Out of Light, Into the Dark

[Proto Man]

“I think I’ll take the forest fire,” Mireya muttered as the group stepped out from the gate and surveyed the land in front of them.

Unlike the dense, tree-filled Tangled Green, the landscape in front of them stretched on to the horizon, with only a few distractions in the form of copses and Darkshire. The town itself, a few miles away from the triumvirate, looked as sad and downtrodden as the gloomy, haunted landscape. Despite the fact that it was still the early hours of the morning, there was very little light given off by the town. Only a handful of smoke pillars trailed up from the myriad chimneys that poked above the ‘skyline’ of Darkshire.

“Is that where we are headed?” Mireya inquired, turning her attention to the two preteen-sized androids.

“That’s a place called Darkshire,” Proto Man remarked as he pulled up a data readout on his internal display. “It used to be the heart of the Kingdom’s colonial holdings before Diablo’s army turned the Moors into what it is today. Nowadays it’s in a gradual decline and under continual harassment from all sorts of terrible things.”

“Sounds just wonderful,” the nomad retorted as she glanced back at the gate to the Nexus. Proto Man knew that Mireya had spent a great length of time in Camelot, but he doubted the half-night elf had traveled anywhere outside her sphere of familiarity. While the overall geography of the Pale Moors was similar to Camelot, the atmosphere was utterly different. Remarks from travelers spoke about a ‘heavy air of desolation and grief’ that hung on you like a blanket. Proto Man lacked the necessary parts to genuinely experience that, but he had seen some pretty dreary places. Parts of Monsteropolis, New York City, and Coruscant all came to mind.

“I’m sorry,” the red robot offered as he looked up at the moon. “Sometimes I am glad I’m not a true human, because it means I have at least a little more strength when dealing with emotions.”

“You said it.” Snake Man added as the serpent took a few steps in front of the trio. “Personally, I think I’d like this place. So many shadows… And how about all those clouds? Crime in that town must be terrible.”

“There’s a lot of segregation in the town,” Proto Man read from a screen he’d just pulled from the Dataverse. “Crime is nonexistent in what remains of the affluent part of the town, while it can become a veritable free-for-all in the poorest parts of town.”

“Good to know.”

“I vote we keep our time there short,” Mireya muttered as the group slowly started across the empty field that led toward the walled city.

While he agreed with the woman, the robot’s reasons were more for the sake of time than comfort. “We just need to see if there are any leads on this Blight. I highly doubt we’re the only travelers who have tried to investigate it.”