by Katie Vack
Grayson swallowed, grateful for the short amount of time it bought him. While he wasn't a mercenary per se, he doubted they'd make the distinction. Mercenaries were generally assumed to be cowardly, immoral, and untrustworthy, and while the latter two at least might have applied to him he had no intention of being seen that way. "Oh, you know. See the worlds. Spirit of adventure and all that."
"I see." the man said. It was a poor answer, but at least he didn't pry any further. Grayson preferred being artful with the truth to lying outright; everything was more believable when it was based around reality. "I guess I should wish you good luck then."
There was another pause in the conversation, and this time Grayson was the one to break it. "Why are you heading there so early?" Despite the time that had passed, the sun was no more visible now than it had been when they first came across him.
For the first time since they had met, the woman spoke. "We always say that you're better off early than late. If you get there early you have the chance to look around a little and see what you can find, but if you get there late who knows what opportunities you'll miss."
Grayson shrugged at that. "I normally prefer to turn up right on time. I don't like standing around waiting for things to happen, and besides, I don't normally wake up until well after sunrise."
They all shared a laugh at that- not because it was particularly amusing, so much as that it was a way to release all the stress which had existed since the moment they'd found him there, lying bloody and frozen by the roadside. The conversation moved onto the topics of their lives and back stories, and he managed to manipulate the flow of conversation so that it revolved mostly around theirs, and the question of his own came up very little.
Their names were Mahi and Aurel, and they were wandering traders. They were happily married, and had been for over two decades. Aurel seemed like a fairly grounded man, having spent over half of his life travelling the fragment. Mahi, on the other hand, seemed to be fairly shy around other people and appeared to leave most of the speaking to her husband. Grayson found this particularly interesting, considering that she was the one to have run the business, Aurel coming along at a later date. There was obviously some reason behind this, something they hadn't told him, but he had enough secrets of his own to know not to pry. They were nice enough people, and if they had things to hide then he wouldn't press them any further- after all, didn't everyone?
Continuing their conversation, the three of them began their journey towards their destination. It was a bumpy ride along a poorly maintained gravel road on a caravan with no suspension, and the mule seemed not to hate him any less than any other animal he'd ever encountered, but he found that he didn't mind that. It was comfortable enough, and he had good company, so he was only half surprised that, before he knew what had happened, they had arrived before the gates of Median.
* * *
Median was a far cry from any other city he'd seen, a veritable metropolis by the standards of the typically rural and agricultural Luminacht. By the time they'd turned three corners he was already hopelessly lost, relying entirely on his travelling companions to lead him around. After a short while of being held up and corralled by pedestrians, they reached what they told him was the house of a 'business acquaintance'. Entrusting the caravan to their associate, they continued on foot.
It was far from the first city Grayson had visited, but it was on a totally different level to any other on the fragment. Everywhere he looked he saw alien faces- hellish looking infernians, their aquatic koto rivals, hellion and aetherial peacekeepers, and hundreds more races walking the crowded streets. Humans in their thousands were wandering around happily, although Grayson supposed it was a lot easier for them to do- unlike everyone else, they only needed a single rift to get here. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw a statue begin to move, but when he turned to look at it he found himself faced with a monumental combat mech. He swallowed nervously.
Aurel laughed next to him. "Is this your first time in a Hub?"
Grayson nodded slowly. "Yeah. It's a little…"
"Overwhelming?" He asked. "Most people think that at first. Trust me, you'll get used to it."
Grayson wasn't quite sure how he was supposed to get used to something as full-on as this, but he had to admit that, nerve-wracking though it was, it was also the most exciting thing he'd seen in a long while. He nodded again, and they continued walking.
The actual architecture of the city was as vibrant and varied as its inhabitants. Luminacht technology had been fairly primitive before the Alignment. Glass was yet to be invented. Steam power had yet to be discovered, so manual labour was still used in place of machinery. The lumin had spent half their time farming, and half their time fighting the Darkspawn, and as such technology had been progressing fairly slowly. All of that had changed with the event.
When the Multidimensional Planetary Alignment had wrenched their world from their own universe and into that of the humans, along with thousands of others, everything had changed virtually overnight. Shattered into dozens of fragments, each held together only by the rampant rift energies, Luminacht had spiralled into chaos. Everybody had hailed it as the end of days, the ultimate judgement, yet as the years went on they began to realise that Armageddon wasn't coming.
First contact with the Universal Alliance had been fairly peaceful, considering how things had gone with some of the other worlds. Luminacht was sparsely populated, so while to begin with the aliens were heralded as yet more monsters, there had been little fighting- especially when they realised how vastly superior the Alliance military appeared to be. Within a matter of years alien inhabitants had begun to turn up through the rift, and although there was an intense hatred of the 'invaders' to begin with, that had faded over the century which had passed. Nowadays they were fairly common and nothing to be alarmed by.
