Martyr woke up once in the backseat with Samsara in shotgun and Spectre driving. His limbs all felt so stiff, it felt like he hadn't been able to walk or properly stretch out in weeks. He forgot what walking even felt like.
After the incident at Umberville they decided to not stop to make any stops, the only exceptions being for gas and bathroom breaks. Bathroom breaks specifically were very tough because they had to disguise themselves to even go in the buildings. Martyr hadn't gotten out of the car since their last gas trip which must've been hours ago.
"Are we there yet?" Martyr asked the two up front.
"Not you too." Samsara laughed.
"We've already got Vanagloria asking every half hour. Pretty much every time she takes a break from practicing the move Styrmir taught her she asks." Spectre sounded annoyed at her.
"Oh sorry. But for real though, like how close are we?"
"I mean if we left Thursday at noon, and we planned on making it there before the end of Friday then we shouldn't actually have that much left." Spectre said while cruising at a soft 45 on the highway. "The light capital lights just turned off a few minutes ago."
Day and night on the islands are weird, they aren't exactly the same as earth despite the calendar and times being the same. Because of the way the islands are facing each other and the way they orbit around the earth, sunlight doesn't naturally creep in between the islands at the normal time that they would for earth.
So instead what the islands have to do is use the light and dark capitals to control the lighting of the islands. Phobos start to light up the islands at 6am and goes until 9pm where those lights start to dim and Deimos is responsible for darkening the potential light coming from the sun making an artificial night.
It's not a perfect system, sunsets and sunrises don't exist and the light capital has to get people to dim down the inside of Phobos so people don't go blind during the day. But at least the islands have a normal day and night cycle.
"Ugh, that's still too much." Martyr mumbled as he tried to stretch his leg out. "We should stop for a few minutes so I can spread my legs out. It's so cramped in here."
"We're stopping at the next gas station anyways, we are almost completely out. Plus Blair's gotta go to the bathroom, so you can get out then. Just make sure you stand away from sight." Samsara mentioned.
She was fiddling with some of his music CD's. Examining the cover and putting them in the trucks built in CD player, only to take them out seconds later for a new one.
"Martyr if you wanna stretch out that badly just sit in the truck."
Martyr sighed at Spectre's comment. "Yeah."
He still didn't want to go back there after what happened but his need to escape the claustrophobic inside of the truck outweighed this temporary fear of the trunk he had developed.
"Screw it, I'll do it. I might as well get used to sitting in the trunk."
"That's the spir…"
"SCREEEEEECH"
"Spec, what are you doing?!" Martyr yelled after his head slammed on the back of Samsara's seat. Thankfully it was a pillow or else the sudden brake would've seriously hurt Martyr.
"Look!" Spectre pointed at a creature scurrying away from the truck.
A small chicken-like creature was crossing the road for its life. It had an extremely long snake tail trailing behind it, flailing and flicking around. The chicken had big featherless dragon wings and a deadly crooked beak.
"It just shot out from behind that rock." Spectre still had his eye fixated on the chicken.
"We must be getting close to the forest area." Martyr said, looking at the surroundings.
He was no longer in the same flat desert area he had been in when he fell asleep. There was actual grass, small hills and mountains of dull orange and brown rock, funnelling the road into a very specific path. The rubble hills cover up any sort of view of the distance they used to have.
"Yup, we should come up on the town next to the borders soon." Samsara said, not as thrilled as the other two.
"That cockatrice must've run from the forest area all the way over here. I imagine we're gonna start seeing more creatures the closer we get to Fantasia."
"I'm sorry, what did you say that was?" Martyr asked.
"What, the cockatrice? It's like a combination of a dragon, snake and chicken. It's one of the animals that you can only find on Borealis, you don't see them on Earth or Australis. Actually they are supposed to be extremely rare. It might be a miracle that we just saw one."
"Heh heh, cock." Spectre had taken his eyes off of the cockatice and was looking over at Samsara with a big dumb smile on his face.
"Wow, you're a funny guy."
Martyr and Spectre burst into laughter at the straight-faced comment.
"Oh my god…" Samsara looked like she was trying her best not to laugh at them, holding back a smile. Not wanting to give in to the potty humor.
"Why did we stop?" Blair's voice came from the back window that had slid open in the laughing fit.
"Do you think they pranked us?" Vanagloria said naively.
"No we had to…" Samsara paused to stop herself from laughing after making eye contact with Spectre. "We stopped because an 'animal' ran out in front. Are you guys okay?"
