Kirquar? - Wanderers' Sandbox 2

Kirquar?

Hi there! I'm Kirquar, welcome to my sandbox :)

I. Barracks

"What do you think it'd feel like, Bill?"

Emerson was awake again. Granted, Bill was too. Neither of them had both slept a whole night through since the last blackout, and who knows how long ago that was. Even so, Bill was still a little upset Emerson had spoken up. They lived and worked in the same place- Kipley, California, the single most populated city in the world as of the 2248 census, in an area of the very bottom level of fifteen: Maintenance Camp 3. The sunlight they saw in this place was fleeting and dim, and the nights were the darkest and quietest that someone could imagine a night to be, so dark and quiet that even while your eyes were open, one could nearly experience dreams.

"R'you awake for real, Mer?"

A quiet cough from below his bunk. "Yeah, I'm not falling asleep again."

"Me neither."

A beat of silence passed. In this silence, he silently hoped Emerson had been wrong indeed, and drifted away again just after speaking. His hand drifted to his night-vision glasses, maybe to get out of bed and-

"But what do you think it'd feel like, Bill? Teleportation, I mean."

Bill didn't like the idea of teleporting. It had been invented by a particularly world-changing and eccentric man named Salvatore Oel thirty years ago after he completed his theory about the human soul. In addition, even though nobody in their sect would know about it, the man had been significantly downgraded in his public perception ever since he attempted to teleport himself into an incredibly low-evidence 'skewed universe' and went missing. Three months after that, a squatter in his New Orleans home found files containing nude photographs of Oel and multiple other scientists stationed at his facility. Nobody was quite sure what to make of it, so they decided it must be something bad.

Either way, none of Salvatore Oel's innovations (except for the infrastructure of Kipley itself, of course) had any appeal to a man like Bill. Bill worked with his hands, prayed to Ithins, followed routine, did his duty. He had no need or use for the secrets of his soul, because it worked just fine. He had no interest in any other sort of fluffy, expensive science, either, for that matter. Emerson was different. He was an electrician. Not that electrics was any sort of weak position, but compared to Bill's station in the scrapping room it simply didn't make a man quite as sturdy. Emerson, when not repairing one of the city's hundreds of panels that were never all working right, spent his time reading or painting or whatever. Bill spent his free time working.

As different as the two were (about as different as any two people working in the maintenance level could be, really), they still slept six feet vertically from each other, so by sheer proximity they became close friends. A friend was easy to come by in Level 0 but a close friend was rare, and usually people partnered up with their bunkmate. Therefore, between Bill and Emerson, secrets kept were few and far between, meaning Bill knew just how excited Emerson was about the teleport engines being installed on their level in response to higher and higher tiers of the city being built. Well, they were being sent down to be installed. Any sort of appliance the maintenance workers had was manufactured a handful of levels up by people whom Level 0 residents lovingly referred to as 'oil drinkers'. These were people who received instructions from the original creator of a product and followed those instructions directly, usually without knowing how the appliance actually works. So the Level 0 residents install it themselves. They wouldn't have it any other way.

"I don't know, Mer. Don'tcha get, like…. taken apart, or something? Put back together on the other side?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Oel figured out that the soul actually interacts with these really, really small particles called 'oellas' and kind of semi-entangles the atoms that the soul claims as its own. So if you can vibrate and disturb those entangled atoms enough so that they're almost like a gas, and then suddenly move the soul somewhere else, those entangled atoms will follow it. Isn't that somethin'? You just gotta move the soul, and the rest of you moves with it!"

"That's… ah… yeah, okay. I don't know about all that. None of these concepts were even around ten years ago, are you sure you're willing to trust it?"

"Why not? People trust it all the time on upper levels."

"I mean, yeah, I guess, but those are upper levels. They're the consumers. They consume. They trust the things they're told to trust. I didn't choose to become a laborer because I wanted to just blindly trust some… some smartass magic scientist from the top."

Emerson didn't have a response to that.

II. Scrapping Bay

Noise returned to its place in Level 0 all at once at 7:30 AM, like it did every day. It was calming, after you got used to it, that dissonant chord composed from the whirs of different machines. The maintenance level was home to recycling plants, incinerators, water drainage and filtration systems, power grids, gas lines, traffic and surveillance, and city vehicle storage. Bill worked in recycling. The way that the city's waste management system worked was simple: receptacles were stationed at the corner of every block, and those reciprocals had a hole in the bottom that dropped waste onto a chute that went all the way down to the base of the city to be swept away into processing by big pusher trucks. Bill knew one of the guys who drove those. He was boring.

