Tomorrow will be the last day anyone spends in Talos – well, kind of. It’s time to wrap this baby up in a neat bow. The next three days will be crazy stuff! I paced the floor for hours and wrote in my journal for MORE hours trying to figure out how to properly transition into the War Arc and the ending, which are really one in the same thing. But I think I figured out a working solution. It’s not perfect, but it’ll tie everything up in the end. Just wait and see! (On a side note, sorry for posting this late – classes and choir have me tied up. I falsely put the date of yesterday on this. But yeah, I am posting it a day late. :P)

Word Count: 108,433

The other knights, who had been standing around lazily, did not stop their activities, and in fact seemed hardly startled by the woman standing in front of them. When she didn’t leave, they all pulled out their mu guns and prepared to fire – but Ames was prepared as well. She reached into the air and pulled down a glass panel, then began searching for a network on Talos that connected the mu guns with one another. When she found it, she immediately began tapping on the virtual keyboard, and struck quickly. Flabbergasted, not knowing what Ames was doing by waving her arms about in the open air, the knights attempted to fire their mu guns in hopes to shock her with a large jolt – but nothing happened.

“Yeah, sorry if those don’t work,” Ames said, tossing the glass panel away.

“What did you do to our weapons?” one of the knights asked, suddenly beginning to fear the women who could disable his “magical” weapon.

“Well, you see, those devices are very complicated machines, and I’m a very complicated engineer who just wants to be let into the city. If you’d like, I can make them backfire. I’m sure you won’t survive, so you’d best save yourself and let me through the gates.”

Weaponless, the guards had no choice but to oblige – and under her false threat of turning their own weapons against them, they were scared enough to oblige quickly. Ames saw the men scatter in front of her and run to the gate controls, primitive levers on a thick control pad. For the first in her life Ames was looking at Talos’s level of technology with real perspective. She had spent so much time in Cydia that we was now numb to the technological achievements of Talos; everything felt much more primitive than she remembered.

The large gates to the city slowly creaked open; countless gears rotated through millions of times with every inch the gate moved. Before it was even entirely open, Ames squeezed her way through and caught a glimpse of the inside.
It was certainly not Lanford. In fact, Ames wasn’t sure what city it was at first. There was only one apparent district, an outer ring surrounding the familiar power plant at the center. Another prison, no doubt. The city itself, however, did not match Lanford’s layout to any degree at all, indicating what a rushed job building the power plant must have been. The governments of Talos knew that they were running out of time – that Cydia did not want them leaving their designated place in the universe. This rapid construction was a last-ditch effort for the Talosian leaders to get what they wanted before Cydian forces overwhelmed them – a world all their own.

However, the city, while renovated from its original form, seemed greatly dismantled. No care had been taken in transforming the city into the Lanford capitol it now so well resembled, as if the golden rings had simply been dropped on top of the buildings, crushing them underneath their massive weight. Nothing had been spared – buildings were burned, destroyed, and broken down. Several rested directly underneath the two district rings, one providing the outer gate, and one providing a barrier between the livable area and the power plant. It was a disaster, a mess.

Short was her stay in the city before Ames saw blood on the ground. She stopped and ran her finger across it; the blood was old, dried, probably belonging to someone flogged by the knights. She could only imagine what kind of fight the citizens of this city had put up attempting to drive the knights and the construction work away.

Then, she saw the sign – the welcome sign with the name of the city. She was in Gorom.

The city hardly even resembled Gorom any longer. She hadn’t seen a single living person; Gorom was a bustling city in the Confederacy that had the resources available to expand out into a metropolis. Clearly, that had been the original plan – but now, it was all but completely ruined. Not a soul lived outside anymore, a stark contrast when juxtaposed with Ames’s first visit to Gorom, and to Marcus, who sent her to Lanford via the Underground Railroad. She imagined Graham going through the same process. Finding Marcus, if it was possible at all, was the best thing she could do, she decided, and began moving forward with cautious feet.

