Chương 51: Chapter 13: The Other Side of Flint

As Flint led me out of the small building we saw the other listeners standing around nearby, their conversations dying down to a quiet whisper as they saw me leaving. It was clear they didn't trust me but they seemed to keep quiet about it in favor of following Gron's lead. To my surprise, instead of leading me to an elevator of some kind, Flint seemed to be leading me to a familiar looking collection of vehicles, just like the ones I'd taken with Nori.

"We aren't taking an elevator?" I asked. Flint turned to me for a moment.

"No, there aren't any elevators here. Not on the central ring. Usually you wouldn't travel in here, not like this at least" he said as he climbed up into the driver seat. Unlike the one I'd seen with Nori, the car didn't have a mechara seat, instead it had three melodian seats on the front and a large pick-up truck like trunk in the back.

"Oh, there's no mechara seat on these ones?" I asked as I got in on the other side. It was a small thing, but it felt relieving to be able to ask simple questions to someone without giving myself away. I felt like I could finally start learning about the more intricate parts of living on the lifeboats.

"Down here? No the mechara can't come here, these are all designed for us" he said as he turned it on and we started to move off.

"What about those uh… Robot things" I asked. He shook his head "No those can move themselves. They're controlled by Artemis who keeps all this stuff running. Well, them and us obviously." We started moving out, reaching speeds around what I'd have to guess was about 25 miles per hour. It didn't look all that fast but with every bump getting amplified by the intense gravity it felt like we were going a lot faster.

"Why don't those robots show up near the surface? I've only seen them down here" I asked. Flint turned around for a moment, looking back to see we were fully out of sight from the melodians we'd left behind, then turned off to the side, pulling over near another utility building and coming to a slow stop.

"What are we…" I started to ask.

"Do you really not remember anything?" he asked, cutting me off as he turned to look at me.

"I… Don't remember much, no" I said.

"Not much? What do you remember?" he asked. He spoke quickly, but didn't sound aggressive or angry, instead he just sounded like he was too curious to waste any time.

"Um… Well, like I said I don't remember much…" I started to say.

"Something, anything" he said insistently.

"I… Remember I lived in the back section of the ship. In one of the… Whatever those big plants are called, I don't know" I said. He looked skeptical, "You're telling me you lived in a treeshroom?" I nodded "I lived there with my mom. I don't remember much about her. I think she told me she played in the gravity games. I um… I don't really remember much else about it."

"I've never heard of someone living back there. Are you sure she didn't just take you there or something?" he asked. I shook my head "I remember living there but that's about it. Oh! I remember the song just before the gravity games. I remember I loved seeing that. I always wanted to go down to them but my mom said I couldn't."

"What was her name?" he asked. I shrugged "I'm sorry, I honestly don't know anything else. I was really young when it all happened."

"So that's it? That's all you remember?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, that's all I remember…" I said, feeling a bit sad to disappoint him.

"That's… wow… that's amazing" he said to my surprise.

"What?" I asked.

"Sorry I just… Wow, so you're a melodian who only really knows life from the surface of a planet? No ceiling above you? No mechara? What was it like?" he asked, leaning toward me.

"Hehe, um, well it was… Nice. I liked it I guess? That's kind of a big question" I said.

"Okay uh, oh! What does the sky look like?" he asked, bouncing a little from excitement.

"The sky?" it seemed like an odd question but putting myself in the shoes of someone who'd never seen it, I figured I'd do my best to describe it from that perspective, "well, on sunny days it's blue, on cloudy days it's white, at night it's black and if there aren't any clouds out you can see the stars" I said.

"Sunny? Cloudy? What is that?" he asked.

"It's… Wow, okay right I guess you haven't seen that… So sometimes there are clouds in the sky, they're the big white things you see down there on earth. Sometimes they're small and sometimes they fill the entire sky. If the clouds aren't in the way, the sky is blue. Does that make sense?" I asked. I felt silly explaining something so simple to someone, but I supposed it sounded just as silly to him whenever he answered one of my questions. We truly came from different worlds.

"Wow. I hope I get to see that one day" he said, sitting back in his seat, looking up at the ceiling above us.

"I… Hope I can see it again one day too" I said, looking down at the floor of the car. Flint didn't seem to hear what I said, his thoughts seeming to bring him to other places.

