St Chaos Healer

Ch 18 - The Ceremony Express

Everyone picked up their luggage and stared in the direction of the approaching train. Everyone was excited, like little kids. Even the adults here had their jaw wide opened gulping saliva as if they just wanna gobble the train in a single bite.

My parents weren't any different.

The steam mana locomotive was encroaching at high speed while blowing out big clouds of dark smoke. As it gets closer and closer, I could feel the vibration coming from the platform where I was standing. The scene looked like a giant serpent that breathes out smoke from its nostrils, advancing at us at full speed.

In a mere minute, the Ceremony train arrived at our station. As it came to the platform a surge of strong wind passed around, almost blowing everyone from their feet. It's that's when I finally got a closer look at the beauty of the Ceremony train.

The first thing to come into view was the Steam Mana Locomotive. The locomotive was huge, almost like a walking palace but only made of dark dull metal.

The steam locomotive itself was cylindrical in shape and it was about as tall as 3 storey building and as wide as a big palace. You could just say it looked like a wide tall tower placed horizontally on the tracks. There were a lot of pipes going criss-cross over the engine. I also saw few gauges and cylindrical pipe opening letting out steam.

In the front of the locomotive was a big V-shaped metal frame that was used to clear any obstacle on the way. Just like the combination of charging battering ram and the snow plower.

On the top of the locomotive were eight large chimneys puffing out big dark clouds of smoke. There were about 18 enormous wheels along with even some smaller size wheels to run this thing. I also noticed few mysterious rune patterns in some parts of the locomotive.

This locomotive is actually an older model locomotive as you can tell by how the engine metal had lost its luster. The new and powerful model locomotives are actually used by the regular railways. The one used as the ceremony train was actually the older prototype that they had discarded from service.

But beggars can't be choosers so the common folk like us are more than happy to just board this train.

After the locomotive went past by, we spotted the carriage wagons.
The first set of wagons were long and broad black boxes. Nothing special about these wagons except for the windows. There was a lot of different shape of windows scattered across without any pattern. There were circular, rectangle, L-shaped, etc spread across the wagon. We couldn't see inside the wagon through these windows for some reason.

In the center of the wagon was a double door, the entrance to the carriage wagon. Just above the door was a board sign telling the alphanumerical name of the wagons.

The first carriage wagons were set of A1- 1, A1- 2... and so on.
These A set carriages must belong to those rich class people who had boarded the platform through the elevator.

After A set of black carriages went away, finally B set wagons came along.

B carriage wagons were similar to A carriage, just the color was brown instead of black. The rest of the aspects were the same.

After waiting for few more minutes the train had gradually slowed down and it finally halted.
It's when our carriage wagon, B5- 7 finally arrived right in front of our area.

Suddenly the adults started hushing their kids.
The atmosphere suddenly became tense and I don't know why everyone acting so tight-lipped. Even my parents told me to keep quiet. I had nothing to do anyway, so I obeyed.

After few minutes of waiting in silence the double door of our wagons opened. From inside the door, a steady platform came trickling down to our platform. A mini bridge was created in an instant.