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Blue Diamond Dreamer
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The next tunnel gets uncomfortably dark, but there’s only one way to go and it is thankfully short. I end up squeezed between the sisters as Anet and her pack go last.
“Tell me what it’s like outside, Sam!” Anet speaks up from behind me.
“Outside? Like… where to begin? Outside the walls? Everywhere else? My home?”
“Well, everything not inside the walls is outside them, right? Yeah, start with your home!”
“Uh. Well, I grew up in a city, not as big as the one out there, but pretty big! We lived above a bookstore run by my parents.”
“What did they sell?”
“Uhh... books?”
She takes a moment to process this. “Oh, I thought - okay! Wow.”
“Anyway... some of those books were about my ancestor, and that inspired me to go hiking through forests, mountains, hills, anywhere I could visit. Even the jungle! And that’s just my home planet… This one’s kinda one huge desert, I’m afraid.”
“Ooh, huge!”
I try steering the conversation back towards her. “So um, why don’t you guys like visitors?”
“Oh, well, long ago we got all kinds of visitors! But they were always fighting each other, and everybody wanted us to pick a side and was really pushy. So our ancestors decided to get really small and hide in a really cool city until they went away! But we spent so long hiding, that we forgot how to run all the really cool stuff, so we kinda moved away from the city.”
“...Just how far have you regressed, and why haven’t you tried to reclaim that old tech?”
“I dunno, and I dunno! I’ve been trying to learn it, but I don’t find much working stuff either. Just like you guys!”
“Oh. So, what do you know about these reducers?”
“They built a whole bunch of them to shrink everybody down, then turned them off so they couldn’t be followed. My ancestors tried turning that one on when they moved out of the city, but they thought it was broken ‘cause it wouldn’t make us big again! Looks like they were half right.”
“Well, it’s a good thing it didn’t reduce them twice! Now uh, what are the current elders like? They’re not too keen on outsiders, I take it?”
“There’s two of them! Elder Stone is the head queen, and she’s kinda stern! But fair. Elder Styx is almost as old as she is, and he knows all kinds of stuff about the old days! I like him the best, he’s really entertaining. Um, Stone always tells us to be vigilant around strangers, but Styx probably wouldn’t mind meeting one. He knows a bunch of stories about the wars they had in the old days, but he seems almost wistful about them.”
“Sounds like I wouldn’t mind meeting him either.”
Jaina’s pace slows, and Anet presses against my back before realizing the holdup. I try to start a new line of questioning before the awkwardness sets in.
“W-what’s the deal with you two? Sisters, right?”
“Yeah! I’m the older one, actually. I love exploring and collecting stuff. Jaina likes being a guard, but there isn’t much here to guard against. That’s why she tags along with me on my scavenging expeditions.”
Jaina cuts in. “Hey, watching the walls is an important duty.”
“Of course, of course! And it’s fun too.”
In the middle of trying to explain the concept of a bookstore to Anet, I see a light at the end of the tunnel.
“We’re here,” says Jaina.
“The village?”
“No, the fungal wastes.”
I step out of the tunnel into artificial daylight. The ground beneath my feet is strangely soft and spongy, some kind of purple fuzz. I look up and see we’ve come out in another large room, one with strangely familiar furnishings rising as high as mountains off in the distance. Between here and there, strange trees rise from the ground forming a dense canopy of what I’m just now realizing are mushroom caps. It’s like stepping into a completely alien world… which is saying something since I was already on one.
Jaina starts walking towards the mushroom forest. “We’ve got a long way to go to get upriver.”
“There’s a river?”
“Yes, right down the middle of the room. We cross upstream so anything that falls in the river doesn’t go down the drain.”
“The drain… and where does that lead to?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to find out.”
>Prolong the journey by taking the scenic route - for science
>Hurry to the village before… does night even fall here?
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