"Hey Flint?" I asked as something came across my mind "How did you get into the gravity games?" He slowly opened his eyes, turning toward me as he was brought out of his daydream "Me? How did I… Hmmm…" He looked at me for a moment, then turned back to the steering wheel and started the car once more.

"I want to show you something" he said as we started gaining speed. We started going a bit faster than before as Flint drove us along.

"This thing goes pretty fast huh?" I yelled over the sound of the wind.

"It goes a lot faster than this!" he said as he twisted a lever near the wheel as we started speeding up.

"No no that's okay I'm good with this!" I yelled out as I grabbed onto the dashboard ahead of me. He laughed a little as he took us back down to a more reasonable speed. A large ramp came into view as the ceiling started getting further away from us, reaching higher above us as we turned to get onto the ramp. It took a few seconds for me to notice but I could feel myself getting lighter as we went up the ramp. It wasn't much, but the change was definitely there.

"Where are we going?" I asked, ducking my head behind the windshield to get out of the wind.

"I want to show you a place!" he yelled. We left the warehouse floor below, moving up to a higher floor that looked like it was more geared toward maintenance. There were a lot of large vehicles and more of the robots from before, but aside from the wide street we were driving along there was a lot less space between the various features of the ship. There were buildings with metal pipes leading to and from them with exposed storage tanks along their sides. They looked like they were some sort of treatment place.

"I'd take you to the lower windows" he said just loud enough for me to hear "but that would have been another few floors down and I don't think you'd be up for that. Not yet at least."

"There are windows on the bottom floor?" I asked.

"Yeah! They're only on the central ring, but they stretch all the way around the entire ship! It's really amazing to look out of them while the ship is power generating. It's the only time you can see the outside without the spin" he said.

"What does power generation have to do with it?" I asked.

"That's when the ring spins down to a stop" he said "The mechara will sometimes come down to the lowest floors during the spin down and look out the windows. You can't drive down there during the spin down though or else your car might float away and nobody wants that, but I take it down there all the time when the gravity's going" he said.

"Sorry, this might sound dumb but why would it float away?" I asked, genuinely confused.

"Windows aren't magnetic" he said. My confused look was enough to tell him I didn't understand what he meant.

"Sorry, uh… These cars are meant to help with maintenance on the lower floors of the ship, especially on the center ring where there aren't any elevators. They stay in place on the ground because there's a big magnet on the bottom holding it to the floor during a spindown. The windows aren't magnetic, so if you drive there during a spindown, it won't have anything to hold onto so it'll float away. Wouldn't be an issue now of course since gravity would hold it in place."

"Wait. Spindown, when the center ring comes to a stop. That's not just for the gravity games?" I asked. Flint laughed "No of course not. The game was invented at some point but the ship does that for power generation and course correction. They have this reeeeaaally big particle accelerator thing along the middle ring that only works when it's not moving. So when they built the lifeboats they made it so the center can stop and put all its spin into the back part of the ship."

"And the course correction part?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, when you saw the lifeboats from the outside, did you see those giant engines on the side?" he asked. I nodded.

"Yeah so" he continued "those engines can turn in whatever direction they want. Since they're mounted to the center ring, that means they can be oriented in any way they need and can push the ship in whatever direction it needs to go without having to de-spin the entire ship first. Something this big doesn't like to turn at all unless it stops spinning. Something to do with physics or something." We started going up another ramp, bringing us up to another floor of the ship.

As we entered the new floor, Flint slowed the car down and the road we were driving on became much more narrow, squeezing down to a small tunnel that could barely fit two of the cars side by side. The walls of the floor were much denser with pipes than the one we'd seen before, the tightly packed pipes looking akin to a car engine, but stretched out over miles along the interior of the ship. Before I was able to ask where we were, Flint turned down a small corridor and slowly came to a stop.

"Follow me" Flint said quietly as he got out of the car. Without the wind I was able to hear what the ship sounded like. There was a low, everpresent reverberation coming from all sides, doubtless from the various machines and mechanics required to keep the ship running. There was also a low electric humming noise coming from the area ahead as I followed Flint closely behind.

"You were asking how I got into the gravity games?" Flint asked.

"Oh, right. Yeah" I said, almost forgetting that my question started us out on this adventure. Flint led me out to a doorway, just large enough to walk through without ducking, which led out to a platform. As I followed him I slowed down a bit, taking a bit of caution as I noticed the deep chasm we were suddenly looking down. It was dark, but I could see the bottom about five hundred feet down.

