7.03 Welcome to Prosperity City
December 2384
Miori woke up, feeling surprisingly good, despite the aches she had all over her body yesterday. As she lifted the blanket that she was covered with, she saw the reason: strange medical patches were glued to her skin in various intervals, and as she pulled one of them off, she astonishingly enough found no remnants of any black spots she should have. She was lying in a familiar bed, she realized, slowly sitting up and inspecting the sleeping niche on which she first saw Annie about a year ago.
Annie herself was on the large corner couch, dozing while covered in another one of her blankets. The holographic images of the console in the middle of the seating area cast their light on her - mostly advertisements for various services and goods. Miori wondered if the machine could not be turned off.
Right. I’m really here.
Every time Miori saw this place, it was through Realm of Duels, a pocket dimension that copied Annie’s apartment through a strange interaction between the spell itself and the location of the target’s true body.
Miori slowly sat up and rubbed the back of her head, recalling the events of the previous day. After the interception by the machines straight out a mecha anime and the last survivor’s self-destruction, she was found by the same ginger man who helped her enter this world in the first place. They spent an hour or so sneaking around corners, during which Miori completely followed his guidance, given how she had absolutely no knowledge of the city or its many streets and alleyways.
Annie’s apartment was their destination, and the man, apparently the Rodent Regiment’s leader named Ka’Zarr or Zach, left her in Annie’s care.
“Mhhh…”
The little bundle on the couch was groaning, and soon Annie sat up as well, rubbing her eyes and blinking into the lights of the holographic projector, then her green irises locked onto Miori, and she jumped on her feet.
“Ah! Ah, right! You’re really here!” she exclaimed and hurried over to Miori’s side, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“I am…” Miori confirmed, peeling more of the medical adhesive strips off her body. “And thank you for treating me. It was just black spots, but it’s appreciated anyway.”
“You’re a freak of nature, you know that?” Annie commented dryly.
“Where’s that coming from?”
“Only black spots and aches! You were in the middle of a fusion reactor explosion when that pilot hit the kill switch!”
“Well, I’m not the one who took the brunt of it,” Miori spoke dryly, and Annie tilted her head.
I guess I’m spending the morning explaining Deogemma to her.
“Be my guest. I’d like to see her face while you do.”
“So, you’re two different people altogether, but also not really, and you now have two forms where you fuse into one consciousness, but one of them is more Miori, the other is more Bellona. Also, she’s literally a Roman goddess. Is that about right?” Annie asked in an exasperated tone, and Miori nodded. The two of them were sitting on Annie’s corner couch, ‘enjoying’ a breakfast that consisted entirely out of a strange energy bar that tasted like nothing, and a can of ‘Synthcaf’, which wasn’t more enjoyable, either. It tasted just as bitter and unfulfilling as Miori remembered.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter how it works, as long as it does,” Annie declared, hopping on her feet.
“Go and take a shower. I’ve got a change of clothes for you so you can blend in when we go to the city and meet Zach. Once we meet him, we can go over our next course of action, so you won’t be blown out of the sky again.”
“That only happened because we got careless. If that guy hadn’t grabbed us, then…” Miori started, but Annie shook her head. She unmuted the holographic projector and switched channels, and Miori was immediately faced with immaculate 3D holograms of herself as Ma Bellona, as a news anchor in a suit was displayed in a way that he looked directly at whoever was watching no matter the angle, reading off his script.
“Corporate Police are still searching for the terrorist responsible for yesterday’s devastating attack on Hayder-Katsuya’s Headquarters, which destroyed large swathes of its Deep Dive gaming infrastructure. Currently, no organization has claimed to be behind the attack, but experts believe that the ‘Ghost Freedom United’ net group is connected to the incident. Their members have long held radical beliefs that World of Infinity’s NPCs are real sentient beings – a laughable belief which has been described as ‘new age AI psychosis’.”
Miori tossed a quick glance towards Annie.
“Are you in…?”
“No. Ghost Freedom United isn’t real. It’s a honeypot group set up by the Corpos. Everyone who talked about joining them or met with them vanished,” Annie quickly dismissed her, and Miori nodded, focusing on the report again.
