1.2 Whittled City
Edward woke with early morning light filtering in through the windows of the car, lending an ethereal sensation to the train. The world felt greater—the cool, invigorating touch of possibility lingering throughout the air of the world.
The landscape outside the windows was noticeably more forested than around Lumis, large alpine trees stretching a hundred feet into the air on thick walls on each side. A light mist pooling atop discarded needles, stirred into eddies behind the passage of the train.
Edward stood from the booth seats, stretching beside his table. A middle-aged woman sat halfway down the car, writing something in a calendar. The rest of the people in the car were either meditating, or still sleeping.
Edward extended his hand a half-length in front of him, and swiped to the right in a quick gesture, as if he was following the plane of some invisible surface. Orange lettering appeared in the air in front of him, reading 04:07[1]. Still five parts till arrival in Bilgeton, a good amount of time to kill.
It was times like this where Edward almost wished to have been an alchemist, just for the excuse to have a good reason to meditate[2]. It was isolating at times, exist in an environment where almost every person he met would have a fundamentally different experience of interacting with life, although he didn't regret the decision to purse orthopraxy.
Edward stood in front of the doors of the train as it slowed down just outside of Bilgeton, his suitcases in each hand. Others lined up ahead of him, the town being one of the last northernmost stops in this part of the continent[3].
Soon, the train slowed to a full stop, and the station stood before him. It was a smaller affair, but in some ways more full of life than the grand vista in Orche Light Station. The original framework of the station was clearly just a platform of basic transmuted stone, but in the time since its construction entire layers of etchings and patterns had covered it. There were a few places within the hall where an artwork of notable beauty still laid across the original gray slate, but the rest was a chaotic interweaving of whites and bright grays. The effect felt almost calm as a whole, even with the complete lack of theme that the etchings carried.
Constructed above the platform was a vast assembly of wood, the soft beige of planks forming a structure with enough skylight to feel spacious at only 5 meters tall and thirty across. Sitting against the far walls, carved and whittled sculptures of wood continued the dissonant themes, majestic eagles sitting next to homely grandmothers. The unpainted and all-pine nature of all the wood lent some insight into a hidden artistic theme, allowing divergent design while pulling all the art together with a color and material gradient.
It was, in a word, incredible. The sheer weight of history and identity was like a wave rolling off of the building, an indelible lens into the people of Bilgeton. Edward found buildings interesting, to say the least, and nothing in Lumis really paralleled this. Everything was built to outcome in the city, perhaps a consequence of the readily available access to manufactories for basic resources. If and when art bore the touch of many different hands, it was all part of a single event, at one point in time. It just wasn't viable to leave a single project in place for long enough to accumulate this history[4], the spot taken by an artist with a new design.
Edward pulled his bags off to the side of the platform, the train pulling away from the station. For nearly a part, he just walked about the building, appreciating both the skilled craftmanship of everything as well as the touch of history. Even those isolated islands of pattern preserved since the original carving of the platform spoke to a sense of history in how they warped the etchings around them, providing isolated senses of theme. Here, a temperate forest landscape, and all around it landscapes of other biomes in theme. There, clean lines creating illusory shapes of impossible geometry, and around it miniscule etchings of fractal patterns and tiling formations.
This is what he lived for. Though his effort lied toward the goals of the college, this is where his passion lied—art, intersecting with the world and life in a grand march of meaning.
Edward walked out into the courtyard of the town. The buildings surrounding the town were a mixture of stone and wood, mirroring the construction of the train station—although, in probability they came first. The courtyard was paved with a greenish-blue mix of granite, cut in regular triangles and fit into a tiling hexagonal pattern. Several lampposts of bronze stood holding faded tubes of lux, dim and weak within the daytime.
His first task in the town was to get registered with the local government. The grant for the mission allotted some resources which he could only claim in town, and it was additionally probably a good place to get some information about the town.
There was no convention on what government buildings should look like, especially in such a small town where every resident surely already knew where and what it looked like, but it was a good bet that it held the Imperial Symbol[5] on its exterior—and given the size of the town, it was probably the only building with it. Nothing stood out across the plaza at first glance.