The opposite wall was only about thirty feet away from us, covered in seemingly endless pipes running up and down along the wall, mostly going vertically but with a few going diagonally across the surface. Flint approached the side of the platform, grabbing onto the guard rail and leaning over the side a bit. I was nervous from the height, but I followed after him and held onto the railing. Above us was a seemingly endless void that had to stretch up toward the center of the ship.

However far it went, I couldn't see the top.

"This is where the power is generated" Flint said, gesturing down toward the bottom of the chasm "They make an artificial sun inside the tube at the bottom in that giant ring, which makes all these pipes crazy hot and brings liquid salt up to the center of the ship. They use that to store power. It's really cool, the pipes get so hot and bright it's hard to look at" he said.

"Wait, you've been down here while they were doing that?" I asked. He smiled "Well, I wasn't SUPPOSED to be down here, if that's what you're asking."

"That sounds pretty dangerous," I said, standing back from the railing a bit. He rolled his eyes "Yeah yeah sure. Anyway, you were asking about the gravity games" he said as he held onto the rail while sitting down, hanging his legs over the side of the platform. I sat down with him but kept a bit more distance from the edge.

"I wanted to see the windows. But my dad said I couldn't because only the mechara went down there during the spindown and I wasn't old enough to go down while it was spinning. I told him I didn't care because I wanted to see the stars. So they told me I was forbidden from joining the viewing convoy" he said.

"Let me guess" I said, knowing Flint well enough.

"Yeah so I ignored them and snuck out before the spindown happened. It's not like the one you saw, where it was only going for a few rotations. During power generation it stays spinning for a lot longer. So, I snuck into the center ring on one of the top floors before the spindown happened and started making my way down. It took a while since I didn't have one of those cars, but I was determined to see the stars. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Problem was, once I got near the bottom I heard the gravity games sound go off and everything felt sideways. I didn't know what to do so I started running. I didn't know how much further I had to go, but just as I lost gravity, I found myself on one of those platforms up there" he said, gesturing upward toward the void.

"With the gravity off, I figured I'd just fling myself downward. What I hadn't counted on was all those pipes heating up" he said as he slowly lifted his arm up and pulled back his right sleeve, revealing a large patch of white fur near his shoulder.

"Oh… Did… You burn yourself on them?" I asked. He nodded.

"It wasn't my smartest move… But I was able to grab onto this platform" he said, tapping on the side of the railing.

"This one? Specifically?" I asked. He smiled "Yeah. That's why I wanted to take you here. This is the platform I landed on to pull myself away from the pipes. If you look closely you can still see some of my melted jacket on one of the pipes over there" he said, gesturing to the wall across from us where I could see a vague black outline on one of the pipes. I shook my head "Sorry uh, what does that have to do with you and the gravity games?" I asked.

"Oh, right. So, once I got over to this platform I held onto the railing, no gravity obviously, and I figured I didn't want to risk hurting myself again and it was probably best to just wait it out and make my way up once the gravity started up again. So I sat here and waited. That's when the weird part happened."

"The weird part?" I asked.

"Yeah so, I wasn't able to move from this spot, but I could hear the gravity games going on and wouldn't you know, I could understand what was going on even though I couldn't see them. I mean, I've been to them so many times, but once I couldn't see it, I realized I could tell what they were doing. I could hear when they messed up, I could hear where they were supposed to go. It was like, this indescribable feeling where for some reason just by hearing the sound, I could tell what they were supposed to be doing.

That's what you felt too, right?"

"I think that's a good way to describe it, yeah" I said.

"Well, I was down here for a pretty long time, but when they started spinning the ship back up I made my way out of here. It wasn't easy. My dad was right. I was too young to be down here while there was gravity but I mean, I still made it back just fine."

"Mmm, well I'm glad you made it out but that sounds like you did a lot of stupid stuff there…" I said.

"Well, like I said, it wasn't my smartest moment. But that's not the point. At the next gravity games I found myself playing this game where I'd close my eyes and guess what was happening, then open my eyes to see if I was right. It was pretty neat, I was right most of the time and whenever I was wrong about what was happening I felt like it was my mistake. I don't know why it wasn't obvious to me before, but the music was the thing that guided the players. It felt like I had this little secret all to myself.

