Silas watched Ronin sleep and thought about the fight atop the veranda at the school. His Aether capabilities seemed to be getting stronger over time, a predictable outcome, but still surprising.
Scalpel said, "He's going to leave us all behind if we're not careful."
Looking at her, Silas cringed a little at the wide smile on the girl's face and asked, "How long is that going to be that way?"
Scalpel looked at a watch she pulled out of her pocket and said "Another three hours or so."
Shuddering, Silas said, "Everyone's present now, so we need to go over Ronin's initial planning."
Sellius nodded and tapped his datapad, causing holoprojectors to float into place in the middle of the pod, a table rising from the floor to accommodate the hologram forming.
"Neyk is...a dangerous city to put it politely, but I was able to find a few buildings among the guildless," Sellius said quietly.
Silas asked, "The guildless?"
Sellius nodded and said, "In Neyk, order is maintained via the existence of guilds. They're held together by a group of core beliefs and goals shared by all members of the guild. Anything from religious belief to the pursuit of wealth can be the core of guild life, but one thing is common among all the guilds. They have their own rules and requirements that must be met in order to maintain membership in the guild."
Trigger said, "Sounds complex."
Sellius nodded and said, "To keep things organized and simple, AeEx has, for quite some time, offered all guilds access to a 'title' system. The titles indicate anything from guild membership to accolades for actions done. For example, one man recently ate ten thousand donuts, and now bears the title of "Donut King"."
Delta looked up from her laptop and said, "Sounds like nonsense."
Sellius smiled and said, "Nonsense that the many guilds in Neyk have taken to like pigs to a trough. There are a lot of things in Neyk that are acceptable, and taboo, that we'll need to learn if we want to survive, but most of it is pretty easy. Our best bet would probably be to join a guild, since the guildless are almost universally abused and taken advantage of."
Silas asked, "If being 'guildless' is such a liability, why would anyone choose to avoid a guild?"
Sellius shrugged and said, "You'd be surprised how many people choose freedom over an easy life."
Looking at the escape pod, Silas said, "Yeah I guess I can understand that."
They'd all made the choice to remain with the Bureau, even after the entire facility that many of them had joined to have access to was now solid concrete, inaccessible to anyone. Silas realized that they and the guildless might get along better than she'd thought.
Interrupting her thoughts, Scalpel said, "I think we should let our leader here make that choice though."
Watching Ronin breathing slowly, Silas said "Yeah...I think something big is going on...we'll do well to maintain our order."
Trigger touched a panel on the wall and part of the metal making up the hull of the pod became clear enough to see through.
"What happened up there, Silas?" Trigger asked, watching the scenery fly by.
Silas looked at Scalpel and said, "I...I'm not sure...Ronin and Marcus were fighting something...I know that's for sure...but when I tried to...all I could see was blinding light."
Scalpel began explaining what had happened since she'd sent Trigger and Sellius away and Delta pulled up another hologram, this one of Marcus's data.
"Turns out, Marcus has always been the center of confusion within the Bureau. Apparently he just showed up one day with Director access and everyone just...kind of accepted him without question," Delta said quietly.
Silas pulled Ronin's head onto her lap and said, "What is going on…"
Ronin slept heavily, barely seeming to breathe as he rested, but everyone else was far too awake to sleep, despite the long trip.
Several hours after they'd barely escaped the facility, they arrived in a small town far from the school.
The town was one of several locations with trains that ran on the "River Styx", a line that went to Neyk.
Frequently the victim of bandit and deviant attacks, the River Styx was not a rail line for the weak of heart. Even the track seemed to exude darkness, made of a substance the engineers had dubbed "New Moon Aether", it was pitch black and nearly indestructible.
On the black rails rode the train, Charon, constructed of "New Moon Aether's" polar opposite, "Full Moon Aether".
Pure white, the train flew on the rails at speeds approaching the speed of sound, named Charon due to the unusual amount of people who died within its cabins.
The rumors said one out of every six people who rode Charon never made it all the way down the rail.
Ronin stood and stretched as he left the pod, saying, "You guys ready?"
Silas nodded and grabbed his hand as they walked, with Scalpel spiraling her finger to the side of her head, saying, "You'd think they were going on a romantic vacation instead of running away to save their lives."
Trigger shrugged and said, "This kind of thing is the closest any of us get to a vacation, they may as well enjoy it."
Scalpel's smile began to twitch, changing expression for the first time in hours and Delta said, "See, there's always something good to find. All we need now is for you to change shape to an adult, so we're not constantly being rubbed on by a child."
Scalpel moved close to Delta and pushed the hair around her cheeks upward, making all the hair on her face floof out and said, "I may be a child in body, but my mind is all adult."
Ronin spoke as he walked, "Scalpel, Delta is probably right."
Silas turned and looked at her as she walked backwards, saying, "Besides, we're going to the big city now! Who knows what will happen, you want to be able to defend yourself, don't you?"
Scalpel thought for a moment and said, "Hmmm...you might be right...maybe I'll change forms on the train. I have been like this for a little while now, after all."
