.
As I took to the air, Prince Manlon spoke again, the voice traveling with me as I flew. “Kiki, remain with my niece, as much as you can. And you may remove this bug, now. My deepest thanks for your assistance.”
“Yup yup!” the pixie who was still on my shoulder agreed, then put her little hand behind my neck. A moment later, I felt Light magic operating on the little formation, dispelling it gently.
My escort to the ‘sacred circle’ remained with me as I left. As we flew, they made it clear they would not let me fly toward the ‘Tall Forest’ by ringing me in and more or less forcing my course the other direction. Just for good measure, Mára joined them, declaring that she needed to keep an eye on me.
They didn’t obstruct me beyond that. They also did not speak to me, so I got no help from them as to how to find this ‘House of Gold Leaves’. I flew back in the direction of the ‘Valley Gate’ until I found one of those little plazas I had seen on my way in, and landed to ask directions.
Tëan Tír is many things overlaid on top of each other. At its most fundamental, it’s the location of my grandfather’s forest. Due to the Fairy King calling it home, the valley where that forest stands has become the spiritual home for all Faerie itself. But, due to the fact that Relador’s culture and economy are tightly tied to Faerie, and due to the fact that fairies make lucrative customers for mortal merchants and artisans, it has become home to far more mortals than fairies. Thus, it has become simultaneously an independent enclave of Faerie and a canton of Relador, somehow occupying the same ground. They do not share a government. They simply coexist.
Or, perhaps more accurately, the mortal territory is a webwork of little human hamlets and towns thriving in niches spread throughout the fairy territory, and they form the interlaced whole that is Tëan Tír.
I had just stepped effectively back out of Faerie into mortal Relador by landing in this plaza. The great majority in this place were humans and other mortals.
I walked up to a sidewalk cafe. It was operating like a normal restaurant with a wait staff and everything, except that the kitchen consisted of a cluster of carts.
My escort did not crowd me. Only one had even landed, and she remained outside the dining area, observing as I attracted the attention of a server.
His reaction to me was textbook. You can kind of see it in the eyes. Oh, a succubus. But I will give him credit for maintaining a good, professional wait-person’s attitude with me.
“May I help you, Honored Guest?”
He delivered the line, but the tone seemed a bit uncertain, like he wasn’t sure what I was doing there. I wanted to tease, You do know succubi dine out, too, don’t you? But, since I wasn’t there to eat, the timing for it was wrong.
Instead, I gave a slight bow and told him, “I’m simply a bit lost and need to ask directions.”
“Where do you need to go?”
“A friend told me to head to the ‘House of Gold Leaves’. Have you heard of it?”
His eyes seemed to say, Oh, of course. Like the destination made sense. From that expression, and the likelihood that he was seeing a succubus, I inferred immediately what sort of place the ‘House of Gold Leaves’ must be.
As expected of Serera, I guess.
Except for a slight twitch that briefly slipped through his mask, he valiantly held his respectful grace. Tiana had learned to put up with such things long before I showed up, but I appreciated the diligence he was putting into it.
He nodded. “Of course, Honored Guest. I’ve never been there, of course, but it is a well-known establishment. You should be able to look up the route on the navigation assistant at the station.”
It was a little jarring to hear such a Twenty-First-Century-Earth-like statement. Look up? Navigation assistant? Station?
I was still on Huade, right?
After he pointed out the aforementioned ‘station’, I thanked him and walked across the plaza to a building on high stilts that gave access to that aerial tramway that I had seen from the air. It appeared that all the plazas were actually business centers that grew up around such stations.
Before I climbed the stairs, I dismissed my wings. They were only going to cause me trouble navigating the building.
“Why are you using such clumsy transportation?” Mára demanded of me as she followed. She had difficulty with her wings on a turn in the stairs as she asked that, and finally dematerialized them as well.
Around this time, a couple of the lesser fairies also landed on the staircase behind Mára. They probably had noticed their superior struggling with the mortal elements and come to assist. With far less power, lesser fairies often blend into the mortal world to survive. These two were probably more familiar with this mortal environment.
I told her, “The instructions were based upon using mortal transportation. He didn’t know how to fly, so he couldn’t tell me how to get there in the air.”
More accurately, he’d instructed me where to find the tools a mortal would use, which were located in the station, but I had decided to go ahead and use the transportation itself anyhow.
“Just follow the tramway lines when you fly!”
I made a smirking moue and answered, “But I don’t want to~.”
She frowned back and said nothing further to me.
Was I doing this because I had guessed she would be unfamiliar with using plebian services like this? Not really, but now that I had noticed it, I was going to run with it.
I’m sure that a normal newcomer would not easily learn how to deal with a place like this, but for Robert it was perfectly natural. I mean, there are only so many ways to do public transit, and Robert had ridden such systems in several different cities on Earth.
The only thing I needed was the details on how to use the aforementioned magic tools, and, as it happened, instructions were conveniently printed on the walls of the kiosks where the tools could be found.
Just like the hotel in Royses, everything about their design screamed, ‘a transmigrator has been here!’
Of course, once I saw it, I realized that the presence of the aerial tramway itself had already been screaming that, and I had just failed to hear it. And it made sense that I was only encountering such things here in Relador. Transmigrators with a knack for building things would most naturally gravitate to places like this country, where the magic necessary to recreate Earth-like things on Huade was far more abundant.
The ‘Navigation Assistant’ tool was a box with a smooth top with instructions printed around it. My fairy sight showed me the presence of complex magic formations under the various symbols on the box.
The lesser fairy escorts looked disappointed when I didn’t hesitate, or get confused, or whatever other country bumpkin trope they had hoped to see me experience. Although the keypad was painted and lacquered and the ‘screen’ was a smooth piece of slate, it functioned no different than a touchpad keyboard with an LED display. I soon knew the route I needed and proceed to the ticket kiosk, where I simply pressed ‘purchase new card’ like I knew what I was doing, because I did.
The meanings of labels like ‘refill card’ or ‘purchase new card’ inside rectangles were obvious– to Robert, anyway– so I didn’t even need to refer to the printed instructions.
A ding sounded and a voice said, “Please deposit eight pence for the card and a minimum of eight pence for your starting balance.”
A light lit around the slot where the coins were to be inserted.
Eight pence is half a shilling. That’s way more money than it sounds like. According to my imaginary conversion rate, a penny is about fifty US cents, so the minimum total added up to about eight bucks.
I dropped a shilling into the coin slot and, after a moment, a thin card of polished wood came out. It had a picture of a watermelon slice…
Although I wasn’t sure, I suspected this was something Japan-related. I vaguely recalled a reference in an anime to watermelons, involving the rail system in Tokyo.
Definitely the touch of a transmigrator.
According to the instructions on the wall of the kiosk, I could get the money for the card and the remaining balance back when I turned it in. It was just a security deposit.
I took the card and moved to the platform entry. Sure enough, I just had to hold the card close to another labeled magic formation in order to pass through the entry gate. Magic RFID…
I shook my head as I went through.
