Distortions of Reality
Travel in the current world is a gamble. By land, there's a chance you get Anoms, by sea are spatial fluctuations, and by air you have flying creatures.
Trains can be equipped with weapon platforms, could be reinforced, and they weren't exactly in the middle of the sea or high up in the air. The problem is that they are also provocators of monsters. Big long iron thing and the first thought of the monsters is to fight it. Changye spends too much funds in maintaining these inter-continental trails. Land bridges, made through miraculous efforts, and tectonic changes, made these travels possible, but oftentimes traveling from one place to another requires you to be vetted with utmost scrutiny.
Changye itself was the headquarters of the Otherside Bureau. Although a city-state, most of the funds came from major powers in the world. It's true that legally, the OB doesn't take money from the Reich, but in truth, the Bureau takes any kind of funds that supports its money-hungry society.
The big reason they even allow Changye to exist is because it serves as a focal point. The shape of the city, the existence of it has a purpose. To describe the purpose, then it is counterweight. Like this giant repellant trying to hold one place and the others into shape.
OB-affiliated groups usually have a universal pass. You're part of an Association like the Shichinin no Ken, where you get a reduction of the fee you've to pay to get a place in the train where you don't have to worry about bunking with other passengers. This time, we paid nothing other than a few extra food.
Changye to Okinawa would have been a few hours of flight in the old world, but we have to go through the Old Korean haunts, then up North in Chinese and Russian territory before the train takes a u-turn to the track leading to Japan. The sea around Japan's full of anomalies. Have to go that way because the alternative is trying to ram straight through Anomalies and end up trapped in a non-euclidean space.
Sato's been a real piece of shit. Maybe it's his way of trying to teach us a lesson, but if this continues, then we'll have to deal with Sato and make him understand how shitty it is to be sent to places above our paygrade.
Boss Kei was up ahead, wearing a black fur-lined thermal-regulated jacket over a white formal shirt, red tie, and form-fitting pants that accented her buttocks. Lately, my eyes have been drawn to the Boss. It was very unprofessional for her employee, but I have times like these too. Don't know when it started, how it started. Maybe I was in-heat from all the excitement, but it could be that I was nearing my limit too. Being around a woman like Boss Kei was exciting. It didn't help that I've been having flashbacks of that time we got quarantined and had to spend time naked.
The station smelled of something that never quite washed out of the concrete. Crowds moved in tight packs under the high arched ceilings, eyes down, hands close to weapons or dimenbags. Announcements crackled in three languages at once, warning about pressure shifts, mandatory decontamination, and the usual reminder that the Bureau accepted no liability for vanishing passengers. I kept my Castor close and Pollux holstered where the inspectors could see it. No point giving them an excuse to dig deeper.
"And your cane, Ma'am?"
"Personal weaponry. And no, I ain't leaving it."
The personnel made a double-take of the Boss's information before nodding his head. The boss watched as the personnel inspected all my gear before marking a check on that tablet of his. He lingered a second longer on the gauntlet, then waved us through with the kind of tired efficiency that said he'd already seen everything that morning.
"Here's your room. Information regarding how to secure the room during passings will be announced. If said system fails to do please, tap the panel near the doorway. And if that fails, please manually activate the safety procedures and refer to the manual located adjacent to the doorway."
I wonder how many times they have said that line? Boss Kei wasn't interested and everyone did their research before entering said trains. A step into the train and you can feel the surface of your skin grazing the field, each and every single hair on your body getting lightly pulled. The insides of your body being pushed up and down as if trying to find the right way. It was the same every time, like the train itself was testing whether you belonged inside its metal skin or if it should spit you back out onto the platform.
We made our way through the two compartments, made a brief stop at one of the rooms being cleaned. Burnt smell that forces inside your nose, and that nasty stingy taste at the tip of one's tongue. One of the arms were on the corner of the room, slammed so hard that the cleaners were using a flat piece of metal to shave it off the wall. The cleaners didn't look up. They never did. Just kept scraping, like this was another Tuesday and the previous passenger had simply left a mess behind.
"Bloody train man."
"Least we have a private room this time."
These kinds of rooms were not secured, no, if anything, it's really a gamble. You either live or die or die in these damn things. I set my dimenbag down by the nearer bunk and checked the seals on the windows. The glass was thick, layered with runes and kinetic dampeners, but I'd seen thicker glass fail when something decided the train looked like food.
Our compartment was at the front of the carriage, bigger in the inside with two beds on each corner and a booth table in the middle. There was a tube that delivered food and a tiny cubicle and a decontamination space. Once we were fully in, the reinforced shut off, leaking air and initiated a lockdown. The pressure equalized with a soft hiss that made my ears pop. Outside the narrow window the platform lights began to slide past as the train eased forward, then gathered speed with a low metallic growl that vibrated up through the floor.
