ROMA-NOVA

A novel in instalments   by Andrew Gubb

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0.1 20/03/08 Two centuries ago an event changed the world drastically. This is the story of a different present time. * I watched the city sprawl out beneath me as I flew, imagining that I was still and the needle-ridden mass was alive and squirming under my gaze. I looked up and saw the core of the city... where the needles clustered together so tight that you could think that they were one. But no, look even deeper to the very centre of it, the true inner Core. It towered so high that' was part of the heavens. It thrust into the heights and stabbed the God of the Old World in his chest. I felt it like a knife in my own chest. It was my heart, and how I hated it. One day I would end my pain, or at least perhaps my pain would end me. I swerved past one of the needles suddenly and made for the outskirts. * "What was that?" said Kale. "Yeah," said Rowan, momentarily deigning to forget that he and Kale were in the middle of a fight over the blueprints for an elevator to the moon. "That happens sometimes, doesn't it?" Kale nodded thoughtfully. "Let's ask a grown-up." "Okay!" cried Rowan, getting up and running off to Ronaldo's place. Kale looked at the piece of paper in his hand for a moment and then realised that you couldn't make an elevator to the moon after all. He threw it away. "Wait for me!" "No!" * Ronaldo was reading a book with half an eye and clearing up the bar a little when he looked up, and Kale and Rowan burst in wildly, red in the face and gasping for breath. They tussled a bit and then met his eyes. He grinned at them. "Had a productive working day today, lads?" "Yeah!" said Rowan. "We designed an elevator to the moon!" "No we didn't! That's impossible!" said Kale. "We wanted to know why the lights go out sometimes!" "Exactly!" said Rowan. "You mean when they just sort of go off then on again really quickly? Like the passage lights?" "Yeah! Like happened just now! The darkness kind of moved along the main passage really quickly!" Ronaldo looked up, wondering how to put it to simple words. "That's called a... short-out." The children were staring up at him with shiningly attentive eyes. "It's a... disruption...?" If it happened that they didn't understand the word they were too proud to show it. "Well, lads, you see, when one of the Great Angels pass overhead... their power is so strong that... it disrupts the power that's in the lights. The mana." "Yeah!" said Kale. "Mana! Mana is like power! It makes the lights go on!" Ronaldo watched their shining faces and couldn't help chuckling. Suddenly his own troubles were almost small. "You're amazing. You're going to be great engineers one day, I bet you. Do you want a drink, boys?"    0.2 22/03/08 This was it. Until this point, the passage had been unlit and desolate. After the turn of a corner, however, it had become flooded with an eerie blood-red light and long grasping shadows. The source lay on the floor some twenty paces down, a glow so sharp that it left a string of after-images across Rocio's field of vision. It was the crystal. Someone had got there first, though. "Get out of my way," said Rocio. The stranger shot a malicious smile and made a move to pick up his prize. But leapt back. A bullet of light struck the floor by his feet with a small explosion. He stranger shielded his eyes. Where he had been standing a moment before the concrete floor shone with radiant heat. The crystal was out of reach. He snarled. Rocio's forefingers stretched out almost lazily toward the stranger as his eyes flared with focus. The stranger drew on his energies. His hand reached out and mana ran through his fingers -- There was another flash of light and the stranger threw himself against the wall. Rocio's bullet of light flashed past. The stranger pushed off and stared the line that ran between their two sets of eyes and along Rocio's outstretched fingertips. One moment. Two moments. They could both feel the energy that was running inside each other's bodies, and they could feel what was to happen next --- Rocio's aim was right. He loosed his shot. But at exactly the same instant a sudden terrific G-force wrenched him upwards. The cieling rushed towards him. His hands moved out to take the impact -- his aim had been perturbed -- a little -- The stranger stared at the dazzling point of light approaching his torso. His body twisted away, but too slowly... and mana flooded out from his heart to his fingertips --    0.3 22/03/08 Rocio fell into a roll and span about as fast as he could to close his defenses again. He saw the stranger, standing on what now appeared, to his flipped perspective, to be the cieling. * The missile seemed to approach the stranger slowly, though in reality it crossed the distance in less than a heartbeat. The energy left his fingertips. A haze of blue light formed and condensed. The bullet hit. If time could be measured in moments, then it was indeed one moment during which the barrier and the missile held each other off in a perfect balance of powers. Then the missile exploded and the barrier shattered. White light became everything, and blinded him before he managed to screw his eyes shut. The battle-high must have filtered out the pain, but the damage could only be mortal. Time sped into overdrive and the floor loomed up to meet him. Still, in defiance of reality itself, the stranger smiled. Another bullet hit the wall some way away -- a wild miss. * Grinning manically, triumphantly, Rocio lined up for a finishing shot. Focusing so hard on where his enemy's head would be, Rocio seemed to notice a hint of a smile flicker across the stranger's face. He drew a burst of mana into his hand and shaped it into another bullet of light. And then gravity reverted. He fell to the ground again, head-first, and this time, distraction had slowed his reflexes. His bullet hit the wall some way away from his enemy -- a wild miss. * This... was the best thing that Kale could possibly imagine out of his experience. Rowan felt the same. It was what you got on Midwinter Night, but without the boring bits. Flavours. Ronaldo was looking up and down his shelves of strange foreign bottles. In appearence alone they were fascinating; colours of all sorts, each label a different design; strange names and wierd outlandish objects that were probably what you called fruits or plants. In the Café was all the romance of discovery and the children looked up to Ronaldo as a great explorer and adventurer. Perhaps picking up on their feelings, Ronaldo himself seemed to straighten up now and move about his medium with all the confidence of a master in his own realm. Ronaldo chose two bottles and placed them gently on the bar. One of them was covered with a thin film of dust, which struck awe in the children. Anything so rarely used had to be amazing. "Would you vitalize the water for me?" Ronaldo asked, while he filled two long glasses from the tap and placed them before the children. When they nodded, he handed them two vitalizing rods connected to the mains power. There wasn't anything to it, of course, but -- "Basic safety," he recited. "Don't touch the vitalizing rods." "Yes, sir," they chorused. Rowan said it sincerely, Kale with a bit of defiant irony -- but even so, he was still fearful of breaking the convention. They stirred the water gently, dully watching the magical power turn the liquid into a bluish, pulsating, life-sustaining substance. That was the boring bit.