Scouting For Romance

Entry 66

Day 13, Month 1, Year 573

Ooh...

Oh boy, oh golly.

I'm not okay.

To cut forward to now, around noon, I'm writing this on the spaceship.

Peldor is a dozen miles below us. There's some procedure stuff before we can get going.

My stomach is swirling. I'm sweating despite the cold and have a bandana to soak it up.

Moa is on my shoulder, holding my hair. She's in a similar state.

I feel terrible.

I hate space travel.

I mean, no peldak does. But whatever. I want to die.

So earlier today.

We entered Dar Raju (pronounced Dar Ra-yu), the Gift of Paradise, the city that rests on the north pole. In Cirathan Standard it's called Heaven's Reach. I'm writing this journal in Cirathan Standard, so I'll be calling it Heaven's reach.

I know nothing about it, it was entirely built after the year 0, and therefore I don't care.

When we got off the train I saw the surrounding city. A load of mountains, tropical near the base, a load of trees and grass, with bare rocks closer to the top.

The air was thin around Heaven's reach, it gave me a headache. The altitude was so much higher than anywhere else on the planet.

A dozen or so mountains, spread out over a few square kilometers, rose higher than the rest. They were hollowed out, the caps removed, and sayran use their magical tricks to bring ships in and out of the atmosphere.

I don't know how that works and I don't want to ask.

The population of Heaven's-

****

Okay, sorry. The ship went underway, going faster than light thanks to that same sayran magic. When it happened I was in my seat, and I puked. The seats come with special bins to vomit in. There's no gravity in space so that's an issue.

My eyes hurt.

Tytus is rubbing my back, Moa is wretching and squirming, but thankfully she took my advice and didn't eat this morning. It's a dull agony all over my body. I'm just not well.

Anyway, sorry.

The city of Heaven's Reach was sparse, and spread out over a wide area. There were no flatlands around there, so the buildings were built in the sides of walls, halfway in the rock, with roads twisting and turning along with the natural bends of the landscape. Train stations also sat all around the territory, shipping every kind of good you can imagine to and from the whole planet.

You might get a strip of buildings, or streets stacked up along a mountain like the steps of a staircase. It was pretty. At the bottom of the mountains, down in the grassy valleys, were water ways. That wasn't part of the Vistula, or any other river. It was an independent, man-made lake.

The population was also quite small. Smaller than you'd think, based on the sheer size of the territory.

As we walked around, there were guard posts and bunkers everywhere. Armed soldiers patroled even more than they did in other cities. Unlike those other cities, Heaven's reach suffered no staffing shortages, no doubt due to the high number of aliens.

Dark skin, short, black hair, rounded ears. There were some aliens that looked a bit different, but it was mostly those with characteristics like that.

"There are a lot of aliens." I said as we 'marched' double file around the city. A lot of us were still wounded, my calf was still sore for example, so it was a less professional march. The walkways we're only so wide, so doublefile was best.