“A full lockdown of Prosperity City is in effect. The gates have been closed, and anti-air defenses are active. Attempts at leaving or entering the city will be met with lethal force until this terrorist is apprehended.”
“And there you have it… those defenses are no joke, Miori. I doubt even Bellona could withstand them for long. Missiles, rapid firing high caliber guns, anti-air burst munitions, you name it. The moment they detect you above ground, you’re in for a rude awakening.”
Miori grumbled quietly, but she had to admit that Annie was right. After the beating she took, she had no idea how long it would take until she could unleash the full power of Ma Bellona again. For now, she opted to follow Annie’s earlier instruction, walking towards the combined toilet and shower, even though she had her reservations about the arrangement.
“There’s a labelled compartment for clothes! Just push the button with the shower symbol and you can get started!” Annie spoke behind her as she approached the cabin, closing the frosted sliding door behind herself. She undressed, and just as Annie told her before, there was a compartment for clothes. She pushed it slightly further into the wall until it clicked and the compartment slid out and she could put her folded sweater and sweatpants inside, as well as her underwear. She turned around, facing a console full of buttons with familiar symbols and others that were less so.
One of them was displaying a showerhead with multiple dotted lines radiating from it, so she pushed it. With a little whirr, the toilet seat retreated into the wall and vanished behind a panel that slid in front of it and sealed itself with a hiss.
The water came immediately after – and to Miori’s horror the showers in this world still had the same problem as those back home. Unspent, cold water from the last shower came out first and shook her to her core, taking one or two seconds until the warm water from the heating elements reached the showerhead and her body, slowly bringing back the comfort of a hot shower.
“You wanna keep watching the news while you’re in there?” Annie asked from the couch, and Miori nodded – before remembering the frosted glass and answering vocally as well.
“Uhm, sure!”
She could hear Annie click one of her buttons and the news hologram appeared in front of her. It was muted on her end, but the scrolling information was all she needed.
“FREAK THUNDERSTORM RAGING OVER NORTHWEST WASTELAND. CITIZENS ARE ADVISED TO NO TRAVEL TO NEIGHBORING CITIES.”
“REPORTS OF APPEARANCE OF STRANGE BUILDINGS IN THUNDERSTORM TO BE INVESTIGATED BY CORPORATE POLICE.”
Miori stared at the news and cursed quietly, shouting a question towards Annie.
“So, people here know already? Did no one ever question that they look just like the buildings they ‘erased’ in their videogame?”
“No one’s seen them clearly through all the rain out there. Those freak thunderstorms also always happen when there’s something weird happening, like that invasion of orcs and goblins that I told you about when you came here the first time, so no one thinks twice about strange appearances or disappearances during that time,” Annie explained, and Miori nodded to herself once more.
Suddenly, various slits opened in the cabin’s walls and then she let out a surprised shout as she was blasted by warm air from all sides.
“You alright in there?” Annie asked, clearly a little amused by Miori’s surprise.
“I-I’m alright! That surprised me, though…”
“Ahaha! Guess they don’t do that where you’re from!” Annie laughed, and Miori grumbled a little. She pushed the compartment with her clothes open after everything was dry again, and to her surprise, her clothes came out cleaner than she put them in, and warm as well.
“Wait, this does laundry, too? And so fast?”
“Oh, yeah. It doesn’t do whole loads though, so you’ll have lots of people wearing the same things every day because that’s what fits inside the insta-cleaners. I have a proper washing machine as well.” Annie spoke dismissively.
“Anyway, your new clothes are in the compartment next to it.”
Miori opened the other compartment just as instructed and pulled the clothes from inside. A black skirt was the first she noticed, followed by a T-shirt. Plain and ordinary enough, but there was also a hooded jacket – the one she was made to wear yesterday in fact, now that she had a proper look at it. What at first appeared to be reflective stripes along its surface turned out to be luminous instead. There were knee-high socks as well, with attachable water-repellant layers that sported more of the luminous stripes. The set also came with platform boots.
“Not my usual style, but this actually looks really cute…” Miori had to admit, and Annie laughed from the other room.