Edward started walking around the area, hoping the building was just off to a side street. Most of the central courtyard seemed to be restaurants or event spaces, with the streets being mostly homes.
After stopping to look down the second side street, a voice called to him from inside the plaza.
"Hey, I notice you look a little lost. Can I help you with finding anything?"
The speaker was an older man sitting on a bench 10 meters from Edward.
"Maybe," he called back, "I'm newly arrived in town and I was just looking for the town hall".
"Ah! It's easy to miss for newcomers here. This plaza is actually the event plaza—we use it for things like festivals, or whenever someone wants to host something[6]".
The man beckoned Edward to come closer and pointed to a street on the opposite side of the plaza, "It can get a bit rowdy out here sometimes, so the town hall is actually tucked a couple blocks down 7th street, over there. You should be able to see it pretty easily once you get to the right place."
"Thank you so much! I would never have guessed this was all," Edward gestured to the courtyard with his hand, "just for events."
"Yeah, the placement is more of a relic than anything, but it does make for great holidays! We like to say that whenever family visits for the holidays they can hop right out of the train, party, and hop right back in."
"Yes, well..," Edward trailed off, feeling a little awkward at the continued conversation. They stared at each other for a moment and then he nodded and started walking toward 7th street.
7th street was more subdued than the plaza, in the wordless manner that streets sometimes are. It was clearly a street of homes, places for those who kept their life tasks separate from their doings.
In some sense, every person had a space of their own—sleeping was a desperately private activity, however you did it—but most people did not have a home simply for the purpose of living[7]. It was something Edward had thought about before, given the constraints of the city. You did see people live apart form career or education not infrequently in Lumis, but he had thought that was due to the sheer size and space concerns of the metropolis. If anything, it should be less prominent in Bilgeton.
Perhaps it had something to do with the Daubers from the pamphlet. After all, he hadn't yet seen a single sign of a greenhouse in the city thus far, and surely someone would have built one if they could.
The town hall itself soon appeared, formed of the typical stone-and-wood aesthetic as the rest of the city, front adorned with a massive banner with the Imperial Seal. The building was two stories tall, relatively tall for a structure in the town.
Pushing through the richly red-painted double wooden doors, the interior sat a sheet of cool and smooth stone, evidence of a thick foundation. The lobby was a rectangular room, a open window to a reception desk on the half of the room with the door. The far half held 3 more unmarked doors, presumably to rooms further in.
A short man sat at behind the desk, brown hair closely cropped against his head, bone-white skin evidence of above-average advancement in self-alchemy[8]. Though he sat in what looked like a deep meditation, he opened his eyes as soon as Edward approached.
"Hello", he spoke softly.
"Uh, hi," Edward responded. "I just came by to register myself.. I'm working on the-"
"N3 ruins grant? Lumis Praxic College?"
"Yes! How did you know?"
"The praxis on your belt, this being the first day of the grant work, and the suitcases full of things. Any alchemist would either be bringing much less or much more. And, you came here first. Anyway, I have your chit," the man puts a token of metal carved with incredibly intricate patterns thin colored lines[9] on the counter of the window, standing up, "and I will go grab the shipped ritual materials now."
"Ah no, no need for now, sorry! I still have to get my 'house' set up before I need the ritual components, and—trust me—I really do not have the hands to carry that right now."
He sits back down, turning back toward Edward. "No problem, we can hold them for a while. Just remember to pick them up before Salzday[10]"
"Thanks," Edward muttered. He stood there for a moment, tapping the tips of his fingers against his pants. "Uh, would you.."
No, this was too much. He shouldn't be bothering anyone of this stature about something like this. As he began to turn around, the man spoke again, "Would I..?"
"It's just..," Edward turned back, "I don't really know where to go to get a room just for the night, and I was wondering if you did."
"Ah, yes. Dahlia's place is just a block down toward 1st from here, the sweet little girl. If you just take the left out the door, and head down till you hit 6th street, it's the larger building on the corner—though it's not hard to miss up close. She knows a thing or too about the area too, and she should have no problem showing you around."
"Thanks again. I don't know if I would want to bother her about it, but I will check it out for sure," he muttered again.
Edward nodded once to the man again, and made his way out the door and down the street.