Up ahead, Ronin seemed to be having some problem with the ticket vendor, saying, "That's odd...usually we've got tickets handled ahead of time. Give us just a few minutes here."
Waving to the rest of his team, he pulled them off to the side to let other buyers through to the vendor and said, "It looks like we were at least partially right."
Cocking her head Scalpel asked, "What do you mean?"
Silas rolled her eyes and said, "Our government clearances now require confirmation. Looks like at the very least they're trying tighten our leashes with the Bureau in a weakened position."
Ronin nodded and said, "That's a best case scenario...it's also a possibility that the guy Marcus and I fought, Daruik, is working with them...and they're trying to track us down."
"So we're paying our own way now," Trigger asked.
Ronin nodded and said, "It looks like it. We'll probably have to assume whatever money we've got in our personal accounts is the only safe money to use. All Bureau researchers' accounts are highly protected so our ins and outs can't be tracked in case our research goes into...legally gray territory. That's part of the reason our missions payouts are sent to us directly, it was part of an effort to make us more independent from them."
Everyone nodded, except for Delta who had a look of shock on her face, saying, "Oh my god...I put all my money into the Bureau saving accounts...I've got NOTHING."
The other members of his team had done something similar to this, but with the exception of Delta, they'd all been doing research into devices that could, and likely would, be checked out if purchased from the wrong place.
Bureau membership got them a lot of leeway to to be sure, but not even being a member of the Bureau could get them out of trouble if a government facility thought they were going to kill a bunch of people for an experiment.
Ronin said, "Well I'll handle the tickets here. For now we have to assume we're completely cut off from any of the benefits we'd had from the government OR the Bureau. If anyone asks, we're just friends going on vacation in the city."
Walking to the vendor, he said, "I'll just pay for the tickets myself."
She smiled and nodded, needing to follow policy if it arose, but Ronin figured she wouldn't go out of her way to bother them.
Travel in and out of Neyk was officially illegal, but the government didn't enforce it unless it was really a problem. A lot of people came in and out of the city, bringing goods and services to and from...services that the government unofficially needed, like trained and hardened mercenaries and even specialized forms of ellenium they didn't acknowledge the creation of, but needed for facilities.
Neyk was a dark and terrible place where science and research went unchecked and unhindered by the moral quandaries that plagued government facilities.
In addition to alchemy, research on Aether was decades ahead of its time in the city, an entire city that basically functioned the way the Bureau did with absolutely no rules or inhibitions.
The desperate situation they were in aside, Ronin actually looked forward to seeing the ways that Aether had been put to use.
Receiving their tickets, the cost of which staggered Ronin somewhat, being close to a hundred thousand total, he gave each of them their ticket and they moved to the waiting area for Charon to arrive.
As it was later in the evening, getting close to eleven, Ronin was surprised to see that the waiting area was somewhat full Some of them fiddling with their V.U.I.s, some of them watching movies on datapads, all of them seeming to be fairly poor.
Looking around, Silas said, "I knew a few people in some of the towns I've lived in who did this...saved money for years, sometimes generations, to get out, only to go to Neyk. Some of the people here just spent every cent their family had ever owned to get into the city."
It made sense. Getting into the city couldn't be easy for the transport company. Likely everyone here was being classified as 'labor' to justify the movement of people on the line.
Ultimately, Ronin decided, it wasn't his problem...though it filled him with unease to realize that he'd have to ignore people who needed help...and concern that he may have to do it more frequently in the very near future.
Scalpel walked to where the train would come, sitting down with her legs swinging gently over the edge. Some person Ronin had never seen before went and tried to talk to her, and after a few moments she was holding a knife to his throat, pinning him to the floor.
It had happened faster than Ronin could keep track of, one moment, she was quietly minding her own business, the very next she was about to kill some guy.
Still holding the knife to his neck, she pulled a syringe from one of her many inner pockets and stuck it into the guy's leg. He started screaming and pushed her off of him, running past the team and out of the station.
She came back, a look of disgust on her face and said to Delta, "Hopefully there aren't more people like him in the city"
Delta nodded, seeming to understand the situation intrinsically, and said, "Me too...I hate people like him."
Ronin looked at Silas and she said, "Delta comes from...a troubled home...let's put it like that."
Nodding, understanding somewhat, he figured that if Delta had wanted him to know the details, or to talk about it, she'd have come to him already. He waved softly at her, and she waved back, the wordless exchange between the two speaking volumes.
Several minutes later the train rolled in, blowing off steam and excess Aether energy from its dozens of exhaust ports, looking more like a slowly moving cloud than a train for a moment.
They all regrouped and waited for the rest of the waiting room to board the train, watching warily as the weary travellers dragged themselves to, what they'd hoped would be, a better life.
As his team finally started boarding, Ronin thought he saw a glimpse of something on the back of the train.
Looking harder, he saw a flash of white that seemed to glimmer for a few seconds and then disappear. Rubbing his eyes, he followed his team onboard, deciding that sleep would probably be a good choice.