Quantum wrath, p.4
Quantum Wrath, page 4
The sunset was sort of nice, though, I guessed. The sun here was a mesmerizing shade of purple that varied from lilac to deep violet depending on the time of day. Right now it was a deep, dazzling periwinkle with lavender halos around it. Soft, lacy clouds dispersed the light in a weirdly ethereal way.
“It’s a good one,” I said in my best attempt at a neutral voice. It came off as flat and stoic to me, but the gatekeeper seemed to accept it well enough. “And we’ll be glad to put some food in our stomachs.”
“Of course,” the man said pleasantly. He accepted the two thin sheets of rhodium from me and nodded. “Judging by your payment, I’m assuming that ‘we’ is just you two, right? Because if not…”
“Just us two,” I assured him.
A tinge of relief crept into his features, and he nodded as he reached for the lever that unlocked the gate.
As soon as it cracked open, I ushered Dougy in ahead of me.
I heard the sound of footsteps shadowing ours, but they cut off with a stomp, and the woman following us grunted in frustration as the wooden gates crashed together behind us.
“The toll to enter Pheretri is one nova note, if you please,” the gatekeeper said crisply.
“I don’t have any money,” the woman spat. “You really think these pathetic little twigs are going to keep me out? I can– ow!”
I smirked but didn’t turn around.
Laylix might’ve had an earthy, pristine atmosphere, but their technology was surprisingly good for where they were at in time, and they took their security very seriously. By now, I knew that the innocent-looking tree trunk walls and gates had wickedly sharp, white metal spikes that would shoot out at any sign of threat or force. And that was just the mild defense.
Dougy cast one last look over his shoulder and turned to me with an expression of visible relief. “Thank god. What will we do–”
His words morphed into a bark of fright as a whole row of gleaming amber street lamps shattered above us.
“Shit,” I snarled, and I clamped my fingers shut on my forearms as I drew into the shadows to just breathe for a moment. “Gimme a sec.”
My zenith was still buzzing like mad after using it to get us here. After the first few times this had happened in Laylix, I had learned to keep it under strict control. But this whole day had been incredibly rattling, and I realized my power was practically bouncing off the walls at the moment.
Still, I had plenty of practice with reining it in. I opened my eyes and fixed my gaze on the nearest working street lamps, which were about a block away. Once they stopped flickering, I knew for sure that my shit was under control.
I allowed the breath to flow through me for a few more moments before I stepped out again.
Luckily, we were on a deserted street near the outskirts of the city. That hadn’t been the case when this had happened to me before. Of course, the Laylix people were too peace-loving to consider throwing me in jail like some places might’ve, but the occurrence had been enough to earn me the distrust of the local people.
Although to be fair, that had seemed like a losing battle from the start. The people of Laylix were overwhelmingly homogenous as far as physical appearances went. They tended to be slight and slender, not to mention cheerful and simple. The sight of a hulking, cold-eyed dude like me striding around the streets seemed to make them uneasy right off the bat.
Still, the people we passed were surface-level friendly, and they all gave us cordial nods that lent another small-town air to this city.
Despite his extra-plain appearance, the sight of Dougy at my side seemed to earn me some points, and a half-smile twisted my mouth at the thought. I had a feeling my squirrely friend would be very happy here.
“Whooooa,” he breathed as we made our first glittery woman sighting. “Would you look at that? You really weren’t kidding. I-Incredible…”
The woman wore a skimpy leaf shirt and an emerald-green skirt like a sarong. Her skin glittered with all the shades of golden sand as she swayed past. She batted her eyelashes at me and tilted her head coyly as she stopped to chat.
I sighed and hitched a poor attempt at a smile onto my face. I guessed it wouldn’t hurt to hear the latest news, and this woman was a good enough way to get it.
“Hello,” she fluttered. “I’m Liliya. And you are…?”
“Heath.”
“Heeeeeath,” she repeated slowly. “Hmm… May I call you… Heather-man?”
A sudden urge to groan almost overcame me, because this exact thing had happened to me on my last visit.
Here in Laylix, almost everyone had a name that was related to nature in some way, often to plants specifically. For the women it was things like Lily, Iris, Willow, Ivy… Or that was what my translator turned them into, anyway.
The men’s names tended to be things along the lines of Cedar, Fox, Brooks, and Kestrel. Some of it reminded me so hard of the 2000s back on Earth that I almost physically cringed hearing them. Heather was definitely an unusual name for a man here, but it was the closest nature-related thing these people could associate with my real name. So they seemed to have decided to make up for it by adding “man” to the end.
Yeah, people really didn’t change here.
If Dougy had a translator, I was pretty sure he’d be cracking up at the moment, but as it was, I had to pull my face into a normal expression and carry on with the conversation.
I wondered if anything at all had changed since I was here last. Probably not– at least not now that technology had entrenched the classes firmly in place. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know.
Unfortunately, the glittery women tended to be a little on the dull side, and this one proved to be one of the dullest. When I asked for the latest news, she immediately launched into an account of events that basically sounded like small-town gossip.
