Chapter 98

The first thing I did upon entering the tower built by design for fairies was find somewhere out of the way to clean myself.

Four days of travel had consequences.

Not important ones.

My physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] handled anything that actually mattered, my body remained perfectly functional, and the social skinweave I wore had been designed with considerably more practical considerations than its appearance suggested...

But dust was dust.

Fine particulate matter had settled into the folds of white fabric.

My hair had accumulated enough grime that its natural iridescence had dulled.

The same applied to my skin.

After landing on one of the countless unoccupied side platforms bordering the tower's entrance areas, I [Focus]ed my [Awareness] on myself to locate everything that did not belong.

Then I [Will]ed it away.

Dust detached from fabric.

Grime separated from my skin.

Tiny particles worked themselves free from my hair.

Whatever could be harmlessly removed without requiring actual cleaning products gathered into an increasingly unpleasant little cloud before me, which I compressed together and disposed of in the nearest receptacle.

A final adjustment of my hair ornaments followed.

Then the folds of my skinweave.

Then my backpack.

Like that, I became fittingly socially presentable again.

Which was useful, considering I had come here to take up residence.

The tower had a name, naturally.

Lylily Tower.

Apparently pronounced as the same sound repeated three times.

Supposedly, that made it an especially apt fairy name according to some naming convention whose explanation I had skimmed while determining whether this particular tower was an appropriate place to settle.

I hadn't cared enough to remember the explanation.

What mattered was that Lylily Tower was a Strata in-between-stretching structure located in Everwell Prime, heavily associated with the Fairy Court, populated by a ridiculous number of fairies, and sufficiently close to enough institutions and individuals of interest for me to use it as the center of my activities.

Its name didn't.

So, with myself once again looking like the wealthy, young, and pretty fairy my social skinweave had been specifically designed to present, I went looking for somewhere to live.

Finding the appropriate administrative floors was almost embarrassingly easy.

The tower possessed public route markings everywhere.

Not markings placed solely beside doors or at ground level, either.

Some hovered in open air.

Others were embedded vertically along walls.

Directions appeared around ceiling entrances, underneath platforms, beside openings halfway up shafts, and at intersections where a grounded architect would never have considered placing an intersection because there was no floor upon which to stand.

I followed them upward.

Then diagonally.

Then through what initially looked like a window and turned out to simply be another public entrance.

A few minutes later, I landed inside an administrative reception area where everything was finally, wonderfully, sized normally.

Normal for me.

The counters were low.

The writing surfaces were usable without landing on top of them.

Seats existed at proportions where sitting on one wouldn't leave my feet dangling halfway up a giant chair.

Even the piles of forms waiting beside the reception stations were fairy-sized.

That last advantage rapidly became less charming, though.

There were a lot of forms.

A lot.

Taking residence within Lylily Tower did not require anything resembling the Pulse's evaluation procedures, the Faith's rank increase examinations, or the extraordinarily convoluted negotiations I had experienced whenever organizations actually cared what I might become...

But it did require Civilization to know everything Civilization apparently considered relevant to someone renting one of its rooms.

Name.

Age.

Species.

Morphology.

Place of origin.

Current residence.

Previous residence.

Organizational affiliations.

Prior organizational affiliations.

Employment.

Sources of income.

Expected duration of residence.

Reason for residence.

Relevant [Contract]ual obligations.

Emergency contacts.

Guardians.

Parents.

Lineage.

Known family.

Medical accommodations.

Dietary requirements.

Flight capability.

Accessibility requirements.

Whether I intended to conduct commercial activity from my residence.

Whether I intended to receive clients.

Whether I possessed pets.

Whether I expected anyone else to regularly occupy the room.

Whether I intended to store controlled substances, hazardous materials, living samples, volatile Essence products, or anything capable of independently moving after being left unattended.

I kept writing.

Many questions earned variations of the same answer.

None.

Not applicable.

Unknown.

No.

Others required significantly more information.

My origin alone demanded several fields once the form distinguished birthplace, Sector of origin, Court-recognized lineage, parental lineage, known family associations, and prior registered fairy communities.

I filled everything as accurately as I could.

That left quite a few blanks.

My affiliations took longer.

So did my sources of income, especially once investment proceeds and irregular compensation earned through individual arrangements had to be distinguished from ordinary employment income.

My objective for taking residence required only one sentence.

Personal development and the pursuit of educational, social, economic, and academic opportunities within Everwell Prime.

Accurate.

Broad.

Entirely sufficient.

When the first stack was finished, I received another.

Then another.

