SKYE is the Limit

Chapter 1: The Island in the Sky

The mystical island of Lemnos levitated off the coast of Erebus's northernmost tip. On it, a field of beautiful but deadly poppies stretched and beyond it stood a cave fitted with two chimneys; one made of polished ivory and the other made of buckhorn.

Inside the cave, the white wizard Somnos the Sandman sat in his workshop concocting dreams. He brewed them in a cauldron after trickling invisibly from jars labeled with the most curious names: Nest of Snakes, Unfaithful, Freefall, Pursuit, Tooth Fairy, The Emperor's New Clothes, Icarus Wings, Back to School...

Somnos placed the best fusions on the topmost shelves where they softly projected their contents against the wall like brief and cyclical shadow plays. In the current iteration of Erebus, which had a very high frame rate per second and was more coherent, less surreal but more deceptive, Somnos had in fact become obsolete. Out of habit, the wizard carried on crafting the dream episodes all the same.

Somnos watched over the entire dream-realm through his looking-glass ball, which gave him the power to see any part of Erebus at any given moment; from the excess-loving Centaurs in the east to the ethereal and amoral Sylphs in the west to the nomadic and artisanal tribes of Cyclopes in the mountain ranges. One thing he hadn't anticipated though was the presence of the Faceless Horseman.

The Faceless Horseman intermittently flickered into bundles of ones and zeroes and galloped in and out of the mapped zone. His mount was skeletal and trailed fire from its nostrils. The rider wore oversized, spiked pauldrons and a long tattered blood-red cape that appeared to defy gravity. He was unhelmed but gave the impression of someone wearing black stockings over his head.

Except that was his head.

The Faceless Horseman was a cipher, a dim entity, which in the Japanese language of the early game developers consisted of two kanjis (yū and rei) and also denoted a ghost.

While Somnos the Sandman's back was turned, the looking-glass ball locked and zoomed in on the Faceless Horseman. The Faceless Horseman halted abruptly as though becoming aware of the surveillance for the first time. The rider turned his head towards the looking-glass ball's invisible sensor, his void face filling the sphere and blotting it out.

The Faceless Horseman was outside looking in.

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In all his eighteen years in this world, nobody had ever paid their undivided attention to Raphael "Rafa" Cruz.

Grownups liked to talk about how Earth's running out of rainforests, ice caps or pandas. To a busker and petty thief like Rafa, the only resource that truly mattered was human attention. When he wasn't using it to his advantage, he was usually competing for it. People nowadays were glued to their smartphone screens or lost in their own worlds between their wireless earphones. They played their own choice of music and frowned on the use of amplifiers in public spaces.

That was the first rule of busking and pickpocketing right there: respect other people's turf. Don't be the dipstick who got in people's faces. As a thief or grifter especially, don't go starting a turf war that you couldn't finish, and be careful not to fleece the herd too much if you didn't want your world to suddenly get smaller. You'd get too much heat from the po-po and then not even your protection money to the Red Domino could save you.

The thing about picking pockets that had really grown on Rafa is, especially when he was with his crew and they were on a roll, it almost felt like a choreographed dance. First, Jamal, their "fearless leader", was the shade. He constantly wore a pair of shades himself, not because he was posing as a blind beggar but because he was hiding his restless, roving eyes.

In the packed MRT car presently, Jamal stepped into a straphanger's personal space and set off all kinds of alarm. This, at least to Rafa, was akin to a performer engaging the audience. It didn't matter whether it was welcome or not. Jamal put the mark at ease by standing next to him and pretending to watch a YT vid of cats. The mark also stole a peek at Jamal's smartphone.

People had their guard up against sleight-of-hand and misdirection but they never doubted their own perception; what was in their control, what was familiar and "real". In this case, the sea of faces where one went to disappear and to dismiss.

Shielded by Jamal, Rafa lifted the mark's wallet and passed it behind him to Eman. Discreetly inside his black gym bag, Eman fished the credit cards out of the bifold. He swiped them in a skimmer. That was what Eman was good at: card games, chess, PC games and hacking. Finally, Rafa returned everything to the mark's back pocket without anyone being the wiser.

A practical distance from the three of them, stood their lookout: Krystal, both cute and sexy in dreadlocks, a crop top and a pair of Daisy Dukes. If she was alone, she'd very likely be attracting gropers and molesters beyond the usual head-turners. Right now she was scanning the crowd to make sure there was no guy who A. was alert to the goings-on in the MRT car and B. wanted to play hero or, worse, C. was a cop in plain clothes. Krystal was the only rose among the thorns of their crew and Rafa and Jamal were rivals for her attention. Or at least they liked to think of themselves as such while Krsytal was oblivious to both of them.

At this point, the crew was playing with the spotlight and the blind spots around it. The mark's awareness of reality. That was where Rafa, Jamal, Krsytal and Eman existed. They trod in the spaces where their fellow human beings seldom turned their gazes. The parks at night were their office, along with the pee-smelling overpasses and rat-infested underpasses.

Again, Rafa was reminded of dance, or at least busking. Because they weren't professionals on a stage, they didn't rob people using the power of institutions. They could choose to be in the shadows or the light. This was what really got him and why he thought being a pickpocket was the job destined for him. His family name Cruz was a fake one after all. It had been assigned to him by a social worker and a judge. It aptly meant "cross" because he had never known his biological parents and no Forever Family ever took enough interest in him, until he finally aged out of foster care. As for his first name, the old nuns at the boys' home had named him after Saint Raphael the Archangel, who, according to the Bible stories that the nuns were so keen on, had the power to heal the blind. In a word, Rafa was supposed to have the power to bring light to the sightless or to keep them in darkness.   

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This series is about shape-shifters, RPG, dreams and cutting-edge technology. I hope you support it. 

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