Secret of Frost and Moon

Progress

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Alaia Skyhawk: Hehehe, I can't wait to see how you react to what is revealed in this chapter :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians, the Guardians of Childhood, or any related characters etc. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes.

~(-)~

Chapter 100: Progress

Two more years passed for Sophie at Yale, and with every passing week her determined efforts spread faith in the Immortals and encouraged others to reach out and grasp the power of Belief. But if Yale and New Haven had changed a fair bit, then that was nothing in comparison to the world itself.

The year was now 2031, and Jamie's hard work had paid off in pushing forward what was now being dubbed the Etheric Technological Revolution. Worldwide, all power stations had now been replaced by Etheric Turbines, and infrastructure such as pylons were now being ripped down due to every town and city above a certain size being set up with a turbine tower of their own. Isolated settlements were getting the same treatment, so power-outages in colder climes, caused by frozen power-lines, were going to be a thing of the past. People once employed in power stations were being retrained to do maintenance route round the towers, so all-in-all electricity generation companies were doing ok, if you ignored the fact that they all now had defunct stations to decommission. Electricity suppliers however, the companies that purchased wholesale electricity from the 'grid', helped maintain the pylon networks, and sold power to customers to pay for that... Less fortunate, and in fact many had gone bankrupt. But then that was the nature of change, and where one industry falls, another rises.

Most notably the car industry. What with electric cars, complete with their own internal miniature Etheric Turbine, being the new 'big thing'. Cheap to build, free to run apart from obvious maintenance for brakes, tyres, etc, the public in the more developed nations were clamouring to trade their old petrol and diesel cars in for scrap and get the new ones. Even crazier, although not surprising, more than a dozen flying cars were now seriously being considered by car manufacturers. What with the problem of power-supply and flight-range now no longer being an issue.

But industry and technology weren't the only things to change. On the matter of 'Carbon-sink Reforestation, Mother Nature and Ariko had finished making deals to get previously deforested tracts of land in vulnerable areas, signed over for permanent non-development. That is no one would build there, cut trees there, or try to farm there. Large swathes were already now host to newly rejuvenated forest, and illegal logging attempts had only been a minor issue. Hardly surprising with a dozen of Ariko's Lieutenants on patrol, with permission to wreck any logging equipment brought in to harm the newly grown trees.

But for all the positive things, there was one undeniable shadow lingering over it all... The fanatics, their organisation still nameless and faceless. Of the several thousand people now identified as being at least fairly close related to an immortal, fifty-seven had been killed. Tristan Bennett, Jamie and Sophie's uncle, had been among them.

Victories and losses, good or ill, had shaped and were still shaping the world. But there was one place where knowledge of these happenings was completely absent. In fact, life there had remained completely typical with nothing happening that was of note bar a certain incident five years previous.

It was a cluster of islands, located in the middle of the ocean somewhere between Greenland and Norway. Where it snowed nine months of the year and hailed for the other three, as the local sayings went. A place untouched by history for more than a thousand years, and still kept hidden from most by the will of Odin.

A place where on the northernmost inhabited island, a young man was at work on a small boat beached in a secluded sandy cove. His brown hair tousled by the wind, and his Viking clothing of coarse cloth, leather, and furs dusted over with a scattering of damp sand. He was leaning over to examine the anchors for one of the stays that held up the mast, when a female voice interrupted him laden with sly humour.