Along the way, she passed more dried blood on the cobblestone streets, and turned her head to look away. So much blood, so much terror and turmoil – was this the future of her homeland? Had she done nothing to stop it, travelling and working with Graham? Her entire life, as far back as she could remember, was spent running from the government and those wretched knights, but it had never escalated to such a global affair. In her absence the situation had worsened exponentially. When a cadaver appeared on the side of the road, its limbs dismembered and skin burnt to a crisp by electric shock, she knew this was not simply the work of the Confederacy, the joint territory and organization controlled by all nations on Talos.

Something so horrible could have only been done with Cydian technology. And although the knights were in possession of mu guns, a device that emitted an electrical charge this strong – strong enough to blacken the skin of a man – had never been in their weapons repertoire. The thought that Cydian forced might already be nearby frightened Ames, and when she saw, down the road some ways, a navy blue knight dismembered and burnt in the same fashion, her fears were confirmed – Cydian forces were in Talos, wreaking havoc.

Then the tanks outside of the city were not because Gorom was off-limits to outsiders, but because the city had become a massive quarantined area. It was a battlefield; possibly one in a much larger struggle for control of the planet’s dimensional placement. And from the looks of it, Talos was losing.

Remnants of the tram that had ferried citizens to and from Gorom’s entrance gates exaggerated the city’s dilapidated condition. Ames began darting down the road, around the single district circle that had been so carelessly formed. If anything, it was the Talosian governments’ rush to build these gigantic inter-dimensional jet engines that left them so susceptible to attack and utter defeat. She was ashamed of her world for lacking the ability to defend itself – Cydia had the upper hand; Talos was, for all intents and purposes, helpless against the might of their advanced technology.

Knowing the threat, why was she so compelled to remain in Gorom? She could not bring herself to turn around; she had known too many people in Gorom, had so many experiences at this place so long ago. She wanted to find someone – anyone – still alive. And so she continued through the city, searching for any sign of life, breaking into homes that had long since been blown up by bombs, set alight by fires, yet still partially stood.

At last she found someone – or could have sworn that she did. After inspecting a home she heard footsteps outside. Mimicking those footsteps Ames ran out of the house to see whom it was, and caught a glimpse of a young blonde woman dashing down the street, apparently running from something. She turned a corner into an alley and disappeared.

Ames gave chase at once, but could not catch up with the girl. When the alley gave way to a dead end, she gave up. Yet she did not want to believe it was a hallucination; her gut told her that it could not have possibly been a hallucination, that there was meaning behind this girl running down the streets. She had gone somewhere, somewhere far out of Ames’s reach.

Tired, she trudged down Gorom’s roads until she reached Marcus’s half-destroyed map shop. Opening up the door, she expected the worst.

She would have remained relatively calm amidst all this gore and destruction had Marcus’s body not remained inside the shop after he’d been killed. But the Cydians, in their collective wisdom, had left the body slumped atop the sales desk next to the cash register. His body, seeped in dried blood, was covered in gunshot wounds. The entrance to his storage room, where Ames knew he kept his newest potential recruits to the Underground Railroad, was burst wide open. Written on the brick walls of the storage room was the word “EARTH” in white chalk, hastily scribbled for whomever could read it.

Whoever had killed Marcus had also raided that room, but Ames lacked the nerve to look for more dead bodies. Seeing Marcus’s body and the open room behind it forced painful memories to resurface in her mind. Unable to withstand the trauma of this scene, she rushed out of the room. There was nothing left for her to see in Gorom.

Curie was having trouble keeping watch on Graham’s body. Tanks and air ships continued to pass them by, and it was only a matter of time before somebody stopped and asked them why the two men were hanging around. Curie hoped Ames would return with word of a hospital in the distant city, but knew that even if the hospital admitted Graham there would be no proper treatment for an illness caused by his fetch. And so, with hope, Curie continued to wait for the consciousness of his long-time friend to reattach itself to the fetch’s mainframe.

It happened just as Ames entered into a visible distance. Graham’s fetch suffered a bout akin to a short seizure; Curie heard a shocking noise, and Graham regained full control over the fetch without fatigue or loss of motor functions. Boldly, Graham stood up.

