Chương 71: B2—Interlude 1: This Is So Unfair

Lyura sat at an outdoor café in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, sipping a delicious cappuccino and eating a rich chocolate cake. The summer day was perfect, with a warm sun that wasn't too hot and a pleasant breeze drifting from the canals. The piazza was breathtaking, with its majestic architecture and hundreds of birds strutting fearlessly among the people. She enjoyed all these things, yet inside she fumed. Every sip of cappuccino and every bite of cake only made her angrier.

Lyura's thoughts kept circling back to her mother, and each time her rage swelled, ready to erupt like a volcano and cover everything in burning lava. She wanted to Gate-hop home that very instant, to storm into her childhood home like a raging tempest. She imagined seizing her mother, shaking her until her teeth rattled and her hair came loose, screaming in her face with all the fury that had been building inside of her day after day.

"How could you do this to me?" she imagined herself shouting.

"How could you let me grow up in that filthy, backward town without a hint of magic and the wonders that lay beyond? Why did you keep me ignorant and trapped while you traveled the worlds and experienced the things I could only dream of?" She wanted answers. She needed to know why her mother had hidden this incredible truth from her for so long. The betrayal left a deep wound that festered and bled with every passing day.

Lyura had always viewed her mother as a beacon of reason and logic in a world drowning in superstition, yet she had kept this enormous secret from her for her entire life. How? How could she do this to her? She was her mother. She was supposed to love her. How? Sometimes she felt like an animal in a cage, throwing herself against the surrounding bars and dreaming of lunging at the person who built them. Bars of ignorance and betrayal built by the person she trusted most. The injustice of it burned inside her.

Lyura's life could have been so different. It could have been full of adventure and knowledge, of various worlds and beautiful places, not that narrow, dirty, and smelly existence she grew up in. As she sat in the café, surrounded by the beauty and sophistication of Venice, the contrast to her past felt like a stinging slap to the face. The anger simmered beneath the surface, never leaving her alone.

It tainted every moment of joy in the present world and remained a constant reminder—an unshakable itch—of everything that had been stolen from her. The thought of her mother's calm face sent her blood boiling. She could see her mother's expression, the one she wore when she thought she was doing what was best. But Lyura didn't need her mother's misguided protection; she needed the truth. Lyura grew up in a backward, unintegrated world, in a small, dirty town.

The streets were unpaved and covered with mud for most of the year, and when the mud finally dried in the summer, the air was so thick with dust it was hard to breathe. The wooden houses were cramped and poorly maintained, with thatched roofs that often failed to keep out the rain. People dumped their chamber pots into open ditches along the roads, where the waste festered and attracted flies and rats. The smell was the worst in the summer, so foul it sometimes made her dizzy.

Her neighbors only washed in the river from late spring to early autumn, when the water was warm enough, and none of them had a tub at home like her family did. They even resented them for it, as if being clean made them outcasts. For the rest of the year, the people in town were dirty and smelly, their clothes stiff with grime and their skin coated with sweat and dust. Children with matted hair and adults with open sores were common sight.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The worst part was that all of them were deeply suspicious and superstitious. Every male traveler who passed through was immediately suspected of being a bandit, there only to scout the town before his band came to pillage, rape, and burn. Every woman traveler, no matter her station, was immediately seen as a dangerous witch who had come to steal their souls and curse them to death.

Every time something bad happened—a chicken stopping laying eggs because of age, a child getting sick, or even rain on a day the farmer did not want—it was a curse. And if no woman had passed through the town lately to be blamed for the misfortune, they looked inside the town for the hidden witch responsible. The only thing that protected her and her mother from accusations was that they were the richest in town, and everybody knew rich people could not be witches.

All her childhood, her mother told her never to believe those superstitions and insisted it was all nonsense made up by ignorant minds. Yet it was all around her, inescapable and pervasive, coloring every interaction and seeping into her belief whether she wanted it or not. Her family loved her, but the other children were jealous of her. They called her a 'spoiled princess' because she was always clean, had nice clothes, her family was the richest in town, and she was the only one who knew how to read and write.

Every autumn, her mother would leave to buy stock for their shop and return in spring with lovely things that even nobles came from afar to buy. When Lyura turned seventeen, her mother informed her it was time to find work and mentioned her connections with a noble family in need of a governess. She also warned Lyura and her father that the family planned to sail overseas, and no one knew when they would return. Lyura refused at first, but her mother insisted and would not let it go.

She said that if Lyura did not like the work, she could always return, but urged her to join the annual buying trip at least to meet the family. Instead of traveling on the road, her mother led her into a forest, and when they reached two enormous stones, she pushed her through them. Lyura experienced the most incredible pain she had ever felt and wished to die. When she came to, there was a blinking light in front of her eyes.

Her mother instructed her to touch it with her mind, and she received a message about being a Gate Traveler. Her mother taught her how to view her information and access details about her class and skills. Then she took her through a four-Gate chain to a world called Gaia, showing her how to sell in pawn shops and buy valuable items for their store. On Gaia, those things were called "Mass Produced" and came from a kingdom called China.

During their journey between Gates, her mother told her about being a Traveler and the different worlds she had visited. She taught her spells, trained her in archery and short sword fighting, and showed her how to camp in the wilderness, build a fire, and hunt. Her teachings included how to engage with individuals in magical worlds and how to navigate technological ones. She shared how she had come to their world, fallen in love with her father, and stayed.

She took her back through the Gates and showed her how to sell the things they bought to earn coins in the worlds they passed until they returned home. They traveled for almost two years, but only five months had passed at home. Her mother warned her always to remember the time jumps between worlds, that sometimes they could go the other way, and that if she traveled too long, she might return to find her father already gone. Lyura spent another month at home with her father before leaving to travel again.

When they first visited Gaia, she fell in love with it, so she returned there. For three months, she watched television and movies to learn about the world. She understood the money system and the traveling vehicles, but still found the "internet" and electronic devices very confusing. Slowly, she was mastering the use of the mobile phone.

She traveled all around Europe, eating new and exciting food, seeing beautiful architecture, visiting the theater and opera, exploring the abundance of books and music, and enjoying every moment. But she still fumed at her mother every moment of every day. How could she have allowed her to grow up in that backward "dump"—to use the local dialect—without magic and, most of all, without TELEVISION!!