8: Cliques and Outcasts
After her enlightening education on archaic human technology, Phantasia left the shop and continued on her original quest. After a few more uneventful streets peppered with shops selling everything from laboratory-grown food to renovated furnishings recovered from abandoned villages, she found herself on a cobbled road leading down a hill. The people loitering around were a world apart from those she had been passing in the streets before. Their elegant manner of dress, tribal make-up and sexual extroversion recalled the World’s End, and Phantasia wasn’t surprised to recognise a few faces from the nightclub, and even less surprised to see the desolate industrial district in the distance. Her intuition took her down the hill a short way, where she found Joel and Kaori standing outside a purple-painted shop, dressed in even more outlandish clothing than usual. At first she was afraid there might be some tension, or that Kaori might still be ignoring her, but when Kaori noticed her she glided over.
“Hey! We were wondering what you’d do with your weekend. We were afraid you might end up staying at home!”
Phantasia relaxed, sensing no hostility from her friend’s aura. “Oh, well, you know, I don’t know what to do around here really! I’ve just been exploring a bit. It’s always fun to look around new places,”
Joel adjusted his top hat and leaned forward with a whisper. “Dude, you haven’t run into those bitches, have you? You know, Astrid and that lot?”
Kaori thumped Joel in the arm. “The Godhand Inquisitors are always on patrol. You must have noticed them? Long robes.” she waved her hands around in a feeble demonstration, “Too scared to come down here though.”
“There’s way too many of us,” said Joel standing tall and flexing his skeletal arms, “They came down here and they’d get a beating for sure.”
Kaori looked at him with doubtful eyes as he attempted fighting gestures with his fists. “I think the second one of them gets beaten up by a Raven, we’re all goners. They’d sweep down here and have every one of us executed for witchcraft if they could get away with it.” Kaori brushed Phantasia’s arm, and she felt her warmth again. “Please, be careful. You’re just the sort of girl they’d go after,”
“Well,” Phantasia sighed, “I’ll do my best, but if someone’s getting hurt, I’m not just going to ignore it!”
To diffuse the tense atmosphere that had come from such a brief discussion, Joel and Kaori gave Phantasia a tour around their local haunts. Each shop was straining against society’s laws, wanting to burst free and be alternative, yet confined to walking a line lest it was shut down by the ever-threatening Bishop Wotan. From hand-made trinkets to elaborate tattoos to expensive dresses imported from the big city, the street had everything a would-be Raven needed to blend in to the tribe. If Phantasia had any of what Kaori called ‘money’, she might have acquired some of the objects for further study. Then Kaori emerged from a shop and handed her a gift wrapped in brown paper.
“I hope it’s not too much,” she said, biting her lip as Phantasia removed the wrapping, “I like collecting them. I thought you might too.”
It was a figurine of a beautiful human woman with elaborate wings. Phantasia was immediately reminded of her own kind, and wondered if Kaori had figured her out already. Was it a trick? A subtle clue? A coincidence? Kaori must have noticed the expression on her face, because her aura had retreated somewhat and she was looking down at the floor, hands clasped in front of her as if she had done something terribly wrong.
“I-I’m sorry. If you don’t want it, I can get you something different?”
“No! No, it’s lovely!” cried Phantasia. She almost dropped the figurine as she rushed forward to hug Kaori in the hope it would ease her unnecessary anguish. Though Kaori returned the embrace, her warmth had dimmed.
