Krahe walked through the door, finding the “restaurant” to be just as she remembered it. Of course, iy, it had not been here, but visiting that pce was her only reason to take a break at this rest stop in particur, and so her mind pced it in the first empty space it would fit. She held a great deal of nostalgia for this p particur, despite oing 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 eve in this mental struct, but sure enough, she could evehe burn of hot grease spitting from the meat-der as it rotated o an array of blowtorch-style gas burners. The whole apparatus was welded together from scrap, and an old surgical saw dangled from the plug o it. Besides the basipos, there was intensely garlicky white dressing and several varieties of faux-vegetables — seaweed shaped, textured, dyed, and fvoured to imitate real vegetables, whether extinct or expensive.
Wheook 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 ’t be any worse than I remember it being, 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 repy of her memories, somehoed all but the most surface-level enjoyment out of it. She spent awenty minutes or so at the rest stop, simply walking around before she returo the hovercar and took off once again.
Instead of arriving at her goal, she emerged from the tuo a sight very much alike to Neo Babylonia, yet also infinitely different. It was nothing more or less than Neo Babylonia fourteen years ter, a wretched image of desotion. Of the great towers, half were toppled or broken in half, and two of those still standing were now no more tha pilrs, 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 colpsed, allowing the sun to shine down, and stru from the surface crawled into the opening like iion into a wound.
As she flew over the desote ndscape, notig the many pces where things had to be filled in with ses 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 pce to live at its height, it had been no worse than that. One could realistically eke out a det living. In short, it had actually been one of the best pces to live in all of Megacity Gamma.
Not long before her death, Krahe had learhe flict 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 ey, as opposed to splitting ownership between multiple corporations. The man had held the widely unpopur opinion that Sector 8 should be ied with Sectors 5 and 6, which were uhe trol of Whitesto the time. Of course, the Tower Lord iion had bent his substantial resources towards fabrig a false sensus to fool the average inhabitant into thinking they and those they knew were part of a minority in disagreeing with the iion. 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 pn for the sake of their own survival. In the end, the simply-ower War had weakened Neo Babylonia to aent 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 leself with these cruel reminders, she pushed onward. She would reach him. She simply khat pce deep withior 7 to be her way out, but she also wao go there, o 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 plexes straight from a VRMMO she would py whenever she had to y low in one location for long periods of time. The work security had been sed 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 popur 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 catabs, 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 stomato a beach of bck sand against which waves of white liquid pped. Corrosive fumes lingered he ground, and the “water” itself was even more corrosive still. As Krahe looked out into the dark, she couldn’t help but feel an uling sense of the sublime, like there was something out there, beyond the fog ah the waves. She wasn’t sure if it was something other than herself or merely something subscious, perhaps even a maion of the Wound-like Grin itself, but she knew she didn’t want to e 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 dire 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 happehen, just as she sidered 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.
Akaso