“We’re in Talos? Is this where the portal led us to?”

“No exactly,” Curie told him. “You were unconscious a little bit too long. We ended up in what looked like a shipping facility a ways up the mountain. I carried you here while Ames went out that nearby city to find out where we are. It looks like she’s coming back now.”

Graham observed the surrounding area, looking at the glimmering golden city and a large black cloud hovering over in the distance a ways away. His head began to shift back and forth quickly as he searched for clues; he saw the tracks of a large locomotive on the ground next to the city. He saw a small house below the black cloud in the distance – even further than the city. Close to the ocean, perhaps.

“We’re right next to Gorom!” he shouted. “This is the Oceanic Confederacy. That makes sense – a portal would be here if all the world’s nations collaborated with The Collective. Yes, we must be nearby Gorom, but where is it? That looks like Lanford, not Gorom.”

“You don’t know that,” Curie said. “You don’t even live here, or on this planet for that matter. Wait for Ames to come back.”

“But that cloud of ash and dust is unmistakable. I remember choking on it, waking up to a mouthful of soot when I first gained consciousness in Talos. That’s Vanessa’s house.”

“You don’t mean…”

“No, not her. I haven’t seen her since you all moved away, though I suppose they’re back on Cydia? I hope you haven’t dragged them into all of this.”

“The only person I dragged into this was Vanessa. The kid… he was just a computer simulation. An empty fetch.”

“Smart fetch, then.”

“Yeah…” Curie said, feeling ashamed to have lied to Graham for so many years. “Listen, I should have told you about all of this sooner. Although my career troubles were real, it was completely untrustworthy of me to keep everything a secret from you. But I had reasons. I still do. I hope you understand that and can forgive me for hiding so much from you, because I really had no other choice.”

“Don’t think anything of it, Adam. Whatever you are, whatever your real name is – that doesn’t mean anything to me, as long as your intentions are still right. And so far, you’ve done nothing to convince me otherwise.”

Ames approached the group. “That’s Gorom,” she said, looking at Curie and then at Graham. The sight of Graham not playing the role of a slumped over unconscious mass of artificial skin and bones made her jump backward, exclaiming, “You’re all right! Thank goodness!” She immediately embraced him. Graham tried to push her off to tell her that everything was just fine, and that there were more important matters at hand, but she wouldn’t let go. Graham gave in until she decided it was time to release him.

“Ames, I think something happened to Gorom while I was unconscious. You have to tell me what’s going on – right now. What did you see when you visited?”

“The entire city is guarded by knights and tanks, and the inside is a complete wreck. It looks like there might have been a battle within. I saw several knights completely torn apart via methods no weapon from Talos could have executed, which makes me think Cydian forces are already invading. If that’s the case, we might be in a lot of trouble.”

Graham’s heart sank. “And… Marcus? We must return to the city, I have to see him!”

Ames shook her head and choked on her words. “James, Marcus was murdered.” At this Graham turned around and pounded his fist on the cliff, cursing the heavens.

“Goddammit, Wheat! Why did you tell me all of that?” he said, his fist pounding with pain from hitting the cliff. He massaged his hand with his other hand and faced the group, wondering the purpose of his old vision.

“Wheat? Adam, did we get another message from Wheat while I was gone?”

“No.”

“I did,” Graham said, causing the other two to look at him. “At least, I think I did. It might have just been a dream, it might be nothing, but he knew we would be nearby Gorom – he knew we’d end up in the Oceanic Confederacy! He told me to find Marcus, but Marcus is… he’s…” Graham stopped and bit his bottom lip, withholding any further words afraid to utter anything that would worsen the group’s situation. After a few seconds, staring at the tanks moving around in the distance, he released his lip. “We’re not safe here, are we?”

Nobody in the group knew. Nobody in the group responded – there wasn’t any time. Before Ames could state that they were safer on Talos than in City Square, a tank came rushing towards the group at an incredible speed. Hoping to avoid it, the three travelers made their way around the cliff side, but the tank followed them. When at last there was no escape, the hulking vehicle paused, and its top hatch opened up. A golden knight appeared from inside the tank. Ames pulled down a screen and keyboard, prepared to disarm his mu gun if the knight tried anything.

