Surviving Arkadia

I was sad when the Blitzenpaard disappeared as we decelerated for the Gondola Station but I was not sad to see the back of the bone-chilling cold she brought with her. I was still shivering as I got out of the mechanical carriage, even though it was a warm day. I stood by the carriage, hugging myself and trying to rub some life back into my nose while Sigifrid unloaded our luggage and packed the furs back in the storage box.

Jethro paid Sigifrid with a thin roll of notes as I tried to take in our surroundings. The station was a broad paved area with a ticket booth, a huge noticeboard and a bunch of benches. Outside the station were several tents and stalls with sandwich boards advertising snack foods, portable entertainments and dubious sounding products.

The notice board was mostly taken up with a complicated timetable of gondola times and regular local carriage omnibus schedules. Around the outside of the noticeboard people had pinned up fliers, posters, and advertisements. If I hadn’t been so horribly cold I would have looked at all of them and tried to get a feel for the city we were approaching.

I jogged on the spot to warm up while trying to make sense of the timetable. I gave up on the timetable when I realised that I had no idea what day it was. The big clock above the ticket booth told me that the time was just after noon but that was no use without the day of the week. Jethro declared that we had about half an hour to wait for the next one. I found myself wondering if half an hour here was anything like half an hour back home and if there was any way of knowing.

We took our bags over to the benches and unpacked our wrapped sausages. I was still cold, somehow.

“I think I would kill for a hot drink,” I said. “Well, maybe not kill. Maim? I’d definitely cut someone.”

“Hey Porter!” shouted Jethro.

A head popped out of the ticket booth. “Yes sir?”

“Anyone round here selling hot drinks?” said Jethro.

“Sure. There’s dandelion pick-me-up, rose hip tea, toddy, and if you really want to enjoy your trip in the Gondola there’s mushroom tea. For just one silver I’ll go and get whatever you want. It’ll be quicker.”

“Dandy pick-me-up for me,” I said.

“Two Dandy pick-me-ups and can you make change from a gold?” said Jethro.

Practically our only coins were the change from paying our Tavern bill. We’d purposely paid them with some of our paper money because we knew we might have trouble spending it and we thought they would have lots of coins. I think it pissed off the Tavern Keeper because he gave us change in gold coins. He definitely could have given us some silvers.

“No problem, sir,” said the Porter.

When the Porter returned with the hot mugs of pick-me-up I used it to warm my nose up. Once I’d got the circulation back into my face I warmed my hands on my mug while drinking. I wanted to find out more about the Gondola Station, maybe read some of the fliers or talk to the people who ran the stalls, but by the time I’d recovered enough to do any of that the Gondola was arriving.

#

The image that the word Gondola conjured in my mind was the shallow draft boat that they use to fleece tourists while showing them the canals of Venice. This was absolutely not that.

The Gondola that we’d been waiting for turned out to be a delicate glass cylinder with rounded ends. There was a brass frame around the cylinder that gave it metal feet to stand on when it landed. A glass and brass door was held in place by the frame. It swung open as soon as the Gondola touched down.

The Gondola arrived empty and there were no other passengers waiting. The only thing stopping us from entering was the reluctance to enter a fragile glass vessel with no visible means of support or propulsion and only a schedule on a noticeboard to suggest that it went where we wanted to go.

“Hey Porter?” I shouted.

The familiar head popped up from behind the counter of the ticket booth. “Yes, miss?”

“Is this the one we want?” I said.

“If you want to go to Moonstone, that Gondola is going there,” said the Porter.

Jethro stepped inside and I followed him. There was a long double bench in the centre of the Gondola but we’d been sitting practically all day so I just put my bag on the bench and went to the front to look out through the distorted, curved end of the Gondola. I looked up into the sky, in the direction the Gondola had come from. I expected to see a distant mountain or the support structure of some impossibly tall building but all I could see was some low clouds. After several days of good weather it seemed that there would be some rain.

The Gondola waited there for several minutes. I assumed that it was bound to do so by the dictates of its schedule. While we waited I paced the length of the Gondola and Jethro stretched out and lay down on the bench.

“What are we actually going to do when we get to Moonstone?” I said. “Do we actually have a plan?”

