There were a few interesting things about Tomar that set it apart from anywhere else in all the connected worlds. It was the only large permanent city on the entirety of Latolan; a city-state of something like twelve thousand square miles. Smaller settlements and individual homesteads and farms spread out in a wonky halo a hundred miles out at its farthest reach, but the semi-sentient jungle had a habit of pushing in, encroaching back into the places they had burned it out from.
It was also the only place where a relatively high number of inter-world gates had opened into such a small area. If any of them went through a cataclysmic overload, it would cascade to all the others, and the only thing left would be a crater, disintegrating everything in a three hundred-mile radius in an explosion of magical fusion.
Yet both Sunny and Lidea kept home bases in Tomar along with eight and a half million some-odd other people.
It was impossible to get used to coming through an inter-world gate, and everyone adjusted for it differently. For Lidea, it was like eir brain shut down then restarted, firing back up over the course of a few minutes. Ey was vaguely aware of time passing, but eir perception never matched the time elapsed. Ey could feel the journey in eir legs, though, as ey walked eir body over a bridge of concentrated magical energy.
Sunny described it as simply ceasing to exist as a discrete sapient being for a short while. When he re-materialized, though, he could read in his bones, to the second, how long it had taken him to move between two points. He had tested it with a mechanical stopwatch before.
"You good, Liddy?" Sunny touched the outside of eir hand as ey wobbled in the hallway outside the gate room. The attendant that had helped em down the steps and out into the passage was already on the way back to help the next uneasy traveler.
Lidea snapped to, shaking eir head into shape. Ey grabbed Sunny's hand tighter and nodded.
"Yeah, just need to walk it off."
Lidea let him guide em up the hallway, past one of the waiting rooms, and into the main foyer. Gate stations were universally low and flat, built around the spontaneous openings through space and time.
No magic-fueled machinery. No electricity.
Light came in through skylights and windows, transported through the building with mirrors. In the too dark early mornings and evening, oil lamps did the job. The ticketing system lived just off-site and was updated manually over the course of the day with a team of runners.
Lidea glanced at the black ticker board above the curved travel information desk. One of the help-desk employees changed it out by hand every hour on the hour. They had come across the Erykeanós gate, piping them through from Correlan. After the Tourney in midwestern Illuria, they had traveled slowly toward the east coast. There were a few days to kill in the capital city, Lyric. Then they headed to the gate station just outside of town with a whole crowd of other travelers switching from summer to fall locations.
Down another L-shaped part of the building was another gate, this one going to Azelan. It didn’t welcome nearly the same level of traffic, just a simple trickle of pale people in velvet waistcoats and lace parasols.
A batch of runners with their blue bags of afternoon tickets was disappearing around the side of the building as they exited out onto the promenade in front of the gate station. Tomar was small enough it didn't need transport circles, choosing to usher people through the streets with a robust public transport system.
The color-coded trains of Tomar were a menace of form and function, a half dozen systems on top of each other to move everyone around in a system of complex patterns. Practically no one drove their own vehicles, so the streets were alight with primarily bikes, cars for hire, and the slow-moving pedal trams. These were set into grids with street-level railed trains that moved a little quicker.
These were all below them as they took the high-speed elevated express monorail. It had only a few stops, one or two per borough, latticed in an oddly shaped but spatially efficient polygon.
The ancient, narrow buildings of Düzlem had fallen away quickly from the lift platform as it traveled up to the monorail, and now they slid off in a rolling tide of clay and thatch roof tiles. The border into the next borough to the north, Westlake, was harsh, once flashy glass buildings, now neatly blacked out against the sun. From above, brightly colored marquees and wall-high murals became neon constellations in a cool gray galaxy of angular semi-expressionist architecture. The rail picked up a small group of people in long sleeves and dark glasses, probably hemaphagic vampires.
The monorail cut the corner of Starlight Vale on this edge, far south of the luxury mansions in the foothills, then rattled on vaguely east over Eifanei. The simple, boxy architecture of the mini-elven enclave was all clean ivory, ochre, and green. On other worlds, the roofs would be covered in native grass and flowers. Here, that was maybe too dangerous, so they’d settled with toothless moss and lichen. If it picked up any elves, they didn’t come through their car.
