In her dreams, Waleria drifted, unsure and slippery in her grasp of what she saw for most of the night… but then, suddenly, she felt an unusual amount of focus. She saw herself walking down an enormous hall of modern-era architecture: concrete columns and desks for hundreds of metres in each direction, regular octagonal lighting fixtures in the ceiling, a concrete floor with directions painted right on it, and alphanumeric signs designating each sector of this enormous space. This was the Concrete Orchard; a dream-space that has been appearing to Duchowieseners in their slumber since around six years after the guns of the Continental War fell silent. And even if Waleria didn’t recognize it yet, she knew what she ought to do in this dream. Across the many signs and posters dotted around the area, there was the same text on each one: “Waleria Roos Nowakowska to Desk 501-R7 please!” The guidelines on the floor all converged in the same direction, beckoning her. She stepped up her pace, walking faster – and decided to break into a run when she saw that Desk 501-R7 rose above the space on a pyramid of concrete steps, lit by spotlights to draw her attention. She climbed the steps… and she saw that the desk had several boxes on it and next to it, all labeled “Pieces of a Kingdom”. Waleria walked closer, and carefully opened one of the boxes – and right that moment, she woke up, back in the material world, on the bed in Ferienstadt Binnenstrand.

Waleria looked to the windows, and noticed the first rays of the sun as it was coming up outside, while the couch was empty. A moment later, Levi walked out of the bathroom, already dressed for the day. Waleria climbed out of bed, and noticed that Octavia was still asleep. With another dash of her eyes to a clock hanging on the wall, she noticed it was 7:15 AM – very early morning, but the goods train was due in 45 minutes. Then, Levi turned to her and asked:

“Waleria, should we wake up Octavia?”

“Hmm, I don’t know...” Waleria responded. “She told us she is not so good at hauling things, but we might still need her help on this...”

Waleria thought for a moment, nodded to Levi, got up, and walked over to Octavia’s bed. Then, she gently pushed her side-to-side with her large furred digits. “Hey… hey Octavia… it’s morning! 7:15 AM, we’ve got less than an hour...” she told her quietly.

“Nnnmh… already?” Octavia asked as she woke up from the night’s slumber.

“Yes!” Waleria responded. “I know you told us you’re not much for hauling, but we… we might need your help with it. I’m not sure.”

“I guess that’s fair…” Octavia grumbled as she also got out of bed. “But ugh, I am really not in the mood to haul stuff this early in the morning...”

25 minutes later, the three already stood outside of the Binnenstrand's Imperial Gothic railway station. Levi walked out in front, and asked one of the employees milling about next to the building – a human with a silver-colored tail and big floopy ears on his head, wearing the uniform in the colors of the Ferienstadt:

“Hello! We’re the helpers who bartered for a hotel room yesterday – is the train arriving on time?”

“Ah, yes, you three!” the employee responded. “Your way of trading for an overnight stay was most elegant, if I may say so.” He waited a moment, looked at his watch, and said, “Yes! The train is due in 15 minutes, on time of course!”

Levi nodded to the hotel employee, and the three looked around the station. In the rays of the morning sun that came over the crowns of trees opposite the Inland Sea shore, it was far easier to see in detail than on the previous evening, and its pompous design was evident to all looking at it. A building that was two floors tall definitely did not need columns, gargoyles, flying buttresses, or three whole spires (two hilariously tiny ones at its sides, and a larger central one), but it had them anyway. The monumental granite exterior seemed as a lieutenant-colonel wearing a uniform with forty different medals pinned to it – a memorial to an inflated sense of self-importance that died in the shell-raked muddy trenches some dismal day between 10213 and 10224. As students of Riddle History and ethnographic journalism, Octavia and Levi understood all too well the hubris that led to the building’s existence… and Waleria, though she hadn’t known the exacting detail, just knew, as almost all Duchowieseners did. Then, they looked around the station building, and saw a much prettier picture: green hedgerows, branching coastal trees, wide comfy benches where it was inviting to lie down and rest, if required. A bit further down, on the other side of the station platform, there was an unloading dock for freight trains; a recently-built structure mixing modern and green architecture. Its blocky features, straight lines, carefully-measured rectangular proportions, narrow lattice windows, and occasional highlights of colored squares across its stark white facade were complemented by its use of crawling vines to enliven the picture, and planters full of grass growing on different levels of the building. As Waleria marveled at the building’s no-frill appeal, and Levi wondered if its architectural style was inspired by the art movement literally called “De Stijl”, they heard a loud train horn from the opposite direction.

