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225 - Neo Babylonia Pt. 2 [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2024-09-04 02:09:35 +0000 UTCKrahe walked through the door, finding the “restaurant” to be just as she remembered it. Of course, in reality, it had not been here, but visiting that place was her only reason to take a break at this rest stop in particular, and so her mind placed it in the first empty space it would fit. She held a great deal of nostalgia for this place in particular, despite only eating there twice before it was wrecked. Never once had she been able to find a doner kebab quite like this one.
She wondered if she could even eat in this mental construct, but sure enough, she could even feel the burn of hot grease spitting from the meat-cylinder as it rotated next to an array of blowtorch-style gas burners. The whole apparatus was welded together from scrap, and an old surgical saw dangled from the plug next to it. Besides the basic components, there was intensely garlicky white dressing and several varieties of faux-vegetables — seaweed shaped, textured, dyed, and flavoured to imitate real vegetables, whether extinct or expensive.
When she took the first bite, Krahe almost expected to be disgusted, but no such thing happened. It was just as heavenly as she remembered it.
“Guess it can’t be any worse than I remember it being, can it?” she thought. Even still, it was a hollow feeling. The mere knowledge it wasn’t real, and even worse, that it was just a replay of her memories, somehow sapped all but the most surface-level enjoyment out of it. She spent another twenty minutes or so at the rest stop, simply walking around before she returned to the hovercar and took off once again.
Instead of arriving at her goal, she emerged from the tunnel to a sight very much alike to Neo Babylonia, yet also infinitely different. It was nothing more or less than Neo Babylonia fourteen years later, a wretched image of desolation. Of the great towers, half were toppled or broken in half, and two of those still standing were now no more than inert pillars, their windows all blown out. Still, even still, that Wolf and Raven hoload persisted. It was garbled nonsense now, but it persisted. The cave ceiling had collapsed, allowing the sun to shine down, and construction from the surface crawled into the opening like infection into a wound.
As she flew over the desolate landscape, noticing the many places where things had to be filled in with sections of other cities, Krahe couldn’t help but stew in how utterly galling the fate of this city was. Even if it had been a generally shit place to live at its height, it had been no worse than that. One could realistically eke out a decent living. In short, it had actually been one of the best places to live in all of Megacity Gamma.
Not long before her death, Krahe had learned the conflict that destroyed Neo Babylonia had been instigated by a man known only as the Tower Lord, who also came out victorious. As the name suggested he owned one of the city’s towers in its entirety, as opposed to splitting ownership between multiple corporations. The man had held the widely unpopular opinion that Sector 8 should be integrated with Sectors 5 and 6, which were under the control of Whitestone at the time. Of course, the Tower Lord in question had bent his substantial resources towards fabricating a false consensus to fool the average inhabitant into thinking they and those they knew were part of a minority in disagreeing with the integration. This had not worked — the people of Neo Babylonia had seen through better lies, and so their malignant hidden overlord had simply chosen to rape and kill them until they accepted his plan for the sake of their own survival. In the end, the simply-named Tower War had weakened Neo Babylonia to an extent where it had no choice but to submit to Sectors 5 and 6, and by proxy, to Whitestone.
In spite of the bitterness, in spite of the journey seeming to lengthen itself with these cruel reminders, she pushed onward. She would reach him. She simply knew that place deep within Sector 7 to be her way out, but she also wanted to go there, one last time. Even if Sauer wouldn’t be there.
The more she focused on that goal, the more time began skipping forward, much as it would in a dream.
And so, she found herself far beyond the half-dead corpse of Neo Babylonia, traversing not real locations, but vast subterranean complexes straight from a VRMMO she would play whenever she had to lay low in one location for long periods of time. The network security had been second to none due to the developers themselves being anti-corporate cyberterrorists and using the game as a recruitment tool, making it one of the few games widely popular among individuals of Krahe’s ilk.
The caves gradually narrowed until she had no choice but to go on foot, and she spent several hours trawling through dungeons and catacombs, even through the hollowed-out insides of long-dead, yet unrotting gods. Eventually, she emerged out of just such a god-corpse’s carved-open stomach onto a beach of black sand against which waves of white liquid lapped. Corrosive fumes lingered near the ground, and the “water” itself was even more corrosive still. As Krahe looked out into the dark, she couldn’t help but feel an unsettling sense of the sublime, like there was something out there, beyond the fog and beneath the waves. She wasn’t sure if it was something other than herself or merely something subconscious, perhaps even a manifestation of the Wound-like Grin itself, but she knew she didn’t want to come face to face with it.
It wasn’t as if she had to worry about that right now, however. She was stuck.
And so, she decided to follow Casus’ advice, and call for help. Looking around, she stared off into the distance vaguely in the direction of the sky.
“I’m sure someone is listening, so if you are: I could really use a ship right now.”
A few moments passed. Nothing happened. Then, just as she considered how she might better get the message across, she abruptly found herself standing atop an enormous, tanker-like ship, the shore just barely visible in the far distance.