But at the end of the game, this melodian I'd never met before took me to the side. He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was listening to the music. He asked me more about it, I told him about how the sounds guide the players and he told me I needed to keep it a secret and not tell anyone about it. He sounded really serious too, so I promised him I wouldn't say anything.

"As I got older I told my parents I wanted to compete. I mean, I figured I had the secret, right? So I could probably play better than any of them. It took a lot of convincing, but I eventually got into the junior gravity games league. But before I started playing, that man showed up again and he brought me down here, to the same spot we brought you. They asked me a lot of questions, but they eventually let me in.

They said I was the youngest listener they've ever had and they were impressed by how well I understood the gravity games. They asked me how often I used the assembler and I told them I never did." My ears perked a bit as he mentioned the assembler.

"You never used it?" I asked as my curiosity overpowered whatever fear I had of the void, leading me to sit next to him and grabbed onto the railing. He shook his head "Well… There was one time…"

"Can you tell me about it? I don't know much about it aside from something Nori said to me" I said. He gripped the railing a little tighter as I mentioned her name.

"Yeah? And what did she have to say about it?" he asked, barely masking the anger in his voice.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to make you upset…" I said. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, his hands loosening from their grip.

"You don't know. It's not your fault" he said softly.

"We don't have to talk about that. I'm sorry I brought it up…" I told him. He didn't say anything for a few moments, but he looked like he was gathering his thoughts.

"Have you ever seen one of these?" he asked, reaching into his shirt and pulling out a necklace with a familiar looking shard on the end of it. To answer his question, I reached into my backpack and pulled out the shard that had been left to me.

"Oh you have one. Gotcha. So, when a melodian is born, they have an assembler installed. Technically, it's called the 'assembler three' but nobody really calls it that."

"Three? What were the other two?" I asked.

"Um… Well, the assembler two was used a long long time ago. When the lifeboats first started. It was like this… Visor… Thing. It shines the light in your eyes and plays the sound from the shard to make it so you can experience any memories you want. Later on the mechara invented this new version that grows inside you. It's small, but it's put into the back of your neck right after you're born. It's like its own little organism that grows and connects itself to you.

It reaches up into your brain and out to your eyes where it can put the lights on the other side of your iris. That's why you see their eyes light up like that. It's all built in so you don't need the visor anymore." A shiver went through me as he described it.

"That sounds horrifying" I said. He nodded "It is. Yeah. I never liked the idea of it. I wish they'd never installed it. I always felt like it was wrong, but everyone else just thought I was being paranoid."

"Paranoid about what?" I asked. He sighed, leaning back and looking up at the void "Growing up… I always had this feeling about it. We don't start using it until we're of 'the right age' and I couldn't help but notice that the older people were less…

'there.' They stopped enjoying things. They stopped having close relationships with each other. They stopped caring about anything. They only cared about being inside the assembler and they wished they could never leave it. My friends seemed so much more present than any of the older melodians. I didn't want to be like them, so when it was my time to start using it, I just… didn't."

"That seems to have worked out pretty well for you" I said. Flint sighed, laying his chin on the railing "Now, yeah. But at the time it wasn't easy. They made fun of me, told me I was missing out. They said the way they were doing it was different, that they'd never turn into the mindless melodians we'd seen everyone else turn into. But they loved it. They told me about all the different adventures they could relive as if it was happening right in that moment.

They told me stories about what we used to do when we were kids and how great it was to see it all over again.

"The thing is though, they stopped doing new things with me. They only wanted to talk about the things they saw in the assembler, coordinating which memories they'd experience together so they could talk about it. I felt like I'd already had those adventures, I'd already done those things. I wanted to do new things, but they all stopped caring about that. I watched as their lives got more and more dull. They eventually stopped talking to me entirely and soon they stopped talking to each other.

The only thing they cared about was spending time in the assembler and everything else was a waste of time to them.

"I lost my friends, I lost the people I liked to be around and I lost that sense of adventure I used to have. It was just… Gone." We were silent for a moment as the weight of everything he'd just said sank in. I remembered when I'd first arrived. I'd noticed that the younger melodians seemed to have a lot more life to them. They seemed to be the only ones that had anything going on where everyone else seemed to be… missing…

"Once" he said softly "I used it once."

"Why?" I asked.

