Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

In the Name of Pain

It was raining o the Tesraki home world, great drops fell from the sky mingling together in the gutters and byways of thousands upon thousands of levels, eventually trickling downward to the bottom most streets, dark and dingy, held together by scrap metal and stuttering Neon lights. The poorest of the poor lived here hiding in great droves under cobbled together street signs, surviving off the great heaps of trash that were dumped down into their homes without a second thought.

Sunny had never visited a more hopeless and depressing place. Everywhere she looked sad dark eyes glittered at her from under runnels of trickling water, blinking from the darkness. The owners of those eyes didn't tend to show their faces, though when they did the bodies that contained the eyes were almost as sad as the eyes themselves, bony with wet matted fur sick with mange.

The Tesraki homeworld had one of the largest populations of any known planet, and it was increasing by the day. No one was sure exactly how many Tesraki considering that the census never went lower than the upper street levels, so it was estimated that there could be a hundred million missing in the census. Based on the amount of eyes she saw glittering at her from the dark, Sunny was more than willing to believe it.

Exanimar was voted the most lifeless planet of 4020 in earths Interstellar Life magazine, but that wasn't because no one lived here. It was home to thousands upon thousands of Tesraki. The vote came from he fact that Exanimar had no trace of its original ecosystem left. Over thousands of years the Tesraki had run its natural industries into the ground until the planet was left completely without natural resources. The entire planet was one massive city linked by thousands and thousands of streets and pipes and sewers, etc etc.

In fact, the Tesraki had originally left their home planet for fear that they would not longer be able to live there in the next thousand years.

They might have been right if it wasn't for the life support systems that kept the planet habitable.

Water and oxygen was generated into the atmosphere on a regular basis allowing it to maintain a weather system. Technologies had been made to clean up the air so the sun could shine through though there was at one point where the Tesraki said the sky had not been visible for hundreds of years.

The thought made her shutter.

Even the humans had managed to keep their planet somewhat clean, and they were only second in line to the Tesraki when it came to wasting natural resources. To think that the Tesraki had no idea what their planet had originally looked like made her cringe. Down here under miles and miles of metal and concrete, she felt trapped and suffocated by the weight of the city.

Growing up on Anin with a sparce population and wide open spaces, it tended to make one forget how good they had it.

Even Adam seemed out of place walking next to her. He had his jacket pulled up over his head, and ith the way his mechanical eye glowed in the light of the rain, it seemed as if he had walked right out of one of those sci fi dystopian movies that he loved so much.

Water splashed up around their feet as they cut through the darkness.

A gentle welling of steam rose up from the ground at their feet, heated by thousands upon thousands of miles of pipe.

"Any luck?" Sunny asked as Adam paused below a street sign. It seemed to be the one dry pocket in this part of the under streets that had not been taken over by the destitute.

"No, nothing."

"I thought we had dealt with the drug trade." She grumbled pulling her cloak up around her shoulders.

He snorted, "You don't DEAL with a drug problem, you can only hope to control it. Besides with the Celzex acting as strange as they are, I am not sure how far this investigation is going to get."