The Contract Saga, BOOK 2: Story of a Name

CHAPTER ONE

We tried to blend in with the world, but they despise us. So we choose to stand alone.

Our world isn't very big. But it's full of very strange places with even stranger traditions.

The war started in the continent of Midland in a, well, calling it "lesser" probably sounds stupid considering what damage it did but, nonethless, it was a lesser country. Such was the damage it did that its very name was cancelled from the annals, history book, even normal and scientifical books. People just wanted to forget. And forget they did, in a way. Now that country is just a barren land with nothing but craters from bombardaments everywhere the eye may look. And salt. Salt everywhere. There's so much of it that now the place is simply called the "Salty Planes".

Anyways: there are four continents in our world. The first one is Midland and its capital is called Centralia. It's your average continent: normal climate, normal people, normal folklore, everything is normal. Except maybe from the minds of the idiots who decided to call it Midland. Well, at the very least it is a better name than "Firstland". Because yes, this was the first continent inhabited by humanity. All the rest came after. The Capital, Centralia, was called this way because, originally, it represented the center of the known world. Yeah, I know, "what fantasy". Believe me, that's one of the reasons this continent is considered normal.

Then, more or less three thousand years ago, when the higher ups noticed that a problem of overpopulation was beginning to form, them being incredible geniouses that really did like their positions of power that gave them peaceful lifes without a single care in the world, thought it was a good idea to send ships around the world to discover some new land where people could go to live.

The first new continent that was found was the one that, nowadays, is called "The Halved". "Why?", you may all be asking: becasue it's litterally divided at its half by a giant, three kilometers wide, well, we shall call it canyon. At the time scientists were baffled because its sides were vertical and completely smooth, like some kind of god had just used a sword and cut the continent with it.

There were theories going around at the beginning about a particular civilisation that had inhabited the place when the colonizers arrived and killed them all. Naturally that theory was just that, just a theory. The governments made sure it stayed that way. It would have caused too many problems.

The capital of this strange land is the city called "The Bridges", also called "The City of Bridges" because it's entirely built on brides that connect one side of the canyon to the other. It's a peculiar place with an even more peculiar tradition, that is you have to always choose the bridge on the left. For some reason every single inhabitant of that city believes that using the bridge on your right will lead to something horrible happening. And naturally, because we live in a world of people who like to laugh and make fun of each other at any occasion, this lead to many gags about some kind of criminal escaping from policeman and choosing the bridge on the right being able to run away 'cause the policeman didn't want to follow him and break this unwritten rule. Those gags usually end with the criminal being hit by something on the head or falling off the bridge after some kind of very improbable trip and fall accident.

The Canal, which can be used only for nine months a year because of a fenomenon in which winds are channelled inside making it impossible for any ship to traverse, that's at the bottom of the canyon is used as a way to travel faster between the Great Central, the, you've probably guessed, ocean that actually is at the center of our world, and the Western Silence.

That's actually a very creepy place to find yourself in. It's the westernmost sea of this world and it got its name because of a peculiar effect it gained some centuries ago. Nobody knows how it happened, not even the higher ups. It's just that, one day, in the distance, something exploded... without making a single sound. A fungus, the kind that forms when something explodes, slowly formed in the skies, and then nothing. Or, at least, many thought it was nothing. In reality after that strange incident the place became utterly silent, in the sense that nothing could make a sound. Enter the limits of the "Western Silence" with a ship and its engine stops making a sound. Try to talk and no sound comes out of your mouth. Shoot a g*n, use a missile, anything like that, and there's nothing. Radars stop working because, apparently, the waves produced by the machines simply stop existing. And when there's a storm you cannot even hear the wind.

If you go west enough there you'll end up in "The Calm". This sea was originally as normal as the Western Silence but, after that same incident, it became a place of utter calmness. There's never wind, there are no storms. Some fisherman actually say that it's the best place to fish. Scientists speculated that the effect of the explosion that made the Silence become what it became arrived to the Calm with a milder effect that, in a way, "silenced" the winds and any problem that they might cause.