The most radical change, however, had been the technology. Bombarded by a thousand different species' technology, they had somehow managed not only to pick up bits and pieces from all but to preserve their own in the process. So it had come about that Luminacht had turned into a world where technologies from almost every age were all equally available and relied upon. As with most of the other minor members, Luminacht it was now in a position where past, present, and future, had all converged upon one setting.
This bizarre compilation of a thousand species' history had manifested itself in the architecture of the city. As he walked through the bustle, all Grayson could think about it was that no matter where he looked, nothing seemed to be the same. To his left were square, sandstone-like houses. To his right, wooden huts of some variety. In the distance rose a great twisted spire of some kind, and he couldn't help but think that it looked somehow… organic. When he looked up he could make out a scattering of floating, metallic, buildings, tethered to the ground below in ways he couldn't hope to fathom. He barely noticed it as they walked out of the street and into some kind of square.
Aurel tugged on his arm, bringing him back to his senses. "I know it's a lot to take in, but you need to stay focussed. Spacing out is a good way to have your things stolen." He frowned, evidently having spoken before he thought it through. "Or it would be, if they hadn't been already."
More than anything else, it was that statement which captured Grayson's attention. Not because he was worried about thieves or pickpockets, but because he hadn't yet thought through the opportunities a city like this could present. Looking past the overwhelming life and character of the city, he began to realise just how well he could do if he stuck around here. His mind wandered off again, this time with thoughts of just how many targets there were here, and just how easily he could do his work.
"We're here." They were standing outside a stone brick building which claimed to be the residence of a 'spiritual healer'. Lumin were an extremely religious people, so the sign was nothing to be surprised by. Lumin mages generally believed that their magic was in fact the harnessed power of their gods, regardless of
absolutely no proof to indicate this being the case. This didn't bother him though- the fact was that, as long as they could heal him, he really didn't care how or why it worked.
He personally had never had much time for religion. It wasn't that he was hell bent on disbelieving in the existence of gods; he simply saw no reason to do so. The way he saw things, if they did exist they would be too busy to care about him, and so the whole argument was rendered pointless anyway. He liked to think that there was some kind of unspoken agreement between them- he wouldn't bother them, so long as they didn't bother him. In fact, whether he would call himself a religious person or not really depended upon who he was speaking to at the time, which meant that in this instance he would probably be extremely devout.
Mahi handed him some coins for the healer, and he had to admit that after they had been so generous to him, a generosity he encountered only rarely, he actually didn't want to take them. If he refused, however, he'd then have to answer why, which might then lead to the awkward questions about why exactly he'd lied about having his own money. Berating himself mentally about getting himself into such a predicament in the first place, and promising himself that he'd find a way to repay them the favour in the unlikely event that he met them again, he accepted the offering.
"Thank you. For everything." He looked back at the house. It was hard, this. Saying goodbye. He'd always been a bit of a loner, half through choice and half through circumstance, so he didn't have a clue what to do in these circumstances. He was sure he should probably say something else, but he had no idea what. Tell them that in the space of a few hours he'd gotten as close to them as he ever had anyone? Tell them that they were the closest thing he'd had to parent figures? That they'd been kinder to him than anyone had in a long time? That he was sorry for lying to them? That if they knew what he really was they'd never have treated him as they had?
There was an uncomfortable silence, and in the end he decided just to say nothing. "Goodbye."
"Goodbye. Good luck." He wasn't sure whether he was imagining it, but it looked to him like their eyes were glistening a little. "We'll miss you."
"Yeah. You too." Grayson stood there for a few seconds, before turning on his heel and striding towards the healer's. He rapped loudly on the door, waiting until it opened for him, and then stepped through into the unfamiliar building. The door shut behind him.
He didn't look back.
* * *
Half an hour later, he stepped back out of the house and found himself once more immersed in the complete chaos of the Hub city. While the healer himself had been of rather average skill, the power of lumin magic had proven itself once again. The cuts on his face and hand were gone, now nothing more than a fine tracery of pale, barely noticeable scars. His missing piece of lip had grown back, although admittedly it still stung a little, and his bones had been, for the most part, mended. While it was true that a better healer could have fixed him completely, leaving no lingering pain or any traces of the original injuries, Grayson wasn't particularly bothered by that. If anything, he preferred the scars- they gave him some sense of history, a living testament to his past.
Setting off walking in a completely random direction, he began to wander round the city. It was still barely midday, so he had a few hours left before he needed to be anywhere. Thoughts of his two travelling companions rose to the front of his mind, but he brushed them aside angrily. When had he even begun to think of them as companions anyway? They had been a means to an end, nothing more. Simply a convenient way for him to reach his destination at a time in which he had had no other choice. Try as he might, he couldn't really bring himself to believe it.
