08-07-2014, 10:07 AM
Samus descended on one of the many great elevators from Tier One. The gravity inside the pod was regulated, a good thing as otherwise she would’ve been trapped against its ceiling. She watched as the great streets vanished into darkness and the skyscrapers of Tier Two entered her view. It was truly magnificent, and more than a little dizzying to be up so high. Many preferred the windowless cabs, but Samus always liked to be able to see, even if little ever changed.
Tier Two was not near to the opulence of Tier One, but that only spoke of the latter’s lavishness. By her own world’s comparison, it would have been fairly standard for Federation homeworlds, prosperous as they were. It buzzed with activity. In some ways, this was where a lot of the real work got done. Above, politicians and nobles shook hands as the rich frittered away the city-verse’s money in clubs that continued through day and night. Tier Two was where most businesses set up shop proper. If you wanted to buy a car without taking out a mortgage, or a nice house without its own moat, this is where you came.
The light inside the pod dimmed momentarily as it shot through the floor of Tier Two and out the other side.
If Samus had been forced to pick favourites, the winner probably would have been Tier Three. A few years back, Tier Three had been something of a ghetto, and it still wasn’t anywhere you’d want to admit to living if you spent a lot of time under the real sun and cared what people thought of you. To Samus, it felt like what home should. You felt welcome here, whether you walked in wearing a dress or a suit of armor. You could walk the streets without being sized up or sized down. It was ordinary. Real. And most of the people who lived here were grateful. It was beginning to thrive, and it showed in the number of new buildings that were being erected. Many of them held that ‘just summoned’ sheen while others were being rapidly erected with the help of ships and scaffolding.
The elevator slowed as the ground grew nearer and nearer before stopping and opening with a hiss, the lights inside changing colour and indicating towards the exit. This was as far as it went. Samus stepped out and switched on her X-Ray visor. Beyond about twenty metres, the world went dark, but within her little circle of proximity she could see everything. A world of black and white, yet so much more detailed. She could see those who were carrying guns or wearing armor beneath their clothing. She could see the ones who scurried about in the tunnels beneath her feet, a world-between-worlds that most ignored or didn’t know about. She could see the workers lounging at their desks or pursuing more recreational activities behind closed doors.
It made her feel a bit voyeuristic, truth be told.
She tapped the side of her helmet again, pulling up the visor options and fiddling with the calibrations. She wanted to be able to use the X-Ray visor’s functionality without losing too much of her normal visual function. Luckily, her visor hadn’t been built in the 20th century. It flickered as the real world brightened into view, revealing the colours and contours the human eye was built to perceive. She fiddled with the settings some more until her X-Ray vision overlaid, allowing her to see both surface and subsurface details to a degree without switching between one or the other. It occurred to her that she probably looked stranger than normal, staring around as though she’d never seen a person or a building before. This wasn’t something that bothered her, particularly. She rarely elicited a normal response from other humans.
There was an entrance to Tier Four not far from here. An elevator still in relatively good working order, though Samus had had to fix it herself on no less than two occasions, when it had decided that moving people wasn’t really what it wanted to do in life. It was still better than taking the stairs; some of the seediest human beings in existence hung out in the corridors and crevices between this floor and the next. Mostly harmless, but cloying and often unsettling – drug addicts and homeless, mixed in with the occasional predator or wandering packs of kids who would vanish the moment you saw them. While they weren’t problems to be ignored, they required a finer tool than Samus. At the end of the day, she was a blunt instrument. A damn good blunt instrument, but that was it.
She found the elevator in its usual place, stuffed behind the back entrance of a pub named the Third Bottle and obscured by the city wall, which cut in here to form a crevice. It was used by a lot of workers and local types that still had business on the fourth tier and sense enough not to use the tunnels. She stepped in, hit the button, and leaned against the wall as the door closed.
Light funnelled in through the narrow horizontal windows, and she got a glimpse of the Fourth Tier. More of an eveningscape than the other tiers even in the middle of the day, the lights did a far worse job of emulating sunlight and got it somewhere between football stadium and ritzy nightclub. On the skyline, Samus could make out the F-Zero racing circuit, one of the few things able to seduce the rich down to this level. Most of it was obscured by looming towers of grey metal – the residential blocks that housed those stuck in the middle of Coruscant’s sandwich of super-rich and ultra-destitute.