"I gave up. I didn't want to do it anymore. My friends were all gone and I was alone. I hated everything about the situation I was in and there was an easy way out of it. So I decided to give it a try."

"I'm guessing it didn't go well…" I said.

"It went… It…" he shook his head, then he turned to look at me.

"Tess" he said softly.

"What's up?" I asked in an equally soft tone.

"This might sound crazy. I've brought it up with some of the other listeners, but they just… They thought I was just making stuff up and didn't take me seriously. But you're different. You're like me. You haven't used the assembler at all. All of them, they still use it. They think it doesn't hurt them if they use it in moderation. They have all these strict schedules they give themselves for when they can and can't use it. But I think that's what keeps them from hearing… Uh…"

He paused, reaching his hand up to his neck as he scratched it nervously.

"Hearing what?" I asked.

"Do you promise not to laugh?" he asked. I nodded. He leaned further in toward me "Do you ever feel like there's another person up there?" he asked, tapping his head. My eyes went wide, I felt my hearts stop for a moment, the fur along my arms stood up as he mentioned his other half.

"I…" I started to say, the words getting caught in my throat.

"Sorry, it's dumb, I'm sorry I brought it up" he said as he quickly turned, starting to get up from his spot. I reached out, grabbing his arm and holding him where he was.

"No, Flint I know what you're talking about" I said. He froze for a moment before slowly sitting back down, his eyes locking with mine.

"You do?" he asked, his voice shaking.

"He's always been with me. I didn't know it at the time, but I've always felt him there. I never spoke to him until we made our own assembler." His head tilted to the side "Made your own?" he asked. I nodded.

"We got this flashlight thing from Sloan's friend. Well… it's more like we stole it from him, but that's not the point. It was the same type the guards used on me the last time I saw you. We found out that we could play back these sounds while the light was on and I could experience things. I didn't know what an assembler was, or that we made our own version of it using what we'd found, but it brought me to a place in my mind. My other half. He had to show me something. It's…

A long story, but we ended up talking at the end. The next time I saw him was when those guards used it on me. He helped me break out of it."

"Your other half helped with that? I… Didn't know that was possible! I was wondering how you did that" he said excitedly.

"Maybe it hasn't effected me as much" I said "I mean, I went my whole life without using it, I was a lot older and I only used it a few times, but never when I was young. I think that probably helped."

"That makes sense. Maybe that's why they don't let us use it when we're too young. It breaks us" he said.

"I think you might be right…" I said.

"It sounds like you had a similar experience then. At a certain point, I gave up on everything. I was sitting in my bed, looking up at the ceiling and I just gave up. I closed my eyes, I reached out to it and I found myself in a white void." I nodded "I remember that…" I said. He took a deep breath before continuing "What you see from the flashlight is a bit different. The flashlight is forced onto you, there's no input to or from the Artemis network, it just forces you into that state.

When you use the assembler it's like, you can be conscious of whatever is going on around you if you want. You can stop it at any time you want, but you can't be in it all the time. It makes you sick, it makes your head hurt and that pain brings you out of its influence. Usually you'd want to cut it off before that, but people tend to try to be inside it as long as they can."

"So what's different about the assembler when you use it like that?" I asked.

"It's like… This big index. You can see all your memories, you can think about events, ideas, feelings and whatever else you can imagine and it'll sort through the memories you've stored onto the shard and let you choose the one you want to experience. Once you've started, it's perfect. It's like you're experiencing that moment all over again."

"What memory did you go back to?" I asked. He smiled.

"It was the time my friends and I took one of these cars. We weren't supposed to drive them, but we figured nobody would stop us. It was so much fun. We drove around the central ring up in sector two. But when it was my turn to drive, this girl reached out to me and grabbed my arm. It felt weird, I turned around and everything was gone, the memory, my friends, the void had turned black and this girl stood in front of me. She was crying, she told me I was hurting her and I needed to stop."

Flint went quiet as he looked down at the floor.

"That was your other half?" I asked. He nodded.

"She told me she didn't want me to use the assembler again. She said it felt like she was being forced asleep and she was struggling to stay awake. So… I woke up. I pulled myself out of the assembler and I never tried it again. I don't think she would have been able to speak to me like that if I'd started using the assembler at the time everyone else started."

"You said nobody else has an experience like that?" I asked. Flint shook his head.

