-Margaret Mont-Bismuth-
“It was really kind of you to invite us to this outing,” commented the sweet tooth, Lyria, as she and her cousin, Loria, went to dispelling their Bows of Glyria.
“Yeah, this is honestly a fun idea,” I followed up as I look at the two Glyirians along with Tabitha and her girlfriend, Tala, before looking up to the hidden faux-World Bridge leading to Sweets Futurism. No way I going miss out on another girl’s night like this: these things along Mita helping me invest my rainy day funds, delving with Lyria, Loria, and the Glyirian sweet tooths, and ingredient hunting with Tabitha, Tala, and also occasionally Tynna’s party that I’ve been able to make and purchase so many mandala inscriptions. Magic makes the money, I thought to myself casually, that adage definitely was true because I probably spent around my annual salary worth of money on mandala inscriptions over the past two months and I was already starting to see dividends. And wasn’t even including the mandala scannings Mita and Robert gave me on the sly!
“You sure you girls want to do this?” asked Tala again as the complex tattoos on her Hidden City proxy body’s arms swirled slightly. “I know Margaret is still getting used to her SteelStar and new mandalas.”
“She’s fine, aren’t you Margaret?” followed up Tabitha as she slightly hugged her vox reborn of a girlfriend’s arm and looked at me in my canary oldmark SteelStar. Between the lesser spell specialties of Golden Dagger and Gold-Pyrite Infuser, the school mandala of Mercury Crossing: Shell Chapter to pair with my already inscribed Mercury Crossing: Imbalance Chapter, the Extra Seed Cast Specialty feature set, the Basic Platter of Spirits attunement mandala for Jasminer, Puck, and Trickley to have some access to my vegetarian’s food platter, and the Flasaporium hub proxy body with regeneration boon and cleansing mist gas glands, this SteelStar still took the cake in rarity. Most people starting off in Sin of SteelStar usually started with a Technologia or Crafts model, maybe desire, curse, or dungeon-mana model, but almost never a Five Powers, system cast, or oldmark model like mine.
“I’m fine, new experiences are always good. Besides this might be what helps push me to tier 2.2,” I answered, internally smiling at the idea of forging a connection to a special locale that most normal people would never even know existed. Or the fact I could use this as a chance to catch up to the others in tiers: Loria’s tier 2.7, Lyria’s tier 2.8, Tabitha’s tier 3.1, and then Tala’s insane tier 6.4.
“That’s the spirit,” noted Loria with a sincere smile, letting her delving crazy side show a bit again. Seeing that none of us had any hesitations, Tala relaxed a bit and returned Tabitha’s half hug. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to take things slow, apparently a side effect of going through four different race advancements in a span of a month left her with a racial feature called Sim-PMF of the Vox Reborn. On one hand the mandala mitigated the influence of prolonged mandala fatigues and could inflict a bane that replicated the effect of the malady, but on the other heavier hand it left her with a perpetual minor case of PMF.
Grabbing the keycards for the faux-World Bridge’s teleportation pads, the five of us crossed the shimmering threshold. Entering Sweets Futurism I felt a weird jolt as the Hybrid System tried to forge a connection with one of my system slots: as I let the connection be made, I took a look at the simulated body I was in: it looked like me in a school uniform and maybe about three or four years younger. Trippy, I thought to myself as focused inwardly sense relays of bodies between this one and my real body.
“Is it just me? Or do my flowers smell?” asked Tabitha, looking down and wrinkling her nose slightly at the large dark purple flowers, each with a large black protrusion coming out of them.
“A little bit like rotten meat, yeah. But its subdued and I can also smell perfume, probably the Hybrid System of Flowers obscuring the smell?” answered Tala as she leaned to smell Tabitha’s flowers, her own evergreen plants with long thin leaves I recognized as tillandsias, airplants, rustling from the movement.
“This is so interesting, it seems that not just normal flowers are options,” pointed out the sweet tooth as she inspects her own and her cousin’s flowers. It was pretty obvious what flowers the two Glyirians had, their stalk-like flowers that looked upside-down small bluebonnets with blue flowers for Lyria and white flowers for Loria were both rain flowers: the flower form of rain berries that the Glyiria side of Historia Pastoria Sweets been selling recently.
“Yeah, a lot of variety,” I followed up and noted my own flowers, purple carnations, with a frown. Capriciousness? Really? I internally muttered, remembering what I researched last night to prepare myself. I mean I may be spontaneous, but capricious? That got a few chuckles out from my spirits but I went to ignore them as I worked with the others to figure out the symbolism of all our flowers with the use of our phones and a magical device that Tala bought to help us out.
My purple carnations meant capriciousness unsurprisingly, Lyria’s blue rain flowers and Loria’s white rain flowers respectively meant good hunt and accurate, Tala’s tillandsias meant dreams, and finally Tabitha’s flowers, which were actually called dragonworts, meant astonishment. The fact that Tabitha’s dragon theme somehow managed to cross over to Mercury-Gardenia got the laugh out of all of us, except for Tabitha herself. Staring at the slightly smelly flowers sticking out of her chest, she grumbled,
“Great, now even Vertrala is laughing. He better not ask for me to try and turn this into a legacy for them.”