The role of a scrapper in all of this was to take apart appliances, furniture, and other things with multiple parts, then put their materials in the right place to get recycled. It was an integral position in the minimum-waste setup of Kipley and one Bill took both very seriously and a little spiritually. He was well aware that one day, Ithins would leave his body to the soil and let it disassemble and dissolve him, as the cycle must be, and he did a similar act to these products of the labor of man before him. At the moment, he was working on taking apart an old delivery trolley. Mostly mild steel, with medium carbon steel screws and vulcanized rubber tires.

Someone exclaimed and people began gathering around the window into the drop zone. Mostly new hires. It happened sometimes, maybe a statue or a bus had been sent down and people who recognized it were surprised it was down here with them. But they'd get used to it. Everything got sent down eventually. Nothing new. Bill was eyeing a burnt piano. He liked pianos. He'd never play one, probably. But he'd heard them in recordings. He figured, if given the time, he could work out how to build one. But he didn't have that. He didn't have time. The closest he'd ever get to that experience was taking apart the ones that had already been crumpled by their fall through the city's skeleton.

III. Barracks

"Tomorrow, Bill. I'm gonna be the first to use it, you know. Sector 3 of Level 12 is on backups right now, and I'm assigned to that floor. I got the news at dinner."

"I… yeah. You know how I feel about that, Mer, I've told you enough times."

"Yeah, I know what you think. I'm still going."

"…"

"…You ever think about living up there, Mer? Not the top, but like… even Level 5 has free time."

"What would a guy like you do with free time, Bill?"

"I don't know. I've always wanted to play the piano. Maybe I'd get one of those. Maybe I'd watch a soccer game. In person, I mean."

"Yeah. Yeah, maybe."

IV. Transport Room

The streets of Hexal smelled like battery acid and cigarette smoke.

Five miles south of where its new mayor was sleeping in his office, an old man with gray eyes and a fire-singed beard sat next to his dog. To any person with true sight, the two would be a very worrying image; the dog's jaw was detached from one side and hung limply, its fur matted with dried blood, and the man's hands had been blackened by fires, leaving a dark print on anything he touched.

To any person with true sight, they would have known enough to recognize them as two of the lowest omens in existence- the Hermit of Ruin and the Hound of Slaughter.

Oxisso took a thick syringe from his pocket and set the needle into the base of his neck. A feeling like a deep breath of misty air filled his throat and things began to feel brighter in the city, the humming of the neon light seeming to lose its dissonance and find a subtle chord in the mind. The dog whimpered and placed a paw on the man's knee.

"Alright, Teura."

He gave the dog a hit and stood with a slow sigh, ash sifting out of his hair. They both knew tonight was going to be the last night for a while in which Hexal would be anything like this. Resolutions were in order.

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The interior of the Steel Diamond was filthy and cacophonous and jam-packed, but for a frequent of the club, the crowd was something that moved like a lake if one simply knew how to swim. Oxisso snaked between the hundreds of drunken, high, nervous, angry, aroused, hallucinating thralls of the building and made his way to the bathroom.

The bathrooms, of course, were large and filthy as well. Oxisso's heavy steps were syncopated with about four drips from various locations at any given time, and each corner appeared to have a different species of fungus growing out of it. But none of that really mattered. With or without Oxisso's disgust at the entirety of the establishment, there were someone- well, two people- he needed to speak to.

At the end of the line, in a handicap stall with the toilet removed, there slept a man named Nil Voxel. Nil was the child of Hek Samson and Opia Voxel, two scientists at the big NONCO lab in the center of the city who drunkenly made that big decision to put an embryo into a utero pod together. They were both fired within the week for other reasons, and the child wasn't found until it was born. Nil's life since birth had been a straight line of circumstances few others had gone through before, and most of which they wouldn't care to. But it wasn't for his unique life that Oxisso and Teura had met with him so often.

"Ox."

"Nil. Hello. Are you going to let us speak with him tonight?"

Nil sat up with some effort, pushing his hair aside, and stared at the two for a moment before speaking. "Yeah. Okay.". He pulled up a loose tile in the floor and, from an assortment of various items with various levels of dignity, fished out an old noke sparker and shot a small amount up his nose. Noke was a relatively new experience to humankind- an entirely inorganic hallucinogen, with numerous inexplicable possibilities when interacting with the mind. Nil, for one, didn't meet with the two just for his own charming personality.

"Omens. You torment this man, you know."

"We're quite aware, Elin."

"Teura drips with blood. There's something coming, I assume."

"Yes. Yes, there is. You and Nil would be wise to leave the city tonight."

"Is that really all you've come here to say, Ox?"