"Yeah, we were leaning on the back of the truck so we didn't really get hit. It just shocked me." Blair responded.
"Why are you guys laughing though? What happened?" Vanagloria had a smile, eager to hear the joke.
"Don't worry about it." Martyr would've told her instead of Samsara. But he was too busy trying to breathe.
She popped her door open. "I think it's about time for a new driver. Martyr get out too, this is probably gonna your only chance to get in the trunk for a while."
Martyr took a few more breaths and finally settled down, opening his door and grabbing his backpack. "Okay."
Before putting his foot on the ground he hears a scurrying sound coming from the ground below making him flinch before fully committing to the ground.
Moving his boot out of the way, he sees a small purple scarab rushing over to the side of the road where the sand trickles into the road. The shell is a vibrant amethyst color at the center and fades into a deeper and deeper purple on the sides.
Martyr didn't know much about the types of creatures on the islands but he knew for sure that scarabs are only found in the rock area of Borealis. It got him excited to see all of the new creatures in the trails, the cities never had any cool animals in them so this was a first for sure.
Watching his step he heads around the back of the truck, he thrusts himself up once he reaches the tailgate, landing dramatically in the trunk.
He gets up just in time to see Blair slide into the truck and close the window behind her. Martyr could've sworn he saw her wink at Vanagloria.
"Are you still all good?" Martyr threw down his backpack and started stretching his legs out.
"Uh… yeah. Er… W-What do you mean?" Vanagloria looked caught off guard.
"Like with Umberville and all the other assholes that have been harassing you."
"Oh… no not really. It doesn't feel good." Vanagloria slouched down.
"There were so many people I was friends with that I saw in that crowd. I don't get why they would go against me so easily."
"Maybe it's peer pressure. Maybe it's just the actual assholes in your town pressuring them to be mean to you or something. Plus some of them were still cool with you. Like the counter boy." Martyr does one last stretch.
"Yeah, Pentas is cool."
"Plus you have us now." Martyr sat next to her by the back window.
"Thanks." The comment seemed to make her happy.
The car starts up once again and they continue down the road.
As they start to pick up speed, A little patch of green catches his eye.
"Oh hey look. Alfhiem." Martyr points on the left side of the truck, over the rubble piles of rocks and sand.
Popping out just over the rocks, extremely far out in the distance, Martyr could vaguely make out extremely big green mountains. They were extremely steep and looked almost vertical, like straight out of the background of a mario level.
"Oh wow" Vanagloria said in awe.
Martyr had dreamed of visiting one of the element regions on either island, but now that he could actually see one in front of him it was almost hard to believe.
"I don't think I've ever been to a true elemental region before." Vanagloria said, still staring out in the distance. "Alfheim especially is one that I wanted to see. It's got the tree of Yggdrasil, the capital El dorado and it's supposed to have the biggest number of different species in their forests. There's some much stuff to see."
"Yeah well lucky us, that's our first trail." Martyr remembered.
"Really? Wow I guess I never really thought about where our first trail would be."
"Yeah, the paper Vulcan gave me has the order of our trials." Martyr reached into his Jean pocket to pull out the purely white deluxe paper.
"I remember this, Nova made it right?" Vanagloria leaned her head over to see the contents of the light paper.
"Forest, Rock, Light, Dark, Water, Fire." The page read out in perfect black print.
"Ooo Vanahiem second, I think that's the one I wanna visit the most." Vanagloria said.
"What, cause it sounds like your name?" Martyr turned to look over to her, she was surprisingly close to him at the moment.
"Mostly. I don't really know that much about that place as I do others to be honest." She laughed.
"What does your name come from? I don't think I've ever heard it anywhere else." Martyr asked.
"O-Oh uh…" Vanagloria looked over at him. "I uh, actually gave it to myself."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I kind of just ended up on the front step of our orphanage without any sort of name or anything. And nobody really runs the orphanage, it's run by a chosen person in the town rather than a group of people, so every three days whoever is taking care of the orphanage switches with another person."
"So nobody really was responsible for giving me a name, those adults or the other kids there just called me "you" or "her". The exact thing happened to Blair." Vanagloria slouched back onto a random backpack.
"I don't know how old I was when I came up with it but… uh… how do I explain this… you know about the tree of Yggdrasil right?"
"Yeah, the nine realms representing the nine elements."
"You also know about the nine deadly sins Jesus made, right?" Vanagloria added.
"Oh of course I know about those. Everyone knows about Jesus, he was the first ever champion."