The elevator gave a great clank and Samus steadied herself as it practically fell to the floor. Someone needed to do a proper maintenance on this one, it seemed. The Empire didn’t like people coming down here period, hence why the elevators didn’t descend past Tier Three. They liked people coming up even less. You could see why. As Samus stepped out of the elevator, she saw with her newly-upgraded visor that almost half of the residents out on the street were packing some kind of weapon. She had half a mind to confiscate the illegal weaponry. She didn’t, because of the disquieting suspicion that it would be denying those people their only defence.
This was the first tier on which Samus operated. It wasn’t a bad place, persay. You could get a good ramen, and the movie theatres showed lots of films that were too risqué or controversial to be allowed on the upper tiers. In many ways, it was a place people could come to be free of the Empire in Coruscant. Unfortunately, it was never that simple or easy. When you left a gap, something would always come to fill it. In the case of Tier Four, that was the gangs.
Gang violence wasn’t just common on Tier Four – it was the way people did business. You wouldn’t find a single shop owner here who wasn’t packing some sort of firearm, and most of them had other defences. Shop signs changed frequently, and it was impossible to tell whether the owners had gone out of business, gotten on the wrong side of someone or packed up to move somewhere else. If it was sometimes hard to fathom why so many chose to live in Camelot, even without the convenience of technology, a trip down to Tier Four provided a compelling explanation.
But Tier Four wasn’t where Samus was headed today. Ignoring the food-stands, merchants and touts, she made her way through the crowded streets to the nearest taxi vendor. The driver was a holographic man with a flat cap who, despite his immaterial nature, appeared to be chewing gum. The projector angled in Samus’s direction as she drew close and the cabbie spoke up. “Eyy if it isn’t Samus Aran! Been a while, where you been?”
“Dragons,” said Samus by way of explanation. She climbed into the back of the cab and said, “Tier Five, please,” before the cabbie could get another word in.
“Dragons, eh? Ohh, dragons! That one in er ah, Camelot wasn’t it? I saw that on the news. Big bastard wasn’t ‘e? ‘Course I never seen a small dragon.”
Samus sat back and let the driver talk, doing her best to focus on anything that wasn’t his brain-chiselling stream of consciousness. Taking her gunship would have allowed her to avoid this, but she was taking the slow route for a reason. She wanted to be covert. As powerful as she might be, there were places on Tier Five that made even her wary. Coruscant was a deep place, and its layers, peeled away, revealed something that shook her more than any dragon or monster. Just the thought of what she couldn’t see and didn’t know made her stomach lurch.
Tier Two was not near to the opulence of Tier One, but that only spoke of the latter’s lavishness. By her own world’s comparison, it would have been fairly standard for Federation homeworlds, prosperous as they were. It buzzed with activity. In some ways, this was where a lot of the real work got done. Above, politicians and nobles shook hands as the rich frittered away the city-verse’s money in clubs that continued through day and night. Tier Two was where most businesses set up shop proper. If you wanted to buy a car without taking out a mortgage, or a nice house without its own moat, this is where you came.
The light inside the pod dimmed momentarily as it shot through the floor of Tier Two and out the other side.
If Samus had been forced to pick favourites, the winner probably would have been Tier Three. A few years back, Tier Three had been something of a ghetto, and it still wasn’t anywhere you’d want to admit to living if you spent a lot of time under the real sun and cared what people thought of you. To Samus, it felt like what home should. You felt welcome here, whether you walked in wearing a dress or a suit of armor. You could walk the streets without being sized up or sized down. It was ordinary. Real. And most of the people who lived here were grateful. It was beginning to thrive, and it showed in the number of new buildings that were being erected. Many of them held that ‘just summoned’ sheen while others were being rapidly erected with the help of ships and scaffolding.
The elevator slowed as the ground grew nearer and nearer before stopping and opening with a hiss, the lights inside changing colour and indicating towards the exit. This was as far as it went. Samus stepped out and switched on her X-Ray visor. Beyond about twenty metres, the world went dark, but within her little circle of proximity she could see everything. A world of black and white, yet so much more detailed. She could see those who were carrying guns or wearing armor beneath their clothing. She could see the ones who scurried about in the tunnels beneath her feet, a world-between-worlds that most ignored or didn’t know about. She could see the workers lounging at their desks or pursuing more recreational activities behind closed doors.
It made her feel a bit voyeuristic, truth be told.
