Many cultures told legends or myths of advanced beings who lived in the clouds.
When Jia was a little girl and looked out the windows of her residential tower, she couldn’t help but feel like one of those beings of legend. She lived in Neo Southern California, the greatest metroplex in the entire United Terran Confederation. It was a near-mythical land of massive towers that reached into the sky, where only the best and most honorable people lived.
Adulthood had disabused her of some of her fanciful childhood beliefs about what it meant to be an Uptowner in Neo SoCal, but it had not freed her from her dislike of subterranean tunnels.
As far as she was concerned, they were the realm of maintenance bots and yaoguai.
yaoguaiThe narrow tunnel currently hosting the sub-squad didn’t allow th