"Basically. So there's the normal seven that earth knows, envy, greed, pride, gluttony, sloth, lust and wrath, each one of those connected to an element. But Jesus inscribed nine into the tree of Yggdrasil, Vainglory and Melancholy being the extras that earth has forgotten about. The ones attached to the two extra elements."
"Yeah the galactic and void element that virtually no one has." Martyr recalled. It had been a while sense he had thought of the other two elements.
"Yep." Vanagloria's blue eyes were lighting up talking about this, it was kinda nerdy, but whatever.
"Vainglory, the sin of excessive boasting, is the one that 5 or 6 year old me thought was cool. So I named myself after it. Vanagloria is just the girl version of it. I still think it's pretty cool, in fact I think it's grown on me even more since I first got it."
"I think it's pretty cool." Martyr shrugged. "Honestly it's impressive that 5 year old you was able to come up with a name like that."
"Thanks, it means a lot to me." Vanagloria looked genuinely happy that he said that.
"Mine's also kinda not my name. I've actually only had my name for a decade." Martyr mentioned. "I had it changed because I used to get made fun of for it."
"Really? What was it?"
"It was Mak. Short for Makaveli."
"Oh, after the earth guy? I have a lot of his music actually, he was always one of my favorites." Vanagloria grabbed her bag and started to search through it.
"Oh you listen to him?"
"Yeah, I pretty much only listen to music from earth. I know it's nerdy as shit, but I stopped caring a long time ago." Vanagloria said, her arm halfway into a pocket.
"My mom gave me that name, all of my siblings are named after musicians from earth. She had always been a huge fan of earth music, but she never really realized it was embarrassing until I would come home from school to beg her to change it."
"Holy crap, you must've gotten it bad."
"I mean, it wasn't the worst thing, but I just didn't want to go the rest of my life having to have someone make a funny comment everytime they hear my name."
"Yeah I guess I get that." Vanagloria finally pulled her arm out of her bag. She had grabbed an object with two wires coming out of the end.
"Wait… is that a phone?"
"No. I wish. It's an iPod. It's like an older version that's only for music. I saved up a crap ton of money for this in highschool. There's a shop in a town by Umberville that sells a lot of earth stuff. Every weekend I would walk for an hour over there so one of the guys there would let me download songs onto this with a laptop. It was only 25 copper a song."
"Oh ok, that makes a lot more sense. I do know what that is actually. We used… a freind group of mine used to have a few of those we would borrow from each other. They each had all different types of music on them." Martyr laughed, he felt dumb for not recognizing it immedialty. Or even believing for a second that she would have something as expensive as a phone.
"Yeah, check this out." She unplugs the earbuds and hands him the iPod.
"Okay." Martyr just barely recognized a few names out of the hundreds as he scrolled down the seemingly endless list of songs from earth.
"I've been racking up that list for years, there's hundreds of songs on that, pretty much all of them are from earth. I've had to delete so many just to make room on that thing." Vanagloria looked very proud of herself, her face being lit up by the faint light of the screen in the dark of night.
"Oh hey, we were playing in the truck earlier." Martyr points at the screen.
"Oooo Ville Mentality is a great Cole song, honestly he's probably my favorite."
"Same, he's definitely one of mine."
"That one right there." Vanagloria points to a song just over that Martyr recognizes, "It's Raining Somewhere Else. That's Blair's favorite song."
"Oh cool."
"This is so weird, none of my other friends listen to music from earth."
"Yeah most people just listen to bands from the islands, like the Avengers."
"A few of my friends listen to some stuff from earth, I think more of them would if it were easier to access. I have shown some stuff to Samsara and Spectre but they weren't too into it." Martyr says, still scrolling through songs.
"I show Blair a little every once and a while but she likes chill music. She doesn't really like any sort of intense music I do. But yeah, I do think music should be more accessible to us. I mean, people from earth have it so easy with phones and all that."
"If the internet were a thing on the islands I would probably do nothing but screw around with a phone." Martyr finally reaches an end to the list of songs and hands it back to Vanagloria.
"You're gonna have to let me borrow this at some point, this is too cool."
"Yeah of course." Vanagloria carefully lays it back into her bag into a pocket with a blanket in it. She stuffs it deep into the fluffy fabric, shielding it from the dangers of the outside world.
Martyr watched as the rocky hills on the sides of the road slowly got shorter and shorter. Revealing more and more of the lush green mountains of the forest region.
The back window suddenly slid open from behind him and Vanagloria.
"Get down!"
"Wh… what? Why?"
"We're about to reach the town!" We're almost there!"