The knight, however, did nothing but speak. “Get in the vehicle,” was all he said.

Graham, Ames and Curie responded with a silent “no” – they stood there, staring at the knight, knowing that giving the man and his cohorts inside of the tank one wrong answer might result in their immediate elimination. And with no Collective on Talos to return to, Graham feared his consciousness and the consciousnesses of his allies would be forever lost if such were to occur.

“You either get in, or you die,” the knight said. “I’m not here to hurt you. You’re all obviously confused; you should not be outside alone. All cities are in lockdown right now. It is my job to gather up stragglers and transport them to a save place.”

Ames couldn’t stand the lies. “Safe?!” she shouted, moving up towards the vehicle. “This vehicle is save, but your kind are the last I’d ever expect to help normal, healthy citizens. You despicable monsters pride yourselves in maiming and hurting others in the name of your country. Your people killed my closest friends, and I can never forgive you. Tell me why I should go with you – I implore you to try and convince me!”

Overhead, and air ship suddenly began dipping towards the ground. Smoke rose high into the heavens and the zeppelin-like balloon of the air ship exploded in a burst of flame. The culprit of this destruction was a strange aircraft several hundred meters away. It was not apparent how, but by some means this distant aircraft had swiftly removed the air ship from the sky. The golden knight motioned his arm at the wreckage, and then pointed to the strange aircraft that had shot it down. “That is why,” he said.

“That looks like a Cydian aircraft,” Curie whispered to Ames and Graham. “If those are here, then that means The Collective has complete and unfettered access to Talos now.”

“We’ll get in,” Ames said immediately.  “But don’t try anything. I’ve beaten up my fair share of knights, and my opinions haven’t changed.”

All three climbed a ladder on the side of the tank and entered its hull. The hull was made of a thick black metal that reminded Graham of the metal used to create buildings on Cydia, but he thought that it must be impossible for Taconic Slate to be on Talos, unless Cydia had been sending it to Talos for its own purposes.

Or had Cydia made the tank? Suddenly, Graham wasn’t sure which faction was carrying him and his companions to safety. He began inspecting the walls nervously, hoping to confirm that it was simply black steel and not Taconic Slate. Not everything on Talos could have been built with Cydian technology, he thought – there must have been some part of the tank built off of original innovation from Talos’s great minds.

The pipes, perhaps, but those were made through metalworking techniques clearly stolen from Cydian descent.

All at once he snapped back – why was he worrying about this? The inside of the tank was bare and dark; there were several seats and a dashboard, but no screen or window to see where one was going. Ames pulled down a screen to see what was outside of the tank; somehow the knights did not need a virtual window to navigate around in this vehicle.

“You’ve sure become adept at using the glasses,” Graham said.

“I learned quite a bit during my short stay in The Collective, before Adam put me in my fetch. I even learned how to disarm Cydian weaponry – at least the mu gun. The knowledge just flowed into my mind; I didn’t want to see anyone hurt by those wretched devices anymore, and I suppose The Collective responded to that want by supplying me with the necessary information to execute an action to fulfill the want.”

“That sounds quite a bit like my experience.”

“Oh? What sort of information did The Collective give to you?”

“Ah, it was nothing special. Nothing useful like how to disarm a weapon, though I suppose with enough tinkering around I could figure that out on my own. In fact, forget I said anything. None of it was really important anyway.” Graham never mentioned that the information he received explained their entire predicament, and ultimately unveiled the nature of Cydia’s involvement with Talos. But Ames was obedient – it was not a minute later that she did indeed forget he’d said anything, and simply sat quietly.

Then, she broke the silence. “I saw someone in Gorom. Someone alive.”

One of the knights reacted to this: “Gorom is sealed off; everyone inside was either evacuated or killed. And how did you get inside anyway? But no, it’s impossible that anybody was still inside.”