By the time I reached a declaration stating that I understood intentionally obstructing public flight corridors could result in escalating penalties depending upon the degree of danger created, I had developed a considerably deeper appreciation for just how much bureaucracy could be compressed into appropriately sized sheets of paper.

At least no one seemed especially interested in me.

There was no [Assessment].

No physical inspection.

No demand that I explain how an environmentally conceived fairy with no known parents had ended up crossing multiple Sectors alone.

No insistence that someone older confirm my decisions.

No subsequent [Interrogation] regarding why someone barely more than six years old possessed my income, affiliations, or travel history.

The administrators verified whatever actually required verification, clarified two sections where my circumstances didn't fit neatly into the available categories, then proceeded onward.

Apparently, strange young fairies were sufficiently common within the Fairy Court that one more did not warrant suspending ordinary procedure.

That was convenient.

Even more convenient was the rent.

I had no intention of buying anything when I didn't yet know whether Lylily Tower would remain the best center for my activities a month from now, so I paid for exactly one month.

One of the cheapest residences available.

Then the amount decreased further when my age was processed.

Juvenile reductions.

Fitting, considering I had deliberately come here intending to exploit the advantages Civilization attached to my young age.

I accepted the reduced rate without complaint.

Soon after, I officially had a room.

The route toward it introduced me to another advantage of living in architecture that considered flight normal rather than exceptional.

I didn't wind up outside.

Normally, when I needed to climb hundreds of floors through a tower built around grounded giants, exterior flight was overwhelmingly superior to lifts, stairwells, crowded internal corridors, and whatever other means had been created to compensate for the inability to simply move upward.

Lylily Tower had apparently reached the same conclusion.

Then designed around it.

The route markings directed me into an immense interior flight corridor extending vertically through a considerable portion of the structure.

Traffic entered from dozens of openings.

Fairies accelerated upward.

Others descended.

Some crossed between lateral passages.

Separated lanes existed, but they weren't physical lanes in the way roads were.

Glowing markers designated directions, velocity expectations, merging zones, and areas where stopping was forbidden.

More interestingly, [Ether] devices lined the corridor at regular intervals.

I felt their influence the instant I entered.

They made the turbulence disappear.

Not entirely, as thousands of wings could not move through the same enclosed air without influencing it.

But the chaotic air [Flow]s I expected never developed.

One fairy accelerated past me.

Her wingbeats should have left a noticeable wake.

Instead, the disturbed air spread outward, softened, and vanished into the surrounding [Flow].

A group descended in the opposite direction.

Their combined displacement reached me as little more than a smooth pressure change.

Even near intersections where dozens of fairies altered direction within seconds of one another, the air continued to [Flow] remarkably calmly.

That it wasn't still only made it more impressive.

Still air would have been inconvenient for flight.

This was air maintained in a state that remained useful despite everything moving through it.

A calm [Flow].

I had to consciously stop my thoughts from digging any deeper into the phenomenon.

Interesting as the system was, my [Flow] Aspect had a development quota attached to it.

I was currently finding my room.

So I let [Guided] record everything and followed the traffic upward.

And it was fast.

Not train fast, though.

Civilization had apparently not yet discovered how to easily make flying through a building compete with being launched across districts in an underground metal tube.

But fast enough that I reached my residential floor and section without ever once considering leaving through the exterior.

I liked that.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

My room was a cube.

A remarkably utilitarian cube.

There was a door.

There were walls.

There was a ceiling.

There was a floor.

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And there was a bed.

No window.

No kitchen.

No bathing area.

No toilet.

No sitting area.

No desk.

No decorative lighting beyond the basic illumination embedded into the ceiling.

Perfect.

Most of those omissions had been choices.

The cheapest residential category came with enough configurable options that I could have added various amenities individually without upgrading to a larger room.

I declined all of them.

My physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] made it so I didn't need to eat, making a kitchen an inefficient allocation of space and credits.

I didn't need conventional bathing facilities often enough to justify possessing my own when public alternatives existed and [Will] could handle most superficial cleaning.

The biological processes normally requiring a toilet had been rendered similarly irrelevant.

A window would have increased the price merely so I could look outside from a room I intended to occupy approximately once every eight days.

Which left the bed...

Because I did sleep.

Occasionally.

I dropped my backpack beside it.

For the first time in four days, my wings were no longer compensating for its weight.

I immersed myself in the feeling of liberation for all of a minute before moving on.

The room would serve its [Purpose], and nothing more.

I had no intention of hiding how long I remained awake.