Continuing northeast, the buildings went old and brown again, but with a soothing red cast over the wider avenues and taller buildings. The monorail slowed with a sudden drop as it neared their stop. Tower Watch rose to meet them as they took another lift down, aiming for transfer to a tram.
The yellow route tram stopped in front of Tower Watch Plaza, an orderly mish-mash of social, civil, and commercial space. Guild Row was typically the thing a person came here for, though, so the feeder buildings faded into the background. The large, ornate buildings crouched around a central cobblestone courtyard, each one home to a headquarters of a major inter-world network of various professionals or magical inclinations. The Council of Vampires, The Mercenary Guild (capital M implied over the smaller mercenary guilds), a few of the Mage Guilds with their specific specialties. And sitting low and solid among them, slightly out of place with it's more brutalist architecture, was the main office of the Thýlalykófoton, the place where greenwitches gathered.
It was quiet. It was always quiet. And it felt like a hospital, eggshell walls with blue and green accents as a floral patterned striped down the center. The first area was a small foyer with a round secretary’s desk in the middle. The guild beyond was partitioned off by a wall with a few doors leading into the rest of the building. The secretary was a young person, elf-shaped in all the normal anatomical ways, but with dark brown hair. They didn't have the sense of magical inclination around them, though. Numerically, there were only so many magician elves. During staff shortages, other elves with slight defects (by wood elf standards) sometimes slipped in to fill the gaps.
Wood elves were too weird for their own good sometimes.
Lidea gave the receptionist a little wave and moved toward the door farthest to the right. A sensor box nearby recognized eir specific magical signature, and the door unlocked for em. While every elf with an active magical inclination belonged to the organization automatically, only members of the central college like Lidea were received with special treatment. Ey couldn’t say, to this day, what rubric they used to induct certain members into an elevated position. A letter had simply shown up at eir family home explaining what they had on offer for em. Ey had never pressed it further.
The Thýlalykófoton had a small dormitory, maybe a dozen rooms on two floors. Only three had inhabitants on a more permanent basis, but they stood empty for large periods of time. Through the door, they moved into a small hallway that had a little sitting room off to the left side. A double door on the opposite side of the sitting room led into the rest of the building. Across the hall from the sitting room was the first set of stairs, but there was a sign on them claiming they were out of commission.
"What the hell is this?" Lidea muttered, flicking the sign with eir fingertips. Eir room was on the top floor, but there was another U-shaped staircase at the end of this hallway. As they moved down it, however, the wood floors, normally pristine, felt squishy underfoot.
"Lidea!" Ey turned to an elderly stone elf woman, thick silver hair in youth, now white and brittle, leaning on a cane to support her she moved from the sitting room and into the hallways.
Mattie had been head of the college in her youth, and now she spent retirement handling the onerous task of paperwork. Lidea hugged her gently, squeezing a body made of stringy muscle with firm pressure.
"I wanted to catch you before you made it this far," Mattie croaked. "You can't stay in your room right now. There was a pipe leak, and now the mold is just…it's just everywhere. We hoped to have it fixed by the time you birdies came home to roost, but-"
"No, I understand. That's…that's annoying; I'm not going to lie." Lidea's shoulders dropped.
"Your stuff is okay. We moved it into storage. And we've got a voucher for a hotel for you. So! It's all squared away. Just come by my office." Mattie turned immediately, heading back to the main part of the building. Lidea moved eir bag up on eir shoulder and turned to Sunny. Ey ran eir hand through his.
"Head on to your place. I'll catch up with you later. See what terrible hotel they put me up at."
Sunny didn't move, though, stalling as he worked up the courage for the next ask.
"Why don’t you just stay with me?"
"What?"
"You're only in for a little while, right? Until you catch your next contract? I've got the room."
"Um." Ey studied him. Noticed the way he glanced off holding eye contact. Ey wanted to stay with him, ey realized. Ey didn't really want to part, unsure when ey'd see him next with his lectures coming up. Why had ey never really realized that feeling before?
"Okay," ey said, and felt both their hands tighten around each other.
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