Afterward, I said my goodbyes to the woman with as much courtesy as I could muster and then got us going again.
“H-how was she able to understand you, Heath?” Dougy asked with a dazed look back at the glittery woman. “Do they have the same type of translators we do back on Earth?”
“Sort of,” I said.
People on Earth had come out with that type of technology centuries ago, and plenty of improvements had been made since then, but so had a good amount of other dimensions I’d been to. I wasn’t as certain about the timeline in those cases. But in some places, the tech was advanced enough that I could use it to my unique advantage. A few of my earlier warps were some quick dimension-hopping trips for the sole purpose of acquiring and fine-tuning a translator that was superior to the ones on Earth.
“So where’s yours?” Dougy frowned in confusion. He overcame his usual avoidance of eye contact enough to scan me quickly up and down.
I tapped my temple. “It’s an implant.”
Dougy looked a mixture of horrified and impressed.
“It’s… in your head?” he whispered.
“Yep.” I shrugged. “I figured I already have a screw or two loose after warping so many times, so why not take a calculated risk? It’s worth being able to communicate pretty much anywhere.”
Of course, my translator wasn’t perfect, but the fine-tuning I’d done had ensured that it was pretty damn close. I needed the device to be durable enough to withstand my warps, and complex enough to send out a signal to any style of translation device it detected, but still be able to learn. At this point, every language I heard was constantly being decoded by my device and added to the catalog.
Laylix’s translators weren’t anywhere close to mine, but they were good enough for someone to get by easily in this dimension specifically. Laylix had so many languages floating around that almost everyone had some sort of device working for them. With one of those on him, Dougy would do well here.
“Will I get one as an implant?” Dougy asked with an apprehensive look.
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “But don’t worry. People were so wary of tech here that there’s been a lot of effort into making good translators easy to implant. The process isn’t much more complex than microchipping a dog.”
Then I realized that this comparison would be lost on Dougy, who was too young to remember the days of pet dogs, much less putting microchips in them.
“It’s quick and painless,” I amended. “Trust me, you’ll be fine.”
Dougy nodded hesitantly and lapsed back into silence as he took in the city around us.
The power poles here were shaped to look like more pale-trunked trees, and the lines strung between them were made to look like delicate green vines. Pretty much everything was vaguely naturey in appearance, at least on the surface. But despite the butterfly-shaped cars on the aerial tramway overhead, there was no denying that technology had a very firm toehold here. Sure, it was centuries behind most of the stuff that existed back on Earth now, and in many other dimensions, but it was still gaining ground in a way that these people had never expected.
In fact, Pheretri had once been a tiny, extremely rural town that shunned any intrusion of city life– which included basically any form of “modern” technology. The people who had lived here had firmly resisted the call of the city that lured so many other rural Laylixians to the urban centers of the dimension.
But eventually, the city had come to them.
The countless buildings that had sprouted up between and around their shacks at least had the courtesy to try and conform to the whole nature-loving aspect of the rural area with their tree-gates and butterfly-trams, but eventually it had become no secret that the wealthy technocrats were here to stay.
We passed one of them now. He didn’t look like the type of elite I had come to expect from my time in other dimensions. He wore a boater-style hat with a green silk ribbon and a design of woven vines on it. His whole outfit matched, from his green bow-tie to his woven-leaf shoes. Even his characteristic array of nose piercings all sported a green-colored jewel.
But he was dictating something to a tiny, gnome-like woman who hurried to keep up with his long strides. She was hurriedly tapping away at a tiny, leaf-shaped device with a glowing screen like she was recording his words, and she had a little green headset wrapped around her head.
Yeah. Apparently, Laylix’s technocrats had decided to disassociate themselves from technology by forcing their servants to carry it around and use it on their behalf.
And their servants were almost always gnomes. I had no idea if it was because the kindly little beings would work for cheap wages, or because the technocrats personally wanted a specific population of people to become disliked as the most blatant technology-wielders of the place, but that was the way things were here.
I approached a restaurant called the Village Taste. It looked a little upscale, but not so upscale that I would be stared at. I thought it could be the perfect place to get some nourishing food in Dougy’s stomach, gather some news, and make a few connections without some wealthy, green boat hat-wearing bastard staring down his bedazzled nose at me.
Or staring up his nose, in this case. I towered over all these idiots.
Last time I visited, the restaurant here had been called the Village Market. Now, it appeared to double as both a restaurant and something along the lines of a kooky consignment store.
I was already hoping we could get Dougy a temporary translator, so he wouldn’t be totally out of the loop walking around. These functioned more as earpieces and wouldn’t help him do any talking, but it was better than nothing until I could figure something else out.
The glittery workers greeted me immediately when I came in. They ushered several slim, sparkly, corduroy-clad men out of their seats at the bar.
Which was good, because I took up about two seats in this damn place.
Dougy squeezed himself into the one next to me pretty comfortably. A smile leaped onto his face at the sight of the women.
Their lavender eyes widened at him.
