but I didn’t want to mess with having to manually swap the contents and wait for refills while keeping track of a thirty-minute timer. Far easier to just keep it all as simple as could be.

The nomadic group, the Leper-Khans according to Athena, were north of Sunderland last she had heard, so the trip wouldn’t actually be that bad. Sunderland was a primary mining town about half a day’s travel to the east of the city.

Since it was an important asset, there was even a road connecting the mining town to Aythryn City; the Sunder Stretch. A patrolled road. From Sunderland to the Leper-Khans would all be offroad though, so that's when my journey would really get annoying.

I checked my bike one last time as I neared the Sunder Strip. Fuel? Chek! Tools? Chek! First-Aid? Chek! Air quality probe? Chek! Spare parts I probably wouldn’t even need to use but bought anyway out of the very real possibility my bike dies and strands me in the middle of the desert for weeks? Chek… last but certainly not least, my weapons? Chek chek.

I cast a glance back at the city. This would be the first time actually leaving my birthplace since… ever, really. Sure I had the occasional trips to the overlook point on the north side of the city, but this was my first time actually leaving this place...

Leaving. That word held a weight I’d never really felt before. It was an odd feeling, like a mixture of anxiety and excitement twirled together into a boulder upon my chest. It’s not like I would never return… and yet part of me felt that way. It was such a weird vibe.

I cleared my head the best I could and slipped through several streets till I arrived at the Sunder Stretch. Just as its name suggested, the road stretched out before me as I pulled onto It and began my long journey away from Aythryn City.

The Sunder Stretch was a long four-lane highway leading off into the desert. One with no speed limit… bike go BRRR!!! I didn’t slow down in the slightest, even as the road degraded with the occasional pothole here and there. I just went around them at over a hundred miles an hour, draining my bike for all it had.

In the hour of distance I drove down it, the road sat almost entirely abandoned with only the occasional semi or armored truck heading to or from the city. Spots of the road had small dunes of sand blown across it from the surrounding desert. Occasional burnt-out vehicles sat pushed off to the side, long stripped clean of any valuables. I even found a few areas with at least a couple dozen cars all lumped into a pile as if a giant stacked them into a ravaged castle.

In the distance, I could see a building every once in a while, a testament to the strength of humanity from before the Eternal Sandstorm and other various phenomena like the Dune Walkers wiped out cities and rural towns. They stood, lone wreckages of a time long since past.

After about an hour, I had to throw on my mask as the air quality probe started to wave around crazily. Other than that, it was a really boring drive out of the city. I half expected something of note to happen like maybe a Hawk ambush or Dune Walkers in the road, but nothing did. It was mostly just me out here with the ‘soft’ hum of my bike.

A few hours after that the scenery finally started to change. Up to this point, the endless sea of dunes all around started to drive me crazy. Now though? Small outcroppings of rock popped up and far off in the distance dunes gave way to sandy mountains. The sky around the mountains was nearly black with smog, which was just… perfect.

It wasn’t long before the sun was once more locked out of the sky by the smog, the warm desert air fading just as the light did. It was back to cool with unnatural splotches of heat by the time I hit the mountain range. Unfortunately, it was the only thing that returned to how it was in the city. The air quality only degraded further, probably due to the thick smog around the mountains.

A few miles further into the range and I found out why. I guess it wasn’t called Sunderland for no reason. Massive chasms and endless mine shafts dotted the mountains, most of them long abandoned and caved in. Rotting wood and rusted metal sat around the decaying locations. Occasionally, great hulking machines and excavators sat scattered about, emitting thick clouds of smog that did little to hide the corporate markings around their location.

I put up more and more distance from Aythryn City. The hulks of machines grew more and more frequent as more and more people started to pop up among the mountains. Even the roads started to fill out with some semblance of traffic. It wasn’t long after that buildings popped into view. First, a lone gas station. Then what looked to be a small community.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Then all of a sudden the Sunder Stretch entered a valley between three titanic mountains, mines scattered everywhere across them. In the valley, dipping unnaturally low as if this entire place had once been a gigantic quarry, sat Sunderland in all its smog-filled glory.

My phone’s connection came back to life as I entered the range of Sunderlands Node, updating my location services as the Mapp™ reconnected to their servers. I checked the Mapp and downloaded an offline satellite copy, something I should’ve done long ago.

I pulled off the Sunder Stretch and went a bit off-road up a small rocky dune, passing by several mines as the claustrophobic dune opened into a grand view of the place. I turned off my bike, sat back, and just enjoyed the newness of it all. I even tried to pull off my mask and breath in- it ended in my choking and sputtering before I tossed the mask back on.