Nothing better to do, he wandered aimlessly around the city, only half focussed on the sights, the sounds, the smells. He found himself walking into other people on more than one occasion, hardly noticing it when he did so. Eventually though, he reached the conclusion that, like it or not, what had happened had happened and no matter how much he thought about it he wouldn't be able to change it. Sighing heavily, he continued killing time.
His melancholy forgotten, his mind turned to some of its favourite pass times. Realising, after trying for a few minutes, that he simply couldn't investigate people's characters properly when there were so many of them and they moved off so quickly, he began to look for things to appropriate. Of course, he had no intention of actually stealing things right now- this was more like scoping out a possible hunting ground and filing it away to look at later. As much as he was itching to see how many people he could fool, he wasn't willing to take any unnecessary risks when they could conflict with more serious business. He'd been informed that this was going to be a major, well-paying, contract, much more so than any of his normal ones, and so he had no intention of missing the opportunity it presented.
After wandering round and paying no mind to the time, he found that he'd gotten a little carried away. He was meant to be at the meeting any time now, and he had absolutely no clue where he was, or where the rendezvous point was in relation. He was, however, rather skilled at talking and so, by asking a different person every few hundred metres, he was able to eventually find his way.
It was some kind of privately owned ex-guildhall, a brick and mortar building of the kind that humans seemed to like. A single storey building, large, square, and completely uninspiring. There were windows along every wall, but they were covered with closed blinds and all he could make out were silhouettes. Excited, and more than a little nervous, he walked up to the front door and, without waiting for someone to let him in, pulled it open and stepped inside.
The hall was as bland as it had been on the outside; a 25 by 25 metre block of empty space with a few tables and chairs clustered in the middle. There were three people already in the room, which in itself was nice: he'd been told that there would be five or six, which meant that he wasn't going to be the last to turn up. What wasn't so nice was the fact that the figure that rose to greet him just happened to be an aetherial. If the person leading this was an angel, he would not be pleased.
"I assume you are part of the group?" The man was halfway between seven and eight feet tall, and easily the tallest in the room. He had the normal flowing facial structure of his kind, with green eyes, and blond hair which fell down to brush against his wings. He was clad in traditional robes, white with gold detail, and across his back, between his wings, was slung an enormous gold greatsword that appeared to be as long as Grayson was tall. The man radiated control, immediately clashing with Grayson's ideas that he was his own man and shouldn't be taking orders from anyone. He could already tell that they probably wouldn't be getting along.
His characteristic skill with words, however, was still with him, and his reply betrayed none of his thoughts. "I hope so. It's one hell of a wasted journey if I'm not."
The man paused, as if wondering how to take the comment. "In that case, you're late. You should have been here…" he glanced at a watch, which appeared to be made of the same golden metal as the sword, "thirty-five minutes and twelve seconds ago." This bit amused Grayson- he seemed to be genuinely distressed by his tardiness. "I can't believe we have three people late. It's the first day!"
Grayson ignored the strangely accurate timing. "I'm a lumin. Traditional. We rely on sundials, and I don't happen to carry one around in my pocket." He heard someone chuckle at that, but the aetherial was blocking his view of the other two so he had no idea who it was. "Besides, I was just told to be here for late afternoon."
"Well it'll be evening in twenty-four minutes and three seconds, so you're still barely on time." The man grimaced in discomfort. "In any case, if you're one of us then I guess I have to ask you to sit down." Without checking whether Grayson was following, he turned and strode back towards the tables, taking a seat in the centre of the room. Reluctantly, hating that he had to follow someone else around, especially someone as strange and demanding as this man, Grayson walked over and sat down.
"My name is Karolus Tans. You will
know me as Tans. This lady," he gestured at a young woman to his right, "Is Sora Netta." She was a silvan, and by rights should have been some kind of peace-loving hippie, and yet that didn't seem to be the case. Strapped across her back were a six foot twin glaive, and some kind of longbow. She didn't seem to be carrying any arrows for it, much to his confusion, something which seemed to be a rather severe oversight.
Sora nodded at him in greeting, and he fought down the urge to swallow nervously. She was beautiful in an effortless way, with long brown hair falling fluidly down behind her shoulders, and piercing grey eyes which seemed to look directly into his soul, but it wasn't that which was worrying him. Looking behind the near-perfect mask, he could see something dark, something foreboding. He knew that silvans were pacifists, and that if she was a warrior it was likely with the express goal of fighting for peace, but that wasn't matching up in any way with what he was reading. Ignoring the outward calm and lack of emotion, all he could see were rivers of blood and an ocean of torment. He made a quick promise to stay as far away from her as possible in future, but as always he still made sure that his repulsion didn't show. "Hi."
"This boy is…" Karolus paused, distaste written clearly on his face, "Thief." Grayson understood how he felt on this one- introducing yourself with a moniker was fairly arrogant in itself, but this had to be one of the worst he'd ever heard. The boy might have called himself Nightshade, Razor, or Reaper.