“That was honestly way on the bottom of my list of worries when I bought them for you! But with this you’ll look like a proper resident of Prosperity City. But… let’s get ready, Miori. Zach is already waiting for us.”
“You weren’t visited by a witch and a girl with an eyepatch while I was asleep, by any chance?” Miori asked quietly as her and Annie left the apartment through the hissing, automatic sliding door. She was immediately greeted by a galleria, though the handrails and walls, meant to ensure that people wouldn’t fall off, were removed or smashed where they were made from concrete rather than steel, opening them up to the platform beyond that was clearly a later addition by people who weren’t architects or engineers. Food stalls, clothing vendors, a sketchy stall that sold ‘medicine’, a woman who looked like a fortune teller, though in lieu of a crystal ball, she clacked away at a laptop-like contraption with holographic displays – all these sights greeted Miori, and a similar steel plate above her told her that the same sights would repeat on the floor above, as well.
“Hm? No, no one came into my apartment while you were sleeping,” Annie commented, gesturing for Miori to follow her as she approached an elevator. It was a large platform, surrounded by a yellow chain link fence, with a large panel for selecting floors. Two dozen people were already on it and judging by all the glowing rings of already pushed buttons on the control panel, everyone wanted to be on a different floor.
“That’s not good. I told them to meet me by the houses out there, or in your apartment if they don’t find me. I’m wondering if something interferes with their ability to come here, since their portal got unstable and collapsed…”
Annie gave her a ponderous look before she stared ahead.
“That’s a problem, alright. I do hope they’ll find a way to get here if they ran into trouble doing so. And… if it’s any consolation, I don’t have any issue letting you live at my place until they figure it out.”
“Thanks, Annie… but for now let’s focus on the task at hand instead of worrying about what to do with me afterwards.”
Miori quickly ended the conversation there, though she couldn’t hide her unease from her partner.
“Don’t worry. Even if someone is interfering with interdimensional travel, Janus will find a way around it,” Bellona spoke to Miori’s mind, and she took a deep breath to calm her mind. She pulled her outfit’s hoodie over her head and closed her eyes, listening to the strange, ever-present droning of the city around her. Echoes of loud, yet somehow soothing voices reached her from faraway, the intermingling nearby voices of people riding the elevator, the humming and creaking of said elevator, all of it mixed with the ever-present prattling of raindrops that hit metal and boots that walked through the accumulating puddles.
The elevator ride took a few minutes. Every few floors someone entered the elevator and selected a different floor, keeping the platform on an almost constant state of half-full, and never let it move more than three levels at once. They went all the way to the highest floor, the only one where they could see the sky, cloudy and dark as it was. Multiple beams of light were projected onto the cloud cover – stray lights, meant to illuminate buildings and advertisements, while here and there more of those ‘mechs’ were visible patrolling the sky. Only then did the platform descend again, towards the ground floor.
“Does it always take this long?” Miori wondered as they stepped out of the elevator.
“Sometimes longer, depending on when most people come home from work,” Annie replied, walking by her side.
The ground floor was utterly devoid of apartments, but there were multiple kiosks, a corner store and vending machines down there. A sign on the wall directed towards a communal laundry room in the basement. The center of the floor wasn’t misappropriated like the others, in fact there were rows of benches, even what appeared to have been a playground at one point but got abandoned once the sky was taken away by the new steel roofing. It was currently used like the communal space it was supposed to be, minus the space for children.
There was no time to admire all that, as Annie led Miori outside of the building, and immediately her senses were flooded by almost familiar yet utterly alien sights.
Of course, she knew what it was like to live in a city in which news reports and advertisements were constantly played on big screens at major intersections, but her sense of familiarity was immediately shattered as a hologram of a shark nonchalantly floated along the sidewalk, with a logo reading ‘FIN’S FIN-ANCES’ stamped on its side that made Miori suspect that this creature had in fact nothing to do with maritime life.
In front of her was a crossing, not dissimilar to the one she knew from Shibuya. There were screen-like apparatuses mounted on the surrounding tall buildings, serving the same purpose as TV screens and billboards do on Earth, though these ones projected lifelike images in perfect 3D in front of themselves. Beautiful women were holding beauty products, food items, or similar, technological marvels like robotic limbs and neural implants were presented as mundanely as the newest phone was on Earth.
