Queen of the Pirates

Shandora: The City of Gold

"How confident are you that there is something below us?" I ask, tossing around a perfect square piece of cloud.

"I'm fairly confident that there will be something down here though."

I nod, "We'll be able to settle the debate once and for all. No more wondering if he actually found a golden city. We will be able to see it with our own eyes."

As Robin descends in the hole she's making through the clouds, she makes arms appear in order to brings the cloud blocks up and out of her way. She's expending energy to keep the arms present, and she's working hard to slice through the solid fluffy that is the sky clouds.

In order to keep watching, I scoot closer to the opening, letting my legs dangle down into the hole. It reminds me of the times I would sit at the docks and let my feet dangle into the water. The longing to be out at sea grew with each passing day until finally I was able to set sail with Luffy.

"Akari!" Robin calls out. "There's a way underneath!"

I look down to see her make a few more cuts to create an opening that will drop us down into another room. "You were right!"

"Grab my bag, and I'll use my arms to get you down here," she glances up at me before jumping through the opening she's made.

I pick up her bag, looking at the hands sticking out of the way of the shaft she's made. Then I carefully start walking down the hands that are palm up. Once I reach the bottom of the shaft, I do my best to gently jump down into the room below. A room that seems to be the interior of a large temple that above was simply the top. "It's huge," I slowly turn around to take in the ornately carved walls.

"Just as I thought," she slips her backpack on her shoulders. "This site's deeper than it looks. Even though it is a Blue Sea ruin, the land around it is an island cloud. I knew something wasn't right."

"Sky clouds have taken over this area."

"Exactly. They're just the top layer. We can go deeper."

"We could if stone wasn't below our feet. At this point I feel like we need to get out of here. We need to see what is outside."

"You're right. There's plenty of exploring that could be done out there."

With no map to help us out of this place, Robin leads the way with only the engravings and understanding of a temple like this to get us out. She uses her knife to cut through any vines in our way, which are all over the place. It is clear that people haven't been here in many hundreds of years. We're walking the halls of a place that hasn't had a person in centuries.

This place is darker than the other tunnel we walked through earlier, so I'm keeping as close to Robin as possible. She hasn't teased me this time, but I think we are both too focused on trying to get out of this place. We have to remember where we've been in case we have to backtrack.

"Is that a light up there?" I ask as we make it through a particularity thick wall of vines.

"I think that it is."

Our pace speeds up as we rush to finally get back out in the sun and see if we've made it to the place that we've been searching for all this time. If below the clouds is where the lost city of El Dorado has been all this time. The only way to prove this is to see it with our own eyes.

"Whoa!" I blurt out as I almost fall off the edge of the opening we've made it to.

Robin stumbles, grabbing my arm to pull me back before I plumet over the edge. "Easy there."