“It would make you a shoe in for becoming a superhero though. I know a lot of superhero agencies would die for someone like you and Vertrala,” I half-joked as we made our ways through the Interconnection. Originally the plan was to find this place’s version of cheesecake knights to fight and see if we could explore the non-simulated side of things. But apparently Mita and the others haven’t gotten around to making the new variation of cheesecake knight yet so that was a no go. And when we found an aerial tramway route to a portal that led to the non-simulated side of things, only to discover it was a grim wasteland full of fortified towers that obviously were holding all the bodies that passed through, we decided that wasn’t worth it to explore further.
So deciding on what we would do instead in terms of exploration and making us our newly connected system slots, the five of us agreed we should just go and check out Mercury-Gardenia itself and not get bogged down with staying in a blackzone. There wasn’t any reason for us to stick around just Historie Pastoria Sweets or Mercury-Hyacinth-Johari, especially since if anything went south Tala or I could forcibly plug out our proxy bodies to try and get help or even have Tabitha bare some cross-karmic retribution to have Vertrala go wild. Man this place is amazing, I idly thought to myself on the aerial tramway to the edge of Mercury-Hyacinth-Johari, the entire Trapdoor had an uplifting feeling in its potent ambient mana that seemed to highlight all the positives of its wealthy urban schoolscape covered in waterways and aerial tramways: if it wasn’t for all the ambient dungeon-mana you’d be hard pressed to think this place was a blackzone.
“This place is really strange don’t you think?” commented Loria as we made our way through the city that Mercury-Hyacinth-Johari was located in, Lakes Serenes going by what the locals were saying.
“How so?” I asked back, pausing to look around and see what she meant.
“There is barely anyone talking about the Trapdoor we just left from… It’s not a small time blackzone and this is not a small city from the looks of it. But everyone is acting so nonchalant about Mercury-Hyacinth-Johari, almost like most of them are just oblivious to it.”
“Loria is right, even back in Glyiria we aren’t this composed and flippant about blackzones near or inside towns. Not even for artificial or small ones,” followed up Lyria, motioning to the nearby people with blissful faces just going on with their lives. Thinking about it, they are right, even back in New York I couldn’t go a week without hearing about the Incursion under the subway system, the expansion from a Grand Bridge Dungeon that covered the Statue of Liberty, and any of the smaller contained blackzones around the metropolitan area or in the Saten Babel.
“It’s something about the system, it’s interfering with the minds of the people here, and in some cases the soul also,” explained Tala as she swirled a small thing of magics in her hand.
“Oh wow shit, are we safe?” I yelped slightly, watching as the vox reborn crushed the magics she was just casting before giving a sort of half shrug.
“For now, you and I are safer than the others because we’re using proxy bodies. Although the difference is almost marginal, if we want to spend extended time here we’ll need some sort of specialized defense.”
“So we’ll just keep this to a short outing then and not get caught up in this… weird brainwashing stuff,” commented Tabitha as she tried to lighten the mood. “Let’s just find some casual stuff to fight so we can try out this Hybrid System.”
“Yeah, Tabitha’s right, we shouldn’t put a damper on this. Let’s just enjoy the magic of this place and be safe about it,” agreed Tala with a nod, relaxing a tiny bit as we went to asking the locals where would be a good place to fight some monsters or magical beasts. It was weird how so many people acted obvious or just dismissive of the scope of the Hybrid System of Flowers: most of them only vaguely acknowledged that the flowers sprouting from their chest could be used in some basic specialized spellcraft, barely any of them knew or acknowledged the conjuration aspect of the flowers. A bunch of them didn’t even think or know about monsters or magical beasts for fighting, let alone hunting for magical materials and supplies, so it took out a while to learn about a place a taxi drive that had some magical beasts we could try our hand against.
Thank god there was a working currency exchange we could use, I muttered to myself as Tabitha went to hailing a taxi van for us while Lyria and Loria double checked our floral printed money. Even with all the obliviousness going on around here, a surprising amount of services were still convenient and easy to use: it was a strange juxtaposition to see. Even hailing a taxi and being driven through traffic was easy. We’re barely even worrying about language barriers here either, I noted to myself as I watched the cityscape slowly shift to a mixture of rural, suburban, and mountainscape. I mean I knew that the systems and proxy devices often helped ease communication at times, but this was stupidly smooth in comparison to what I’ve seen in the Slumbering Palaces.
“Here we are, Lake Flidusa,” proclaimed the taxi van driver with a smile as the five of us climbed out of his car.
“Thanks,” I told the driver with a wave as he drove off before turning around to ask the others, “So is the language thing weirding anyone else out?”
“Mildly, everything they say is coming across as Glyirian or a mixture of Glyirian and English for us,” replied Loria, looking at the lake in the distance, a few swarms of oversized flying jellyfish magical beasts floating over its surface.
“It's the same for me, but Alihi’a’Poungain instead of Glyirian,” explained Tala before pausing and then suddenly saying something I couldn’t understand at all in her native tongue.
“What was that?”
“A test, it seems the system is translating with intent. So we can obscure what we’re saying with ease from the looks of it. And from what I can feel out, the translatory magics are tied to this area, so we might have to rely on our magics and translation devices if we go far enough out.”
“That’s good to keep in mind,” I commented, already thinking about how I could potentially use my Trinket of Tongues lesser spell specialty to make us some working translation devices. But that was something I’d have to focus on later when I have time to sit down and think about it. “Anyway, shall we try out our conjurations?”