For a moment, Miori lost herself in the strange parallel world’s advertisements.
“Did you ever drink a glass of water and wondered: who or what was this inside of before? Here at Aquaroid, we are ready to answer that question with a resounding: No one! Our advanced asteroid ice mining brings water back to Earth, with the guarantee that you are truly the first organism to ingest it! Don’t drink someone else’s wastewater, drink Aquaroid!”
“Are you ready for a life in the space colonies? Opportunities await! Whether mining in the asteroid belt or sleeping in a cryo pod on a colony ship’s fateful voyage, OUTSTAR will give you a new life that you can be proud of! Terms and conditions apply!”
“Is your ocular implant acting up? Why not try OPTISAFE, Hayder-Katsuya’s new software package at an affordable price? Kick back and let us do all the calibration work for you! Enjoy your life while we do the worrying for you!”
Annie bumped her elbow into Miori’s side all of a sudden.
“We’re here. You can stop staring into space, now.”
Miori blinked and looked ahead. In front of her was a neon-lit hallway, with a simple sign crowning the door at the back, reading ‘Styx’.
“This is…?”
“A bar,” Annie confirmed, and Miori nodded, before Annie continued with a warning.
“Listen. I let you have your moment out there because it must be new and dazzling for you, but from now on, try not to look around like an alien that sees a city for the first time in its life, okay? Despite appearances, you’re currently being hunted in this city. Don’t do anything that would give you away as an ‘outlander’. In fact, if we’re talking to anyone we don’t know, let me do all the talking.”
Miori grimaced, but she understood, signaling it with another nod of hers.
“Good. Alright, let’s go in and meet ‘Ka’zarr’,” Annie said with a little chuckle and led Miori right through the door. The neon lights continued in here, tinting the place in a moody blue, as slow rock music with synth elements played from speakers set up all around the place. There was one central bar section and multiple niches with tables and corner couches set up around the room, and the clientele looked quite different from the bar patrons Miori knew and served.
Men and women with robotic arms and eyes were spread out across the room, with some of them wearing leather jackets with intricate designs on the back. One was a flaming skull with mechanical eyes; another was a robotic arm that flexed and showed off a cartoony mechanical bicep. Miori quickly understood that these were probably people she shouldn’t get entangled with.
The ginger man waiting for them in a niche looked a little out of place, with the only mechanical part about him being the blue glow in his eyes. He sipped on a drink, looking around nervously until he finally spotted them and hastily gestured for them to sit down next to him.
“About time you show up PPiper… I’ve been waiting here the past hour.”
“Yeah, sorry. Our hero and I needed our beauty sleep,” Annie countered with a grin, and the man let out a little groan.
“Can’t you take anything seriously? You were the one who tried to tell me how ‘ghosts’ are real, and now you’re acting like there aren’t people trapped outside of the city!” he snapped at Annie and she immediately raised her hands in a defensive gesture.
“Woah, calm down! I’m sorry, alright? Anyway, show us what you have, will you?”
The man stared at Annie for a few more seconds before he let out a sigh, then he faced Miori and offered her a courteous nod.
“You can call me Zach. I’ve been on the wrong end of your halberd a few times as the Rodent Regiment’s leader. Before I learned the truth, that is.”
“Uhm… I’m Miori,” she replied, and rubbed the side of her neck. There was a palpable awkwardness filling the air between them, so the man quickly put something that looked like a tablet on the table, which immediately projected a hologram. From what Miori could tell upon seeing all the differently sized vertical rectangles with lines separating them from each other, this was a map of the city.
“Here’s what I got. You want to get out of the city to the buildings that popped up in the wasteland, and the Corpos know that, so their armed forces have their eyes on the skies. Every hovercar, delivery drone or even bird gets pinged by their targeting systems. Seeker drones are flying around, sniffing for their ‘terrorist’, which means they probably got a DNA and scent sample from your fight in the sky.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Miori interrupted him, and he blinked.
“What do you mean by that? They can pick up on trace amounts in the air. We’re probably already on a timer until one of them follows your trace in here!” Zach complained, but Miori shook her head.
