As I was going down the stairs, I noticed how unusual this place was. Every step was almost the same as the last one, and looking at the details on the tiles used to make them, and everything else around this building, I could tell that whoever owned this place was quite the extraordinary person.
I wondered if it could have been that lady from before, since she did say she was in charge of it but… she didn't carry that air of superiority that nobles did, or the arrogance of powerful merchants and mages.
I reached another floor of the building and carefully looked around the halls. There was nobody around, but I realized that this floor was almost identical as the one above it, including the silvery gate. The only difference would be that the doors on this floor had their numbers starting with a seven instead of an eight. This gave me some suspicions about why they have those numbers but I'll know once I reach the lower floors.
Going to the next lower floor I saw the numbers starting with six and the silver gates being in the exact same spot as the one over it, and I realized that not only was every floor likely to be the same as the one above it, but that the numbers on the doors represent how high they are. As to why they would use three digits to indicate that, however, I couldn't understand.
A few short minutes later, I reached the floor with the numbers starting with one, and I noticed that the hall stretched further out, with what appeared to be an exit of the building next to a desk. The stairs where I came from still went deeper—likely to a basement—but I would prefer to make it outside first, so I started going to what I supposed was the exit, while gripping the knife in my pocket.
When I was a few steps away from the exit, I saw that there was a man sitting behind the desk. I had felt a presence as I was getting closer and feared that it could've been an assassin in waiting, but this man didn't seem to care at all about my presence as he didn't even lift his head up to look at me.
He was dressed in dark blue clothes. He looked like a middle aged man, and as far as I could tell, he wasn't a warrior, a mage, or any kind person fit for fighting, which meant that he was either a spy or… just a commoner.
I looked towards the exit again, and realized that it wasn't open, as there were gates made out of glass blocking the path out. A weird choice as a material for a gate, but there might be more to them than what can be seen. I turned to the man again, who ignored me as he kept on looking down into something on his desk, so I went for the gate.
Before I touched the door, a loud buzzing sound came out of it, which made me retreat my hand and take a quick leap backwards. I had heard a similar kind of sound before in my life, it was the sound from artifacts with lightning magic in them—usually for traps—which meant that this gate was more dangerous than it seemed.
I quickly turned to look at the man by the desk, fiercely glaring and readying myself to pull the knife out and fight. However, the man seemed completely unfazed by what had happened. It was as if he either didn't hear the lighting magic coming from the door, or simply didn't care.
"Hey!" I called out to him. "What is the meaning of this?!"
"Huh?" he replied as he looked up to me with a confused expression. "Is there a problem, miss?"
I was taken aback, but I wasn't going to let him get away with it. "Didn't you just hear the magic on the door?! Did you do that?!"
"Magic?" he mocked, "There is no magic in this building. I was just opening the lock on the door."
"No magic…? But—"
The door buzzed again as it had done before and I snapped to look at it. Behind the glass doors stood a middle aged woman with a small dog on a leash. She stretched her hand to grab on to the door and I prepared for the worst. But just as I was about to shout for her to not touch it, she pushed, and the glass doors quietly moved with her hand, after which she just walked into the building, completely unharmed.
"Thank you," she said while looking at the man behind the desk before turning to look at me. "Good day."
She then let go of the glass doors and started making her way to the back of the hall, to the same silvery gates that the other woman had used before on the higher floors. I stared, with my mouth almost hanging, not quite understanding what had happened.
I quickly shook my head and looked back at the slowly closing glass doors. I rushed over to them and grabbed them before they completely shut, hoping that maybe the magic inside wouldn't activate after that other woman used them. Luckily, that seems to be the case as I pulled the glass gates open and quickly made my way out.
Once I was outside, I looked back inside the building, to see if someone was going to chase after me, but to my surprise, the man in the dark blue uniform was just as uninterested as before and the woman was already walking into the opened silvery gates, completely ignoring me.
"What is… going on here…?" I asked myself in a whisper, taking a few steps back to look up at the towering building.
I could see each floor on the building with several glass windows that covered a lot of the walls on each floor. Some windows were opened, but most of them were closed, with a curtain of different colors either decorating at the side or blocking the view to inside.
I tried looking higher up at the top of the building by taking more steps back away from it, but right then, I heard a loud high pitch sound coming from my right, which was followed by a growling sound, akin to the ones of a fierce beast, however, not quite the same. I turned, surprised at the sudden attack, and found a strange thing standing a short distance away from me.
It had a long front that extended for about a couple of steps, and from there, I could see something that resembled a glass window. There, I finally noticed a man inside this thing. He was strongly waving one of his hands back and forth, not like a greeting, but rather like someone who's trying to swat a fly.
Perhaps this man needed help, but when I turned to try to see if I could aid him, he moved and his head popped out from the side of this strange thing. "Hey! Darling! Get out of the fucking road!"
"What?" I replied, astonished at his attitude.
"Can't you hear? You're getting in the way! Someone's going to run you over!" he continued before going back inside the thing that I thought he was trapped in.