“We’re going to deliver the diary and then we’re going to find somewhere to stay,” said Jethro. “We’ve got enough cash, still. We can pay for a room until we make up our minds what to do next. Agnes said that once you got to Moonstone you’d want to stay but she didn’t say why she thought that.”

“What about you?” I said. “I can’t imagine there’s a huge need for Salvagers in the city but there’s got to be even less work for a Forester.”

“You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of fancy people in Moonstone. A lot of big houses with big gardens and big gardens have trees. I’ve got a few levels each of PRUNING and TREE SURGEON. I can find work.”

The door of the Gondola slid shut.

“Aren’t you in a hurry to get back to your little brother? Start making use of that Apprentice perk?” I said.

“I am. But I’m also curious about you. I never really thought much about Outlanders before. Isn’t that weird? Sometimes people just pop into existence, as adults, with a bunch of memories about another world. It’s happened so often that some families dump their children in the middle of nowhere with no gear and only their underwear because they want them to grow up to be a mighty hero like the Outlanders. I’ve known that was a thing for years and I just never questioned it. The more I think about it the less sense it makes.”

I sat down on the bench on the other side from Jethro. “Nothing has made any sense to me since I woke up in the woods,” I said. “I thought that was just life in Arkadia. Weird stuff happens all the time and everyone just pretends that it’s normal and they know exactly what’s going on.” I stopped because something in what I was saying seemed awfully familiar, like deja vu. “To be honest, it’s really not that different from my old life. Maybe it’s universal.”

Maybe that was profound or maybe it was cynical but it didn’t matter, because at that moment the clouds parted and I got my first glimpse of Moonstone.

At first it looked like a single, horribly misshapen pearl nestled in the clouds, as if the sky was a massive oyster lying half opened on the shores of space. Then it looked like a collection of unevenly sized and shaped moonstone cabochons*. Then each of the cabochons resolved into a glass dome with a shimmering rainbow reflection obscuring the details of the buildings inside it. Huge buildings. My brain was having difficulty with the scale. The smallest of these domes enclosed a space larger than all of Rotveil.

While staring at the mass of domes ahead of us I caught sight of something heavy and dark out of the corner of my eye. My head whipped round, seeking it out, sure that I couldn’t be seeing what I thought I was seeing. But no. It really was an iron chain. Each link was more than twice the size of the gondola that I was standing in.

Oh, hey, I was standing up again. I hadn’t noticed myself standing up.

I couldn’t see either end of the chain but if I had to guess I would have put one end on the ground and the other attached to some part of the city ahead of us. Because that was the city, wasn’t it? It pretty much had to be. That insane collection of impossible structures was our destination.

“Did it just not occur to you that you might want to warn me that Moonstone is in the fucking sky?” I said.

“Would you have believed me?” said Jethro.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said.

Beneath each of the huge domed city districts was a darkness that I had taken at first for a shadow. As we got closer I could see that each of these shadows was a craggy outcrop of rock hanging from the domes like a terrible illustration of an iceberg. Closer still and I was able to see other chains. It was hard to make sense of the scale but I had no reason to believe that these chains were any smaller than the one I’d already seen. The chains were attached to iron rings bigger than the Badehaus Tavern. The rings were fixed in place by equally massive bolts driven deep into the rocky roots of the domes.

The Gondola rose at last to the same level as the domes. At this angle the glass of the domes almost disappeared and the iridescent reflection from the surface became just a rainbow shimmer in the sky above us. Now that there was nothing obscuring my view I could see so much activity inside. I saw people moving about on foot, entering shops, hanging out in front of homes as if doing that in the sky were the most normal thing in the world.

We were fast approaching an arched gap in the base of one of the domes. On the other side of the gap I could see the Gondola station. A much grander affair than the one at ground level. This looked like a hub station with multiple Gondola lines heading in different directions. The whole thing was framed with twisted wrought iron decorative arches and signs in an Art Deco style. It made me think of the surface level entrances to the Paris Metro but only in the sense that it looked like the thing that the Paris Metro was striving to emulate.

As the Gondola slowed to a halt I found myself wondering how strong was the connection between Arkadia and Earth.