“When I’m transformed, I’m functionally someone else, DNA and all.”
Zach’s eyes were skeptical, but after a while he nodded and continued.
“You can forget flying out of the city. Even if you fend off all the mechanized forces they’ll send after you, there’s still the matter of anti-air defenses mounted on top of buildings and on the walls surrounding the city. But luckily for you, that’s where all their eyes are currently focused.”
“Meaning the streets are open?” Annie asked skeptically, and Zach shook his head.
“Far from it. Corporate Police are stationed along the checkpoints and the gates are, predictably, closed. However…”
He made eye contact with Miori.
“I’ve fought against you. You have abilities to blow through ten centimeters of steel, don’t you?”
“We should have those,” Bellona confirmed and Miori relayed her words with a nod. That appeared to satisfy Zach, who zoomed in on a freeway that went through the entire city like an artery.
“Here’s the idea, then. You’ll stay low, so that anti-air installations won’t be able to target you. Corporate Police along the checkpoints will definitely try to stop you, armed with mechs, or on police bikes. Maybe even with armored combat vehicles, trying to match your speed. The freeway is currently closed to the public to mobilize Corpo Police all over the city, so if you keep to it, you’ll keep collateral to an absolute minimum. If you cause some chaos, all eyes will be on you, and we’ll be able to follow you to the outside with far less trouble.”
Miori stared at the map, tapping her finger on the table. She appreciated how quickly this pair moved to prepare a plan for her, but still, there was one thing she needed to know, especially from Zach.
“Why are you doing all this? Help me, just like that?”
Zach rubbed the back of his neck and appeared like he pondered whether he should answer that question, but then he spoke.
“It’s a long story, and a little bit of an embarrassing one. You see, after our last fight, there was this witch, and-”
“And who the fuck are you guys? Corpos? Cops? Not a single piece of steel on you, clean like newborn babes,” a new voice spoke, and all three heads turned. One of the rugged men from the bar had moved to their niche, and the lenses he had in lieu of eyes were whirring as they telescopically extended and contracted to focus on the people in front of him.
“We don’t want trouble, we’re just here to talk somewhere the Corpos can’t listen to our every word, alright?” Zach spoke up and the man let out a chuckle.
“Listen to this eloquent fuck! Comes to our turf and says he ‘just wants to talk’, making little schemes and shit with his map.”
Zach sighed and turned off the map, quickly stowing the tablet in a bag.
“Alright, you two. I think we have overstayed our welcome. Let’s leave.”
“Not so fast, flesh boy!” the mechanized man said and pushed Zach back on the corner bench as he attempted to stand up. More of the rugged men and women stood up, and soon the trio had no way to leave their niche without going through them.
“What now?” Zach hissed and the man with the robotic eyes grinned, showing off a row of chrome teeth. Miori grew tense as she felt the hostile intent of all these people surrounding them.
Can we transform again?
“Most I can manage right now is our half-fused form that we had back in Capitolium. But that should be enough for a bunch of small fry like them.”
The man with the chromed teeth leaned closer towards Zach, speaking quietly.
“Haven’t roughed one of you prim and proper fucks up in a few weeks… and since you walked in here, I might as well-”
He was interrupted by a loud bang that made Miori’s ears ring. A strange white liquid sprayed all over the table and the augmented man let out expletives, holding a stump where he previously had his shining, metallic arm. Jagged, sharp metal edges bore witness to how violently the rest was ripped off by a ludicrously powerful projectile, with more of that white liquid spraying from pipes, and Zach held a smoking gun that looked like a revolver, though the barrel and cartridges were way bigger than what Miori had ever seen from any gun on Earth. The ruined remains of the arm landed on the bar counter, and the bartender quickly retreated into cover.
“My damn steel! You’ll pay for that, flesh boy!”
“Anyone else trying to get smart with me?!” Zach shouted, though his voice sounded shaky and his eyes darted around, betraying fear and adrenaline, while Annie started laughing all of a sudden, drawing a gun of her own.
“Oooh, you should listen to him! He’s Ka’zarr, a mighty Einherjar of Valhalla!”
“Can you shut the fuck up about that for just one day?!”