"No. Nobody else seems to know about this. But you do. And you didn't use the assembler when you were young. I think… I think this is something everyone has inside them. But it's put to sleep."

"Wow… I don't know what to think about that…" I said quietly.

"Yeah. But, hey at least I know I'm not crazy, right? All this time I thought it was just me. You know, that's why I was so interested in you when you first gotten here. I noticed you never used the assembler" he said with a smile.

"Well I'm glad you followed me then. If you hadn't shown up I'd probably still be lost in this place" I said.

"Oh hey hey, you said something in the elevator I've been meaning to ask you about" he said with a familiar excited tone.

"Yeah?"

"You said you could tell when I was supposed to stop going down because if you were making the music, you would have stopped the pitch change at a certain point. What do you mean by that? You make music? How do you do that?" he asked. I smiled, feeling a sudden warmth go through my chest as he mentioned music.

"Oh! It's my favorite thing, I need to show you! Do you know where the artifacts are? The ones the humans sent up?" I asked.

"Oh yeah I know where that is" he said.

"Can you take me there? I need to show you" I said. As I stood up and grabbed my bag as I put the necklace back inside. He looked puzzled.

"Wait… I just realized, why do you have that? I thought you were too young to have one while you were on lifeboat seven" he said.

"Oh, yeah It's not mine. This was given to me. I don't know who's memories are on it but the last memory that was put on this is from my dad just before the lifeboat exploded" I told him.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"Uh, so when I was found on earth, I had this with me. I wasn't told about it until recently, but when my friend and I found the ship I'd arrived on we found this little box thing that was able to read it. A lot of stuff happened but we eventually figured out how to translate what was on it in a way that I could experience it for myself. That's how we found out where these lifeboats were and so I reached out. A few…"

I paused, realizing I had no way to communicate 'hours' to him in a way that would make sense "a uh, short time later, we saw all these ships in the far distance turn their engines on to slow down." Flint shook his head "that… doesn't make any sense…"

"It doesn't?" I asked.

"We were told we were stopping because they found a place where we could repair lifeboat seven, but they would have seen this planet from a lot further out. You're saying they didn't stop until you contacted them?"

"Yeah. I didn't know what to say so I sang that song that starts at the beginning of the gravity games. They seemed to think I was Sloan," I said. Flint's ears stood straight up, despite the intense gravity we were still feeling. His pupils narrowed, his entire body going tense as he looked like he'd just seen a ghost. I felt a shiver from the sheer intensity I saw in his face as his eyes darted back and forth as he got lost in thought.

"Flint?" I asked. He didn't say anything for a few more seconds until his eyes turned to focus on me.

"It wasn't lost…" he said almost too quiet for me to hear.

"Sorry… What's going on?" I asked.

"The black shard…" he said as he stood up, grabbing my hand and guiding me back to the car.

"What's going on?" I asked, quickly following behind him as we both got into the car and started speeding off. Flint didn't answer, instead he simply drove. I saw the intensity on his face, his eyes darting back and forth as he was lost in thought. I wanted to get to know the ship better, to ask more questions about it, but Flint was so focused he didn't seem like he'd be up for any kind of conversation. Instead I kept quiet and watched as we drove up along the various floors of the ship.

With each floor I felt the gravity get lighter and lighter until we reached a familiar looking floor. It was much like the one I'd seen at the bottom of the ship. It was the same floor Nori had taken me to. A few short minutes later, we pulled up to a familiar looking doorway, the artifacts being just on the other side. As we came to a stop, Flint spoke up. He spoke quickly and with an intensity I'd never heard from him before.

"I'm sorry, I can't get into this right now but I can drop you off with the artifacts. I'll meet up with you later." I stepped out of the car and before I could say anything to him, he pulled off. As he pulled away into the distance I shook my head, trying to wrap my mind around everything that had just happened. I sighed, turning around and going through the doorway and into the chamber.

Unlike before, it was filled with mechara, all of whom were looking through the various objects that looked like they'd just come in from a recent shipment. I recognized the instrument section and made my way over, doing my usual casual walk to not garner any suspicion. The mechara never seemed to notice a melodian. Unfortunately for me, there was one mechara that did pay attention.

"Tess!" I heard a familiar voice speak out from the crowd. I turned to see Nori holding a clipboard as she and a group of other mechara were sorting through a large pile of items. Nori said something to the group and quickly made her way over to me.

"Tess, we need to talk."