To the South of our little world there's the second continent that was discovered during those expeditions: "The Dark Kingdom". Also known as the "Eternal Night". Why? Because it's always night, duh.

And no, I'm not kidding and I'm not exagerating. It's always night, always. This is another thing that baffled scientists of the time and that even now, almost three thousand years later, still does. In their opinion it should be day at least one month every year. Or, if not one month, on day, in other words, the light of day should shine on that country at least for some time.

Point is, it doesn't. Another interesting fact is that there are only two seasons in this light-forsaken place: autumn and a short spring. It's never cold, it's never hot. It's always in this gray zone.

Many people think that the place is a haunt of criminals and such people, but the truth is that it's actually the safest place of this world. Because nobody likes darkness and, after sometime, even the worst of all criminals will run out of fuel for its source of light and will have to go to one of the cities and to get some. And that's when they get captured.

The capital of this continent is "Lumina", also known as the City of Candles. The name actually comes from the fact that, originally, the only source of light in the city were candles but it didn't take long for them to understand this was a bad idea. And so that's the reason electricity was invented. Now the city is lighted by electrical lanterns and is like a sun of its own. And when the "night" comes, when the majority of the lanterns are dimmed, then it's a sight to behold, the city appearing like a starry sky with its own constellations.

So, truth be told, the country is more of a "haunt of lovers" than anything else.

Then there's "Berg". It's the third continent that was discovered and, for a long while, it was considered the harshest place of this world. It's at the north of our world and it's known for being a place where the highest temperature is -10 degrees. In summer. If you can even call it summer. Actually, all in all, it's a normal place, where nature seems to still work as nature should and not as if it had a drink too much. It's a completely barren land where you cannot see a thing for miles. And then there are the cities. The only places where cold doesn't seem to exist because... ways. I never understood how the people were able to mantain those 20 degrees of temperature in their cities, it's a secret that even I wasn't able to unearth.

Anyways, the capital of the continent is called Glamour, but it's known more for its "nickname": The City of Masks.

Glamour was the first city that was created in this barren land and, after the inhabitants found a way too keep it warm, they decided to create a new festival to remember the day. And after that people noticed that they like that festival and wanted it to keep going. And so the city of Glamour became known as a place of eternal festivals, where there's always something to celebrate. A man of the higher ups that went there came back saying that the place was "an eternal Carnival filled to the brim with Harlequins". And yet those harlequins are still thriving and the city is one of the most advanced places in the world. Look what keeping the morale high can do!

But Berg is also known for another reason: it's the place where the first attack by the "forsaken country" happened. It's the continent where the "Music City" once was.

It's the continent where the only place I managed to call home was.

The war.

The Great War!

It had many names, and many were the ways it was fought.

The "forgotten state" managed to conquere the majority of this world during fifteen years of war. Luckily it seems that this world still has a sense of karma or whatever you like to call it and, in the end, decided that, for once, the good should win.

Some continents, like Midland and the Halved, were "easy" to conquere. They just had to take the Capital and the game was won.

Midland was taken in two weeks. They didn't even lose that many people. Nobody was simply expecting the war to start there, mainly because the first victims were people from another continent.

But destroying the Music City wasn't a way of saying that they would start there. It was their way to tell the whole world that they would stop against nothing to get what they wanted.

At least the Bridges was able to put up a fight. The organised themselves with the criminals of the "underbridges", as they liked to be called, and when the soldiers came, "out of the blue" many bridges simply exploded, plummetting them all towards the Canal and their deaths. To control the two original bridges, the ones where everything started, would mean taking the whole city. They tried and, even if it wasn't simple, they managed it.

It took them a year though.

And I was there.

I was one of the soldiers defending those streets. Shooting from the roofs. Walking those alleys and the places under them. Placing a bomb here and there.

Killing.

Killing oh so many of them.

But it wasn't enough.

And so I was also one of those that managed to descend towards the Canal and escape towards the Silence.

