Chronicles of the Exalted Sun Child

Book 18-4.1: A Rakkisgrad Day

In the end, Yuriko spent an additional hundred Weyrmarks to purchase a couple of knives. The sheaths with straps were an extra twenty, but it meant that she could strap a knife on her arm and on her thigh. She’d eventually have to stitch space expansion runescript on her liberated backpack, considering she intended to live off it. For now, at least. She’d been awake since before midnight yesterday, and coupled with the hefty physique rebuilding and reinforcement, she was pushing the can on her endurance. She didn’t even manage to sleep in the motel room she leased! A waste of Weyrmarks, that. 

She paid the proprietor and left. The area around the pawnshop was rundown, and there were a couple of buildings with boarded-up windows and doors. Abandoned or condemned, she wasn’t sure, but this was the neighbourhood where she could probably squat in a building long enough to rest. If she needed to use facilities, she’d probably pay for another motel, or, far more likely, a love hotel. The latter allowed stays as short as a couple of hours, just enough to do her business and leave. 

Which was probably the point in their business model, come to think of it. Not that those establishments actively advertised their purposes, but they were easy enough to identify simply because they were the only ones that advertised short stays. 

Yeah, that could work. They were cheaper than full stays, too, she supposed, though that depended on the quality. How Amalia knew these details, Yuriko didn’t really want to know, unless it was just common knowledge…in Edgewater High? 

Not that she could really throw any stones. Her education in Realmheart under the Mishala clan had contained such wisdom after all. 

She ruminated on how she’d have to spend her days while figuring out what she needed to do to cross the inner ocean, or in the worst case, travel across the continents, while she carefully traversed the city. The plane of Irisvaile could be described as a doughnut, of sorts. The outer ocean covered the area beyond the continents up to the edge of the plane, while the inner ocean was just that, inside the continents. She didn’t have many details about the bodies of water and land, just what she saw as she crashed through the planar veil. Her main impression was that the landmasses looked quite symmetrical, and that, coupled with the plane’s imposed rules, just furthered the impression that Irisvaile was created purposefully. Possibly for the time dilation, or perhaps that was just part of things. 

It was about midmorning, a couple of hours ‘til noon. She was halfway to the work site when she spotted a thrift store as she rounded the corner. She still needed clothes, and she supposed a couple of sets would fit in her backpack easily, even without expansion. Besides, it was actually too hot to keep wearing a sweater. She normally wouldn’t be affected by the heat, but at the moment, she was already starting to soak her undershirt with sweat. 

The thrift store, Pennies on the Mark, contained more than clothes, and she was sucked into window shopping for a long while. She secured a pyjama set, a bit threadbare, but it didn’t have any unexpected holes. A grey hoodie that was thin enough to be bearable in the current weather, and that had sleeves that could be rolled up and secured. A white t-shirt and a pair of stretchy jeans. She had to keep using her stolen sandals as the store didn’t have any footwear for sale. All of it cost her another hundred and twenty Weyrmarks. 

Another twenty was spent to purchase a grooming kit which had a small hairbrush, a safety razor that she didn’t know what the use for was, nail clippers, and a pair of scissors. She brought a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a small canteen for water. It could hold half a Ren of liquid, and she’d have to inscribe the water condenser runescript lines for convenience. She also got a belt pouch so she didn’t have to squeeze her essentials into her backpack, or her jeans and hoodie’s practically nonexistent pockets. All of that cost another hundred and fifty-three Weyrmarks. She had four hundred and thirty-five left. 

That was still more than she had last night, though. 

Chuckling to herself at the newfound obsession with possessions, specifically, Weyrmarks or probably any kind of legal tender. Which was odd considering the Weyrmark bills were labelled as backed by the Westenland Government and not any kind of material good. At the very least, in the Empire back home, each coin was worth something intrinsically, though she was sure that some coins were lighter than others. 

Come to think of it, Astoria was the same. Astorian legal tender was also backed by the Republic of Astoria, as opposed to gold coins or jade. Dragon Fall City was even worse since their legal tender wasn’t even traded physically, and they forced her and other immigrants to surrender their precious metal coins. Her true body had complied, but had also kept a good portion of her personal wealth hidden anyway, which was good since Shangria operated on both kinds of wealth, though more weight was given to actual commodities rather than tender that had value based on a foreign government. Hmmm, actually, she was sure that Shangria Station had a piss poor conversion rate for Dragon Fall City’s credits. 

Ah, she arrived. 

The work site was a demolition job, as she’d learned from Lucian’s apartment. The building they were tearing down was actually part of a larger property that encompassed an entire city block. Tenement buildings that had already gone beyond the pale, and could be considered condemned if the city administration actually got off their collective bottoms and did their jobs properly. 