Nor how much of that time I spent on my [Cultivation].

Trying to manufacture the appearance of a more conventional lifestyle would have been counterproductive when the exact opposite was one of the things I intended people to learn about me.

If someone eventually became curious enough to investigate where I lived, what would they discover?

A fairy child.

No parents.

No known lineage.

Barely more than six years old.

Living alone in one of the cheapest windowless rooms available.

No kitchen.

No bathroom.

Almost nothing recreational.

Possessions overwhelmingly consisting of notebooks, travel equipment, clothing, and whatever else directly contributed to her objectives.

Sleeping roughly once a week because the rest of her existence was consumed by [Cultivation], study, work, and whatever opportunity she had decided was worth pursuing next.

That...

Would probably make me look even more pitiful.

An excellent [Foundation] for my [Purpose].

Not because I intended to fabricate poverty.

My income was recorded.

The social skinweave I had entered the building wearing was obviously expensive.

Anyone sufficiently motivated to investigate me could probably uncover indications that I possessed investments and had no immediate financial difficulties.

That contradiction might even make the rest more interesting.

I could afford comfort.

I simply didn't allocate resources toward comfort I didn't need.

And the parts that were actually pitiful required no invention whatsoever.

No parents.

No family raising me.

No comfortable childhood.

No one who had spent my first years deciding how much [Exertion] and [Cultivation] was too much for a child because there had been no one around to make that decision.

Every part was true.

The only art lay in determining which [Truth]s became easiest to see.

That brought me back to what I had come here to build.

Not merely an economic [Foundation].

Not merely a social one.

A [Foundation] for the Essence Entity who named herself Solaena after a children's tale.

A young fairy whose [Ambition] made idleness incomprehensible.

Whose [Will] had been forged into something capable of enduring whatever her Path demanded.

Who had started with nothing.

Who possessed the talent to make that story interesting rather than merely unfortunate.

And who, if everything went correctly, would become exactly the kind of young fairy that older, vastly more experienced fairies might find [Worthy] of spending some of their time on.

I began unpacking.

My notebooks went into one corner.

My records went into another, separated according to current relevance rather than chronology.

Travel equipment went beside the backpack.

Clothing took almost no time.

Items I intended to carry regularly remained packed.

Things I might need during my next [Cultivation] period remained the most accessible.

Within minutes, the cube became my cube.

Still empty.

Still entirely adequate.

I stood in its center and spread my [Awareness] through everything I had just organized.

Nothing missing.

Nothing misplaced.

Nothing left to do here.

So...

Time to find out where I had chosen to live.

I had already done something similar within the smaller Fairy Court's court I visited months ago.

Five days of moving between public locations, speaking to fairies, discovering who used Court services and why, learning how factions interacted, what people loved, what they despised, and how much of the organization existed through relationships rather than formal hierarchy.

That had been reconnaissance.

This...

Would be considerably more thorough.

I intended to live here.

Use this tower as the center of my economic and social activities.

Find people through it.

Acquire [Knowledge] through it.

Potentially develop relationships extending throughout Everwell Prime through it.

Which meant learning Lylily Tower couldn't stop at memorizing the route between my room and the exit.

Administrative sections.

Residential sections.

Public gathering spaces.

Commercial areas.

Archives.

Training facilities.

Court offices.

Whatever educational infrastructure existed.

Whatever locations attracted young fairies.

Whatever locations attracted old ones.

Where specialists spent their time.

Where wealthy fairies gathered.

Where people went when they wanted something.

Where they went when they merely wanted company.

Who controlled access to what.

What was public.

What was technically public but socially inaccessible without the correct introduction.

What rules everyone followed.

What rules everyone ignored.

What opportunities existed specifically because tens of thousands of fairies had concentrated themselves inside one building.

I wanted all of it mapped.

Not today.

Probably not this week either.

Lylily Tower was too big for that.

Even with [Guided], completely familiarizing myself with something of this scale would take time.

Nevertheless, conveniently...

I had a lot of it to give.

And if somewhere along the way I discovered another fairy tower whose opportunities surpassed this one?

Then I would move.

A month of rent in Everwell Prime wasn't so expensive that I couldn't consider giving it away.

What's more, I could probably ask for a refund and already enjoyed the Juvenile reduction.

My [Foundation] existed to support my Path.

My Path did not exist to justify remaining loyal to whatever building I happened to choose first.

With that settled, I approached the door.

Stopped.

Then looked down at myself.

White-and-gold social skinweave.

Layered fabric.

Restrained embroidery.

Hair ornaments.

