Chapter 8: Cliques and Outcasts
A ringing bell signalled her entrance into an empty shop, thought she knew there were people there before John strode in through a curtain of clattering beads. His cheery, customer-greeting smile turned into a surprised gape for a brief second, before he immediately regained his composure.
“Hullo, Ms Celeste, you’re the last person I expected to pop in. Are you after anything?”
Phantasia took a look around at the odd devices that cluttered up every corner of the dusty shop. “Oh, not really, I was just curious about all this stuff, that’s all,” she said. Many of the devices looked retro-engineered from the dug-up remains of the Old World’s technology, while some – contained in special cases and not for sale – appeared to be genuine ancient relics.
“You didn’t have this sort of thing where you came from, did you?” said John, “It not really surprising, though. After the Cataclysm, human society was decimated and a lot of technology was lost in time. Even now a lot of people are afraid of it. They think it will destroy the world again,”
“Hmm, that’s funny,” said Phantasia, poking the buttons on one of the picture-boxes, “Everyone blames someone or something else for things that happened in the past,”
John laughed. “That’s because nobody knows how it really happened. If there are historical records, we haven’t found any. There’s no such thing as global communication any more, we just know what we find, and what the Vagrants tell us. Finding out what really happened to the world, I guess you could say that’s our family business. Finding old artefacts, getting them working again, and hoping we can piece together the puzzle bit by bit, that’s what we do,”
“You’re right,” said Phantasia, smiling to herself as she recalled all the apparent-truths about the Cataclysm that the Water faeries prided themselves on, “I don’t think anyone truly knows what happened, just fragments. Maybe if all the pieces were put together… Oh well, no point thinking about it now – what’s this thing do?”
“That’s a television,” said John, moving from behind the counter and collecting a palm-sized card off a shelf, “There are so many different types. Technology evolved quickly back then.”
Phantasia stood back and watched as he inserted the card into the television and pressed a few buttons. After a few moments, a diorama of scenes came to life on the flat surface.
“This was what people used for entertainment,” he explained, “This is a genuine Twenty-Tens film, encoded onto memory card, the most reliable method of data storage humanity developed. It all went downhill after that.”
For a moment, Phantasia wondered if what she was watching was a record of memory from the Old World. Faeries had ways of reanimating memories for others to watch – though not for entertainment purposes – and it wasn’t unknown for humans to have used their sciences to create vastly inferior alternatives. It was only when she saw a lone human fighting his way through an army of spear-wielding demons with only a magical sword that she realised it was all an act. After all, the human appeared to be slowing down time, and that just wasn’t possible!
John gave her a demonstration of several other devices, again many of which appeared to be poor alternatives to natural faerie abilities. Complex long-distance communication that required giant machines in the sky, when all it should take was a little bit of concentration and some astral projection? That the human world was once dominated and controlled by such odd mechanical devices amused her.
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