Then they started to attack the Dark Kingdom. That was a long one. Why? Because, while nobody liked darkness, there was no one in the world that could thrive in it more than an inhabitant of that continent. The lights in every city were dimmed or completely turned off and, for the first time in centuries, no, millenias, the City of Candles actually used candles as a source of light.

The planes of the enemies simply couldn't navigate in that eternal darkness and so they had to use ground troops.

That was when their nightmares started.

Because they didn't know where the soldiers of the Kingdom's army would come. They couldn't see them in time to do something.

And yet, in the end, they managed it.

They managed to conquere Lumina. Or, to be more precise, its empty husk. Every single citizen had escaped and not a single valuable or usable object was left behind. The great generators that gave the city all the electricity it needed had been blown up.

But they left the candles behind. It was such a sick joke.

After that the country simply decided to leave the place be. The higher ups said it was because the continent didn't have that many useful resources. That was a lie. Even the soldiers knew it. The truth was that they knew they simply couldn't win a war that was more a guerriglia than an actual war in a country that they didn't even know that well. So they only left behind some sodiers to guard the city of Lumina and used all the other troops in other battles.

I was also there. I saw the first real defeat of the army of that country.

And when they left, I did too.

That was also the first time I died.

Killed by a group of soldiers that were leaving towards the shores to get to their next battlefield. Or, at least, that was what they said. The body my allies found was mangled beyound recognition. Only the name on the suit let them understand it was "me".

A mask. One of the many.

The next real part of the war was fought at the Stygian Entryway.

"What is that place?" you may be asking. Well, there's one thing I left behind when I described our strange little world. And that is that there's a world under our world. In a way.

Ok, maybe it's simpler to understand if I give you an explanation.

More or less a thousand years ago some spelunkers accidentally found an entrance to a giant cave under the continent of Midland. Or, at least, at the time they thought it was just a giant cave. After many more explorations a researcher realized that the place was far bigger than they initially thought. How? Well, radar waves that were sent outwards into the cave simply disappeared. Sometimes they would show the presence of an island or of some kind of obstacle, but they never came back completely.

That was when someone had the idea to try to build something down there. And so a project, founded by all the main cities on the continents, to build a city down in that place was started.

They began by creating an easier way to get down. That "easier way", which, additionally, costed more than building the city itself in the cave, was what we today know as the Stygian Entryway. A series of drains and canals that, slowly but surely, lead you down to the Underground. Yeah, I know, not very fantasious, but they simply couldn't find a better way to describe the place.

In the years that followed many explorations were established to try to find the end of the great Underground. That was when two incredible discoveries were made.

The first: the cave actually seemed to be endless. Some "calculations" were made by the crews on the various ships that thronged the waters of the Underground, which they discovered were full of strange new species of fish and... creatures? They simply couldn't find the will to define them fish, they were too strange. Anyways: those people stated that, referencing to the measures of the machines, they had traveled two times the lenght of the world at the equator before they had decided to go back.

And they hadn't yet found an end to the place. Nor a way to explain how it was possible that there was still light even that far away.

Strange, right? Well, to those that first discovered the place it wasn't. Why? Because they found out that on the ceiling of the Underground were many cristallin formations which refracted light in every direction, making it possible to see. "But that refraction couldn't simply go on forever", said those that had started the expeditions. Apparently they were wrong.

Anyways, there was also another thing that was discovered: the laws of physics and space didn't apply as they normally did on the surface.

And that has nothing to do with the fact that the place seems to be apparently endless. Ok, simply put: sometimes space would contract and the distance between two places would shorten without any apparent reason. Other times it would do the exact opposite. Sometimes gravity would temporarily go "off". Other times it would invert. To use the words of one of the crewman: "Sometimes it seemed like we were on a fuc_ing squeezebox!"

Usually all these things would go back to normal after a while. But there were places where it didn't happen. Wher what changed did so on an apparently permanent basis.