The carefully designed appearance of a young fairy possessing enough means to belong wherever wealthy people gathered.

My patched [Cultivation] bodysuit was in one corner, and Stavros' combat weave was in another.

For several seconds, I actually considered changing.

Both had their [Purpose] in terms of contrasts.

Stavros' combat weave, with or without my accompanying four needle swords plus auxiliary weapons, would make me look like an Everwell Realm delver.

As for my [Cultivation] bodysuit, it had never been intended to look impressive.

It existed to survive.

Stretch.

Tear.

Be repaired.

Accumulate enough damage from sustained [Cultivation] [Exertion]s that replacing it became more efficient than continuing to patch it.

Then the replacement underwent the same process.

My current one was already well into that progression.

The fabric remained entirely functional, but aesthetically...

It made my new residence look luxurious.

If my present objective had been to immediately start building the image of a [Cultivation]-obsessed orphan fairy, wearing it would have been useful.

However, I still didn't know enough about Lylily Tower to know where that presentation would be advantageous.

Walking around in visibly abused [Cultivation] clothing simply because I could create a particular impression would be putting signaling before [Knowledge] and [Comprehension] of the local social web of relationships.

That was backwards.

So I remained in my social skinweave.

There would be ample opportunities to look pitiful later.

I opened the door.

And went exploring.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

The first thing I discovered was that my mental model of the tower was wrong.

Not catastrophically.

The exterior had already made its fundamental architecture obvious.

Flight first.

Floors second.

But understanding that principle from outside and experiencing everything that followed from within were very different things.

There were conventional corridors.

Lots of them.

They simply weren't the primary assumption.

I followed one away from the residential section until it intersected another internal flight shaft, entered, descended two levels, exited through an opening halfway up what I initially interpreted as a room...

And discovered the room itself continued another five levels downward.

There were shops along the walls.

Not around the floor.

Along the walls.

Their entrances occupied different elevations according to no arrangement a grounded species would have considered sensible.

One had a landing ledge beneath it.

Another simply opened directly into the shared airspace.

A third possessed stairs connecting it to a lower platform, apparently because its clientele included young fairies whose wings weren't yet capable of carrying them.

Above me, a luxurious café occupied several suspended platforms joined by thin bridges.

Fairies sat on surfaces.

Hovered beside tables.

Landed on rails.

One remained airborne through an entire conversation while absentmindedly changing position every few seconds.

I kept going.

A public garden occupied the hollow center of several residential sections, with vegetation growing not merely upward from the ground but outward from wall-mounted beds and downward from suspended structures.

Pathways wound through it in three dimensions.

The grounded ones were disproportionately occupied by children.

Some ran.

Others climbed.

A few launched themselves into the air with poorly controlled wingbeats, traveled distances barely longer than their bodies, then landed with expressions ranging from delight to outrage.

No one treated that as unusual.

Elsewhere, I found a commercial corridor narrow enough that two giant hands placed side by side might have blocked it entirely.

Here, it accommodated hundreds of people.

Tailors.

Booksellers.

Food vendors.

Equipment shops.

Wing-care specialists.

Jewelry.

Housing services.

Legal services.

Court representatives.

Someone advertising private flight instruction despite almost every adult fairy around them already flying with sufficient ease to make the service appear pointless.

[Guided] immediately provided several reasons it wasn't.

Combat flight.

Endurance flight.

High-altitude adaptation.

Cargo flight.

Performance.

Racing.

Aerial choreography.

Fine.

Maybe not pointless.

Another section was almost entirely workshops.

The sounds were appropriately tiny.

That shouldn't have been noteworthy.

It was.

I had spent enough of my existence around giant-scaled Civilization that metal being worked without every impact reverberating through my entire body felt strangely restrained.

Doors fit me.

Handles fit me.

Signs were placed where my eyes naturally went.

Writing was sized to be read without me needing to create some distance from it if I wound up too close.

When I wanted to stop, there was almost always some ledge, rail, platform, suspended seat, or useless decorative projection capable of supporting my weight.

When I didn't want to stop...

Nothing forced me to.

Vertical routes connected everything.

Openings existed where openings were convenient to someone who could fly rather than wherever the floor happened to permit them.

Some staircases were almost comically small.

Some ramps spiraled around open shafts so gradually that a mature fairy would require far longer to walk them than simply flying upward.

Yet they existed.

Young fairies used them.

So did elderly fairies and the occasional fairy whose wings were damaged, malformed, absent, or simply not being used for one reason or another.