The thing started growling again, and I prepared myself to stand my ground against it. It suddenly started moving in my direction, so I lowered my posture and readied the mana in my body to fight, but the strange thing stopped once again, followed by the irate voice of the man trapped inside it and the loud high pitch noise from before.
"Hey!" someone else from the side of the road shouted, causing me to give them a sidelong glance. It was an older man that was steadily walking in my direction. "Come on, girl, don't be causing issues on the road."
"But that man is trapped in there, and this… beast… is threatening to attack me!" I argued back, getting ready to slice at the strange thing.
"What are you talking about?" the old man replied with a confused expression that only lasted a couple of seconds before it changed to one of realization. "Oh! You must be someone from the other world! I see, I see!"
I was surprised that this man knew something about another world. "How do you…?"
He chuckled with a shake of his head. "The people that started showing up five years ago act like that from time to time," he said before beckoning me. "Now, don't stand here. Come."
"But the beast—"
"It's better for you to be here instead," he interrupted me.
I turned to look back at the man trapped inside the strange thing. He was getting more and more irate the longer he stood there, and I couldn't help but worry that it might be because of some sort of curse that he was suffering from being trapped inside that thing, but the old man seemed to know how to handle it, so I started making my way back to him.
As soon as I did, the strange thing started quickly moving on the road, and I readied myself again to fight, but when it was about to go past me, the man that was trapped inside turned to look at me from an opening on the side of the thing. "Stupid fucking bitch."
"What is the meaning—"
But before I could say anything, the strange thing started picking up speed and went down the road before turning on a corner and out of my sight.
"There's plenty of strange things in this world for people like you, huh. I can even see that you're ready to fight, just like a lot of people did in the past," the old man said, causing me to turn to look at him.
"I… shouldn't have helped that man? He seemed trapped inside that strange thing," I asked the old man.
I was taken aback when he laughed out loud before shaking his head. "No, girl. That was just a car, and he was driving it. Think of it like a covered carriage that moves without horses."
"But that man seemed to be in so much… distress. And that thing was growling like a beast."
"Oh yes, I agree that he was quite rude, but that's just how people are when they're in a hurry. Do try not to think about it too much."
As I blinked a few times while trying to take in what the old man said, I noticed that from another corner of the road, another 'car' appeared, but this one was much larger than the other one, with words written on the top part that read 'Midtown'. I was awed by both the size and the noise of that thing, which stopped a few steps away from me and the old man.
"Ah, here's my ride. It's a bus, so don't be scared of it," he said as he turned and started making his way to it before stopping a couple of steps away. "Oh, there's an institute for People with Magic Talent a couple of blocks down that way. You should go there and try to find people there to help you. Maybe someone working there is from your world and they know you."
Having said that, the man quickly walked over to the side of the so-called 'bus', getting inside of it after a couple of people walked out of it. A few seconds later, the bus made a high pitch sound and with an even louder growling than the car it kept going down the road. As it went by, I saw more people sitting inside, all them calmly waiting, sleeping or just carrying an expressionless face. The old man smiled and waved his hand as he went by.
After the bus passed, I also felt a hint of something foul in the air. My instincts told me it could be poisonous, but it was in such a small amount that almost every living creature could ignore it and be fine as long as they didn't take it from the source directly. I followed it as best as I could and realized that the source was the bus. I took a small amount of air to try to determine how that could be and realized that it was similar to the kind of smoke that a fire would leave, even if it wasn't like anything I'd smelled before.
"Those things… do they move with fire?" I wondered, frowning as I watched a handful of cars and buses go by on the road.
I felt inclined to grab one and tear it apart to see what kind of magic they were made out of, but I think it would be a better idea to go to that institute for People with Magic Talent that the old man mentioned. They could answer the questions that I have about this world, and with luck, mine as well.
The old man had pointed in the same direction as the bus that he got on, and he said it was only a couple of blocks away—whatever that means. So I started steadily walking in that direction, taking in as much about this world as I could, from the signs on the merchant stores to the random numbers that were written on some of the road corners.
It didn't take long to cross a road on to a set of houses which were packed together one after the other, most of them sharing a wall, save for a small section that divided some of them with a grassy patch of land and a small road made out of a similar material as the larger roads.
The houses were somewhat varied, even if they all shared a similar design. However, most of them had metal fences at the front, with the second floors of their houses even having metal bars on the windows. That made me wonder about the kind of houses these were, since the only places that would have bars like that would be prisons but… they seemed too nice to be such a thing, and they were even lacking guards or any form of defense. I even saw someone leave, dressed no different than how I was, and walking just as if he was leaving his home.
The likely scenario was that… they had those bars to keep people out, which means that this world is probably not as safe as it seems.
My suspicions were proven right after I crossed another road and stopped by one of the grassy patches, where I saw a group of men cornering a young woman. The men were hiding their faces with a hood, so I couldn't see how they looked, but the way they were acting was no different than the common bandits in my world.
As for the young girl, she seemed to be shorter than me by about one head, she had short dark brown hair, and while her skin was pale, it wasn't quite as pale as mine. She tried moving aside from the men, allowing me to catch a glimpse of her terrified expression before one of them blocked her path again, which told me everything I needed to know about the situation. I made my way to them.