She tapped the side of her helmet again, pulling up the visor options and fiddling with the calibrations. She wanted to be able to use the X-Ray visor’s functionality without losing too much of her normal visual function. Luckily, her visor hadn’t been built in the 20th century. It flickered as the real world brightened into view, revealing the colours and contours the human eye was built to perceive. She fiddled with the settings some more until her X-Ray vision overlaid, allowing her to see both surface and subsurface details to a degree without switching between one or the other. It occurred to her that she probably looked stranger than normal, staring around as though she’d never seen a person or a building before. This wasn’t something that bothered her, particularly. She rarely elicited a normal response from other humans.
There was an entrance to Tier Four not far from here. An elevator still in relatively good working order, though Samus had had to fix it herself on no less than two occasions, when it had decided that moving people wasn’t really what it wanted to do in life. It was still better than taking the stairs; some of the seediest human beings in existence hung out in the corridors and crevices between this floor and the next. Mostly harmless, but cloying and often unsettling – drug addicts and homeless, mixed in with the occasional predator or wandering packs of kids who would vanish the moment you saw them. While they weren’t problems to be ignored, they required a finer tool than Samus. At the end of the day, she was a blunt instrument. A damn good blunt instrument, but that was it.
She found the elevator in its usual place, stuffed behind the back entrance of a pub named the Third Bottle and obscured by the city wall, which cut in here to form a crevice. It was used by a lot of workers and local types that still had business on the fourth tier and sense enough not to use the tunnels. She stepped in, hit the button, and leaned against the wall as the door closed.
Light funnelled in through the narrow horizontal windows, and she got a glimpse of the Fourth Tier. More of an eveningscape than the other tiers even in the middle of the day, the lights did a far worse job of emulating sunlight and got it somewhere between football stadium and ritzy nightclub. On the skyline, Samus could make out the F-Zero racing circuit, one of the few things able to seduce the rich down to this level. Most of it was obscured by looming towers of grey metal – the residential blocks that housed those stuck in the middle of Coruscant’s sandwich of super-rich and ultra-destitute.
The elevator gave a great clank and Samus steadied herself as it practically fell to the floor. Someone needed to do a proper maintenance on this one, it seemed. The Empire didn’t like people coming down here period, hence why the elevators didn’t descend past Tier Three. They liked people coming up even less. You could see why. As Samus stepped out of the elevator, she saw with her newly-upgraded visor that almost half of the residents out on the street were packing some kind of weapon. She had half a mind to confiscate the illegal weaponry. She didn’t, because of the disquieting suspicion that it would be denying those people their only defence.
This was the first tier on which Samus operated. It wasn’t a bad place, persay. You could get a good ramen, and the movie theatres showed lots of films that were too risqué or controversial to be allowed on the upper tiers. In many ways, it was a place people could come to be free of the Empire in Coruscant. Unfortunately, it was never that simple or easy. When you left a gap, something would always come to fill it. In the case of Tier Four, that was the gangs.
Gang violence wasn’t just common on Tier Four – it was the way people did business. You wouldn’t find a single shop owner here who wasn’t packing some sort of firearm, and most of them had other defences. Shop signs changed frequently, and it was impossible to tell whether the owners had gone out of business, gotten on the wrong side of someone or packed up to move somewhere else. If it was sometimes hard to fathom why so many chose to live in Camelot, even without the convenience of technology, a trip down to Tier Four provided a compelling explanation.
But Tier Four wasn’t where Samus was headed today. Ignoring the food-stands, merchants and touts, she made her way through the crowded streets to the nearest taxi vendor. The driver was a holographic man with a flat cap who, despite his immaterial nature, appeared to be chewing gum. The projector angled in Samus’s direction as she drew close and the cabbie spoke up. “Eyy if it isn’t Samus Aran! Been a while, where you been?”
“Dragons,” said Samus by way of explanation. She climbed into the back of the cab and said, “Tier Five, please,” before the cabbie could get another word in.
“Dragons, eh? Ohh, dragons! That one in er ah, Camelot wasn’t it? I saw that on the news. Big bastard wasn’t ‘e? ‘Course I never seen a small dragon.”
Samus sat back and let the driver talk, doing her best to focus on anything that wasn’t his brain-chiselling stream of consciousness. Taking her gunship would have allowed her to avoid this, but she was taking the slow route for a reason. She wanted to be covert. As powerful as she might be, there were places on Tier Five that made even her wary. Coruscant was a deep place, and its layers, peeled away, revealed something that shook her more than any dragon or monster. Just the thought of what she couldn’t see and didn’t know made her stomach lurch.
![[Image: 0bwAI3j.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/0bwAI3j.jpg)