The tower assumed flight, but reason had still been applied, and thus it did not require it everywhere.

Which was probably how sensible fairy architecture ought to work.

I marked routes.

Stored names.

Read public signs.

Stopped at directories.

Entered places that appeared openly accessible.

Avoided places that didn't.

Whenever [Guided] recognized a repeated symbol, naming convention, administrative designation, or traffic pattern, I incorporated it into my growing mental map.

And all throughout...

Fairies.

Hundreds became thousands astonishingly quickly.

Then enough thousands that I stopped trying to estimate how many distinct individuals passed through my [Awareness].

I had thought the smaller court gathering area was alive.

Lylily Tower made it look like an isolated village.

Everywhere I went, wings moved.

Transparent wings.

Opaque wings.

Long.

Rounded.

Angular.

Broad.

Narrow.

Two wings.

Four wings.

Six wings.

Patterns spread across them in colors I had never personally seen on another fairy.

Gold.

Deep blue.

Red.

Green.

Black structures edged with luminous markings.

Nearly transparent wings whose patterns only appeared when light struck them correctly.

Others so intensely colored that the rest of their owner's appearance seemed secondary.

Hair varied just as extensively.

White.

Black.

Brown.

Gold.

Blue.

Red.

Colors I lacked names for.

Some long enough to trail behind their owner in flight.

Some cut almost shorter than mine.

Some braided.

Bound.

Decorated.

Left entirely alone.

Eyes followed.

Skin.

Faces.

Body structures.

Even size varied more than I had expected.

Some fairies were barely larger than me.

Others approached twice my height—though I only found a handful of those amidst thousands.

One extraordinarily broad-winged fairy possessed a body almost disproportionately slight even by our species' standards.

Another had four wings so small relative to her body that I initially assumed she had to compensate through an Aspect merely to remain airborne, only for [Guided] to remind me that judging another fairy's flight mechanics from appearance alone was precisely the kind of unsupported assumption I had spent years training myself not to make.

Fair.

Clothing ranged from things resembling my own skinweave to simple everyday garments, workwear, uniforms, elaborate Court fashions, protective fabrics, outfits designed around professions I couldn't identify, and enough variations of wing openings that I began passively cataloguing how many solutions existed to the same fundamental problem.

Some stared at my wings just like I looked at theirs.

A few people looked at my eyes.

More noticed my clothing.

Several noticed my age.

One fairy looked at my backpack, then at me, then looked again with enough obvious curiosity that I almost approached her simply to discover what conclusion she had reached.

I didn't.

Not yet.

I was mapping.

But the longer I continued...

The more obvious one conclusion became.

This was extraordinarily suitable.

Not merely because everything fit me.

I had experienced that already.

The smaller court area had taught me what it felt like for fairy morphology to be treated as the default rather than an accommodation.

Lylily Tower took that principle and multiplied its opportunities by several orders of magnitude.

Thousands upon thousands of potential relationships.

Experts.

Children.

Families.

Old fairies.

Young prodigies.

Workers.

Merchants.

Court functionaries.

People with centuries of [Knowledge].

People who knew those people.

People whose only relevance might be introducing me to someone else ten relationships later.

And all of them compressed into a structure I could cross in fractions of the time giant-oriented architecture normally demanded.

If I wanted an environment in which to develop the social and economic [Foundation] surrounding my actual [Cultivation]...

I couldn't have asked for much better.

Then I heard the noise.

Not loud by giant standards.

By fairy standards...

Very loud.

Hundreds of overlapping voices reached through one of the branching corridors ahead.

Wingbeats joined them.

Music.

Something repeatedly striking something else in a rhythm I couldn't identify.

Bursts of laughter.

Announcements.

Arguments.

The unmistakable density of a large number of people who had congregated somewhere for reasons other than efficiently moving from one location to another.

So I altered course.

The corridor widened.

Then opened.

And my [Awareness] flooded with fairies.

An enormous chamber stretched farther than my [Awareness] could immediately perceive, broken into hanging platforms, open balconies, suspended gardens, tables, stages, resting spaces, and broad volumes of completely unobstructed air.

Thousands of fairies occupied it.

Talking.

Eating.

Trading.

Watching performances.

Meeting.

Arguing.

Introducing one another.

Existing in the exact kind of social environment I had spent months deliberately seeking out one gathering at a time.

Except this one had apparently been sitting inside my new home all along.

I hovered at the entrance for several seconds.

My mapping endeavor could wait.

After all...

The foremost value of a map was knowing where to go.

And I had just found somewhere interesting.

So I flew in.