“I saw her! A young blonde girl, running about. She turned a corner and disappeared. Don’t tell me I’m seeing things, because I’m definitely not seeing things. She was real, and she somehow escaped the city.” She turned to Graham, “You believe me, right? She was probably a Cydian, in a fetch or something.”

“I believe you, but I haven’t exactly been there for myself. Right now, I’d just like to know where we’re going. This doesn’t make much sense – the knights have never done anyone favors before.”

But Ames already had an inkling from the start – the knights were particularly sloppily dressed, and it seemed like one of the knights driving the tank wasn’t sure how the armor came on and off, and continually struggled with the metal gloves. Yet the tank ran smoothly – how did they know where it was going if they couldn’t even put their armor on straight? But Ames knew, either way, that these knights couldn’t possibly be real knights; no, they were conductors of the Underground Railroad, most certainly!

She reached for one knight’s helmet, planning to rip it off and expose him as the Railroad worker he was, but the man knocked her arm away harshly. “Don’t touch me, or I won’t hesitate to subdue you.”

“You’re weaponless.”

“I’m covered in Talos’s strongest metal,” the knight said, and immediately Graham thought of Taconic Slate. “You are not. Do not be afraid, we’re taking you all to a safe place where the enemy cannot harm you. You can remain there for the duration of the war; you will be provided with rations and clothes, and when this unholy mess is over you will be released.”

“And who decreed this,” Ames said, “President Davy? He’s not the type to give a damn about Alteria’s people.”

“President Davy was murdered several weeks ago,” the knight said, “by the alien forces. Since then we have pooled all of our resources into protecting the land and fighting off the enemy, and we are doing well. Victory is in sight after these long weeks of battle, and Alteria’s populace is stored in several safe locations, waiting for myself and the other brave knights to finish fighting this war. Victory is not far out of reach, I can assure you.”

The knight ceased talking and made a sharp turn, which tossed Ames, Curie and Graham about the cabin of the tank. Ames mind, however, had already been tossed by the news of President Davy’s death. Davy was one of the six – five, discounting President Ford – leaders that governed the different continents of Talos. They had been ruling as long as Ames could remember; thinking back to her childhood, she had seen their faces growing up, and their faces as an adult. And now she was watching Cydian operatives slowly exterminate each one. Who would be next?

They must have been a good distance away from Gorom when the vehicle finally stopped and the knights forced them out. “So much for being hospitable,” Ames said as she climbed out the top of the tank. Immediately she breathed in the thick fumes of factory smoke, and saw directly in front of her a walled community filled with people. The walls extended out farther than Ames could see, but she was quite sure it was circular and encapsulated and grandiose amount of people – more than the sum of the Gorom escapees and the populations of the surrounding towns combined.

The trio was unloaded and shoved into this temporary village. They were told by several knights guarding the area that it was a refugee camp, and that the area was under the full and constant protection of the knights of Alteria, even in the absence of their President. The last remaining organization forces at work on the continent had gathered together to build and sustain these camps so that “the hardworking citizens of Alteria could outlast the enemy forces.”

Inside the camp, business seemed to be as usual – life went on unchanged, at least as viewed by outsiders such as Graham. To him, it looked as though Gorom had not been destroyed, merely shifted over to a safer location away from the battlefields, or rebuilt with slightly cheaper materials. But they were the same roads, the same homes, everything the same except for the lack of stores. Right nearby the entrance was a building dedicated to rations distribution, though nobody was lined up to get his or her food for the day. In fact, the doors looked as though they’d never been opened. But they must have been – somebody had to eat.

Overhead they could still see air ships flying off into the distance, armed to the brim with steam guns and large missiles, prepared to unleash the full force of their might on the Cydian threat. Ames wondered if they were fighting on orders from a President, because she knew from Ford that none of them had any interest in protecting the planet or its people, or if the fighting was happening entirely on its own due to the people’s will to want to drive away a genuine threat to their existence.

But if that were so, the Oceanic Confederacy would have been overthrown long ago.

