You've been this way before. You're buoyed by reassurances, nudged along by the throbbing 4/4 kick that metronomically keeps driving on. You know if you miss this bar, you can catch the next one. It's such an engine, constant, progressive, passing through vintage redwoods and on to the bigger parts of the city bathed in a neon glow. Translucent curved blocks making up the shapingway to the atrium?a long stretch. Passengers milling about.
It's a train. Powered by ideas and ideology. From the bulky, chunky aesthetic, a critic might be quick to point at it and dub it "steampunk", but there's no steam. Just clean vapors, almost minty in their scent. The train has no buffoonish cartoon grin, but more of a sly, laced grill. A cargo worthy of heist, and every approved passenger a bounty hunter acting as a mercenary until the next station. Just this once.
One of the cars in the back is well-served, stuffed to the gills with the familiar sight of gold bars. The bars are actually hollow, containing far more precious chemicals inside. These chems are volatile, however, and must be mixed carefully in the clinical breadth of a spacelab. Like explosive spices set on cleansing the palate, nourishing the palette, and wiping all traces of a meal well-eaten when done. But the memory always remains.
Jittery figures nearby. They're not holograms, but they're displacing themselves. Clockteasers. Blessed with innate power to distort time and space?reality?in their immediate vicinity for increments up to several minutes, perhaps more if especially skilled. Some of the adepts carry what appear to be old pocketwatches, fob and chain, with the hands removed. Not as timepieces, but as weapons. The standard outfit of a clockteaser is to drape a heavy coat that looks almost fryable in the moist summer heat: gilded, ornate hankerchief entwined down one side of the nape, and (optionally) a cane in the right hand. Their faces are hard to see and their eyes are yellow-green, bordering at times on an orange glow. The caneheads may suggest comparisons to familiar animals. Among the more common are zebras, otters, and a fish or two (whale?).
When the next train pulls into the station, it's like the steady four-on-the-floor becomes a nervous, skittery but still predictably rhythmical pattern, soon meshing with the rest of the environmental ambience. It sits on a parallel track next to the first train, headed in an opposite but equal direction.
A senior clockteaser sniffs the air, her round nose not unlike a cartoon dinosaur's. Plump, green, and bulbous, almost verging on the furry rather than any scale-based origin. She clasps her hands together, one pointing a trigger finger to the chain that binds her should she need to lash out. But not here. This is a place of peace, where attacks are few and the few deaths that do happen are excruciatingly violent and well-deserved. Next, the senior begins to communicate with her disciple, making polyglottal tones as clear as a clarion's call and far superior in its musicality to any language you've ever heard of. And it is so gentle and douce.
Coffee shop nearby pans into view. This place's familiar addictions, beans brewed from the desert pouches of the hiwibaggi. Some of the plants from that part of the world have been brought here too: they look like cactii, but they are growing ripe, orange fruit with an almost metallic sheen. These fruit are called intio and are used as a seasoning, on occasion, for the "coffee" of this world. They are unfortunately also rather addictive, so they are used sparingly as to avoid injuring future life.