The pair looked like they were about to continue their back-and-forth, but the other augmented humans in the bar stepped in to attack them. Miori sat right in front of Annie, and as a punch was thrown her way, she cursed and transformed into her hybrid form, catching the punch with her open palm before she jumped off the corner bench and hit the man in the groin with her knee, sending him flying into one of his gangmates.
Miori quickly assessed the situation, now that it had escalated: there were half a dozen augmented people around them, two women and four men. She saw them reaching for weapons of their own, which looked like crude sawed-off shotguns that had strange electronic parts fixed to them with duct tape. Miori immediately grabbed the arm of the woman right next to her and applied the superhuman strength of her fused form.
If the woman still had biological eyes, they would have certainly bulged out of her skull as the mechanical arm bent backwards until the hand folded into the crook of the arm. There were no screams of pain, and the woman even tried to attack Miori with her other arm, until she hit her with an uppercut, right in the thankfully unaugmented jaw, making the half-robotic woman collapse on the ground like a ragdoll.
From the corner of her eye, she witnessed Zach shooting both arms off an attacker’s torso, leaving him stumbling backwards, with metallic stumps that bled white. Annie’s gun in the meantime turned out to be electricity based and less-than-lethal. Arcs of lightning shot into the first guy who tried to draw a gun on her, causing the man’s body to lock up, rendering him unable to even scream before he collapsed. Annie laughed, applying a few more shocks, though her carelessness rendered her blind to another man’s attempt to shoot her in the back of the head. Miori rushed towards her and wanted to shout a warning, but before she reached them, the attacker’s hand exploded in another splatter of white blood as Zach reacted fast, defying his fearful state.
Miori breathed a sigh of relief, though she had to quickly summon a katana into her hand and block a swing from another attacker, who aimed for Zach’s jugular with a machete. Miori held him locked in a clinch, just long enough to witness the surprise at the suddenly appearing weapon on the man’s nearly inhuman visage before she encased her left hand in a gauntlet and used it to punch him in the face, cracking the optics of one of his artificial eyes and sending him to the ground.
The entire exchange took only a few seconds, and by the end of it, almost all of their attackers were lying on the ground, bleeding mechanical fluid from their ruined prosthetic limbs, though they were still alive. The last one standing was one of the women, who quickly walked backwards from the scene and pointed at Miori.
“You’ll pay for this! I know who you are! You’re that terrorist with the blue hair! The Corpos will make novelty cables out of your guts, you hear me?”
Miori’s eye twitched and she wanted to rush the woman as she turned to run out of the door, but Annie put a hand on her shoulder.
“Leave her. Thanks to the commotion they know we’re here anyway.”
Miori grumbled in response, undoing her partial transformation and pulling her hood over her head, turning towards Zach and Annette.
“You seemed awfully prepared for a confrontation like this.”
“Welcome to Prosperity City. It’s an awfully violent place,” Zach commented as he popped the drum out of his oversized revolver and held a finger over two bullets, letting the spent four cases drop to the floor as he turned the cylinder downwards. He fished more bullets out of his leather jacket and put them into the gun one by one with some difficulty as his hands were shaking, while Annie was kneeling on the ground next to the unconscious attackers and dug through their pockets.
“Thanks for the save, by the way! You truly are a warrior worthy of Valhalla, my knight in shining armor!” Annie teased Zach, and he let out a little annoyed grunt of acknowledgment before he grabbed a bottle of strong-looking alcohol to wash the shock down. He coughed.
“…are you looting them?!” Miori asked Annette in disbelief.
“Sure am! Because those guys belong to motorcycle gangs! Metal Guns and Flaming Skulls precisely! Weird that they’d be together instead of shooting at each other… guess they have a truce right now or something…? Oh! There it is!”
Annie fished an object from the pockets she currently dug through and tossed it Miori’s way, who caught it and immediately inspected the thing in her palm. It was a key.
“That transformation was the best you can do right now, hm? Doesn’t look very fast, so I just secured your transportation for our daring plan to break out of the city!” Annie declared with a grin, and Miori raised a brow. She had a strange feeling that this woman would turn her stay in this world wildly chaotic.