Curie voiced that he thought something was strange about this camp. “These people seem a bit too tired to be walking around. That, or their movements look calculated. Look at that woman, there – every step she takes is just as perfect as the one before it. It’s odd, though I’m sure my suspicions aren’t grounded at all.”

Ames couldn’t see why so many people had agreed to come here. Even if it was safe from Cydian attack, it was not safe from the knights. The entire area could have been an extermination camp for all anybody knew – or didn’t know, God forbid – and Ames was not prepared to rescue more citizens, watch more citizens die. She had never forgiven herself for Wheat.

As they walked around, Curie became more suspicious of the camp’s validity. The population density declined significantly, and eventually there were no people at all. The size of the camp, apparently, was not dependant at all on how many people were being brought into it. It was much larger than the population it accommodated.

They traveled back to a more populated area and began asking people where they were meant to sleep, but nobody would respond to their questions – nobody spoke. Graham grabbed the arm of one man, but the man shrugged it off and grunted, then continued walking along the road. Graham tried asking another citizen, but he was again shrugged off. Nobody would speak with them. In time, Graham wasn’t sure if anybody even knew how to speak. Even so, he pressed onward, hoping to find somebody with some knowledge of how to live around the camp.

Curie was having similar luck, and he was beginning to know why. “James, Jessica, this is a little boy.” Holding onto his arm was a harmless little child whose wide eyes looked up at Ames, and then at Graham. They were filled with innocence, and Graham was filled with sorrow for the young lad imprisoned in this refugee camp, wasting his childhood sitting out a war.

Suddenly, the boy screamed. Curie hand gripped the boy’s arm and swung him in a circle high above his head, gathering force that he used to harshly bash the young lad onto the road below. “What the hell are you doing?” Graham said, reaching for Curie to try and stop him – but the deed was done. The boy had already hit the ground hard when Graham reached Curie. “You’ve probably killed the kid!”

Curie paused and looked at the child on the ground in front of him, and then at Graham, rolling his eyes. “Are you so sure? Look for yourself.”

The child made no more noises; his body simply moved, picked itself up, and walked away, without another word.

“H— he’s not real…”

“Surprisingly, he’s the same model that I used for my son on Earth. Well, not the same model – this one is decidedly dumber. I’m inclined to believe that this entire camp is filled with artificial bodies, simply wandering without purpose. That’s why nobody is gathering rations; these bots aren’t ever going to eat anything.”

“Then what happened to the real people?”

Providence would have Graham’s question answered – from afar, an unknown voice yelled, “They’re gone!” A man was running along the road, attempting to catch up with the trio. He looked as if he’d been following them throughout the camp; he was significantly dusty and dirty, and his disheveled blonde hair signified a man who had been working tirelessly all day long, outside of the stalking. “Jessica, is that you? I thought for sure Ford had killed you! This is incredible, I can’t believe it!”

“Excuse me?” Ames said, stepping back from the strange man, who was trying to embrace her.

“Oh, my sincerest apologies, I haven’t even introduced myself. Or should I say re-introduce? Ah, either way, it’s James Wheat you’re talking to, in the flesh. Or as close to flesh as it gets around here.”

“That’s impossible, get away from me!” Ames said. “James Wheat was a dear, dear friend of mine – don’t you dare mock his name by impersonating him. He’s hardly even a man anymore, I don’t see how you could have the nerve to try.”

“Who’s this Wheat fellow?” Curie asked.

“I was the conductor of Station A of—”

“Shut up!” Ames shouted, and stepped in front of the man so as to block him from everyone else’s view. “He was the conductor of Station A of the Underground Railroad, and was captured and very nearly killed by President Ford and the knights of Lanford. Therefore, it’s impossible that this impostor is really James Wheat. He was mutilated into a mechanical abomination. His body was completely destroyed. And that,” she stepped away from the man’s body, “is not even what his body used to look like. They’re mocking us with this camp. The Alterian administration clearly knows who we are and what we’re up to—”

“Stop it, Jessica,” Curie said. “Don’t be so paranoid – let the man speak his case. If he has one, that is. I’m interested in hearing about it.”