Act 1-2: Roger the Negotiator

[Roger Smith]

Thankfully, the remainder of the questioning was fairly mundane and passed by much more quickly. Typical things, questioning and searching him for any weapons, concealed or otherwise. Of course, he had none at the moment, given his recent arrival. Even the usual tools he might employ for such things were either reduced to a mundane nature, or simply nonexistent. They would be acquisitions for a later date, when he was more well-settled in and had time to truly and properly experiment with the nature of this 'omnilium' stuff. So far it had been easy enough to figure out, but so far had also been mostly simple things. The Griffon had been the most complex thing, and even then, Roger knew its design intimately. Only Norman might possibly know it better.

When the dreary questions had run their course, he was cleared to pass and admitted into the city proper, and given directions to where he could get his own questions answered. It took a little doing to get everything properly translated and filed into a language and format he could properly read and follow, but when it was all said and done, he proceeded on his way. Returning to the Griffon, and pulling out and into the city itself.

This time, it was finally a drive of some distance, according to the directions. It gave Roger Smith plenty of time to mull over and think about things. And time to experimentally fiddle with the radio. As he expected, there was a handful of channels and stations that were picked up, given the size of the city. Some listening discovered most of them to be mostly nonsense, news and the sort of talk which didn't interest him in the slightest or which flew completely over his head. But...information was information. He settled onto one of the more easygoing news stations. If nothing else, it would provide background noise to compliment the sheer scale of wonder that he beheld now.

There was actually traffic here. Plenty of cars and vehicles of all sorts, prowling the roads and the skies above them. Everything was brightly lit, shining and gleaming in almost overwhelming splendor. Compared to the memories and experience of living in a place like Paradigm City...something like this was almost too much to believe. It was surreal, dreamlike. Like everyone always said the world had been...before. Before forty years ago. All that and more. Even in the fragments of memories people recovered, even in the old movies and pictures which had survived, there was nothing like this.

Nothing concrete and real, at least. Only in the few surviving scraps of work clearly known and marked as fictional, just stories and fanciful myths and legends, did anything even remotely like this exist. Which meant this place was....in an entirely different league, after all. Some strange, far off corner of the world well away from Paradigm City, or...some other world entirely.

All the oddities so far seemed to point distinctly toward the latter. And that was something that unnerved Roger more than anything else.