'Jeez, how long is this guy going to take?'
The escort is ten minutes late.
Rory had given him the courtesy of being twenty minutes early, and yet there's no sign of whoever he is supposed to escort to some new ruin.
He had his back on some old streetlight, the rarer solar powered kind that worked even after the city was brough over to The Middle eight months ago. That day was no easy thing to forget.
It's an old memory now, but there are very few things in life that compare to walking down the street one moment, an earthquake like you've never felt before in the next and then you just find yourself and your home in a stretch of desert that never ends.
'Glad I awakened early. Making money would've been impossible without these'.
WSSSH
Rory instinctively summoned a dagger, holding it by the blade. Third Blade it was called. He raised it slightly letting sunlight reflect off the semi-transparent, homogenously grey material.
Third Blade was a larger dagger compared to First and Second Blade. Its blade was straight and slightly tapered, one side razor sharp and the other covered in deep serrations. It was a sword breaker. A basic, cross-guarded and unornamented dagger, but still a useful weapon when needed.
Merely the name caused his expression to darken. Tom loved to play with it, to act like one of those knights he was learning about before The Middle swallowed up the city. He'd pick short fights with Rory, and he'd win most of the time. Of course, Rory would let him win, and he'd summon Third Blade so that it was dull.
But it was an ever so slightly simpler time.
Quick footsteps brought Rory back to the present. He cast a rapid glance to see a skinny man running his way, a man with an oversized backpack for his stature and clothing that resembled oversized robes.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
The man repeated his rapid apologies in a squeaky voice.
Rory sighed and turned to him.
"Was starting to think this was a bad prank,"
The skinny man lowered his head in shame and uttered a final apology.
"I-I truly am sorry for making you wait, I didn't expect the walk from my inn to be this long,"
"I get it, you can stop saying sorry now. Do you know exactly where we are going? We'll need to camp before nighttime,"
"Y-yes! Here"
The skinny man handed Rory a rolled parchment.
Rory opened it and briefly inspected it before clicking his tongue.
"That's a fair amount of trekking we'll have to do, mister?"
"Udo, I am called Udo".
Rory looked at the parchment for a few more brief seconds.
"We'll go through some underground routes there's a safe spot about ten miles before we reach this ruin; Angels don't like going below ground at night and Demons love stalking the surface. With that said, are you Awakened?"
"Y-yes! I believe your settlement refers to me as a first rank, I can create radiant orbs,"
'Oh boy, would anyone have even accepted this if they knew his rank?'
"You have an attribute?"
"I believe it's referred to as Angelic here,"
Rory nodded, and they set off promptly. But Rory had a new suspicion bubble up inside him. Udo spoke rather oddly.
***
The camping spot was just a little over two hours away now. The two had been following arrows and markings roughly cut into the surrounding sandstone trenches.
Much to Rory's intrigue, his intuition was correct about Udo. Udo was from another world, a lush magical world that he called Zaskar. The phenomenon was not as rare as one would originally think so. Afterall The Middle isn't picky on where it abducts from.
There were some rumours that Surge The White comes from a magical world instead of a technological one like Earth, which would explain why he is a third rank Awakened. And that line of thinking also explains why Udo had a rather limited understanding of what Rory considered common knowledge, they method of interaction with the world itself was fundamentally different. But that did make conversations rather enriching.
Udo, by now, was scribbling in a little leatherbound book. Taking notes of his current conversation with Rory and thinking of refinements for earlier ones.
"And what is this Star Plateau I've heard about from other Expeditioners?"
Rory yawned before replying, the physical effort of the trek was slowly taking its toll on him.
"It's a dangerous place. Have you ever seen the bright lights coming from behind the Northen Mount? That's a consequence of the Star Plateau. I've never seen it with my own eyes, but according to our guys who have; it's a giant flatland with tens of floating masses of plasma… that's what makes up a star".
Udo furiously made a note of this.
"And what makes it dangerous?"
"Pure heat. Some scientists back on my world measured the star we orbited, and on average, just the surface was five thousand degrees. Iron boils at half of that. Now imagine what tens of those can do,"
Udo looked in amazement, wrapping his mind around just how incomprehensibly unhospitable that zone must be. He wrote more, then stopped mid-sentence.
"Would the Northen Mount not melt from that temperature?"
Rory gave it a quick thought. And he told Udo only as much as he knew. Which is to say that no one knew why the Northen Mount hadn't been melted. Rory was barely nineteen, he used to be a student learning about aircraft and spacecraft. Stars weren't his specialty.
A more popular theory is that the Star Plateau is just so massive and utterly devoid of any feature that the miniature stars are always blasting at full power regardless of distance. Some say that the distance to the Northen Mount and those stars is the same as between the Earth and the Sun.
And as much as that would be implausible… there's no evidence that it isn't true. Just a climb up one of the few remaining skyscrapers is proof that distance works slightly differently in The Middle.
The horizon doesn't really exist. It's just The Middle for as long as the eye can see. Other cities are visible, settlements, structures that seem as though they were dreamed up in the mind of a madman. But the distances between were so vast.
"Our world doesn't orbit our Sun. A rather smart wizard used magic to project his view far into the sky. He found that our Sun and moons revolved around our world itself."
"Moons?"
"Yes, four of them. Quite relaxing to look at on a warm night,"
"Must be nice, we only had the one".
Camp was now but an hour away.