Turning around by 180 degrees, they saw a train arriving: a large maroon-and-yellow-livery diesel with one large headlamp and two smaller ones below it, and a near-hemispherical front end. Its nose driver’s cab had two front windows, square doors with heavily rounded corners and circular door windows, and there was a wispy trail of diesel exhaust coming from above its yellow-colored roof panels. The sound of clacking wheels became more and more sparse as the locomotive and its train came to a stop next to the freight building, and one of the hotel workers waved to Waleria, Levi, and Octavia, telling them, “There it is! Come with us, we have to unload it in 40 minutes or less!” The trio just nodded and rushed over to the train, noticing its compact twelve-car arrangement; there were ten boxcars carrying goods for the resort, and at either end of the train (just after the locomotive, and just before the minimal caboose), there were the ghost/spirit defense cars. Both front and rear car had similar arrangements: a couple of low-velocity machine guns built for firing firecracker rounds and whistler rounds, and the dome-like round antennae of shield projectors that maintained a flux shield along the entire length of the train. It was evident that the train was a short-haul configuration, but even that meant quite a lot in Duchowiesen. Levi gave an informal two-finger army salute to one of the gunners on top, who responded in kind, and then walked up to the front-most boxcar alongside Waleria.

“We’re ready to help you move this stuff!” he said enthusiastically to the stationmaster who was waiting nearby.

The stationmaser – a stout, good-natured beastfolk wearing the colors of the hotel and a suitably ostentatious railroad cap – just smiled, nodded, and pulled the boxcar’s door open in one sweeping move, pushing on the lever to slide it with swiftness and even elegance. Inside, there were boxes stacked upon one another, most labeled with types of various cleaning and housekeeping items. Levi and Waleria walked into the train car, and looked around its partially lit interior. The sun was bouncing through the open door and filtering through the ventilation grates, with dust floating through its beams. In the boxcar, Waleria with her above-average night vision could see all sorts of boxes, with many goods type labels and brand names of local producers. There were the laundry detergent that Waleria bought for her home needs; shampoo bottles for the hotel rooms and soaps made from the dense, triglyceride-rich redwillow oils; good old-fashioned calcium carbonate for cleaning porcelain surfaces; several massive crates of toilet paper; and a good amount of mops, sponges, and absorbent cloth pieces to replace those worn out by the rigors of daily use in cleaning. Waleria took one good look at it, and said:

“Levi! Go get a handcart! We’re starting right now!”

With a “Hmf!”, Levi went off, and in a minute returned with a wheeled handcart. Waleria picked up one of the boxes, quickly loaded it on the handcart, then grabbed another one and stacked it on top of the first, and nodded to Levi to cart the boxes off to the freight building. He returned in less than a minute, and Waleria was already ready to give him another box… and so, the two fell into a steady rhythm of moving and loading the crates, almost too quickly considering they never unloaded a train together. This was a concern for later, though; right now, both of them were focused on the job here and now. It took them mere 17 minutes to completely unload the train car, and they emerged with a look of victory on their faces. The stationmaster turned to them and said:

“Wow. You do work fast! Why don’t you take a five-minute break, and move onto the next one?”