One of them whipped into motion. She started by pouring a frothy mug of golden ale and pushed it across the counter toward Dougy.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” she greeted us with an intrigued look. “Such interesting gentlemen, too… Especially this one. His skin is like alabaster. His aura is, too.”
Dougy couldn’t have had any idea what she was saying, but the cooing tone of her voice seemed universal, and so was the way she trailed her fingers across his hand as she passed the beer over.
She took in his blank expression and then turned back to me. “Do you not speak Pheri?”
“He doesn’t,” I admitted. “I’m hoping to get him a translator. A temporary one for now, just so he can understand stuff while we’re getting around.”
Now that we were on the topic, I glanced up at the backlit shelves behind the bar. This appeared to be where the best technology in the restaurant-store combo resided, and it was flanked by two burly security guards who had clearly been brought in from out west.
There were all sorts of trinkets on the shelves, and about half of them were unrecognizable to me. Something that looked like an odd, digital monocle seemed to be the most popular item, along with devices that, to my eyes, looked like those little tin kaleidoscopes that I had seen back on Earth in my childhood.
What the hell even was this shit? These people’s technology still looked like children’s toys.
The fact that my childhood on Earth was several centuries ago weighed heavily on me for a moment, but I shoved it firmly to the side as the glittery woman bustled over to one of the shelves.
She brought back three small earpieces and laid them out on the counter in front of me for my inspection.
“These three would be my recommendation,” she said in a light and airy tone that most women here sported.
She gave me a hazy but roguish smile that didn’t match her tone, and I had to chuckle a little. From what I knew, the fact that the Village Taste sold any sort of technology already would make them a little rebellious for the straight-laced folk around here. But the workers becoming well-versed in the ways of the devices would bring it to another level.
I looked over the three devices closely.
They were all earpieces. One had a slender, peach-colored surface that I thought wouldn’t stand out much from Dougy’s pasty skin, which I immediately liked.
Translators weren’t frowned upon to the same degree that a lot of tech stuff was around here. After all, plenty of Laylix’s cities spoke their own languages, and “outsiders” were welcome as long as they didn’t cause too much trouble or parade around like the ultra-rich. But regardless, the less eye-catching technology someone had displayed on their person, the more someone in Pheretri was likely to trust and accept them.
“Can we test this one out?” I asked as I tapped the peach-colored one.
“’Course,” the worker said with a slightly ditzy smile. She picked it up and crooked her finger at Dougy, and then she leaned forward across the counter toward him. “Come here, sweetheart.”
Dougy looked hypnotized as he followed the gesture of her finger and leaned forward. He seemed torn between watching her lavender eyes, her full, coral-colored lips, and her glittery, well-shaped cleavage.
She smiled smoothly as she looped the earpiece over his ear and nestled it carefully into place.
“How does that feel? Does it vibe okay with your energy?” she asked.
“G-g–” Dougy faltered. “Oh… I can understand! Oh, holy shit. Wow.”
These words were clearly gibberish to the worker, but Dougie’s amazement was palpable regardless, and she gave him a startled look.
“He’s from the countryside,” I stepped in. “He’s pretty unfamiliar with this stuff.”
The countryside of Laylix was incredibly vast, underexplored, and home to a variety of different cultures, yet generally regarded with benevolence and nostalgia. I thought it was the perfect backstory for Dougy, even if someone did decide to ask him any annoying questions.
“The countryside,” the worker repeated with another ditzy smile. “How delightful. I thought he seemed pure. There’s like, no little fringy bits on his aura at all.”
“The purest guy I know,” I said truthfully and ignored the hippie nonsense she was spouting.
Glittery girls and their auras, man. I hoped mine was black all over and boiling like tar or something.
I cut off as two plates full of steaming food were set in front of us by the other worker. She pushed the food toward us, and then rested her elbows on the bar and propped her chin in her hands.
“So,” she said with a coy smile. “Two mysterious travelers have arrived in Pheretri.”
“For now,” I grunted. “Just looking to get my friend here settled in.”
The doting, glittery women seemed to be the one exception to the way people didn’t welcome my arrival around here. They tended to regard me as the dangerous stranger who popped up here and there before vanishing into the night, but they didn’t seem to hold it against me. If anything, it seemed to increase my appeal to them.
But then again, I guessed that in a dimension as sheltered as this, anyone different enough to draw attention was bound to appeal to women as simple-minded as these.
Suddenly, I noticed the lights hanging over the bar were flickering. The chattering men near the door all fell silent and shot me a suspicious look.
“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself. I was sure my zenith was entirely under control now.
It was only then that I realized the lights weren’t flickering because of me.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind, and a poisonously sweet voice spoke.
“So, you thought you could get rid of me, huh?”
Chapter 4
I closed my eyes, exhaled slowly through my nose, and then turned around.
“What the hell do you want?” I asked in a low voice. “And how did you even get in here? Also… why are you wearing that?”
The murderous blonde woman had undergone an entirely unconvincing transformation in the half hour or so since we’d parted ways. She had unsuccessfully tried to scrub off her pink lipstick and smudged mascara, and now she was wearing an outfit that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a hospital orderly centuries ago back on Earth.