Sunderland sat in a pit of a valley, the sandy mountains surrounding it like the oppressive towers of Aythryn City. Most of the buildings were built into the steep slopes of the valley, their walls smogged and sandblasted so they all looked mostly the same. The little bits of neon really stood out against the environment, but it wasn’t nearly as prevalent as in the city. I’d say maybe only a quarter as much?

The entire town was an industrial boomtown, of which I had no doubt. Factories and the various silver mines were the top reason to come here, with tourism falling to the bottom of that list. The hundreds of corporate factories, their logos being the only thing freshly painted, constantly spewed pollution into the air as trucks full of resources came and went near constantly.

Raijin International was the most common player from what it looked like; about an eighth of all factories and trucks looked to be theirs based on the lightning logos scattered around. As if having a stranglehold on the fuel industry wasn't enough, they were fully dedicated to attempting to get one on all natural resources too.

Even the roads here seemed to be built for the explicit purpose of helping industry. They were far larger than normal roads back in the city, and had plenty of room for the larger machines and trucks. There’s simply no way some of the excavators and dump trucks could’ve fit on Aythryn City’s roads without causing some major issues.

The streets were almost entirely barren too, at least outside of the workers transporting resources. It was as if everyone in the city was at work, and only a few stragglers wandered the streets. I cast one last look around the sand-blasted city before driving back down to the road.

I’ll stay in Sunderland for the night and head on to the last location of the Leper-Khans in the morning. Maybe I could walk around the City for a while? This is my first time ever going to another city other than my birthplace. Sure, it didn’t look like there was much to see, but surely there was something, right?

I pulled up the information for one of the very few hotels in Sunderland on my Mapp™ and headed to it, keeping an eye on my surroundings as I went. Sunderland seemed to mostly have three types of establishments with only the occasional outlier: industrial, food, and housing. There were barely any entertainment areas outside of bars and clubs, at least from what I could see. Maybe I shouldn’t go out after all…

I booked a room on the Net so I could avoid… social interaction. Eww. After I got the temporary passkeys, I parked my bike in the garage and headed out. I still had quite a bit of time, and I wanted to get a scope of Sunderland, my first external excursion.

Sure, it was a mining boomtown and not all that impressive outside of corporate factories, the smog made the air suffocating without my mask, and almost everything was stained in a mixture of black and gray, but there was a sense of beauty to it from the sheer difference from Aythryn City. I dunno… it was definitely a biased opinion.

Under the layers of ash and soot sat tags that had once been fresh. Really, it wasn’t surprising. I could leave the gangs, but the gangs could never leave me. It was almost second nature to look for tags by this point, and I saw plenty of them around. Most were marked with some kind of pickaxe or drill, and there weren’t nearly as many as in the city, but they were still there.

People and traffic intensified as the minutes ticked by, the workers probably being released from the mines and set out on the various bars across Sunderland. I’m sure not all of them were miners or factory workers, but their stained clothes and skids sure suggested it.

Interestingly, only a few wore masks like I did. Most simply wandered around breathing in the air as if it wasn’t a problem. Confusion settled in my mind for a good several minutes as I watched the people until I remembered they made automatic filtering augments for chrome lungs these days.

Maybe I should look into getting one? Ugh- or maybe not. My last ‘upgrade’ had almost been my last upgrade. At least a month. I'd wait at least a month before making any important decision concerning that.

Regardless, I walked around the town more, enjoying the new views and scenes that felt shockingly cool and interesting for how mundane they actually were. Eventually, though, I returned to my hotel, ready for a night's sleep.

---

The next morning, I briefly cleaned up my bike the best I could, especially paying attention to the thermoelectric semiconductors and getting all the sand out of them. It would seriously suck for my bike to break down once I got out there.

I spent a bit topping off my bike with AE3 and myself with Jack’s Sun Kicker, and then I was off towards my destination as the fragmented sun attempted to get through the smoggy sky. According to the fixer, the Nomads were last heard from about half a day’s travel north of Sunderland.

There was no road and only worn gravel and beat-down sand paths, so the trip out wasn’t all that comfortable. Eventually, even those ended, and I was once more surfing desert dunes. I had to dodge between rock outcroppings and go around the rare mine under the watchful gazes of corporate security, but all of that faded the further I got from Sunderland till it was just me, myself, and I headed deeper into the mountainous desert.