The last time I’d been to L’ri’kit City, I’d been but a youngling. I had been once before, on a field trip with my age mates from school. That last time, I’d been answering a summons along with Miljack, along with dozens of others in our generational group, and it had been for the assessment to verify the desirability of us being considered for the future role in government that now awaited us. Assuming we truly were cleared of this alleged murder, that is.
I heard a gasp off to my right and glanced over to see Kelly’s surprise at the moving walkway before us.
“It’s rather bright in here,” Richard said from behind me. “The buildings and path, they glow like this all the time?”
“They do,” the Hand informed him. “Jenite crystals are embedded within, tuned to resonate with the mana about them. Hence why it gets brighter the closer we approach.”
“You mean they shine because they are reacting to our souls or something?” he asked.
“Not quite, but close enough I suppose.”
“Duuude,” he muttered. “They totally use the Force to light this place.”
“Why don’t you use the coldness of space like for the trains?” Kelly asked, stepping gingerly on the moving platform and ignoring his deputy’s ramblings.
“This city predates such tech being part of the infrastructure and we wish to preserve the integrity of it all,” came the reply. This time from one of the Senior Hunters escorting us. “It doesn’t cause any ecological or personal harm.”
“This is wild,” Richard said, as I stepped onto the walkway. I knew where we were headed and wondered what my new friends would make of it. The High Lord resided in what used to be L’ri’kit City Hall, the offices upstairs now converted into his private residence. The downstairs still held a working comm link up to the orbital platform, which in turn bounced the signal to the Arbiter via a subspace connection. The original hardware was in a glass case, of course, and a much more reliable and up-to-date comm system was in place. Likewise, there was an internal comm that connected to the extra-planetary one, so that official meetings and trials could be recorded as need arose and transmitted to the official main archives.
Whether we would be in the Arbiter’s personal office or in the courtroom, or merely in the comms room remained to be seen. Which one it was would tell me how serious things were.
We walked slowly along the moving platform, past multistory housing that reached ten or fewer stories high. Each was currently empty but kept move-in ready by AI-directed bots and Community Preservationists who oversaw the maintenance. Small parks dotted the landscape, eerily empty of families; the playgrounds silent as if waiting expectantly for children who no longer came unless a school group chose to visit and stopped to enjoy the park facilities. Shopfronts came next, the former commerce center almost exactly as the last inhabitants had left it, signs still informing us of the name and type of business that had been there. Some even still held goods kept in stasis, visible through the windows.
The Hand had called it a ‘living museum’ but to me, it felt more like a tomb. To live, it needed more life than one man’s family and a group of workers who came and went. Why have everything ready to be lived in again anyway, if no one was moving in? It seemed foolish, though perhaps there were still legal entanglements from the heirs of those who’d left this all behind.
I decided this was something I would look into, when Miljack and I ascended. Surely there was a way to preserve this place while letting it actually live? More Preservationists, perhaps, who’d actually live in these buildings and run some of the businesses both for personal everyday use as well as cater to tourists. We did get them from time to time, but mainly those wishing to go on a visual safari. These empty spaces rarely took in large numbers, which sort of made the point of having preserved them feel pointless.
We reached our destination and hopped off the platform.
“Definitely a government building,” Kelly said. “Impressive.”
“It’s also the official residence of the High Lord,” I said.
Kelly didn’t reply to that and for once, Richard didn’t have some odd human thing from a vid to reference. As we went in through the automatic doors, the High Lord himself greeted us.
“I see you left them armed,” he laughed, addressing the Hand, who shrugged.
“They asked us to detain them, so we have. No one said we had to keep them locked up after detaining them for a specified amount of time or to disarm them,” he pointed out.
“You always did like to find your way around the absurd,” the High Lord said, affection warming his words. “Come, we’ll go into my office and you can recount everything once more for the official record.”
He led us to an opulent office that looked out over a park to the rear of the building. He sat down behind the desk, flicked a switch embedded within the desk surface, and spoke his name and gave a case number. Then he looked at us and repeated the allegations. “Now, will you please recount everything for the record, beginning with finding the first of the omegas’ bodies.”
Kelly looked surprised at this but quickly recovered and began. “I was sitting down having the weekly meeting with Richard here, going over the previous week’s arrests and fines and going over upcoming events so we could plan for potential trouble. That’s when we got a call saying some hunters went into a hide, that is human folks hunting for food, not Ilyirzi Hunters. Anyways, they went in and found the first body.”
He recounted going out to see it and how it had been nothing more than a skeleton. He mentioned the cheap earring and plain, rotten garments, indicating the body had been of a commoner and had been there for several months at the very least.
He continued on to the point where we had gotten the request to send a Hunter, and there the High Lord stopped him. “Thank you, Sheriff Townsend.”
He turned his attention to me now and I began recounting my side of things, starting with my being called by the Hand and given the assignment. They wanted to know everything, so I gave it to them. Unfortunately, this was going to take awhile, so I hoped they were prepared.