>>6018173As you enter and sprint into the storm through a bizarre landscape of concrete, steel, and glass, you very quickly find yourself lost. You’ve avoided any main roads, sticking to alleyways like your mentor has done before but the increasingly heavy rain makes it very hard to see, especially without someone to guide the way. And as you wonder if every Stranger hunt is going to take place in a storm something magnificent happens, the city comes alive. Streetlamps flicker on, lights on the sides of buildings glow a fluorescent hew, and billboards written in both your language and a foreign one light up in neon colors. But as you look inside a lit building, you see nothing of note other than scattered nondescript furniture. The city is alive, but it’s not lived in.
As you stand, dazzled by the display before you, Marie yanks on your arm and pulls you into a different alley as a flying boxlike vessel speeds above you. You startled and jump back, “What was that?” Is your totally not lame question.
“I think that was a flying car? Or carriage or whatever. I can’t tell if it was just for show or not?”
“For show? Why would it be for show?”
“The whole city is, isn’t it? It’s not like anyone lives here so the buildings don’t have any meaning other than to be imposing.”
“That’s what this is? A threat?”
“Maybe? I doubt the Stranger wants it to be vacant forever, but it’s not like he invited people to settle,” You don’t mention that he sort of did, “The car might be the same or it might have a camera.”
“Don’t photographs take minutes to make though?”
She doesn’t deign to answer your question and instead asks one of her own, “What do you think the chances Watanabe is at the giant skyscraper in the back? Looks like it would make for a good dungeon and boss room at the top,” She says as she points toward a massive glass and metal structure. With the ongoing storm, you cannot even see the top of the structure as it reaches into the clouds.
You decide to forgo asking questions on every eccentricity of the Stranger’s words, and the ones you don’t understand, and just give an affirmative, “It’s certainly where I’d live, it must be nice having a room that overlooks your entire city.”
“Be a lot better if people lived in it.”
“I suppose?” Is this a point of contention for her? She seems rather annoyed, you wonder why?
“Hopefully, we can meet up with everyone else there. But how should we proceed?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re usually the one that comes up with our plans, I thought you’d want to make more. Was I wrong?”
“Wait, uh, of course, I knew that. It is the job of nobility to lead the way after all.”
