Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Two Dogs and A Shotgun

A fork of lightning cut across the sky. As perpetually dark as arcadia was the white branching forks were easy to see against the black . Rain pattered against the windows, clouding the city skyline in a murky haze of droplets. Now that Arcadia was growing, new cities were beginning to crop up over its surface forcing the need to name their capital. Adam had put out a vote on the Arcadian web to allow the citizens to help choose the city name, and his only stipulation is that it wasn't allowed to sound stupid. Of course, that did not stop people from being people.

They got name suggestions like

Balzcity

Lickum

Metatronopolis

And

Stupidville

In the end those options had been vetoed in favor of NoxUmber which Martha hadn't bothered to point out was just a mix between the Latin word for night and a sort of deep brownish red color, but it was the only suggestion that hadn't sounded too horribly stupid.

Martha leaned against the window feeling the cool glass against her cheek. Below her the artificial suns had been dimmed to match with the ambiance of the rain. Crazy how far technology had come since she was a child. They said that their generators had experienced the most rapid advancement of technology since the late mid 1900s to early 2000s. The time between the first flight to the moon landing had been approximately 65.5 years. Technology had gone from rotary phones to touchscreens and virtual reality in a similar amount of time. Following that earth had experienced multiple wars and a nuclear apocalypse that had almost destroyed the planet and everyone on it forcing earth to work its way slowly back up through the dark ages for a few millennia. Now in her lifetime she had experienced the flight of the first interstellar ship to being someone who lived on an alien planet they had managed to terraform in under five years.

It was astonishing

And it was part of her every day life.

Martha missed earth of course, most of all she missed the sun, the real sun, the burning ball of gas in the sky , and great blue fields stretching out like wings from horizon to horizon. If she ever got the opportunity she would like to move back to earth where she could experience the sun again, but that would be a hard decision to make.

There were perks to living on Arcadia.

One of them was sitting in her lap playing with his blocks.

Kay loved the rain and the lightning, and was plenty happy to sit next to the window and listen to the sound of the rain. His parents had even gone so far as to play him thunderstorm sounds while he slept.

Martha loved spending time with her grandson. She had to admit to herself that she had been rather skeptical about how he would turn out, who wouldn't be? He was only the second hybrid to be naturally convinced, but it hadn't taken more than two seconds of holding him to decide he was just as adorable as his father had been, all be it with more hands to get in trouble with.

And boy could the boy get in trouble.

He had his father's curiosity, and his mother's stubbornness. Hard to believe that so long ago Martha had disliked Sunny. More often than not she forgot Sunny had been the one to take Adam's leg. That fact seemed so distantly strange now she almost wondered if it could even be true, but indeed it was. And here they wall were from enemies to family, and Martha had now adopted kay's mother as one of their own children.

It had taken a bit to convince her, but just hearing about Kazna was enough to put Martha firmly in Sunny's camp.

Off to her side Waffles and Pancake lifted their heads simultaneously.