Waleria and Levi took the stationmaster’s advice, and stood in one spot a while, watching the other workers scurry to and fro with handcarts and boxes. One of them was an Arboreous with neatly-trimmed antlers that easily fit into the boxcar he was going in and out of. Another two were heavyset, strong humans from the North, swishing their short and fluffy tails from side to side and wiggling their big, equally fluffy ears as they darted between the station building and one of the cars, carrying small crates by hand. Further out, one of the alloy golems of Duchowiesen – a relatively rarely-seen, artificially-made person of weathered metal and polished glass – was unloading one of the boxcars all by themself. Their mechanical yet enthusiastic movement was mesmerizing, almost infectious – and so, after four or five minutes or resting Levi and Waleria hopped over to the next train car to start unloading it. Waleria reached to the door levers and opened the car, and the two walked in, again marveling at the play of light and dust inside its confined space. In this car, they saw a great variety of mesh sacks filled with vegetables: potatoes, cabbages, carrots, beets, squash, onions, some garlic and corn and broccoli, several big sacks of cheesegourds with their protein-rich, savory texture, eggplants and cucumbers, and plenty of multicolored bell peppers.

“Would you look at all that stuff!” Levi said. “I’m salivating!”

“Back at you,” Waleria replied. “Let’s get hauling, and maybe we can have some of it for breakfast later today!” With that, she grabbed two large potato sacks, pulled them up under her arms, and headed out towards the freight building. Levi grabbed another big sack with both hands, and followed her.

As they walked out of the car, they noticed Octavia nearby.

“Alright, enough of me loitering around and watching,” she said. “Are there smaller vegetable sacks in the car?” she asked.

“Yep!” Levi told her. “You can find some that should be easy enough to carry…”

At these words, Octavia simply went into the train car, and half a minute later emerged with a small sack of garlic. “Ah, the memories of garlic offerings to the spirits of history…” she mused as she carried the sack right after Waleria and Levi. The three began to shuffle to and fro, carrying the vegetable sacks, and by the time the car was half-emptied, Levi and Octavia began to tire out. Waleria, however, was still moving along, and not only thanks to her greater levels of energy. Indeed, the work reminded her of all the lifting-together that her tram depot’s workforce did when the occasion called for it, and she couldn’t find any greater happiness in life than doing railroad work of any sort. She mused that regardless of any noble heritage, this was her true calling: the railway. And so, when Levi began to slow down a bit, Waleria noticed immediately and told him:

“Okay, Levi, you can bow out! Octavia, if you get tired, follow him. I can handle this myself, it’s just one third of a train car to unload!”

“Got it…!” Levi said, as he came to a halt and then walked over to the nearby bench that was built into the architecture of the freight dock, sitting down on it to rest. He looked at Waleria and Octavia as they kept zooming back and forth with the mesh sacks, and in just under 40 minutes total, both train cars were empty. Waleria looked at the other two triumphantly, then turned to the other workers who were done unloading their own freight cars, and said:

“Whew! I may work in a tram depot, but this is still familiar ground to me! Nothing beats some good honest work on the railway!”

“Are you sure she is really the heir of any regal title?” Octavia asked as she and Levi sat near the building and rested from all the hauling.

“If you ask questions like that, then you clearly haven’t met the king of the Popular Kingdom of West-Bergenhof, who works as a rail steward on the Occident Express,” Levi replied with a snort.

“And you have?” Octavia asked again.

“Did a profile of him for the Magazine in the mid-60s,” Levi responded.

The train line that Levi was referring to was, of course, merely one of dozens of legendary train lines across Duchowiesen; but even then, the Occident Express had its share of fame. It went from the Duchowiesen lands west of the Inland Sea, to the Southwest and from there to the Middle South geopolitical region. It was retrofitted from an imperial rail service so that everyone could enjoy its luxury (schedules permitting). And yes, there was indeed a king who had a working-class job as a rail steward for one of its train cars. He was part of the atmosphere, really; a bonus addition to the cocktail bar car and the satin bedsheets.

After she stretched her shoulders, Waleria walked over to Levi and Octavia.

“Okay, that’s done with!” she said. “And, I remember we’re here to see the painting from the Lost Kingdom, but before that… how about food?”