Huh. Anywho, there were five buildings in the block, arranged with the biggest one in the centre and one of the smaller ones at each cardinal direction. The border buildings were longer rectangles and positioned in such a way that they looked like walls, while the central building was cross-shaped. It was probably a couple of storeys taller than the other buildings. The northern tenement still had about five storeys left to it, while the others were about eight or nine storeys each. She could see the workmen clearing things off the current top of the building, and she could see heavy machinery on standby. 

She couldn’t actually see where Lucian was, and she didn’t want to just walk into the demolition site. Most of the surrounding structures were similarly dilapidated, but a chunk of area looked like they’d been recently cleared too. There was another construction site a couple of blocks away, but they were just digging foundations. Huh. Both sites were worked on by Bastion Construction. He could be at either site, come to think of it. 

Hmmm, she should really check. There was a good enough vantage point on the roof of an apartment building a couple of blocks from the demolition site. She made her way there just as the sun was at its zenith. The heat should have felt nice, but absent Radiance, it turned somewhat annoying. Still, the heat was something she could use to generate Radiance, but sunlight not containing the essential energy was wrong in several ways. It just cemented her distaste for the plane. 

She removed her hoodie and tied the sleeves across her waist. She shaded her eyes as she activated her Enhanced Sight. She spent a quarter of an hour looking at every worker on the site, but didn’t find her brother. He either wasn’t there or wasn’t on manual labour today. 

She skipped over to the actual construction site and immediately noticed her brother. She sighed with some relief as she gave him a once-over. Like the others, he wore a high-visibility vest as well as a hard hat. Lucian was about three years older than Amalia, which made him younger than her true body by a year. She’d turned nineteen a Season ago, though they didn’t really celebrate it, since Lilibeth’s birthday was a different date, and her true body was busy delving. 

Speaking of dates, she snagged a newspaper on her way here, and since she’d found Lucian already, she settled down to read it. Funnily enough, her wanted poster wasn’t in the papers. Rakkisgrad Daily was a broadsheet and… oh, there it was. The poster wasn’t on the front page, but buried in the middle of a secondary stack. But more importantly, she saw the date. 

Either Rakkisgrad was weird, or the entire plane ran off a different calendar, which, in hindsight, made a lot of sense considering the time flow. Either way, the date was 27 Iunius 1995. She wasn’t sure what the year marker was since the Daily didn’t have any indicators. She assumed Iunius was what they called the Season of Fire, or possibly a portion of it. Vague memories of twelve…months comprised the year. Did Amalia mean cycles? 

That was the trouble with Rakkisgrad’s language. It wasn’t Wojan or even a close derivative of it. That language existed, as far as she could tell. Wojan was the language of an older era, from an empire that had long since perished. What the empire’s name was, or exactly when the collapse occurred, wasn’t in Amalia’s knowledge base. 

Annoyingly, Westenland’s, which was the country Rakkisgrad was the capital of, language was called Westtongue, and the only reason she could understand it was because it was embedded deeply into Amalia’s psyche. Unfortunately, while Amalia was obviously a native speaker, Yuriko had an accent, both from thinking and speaking in Dawnspeak, Verdanian, and Wojan. As it were, her voice had a certain lyrical lilt to it that mainly came from Dawnspeak, which was odd because it wasn’t her first language. 

Of course, it was apparently embedded into her Anima in some way, since she had no trouble reading in Dawnspeak as opposed to the other languages. 

She blinked as she stared at the newspaper. The words weren’t dancing on the pages, and she’d been browsing for the past hour. Perhaps it was because this was originally someone else’s body that it didn’t have her greater self’s hangups. Or…continued improvements with Radiant physique had finally overcome her reading problems. One could hope. She couldn’t recall having such troubles with her greater self, but it hadn’t exactly been at the forefront. And, she didn’t exactly spend leisure time reading. Oh well, by the time she synchronised with her greater self, she’d be able to remember and look into it. 

And she was hungry. 

She patrolled around the edge of the roof deck looking for either another diner, or perhaps a grocery or mini-mart. She reached for the trail mix bars she kept in her backpack, but they were better as emergency food than anything else. She spotted a restaurant's sign, about five blocks away, that read Dollhouse Chicken. She blinked at the familiarity. They served chicken fillets in sandwiches for quick and easy meals. They were cheap too, at about a couple of Weyrmarks a pop. She could go for half a dozen, probably. 

With another lingering look at Lucian, she clambered down the fire escape down the side of the building, though she winced at every squawk that came from the rusting metal. She had to jump down to the alley once she was a single floor above, and she landed easily. Soon enough, she was inside the Dollhouse and in line. She forked over twelve Weyrmarks, waited for about five minutes at the side of the counter, then picked up her order. The Dollhouse served tap water for free, so she filled up her canteen. But when she tasted the water, her body seized the heavier metals within it and burned them for Radiance, which caused her hair to glimmer for a moment. Huh, alright for her case, but probably not really safe. 

She was back on the street, and soon enough, back on the rooftop. She ate all six sandwiches with gusto, drained the water from the canteen, then set about inscribing it with runescript lines.