That's the case of "The Depth", a place where gravity had been inverted and water, forming a perfect circle, had gone for the ceiling of the Underground where, bit by bit, it dug its way to the surface where, luckily, it stopped.

For these reasons the sea of the Underground was named "The Unruled".

Anyways, going back to the history lesson, the war to get down into the Underground was, simply put, a war all of its own. Every single canal was fought with teeth and nails.

Some genial i***t had the very bright idea to put some of the most ferocious fish that could be found in the Underground inside the waters of the canals so that, when the enemy ships arrived, well, let's just say they found out how difficult those giant jellyfish with spiked tentacles were to kill.

To put it simple: they never managed to reach the end of the Stygian Entryway.

For a while I was also there. They thought that I got captured to let my companions escape. And, truth be told, I was captured. But I also disappeared twelve hours later.

They next found me in the cold plains of Berg. Only, they never understood it was always me. For them I was just a face as any other. Sometimes not even that.

And while Berg had the climate I liked the most, it was also the place I remained less time. Why? Well, I am still a human. I'm not invincible. And I'm scared of explosions. Explosions so powerfull they cause some parts of the coasts to separate from the rest of the continent, becoming little floating islands that travelled around the world.

Simply put... the nameless country tested a new bomb on the desert snowy planes of the continent. The experiment was a success. Maybe even too much. So much so that they decided not to use them ever again. They wanted to still have people to command on when the war ended.

There was one final place I fought. Or, to be more precise, a place where I run to try and escape the War. But the bastard followed me. It always did. It found me amusing.

Anyways, it was the so called "Sky City". A place of free thinkers where everything that came to mind was made into reality. The story of this place is actually quite funny: it all started as a bet between drunks. It was a group of eight people, all students. Incredibly intelligent. And incredibly stubborn. So much so that, when one of the drunks stated that, as intelligent as they were, they couldn't make something as big as an island fly, they decided to bet on it and, even when they sobered up, they still went on. And so, in 35 years, the place was built in secret in the Western Silence and then it was put to the sky. A beauty of steam and electricity capable of lifting an entire city and that, with some extra modifications, could take even more.

The Sky City played a major role in the war after the country decided to declare war to it. At the time they weren't scared. They had weapons powerful enough to destroy it in a single blow if they wanted to. But they didn't know that the city could move around in the skies without making a single sound, making it impossible for radars to find it. How? They "turned off" all the machines and kept afloat using only the original aerostat, moving around with the help of wind currents at various altitudes. And then, when they happened on top of an important enemy base, they would simply bomb it.

That's how the war was won. That, and the help of many rebels all around the world.

Bit by bit the whole world was taken back and, finally, the capital of the nameless country was assaulted and destroyed. The man who'd started everything was found and was executed on the spot. Stories say that the only part of his body that remained untouched wash is left hand, which he had used to try to take his g*n.

And so the war ended.

All the world celebrated for weeks and weeks.

But, for the higher ups, the celebrations were cut short. Why? Because they found out, thanks to some informant they had put in the country before it was utterly destroyed, that many important "characters" of the government had managed to escape on submarines and ships.

For this reason they decided to create a new law that, more or less, stated that any ship which was found having a flag that wasn't classified in the archives was to be sunk immediatly.

Meanwhile the islands that had been "created" during the war were, well, for lack of better words, reattached to the ocean floor.

One of these islands was colonized by me and many other people who, like me, could no longer find a place to call home. There we built our little secret city.

So, that's it for the history lesson my dear students. Next time we'll talk about... ok, I'll stop with the teacher farce.

Now, prepare your best nautical insults and get those weapons ready. After all, a journey at sea also needs those.

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Can't... write... more... Fingers... hurt.

Ok, jokes apart... well, nothing, I really don't have much to say apart from "I hope that you liked the chapter". I sure did like to write this. Creating a whole new world just because I'm lazy and don't want to look up information about our world (yes, originally the story was supposed to happen in our world), but that's for the best I think.

Well, everyone, goodbye and I'll see you all next chapter. Bye bye!