"Hey, look, they actually bothered to put a television in the place. Huh, even VAR devices?"
"Is it Full-mind?"
She checked the back of the helmet-device and pulled the neural cord, extending into needles that would connect it to the Cerebrum and Brainstem.
"Want to try?"
She pulled on the cord and held the device towards me. I connected to the device with my PDA and ran a scan on it. A few in-brain ads and premium offers. One of them flashed a smiling face promising "authentic recreation of pre-Risk beaches" for only a few credits. I pulled the connection before I get charge something..
"Nasty."
Boss Kei took the helmet and inserted it back into the container. She slid into the bed and then looked at the view of CHANGYE from here.
It was awful as always. The platform city receded behind us in layered tiers of light and shadow, the bagua shape still visible even from this distance, still holding its strange balance against the pale fog that pressed in from every horizon. Tiny suns were still burning holes in the sky. The train rattled once, hard enough to make the table jump, then settled into its rhythm. Kei didn't look away from the window.
I sat across from her and started unpacking the bare minimum we might need if the next few hours went sideways. Extra magazines for Pollux. A spare power cell for Castor. The medical patches Simone had shoved into my hands before we left. Kei still hadn't said much since the platform. She lit a cigarette, the thermal jacket doing nothing to hide the tension in her shoulders, and exhaled toward the reinforced glass.
"Sato's going to owe us more than a free ride for this," she muttered.
I didn't argue. You bet he will.
***
The train left Changye's outer barriers without ceremony. One moment the layered platforms and dim artificial lights still clung to the windows, the next the world outside turned into a wall of pale fog so thick it looked solid. The car lights flickered once. The low vibration under the floor changed pitch, like the rails themselves were suddenly unsure of their own weight.
I watched the fog swallow the last of the city's silhouette. It didn't thin. It just kept pressing in until the windows showed nothing but milky white, the kind that made your eyes water if you stared too long. Kei sat across from me, cigarette forgotten between her fingers, eyes narrowed at the blankness.
Then the fog broke. Tearing open like wet paper and the view slammed into open water. Endless grey sea under a sky the same colour, no horizon worth trusting. Waves moved wrong, that was too slow in places, too fast in others, like the surface was remembering how to be ocean and failing at it. The train was still rolling, but the rails had become something else underneath us. Metal on water. The whole carriage groaned.
Distortions started next.
The sea didn't stay sea. For a few seconds the water flattened into asphalt and streetlights, the kind that used to line old coastal highways before everything went to shit. I saw buildings that no longer existed, ordinary glass towers, neon signs in languages half-forgotten, cars parked in neat rows under a sun that was too bright and too clean. People walking. Actual people in clothes that didn't look like they were made to survive the next hour or for functionarly. A billboard advertising something called "summer festival" flickered past the window and then the image tore sideways.
The old world bled through in pieces. A beach with umbrellas. A ferry terminal with tourists dragging suitcases. A skyline that belonged to a city that had been erased decades ago. Every image lasted only long enough to hurt, then warped back into the grey water that shouldn't have been under a train.
My body went empty.
No warning. Just a sudden, complete loss of feeling from the neck down. The world tilted. I couldn't tell if I was still sitting or falling. The sound stretched. The carriage lights smeared into long white lines. Somewhere far away metal screamed against something that wasn't track.
When sensation slammed back it was all at once and in the wrong places.
Kei was on top of me.
I was flat on the floor between the beds, her weight pinning me down, one of my hands locked on the curve of her ass like it had been glued there mid-fall. Her jacket had ridden up. My other hand was under her shirt against bare skin. She was braced over me, hair in her face, breathing hard through her nose. For a second neither of us moved. The train still rocked like it was trying to decide whether to stay on the rails or dive.
Kei squinted down at me. The look was half-annoyed, half-assessing, and half-flushed. As if she wasn't even trying to process my hand inside her bare butt.
The carriage gave one final violent shudder and then the motion smoothed out. Pressure equalised with a soft pop in my ears. The lights stabilised. Outside the windows the sea was still there, but the train was now riding something that looked almost like an elevated track against thin black lines stretching across open water toward a dark smear of coastline that had to be Old Korea.
We didn't talk about it. Trying to think about it after that kind of shit was giving me a headache. Kei pushed herself up. I let go. She stood, straightened her jacket, and walked the two steps back to her side of the compartment like nothing had happened. I did the same. We both ended up leaning on the booth table because sitting still made the stomach turn. The train was rolling over open sea now, the whole structure vibrating with the effort of staying above water that wanted to swallow it. Every few seconds the carriage dipped a fraction and my gut tried to climb into my throat.
Kei lit a fresh cigarette with steady hands and exhaled toward the window.
I kept my eyes on the grey water and the distant line of land and tried not to think about the exact shape my palm had memorised.