I took the stairs down, arriving at the first level basent of the city hall. It seed to act as a storage floor, with several rooms being marked as such. Yet, this wasn’t my destination. The signs for the gate indicated to continue down, which is what I did.
I ended up going much further than I expected. It was only on the fifth basent level that there weren’t any stairs going down anymore and that the signs directed
toward a room to the front. The mood was very different from upstairs, a lot graver with so tension in the air. As I moved forward, I ca across a couple of guards guarding a large door, both being rank 3.
“Travelling through the gates?”
“Yes.”
“Show us your ticket.”
They quickly inspected it and let
go through the door. Inside was my destination, a very large space containing three gates at the end. Each gate was a large tallic rectangle the size of several humans filled with a grey surface of sel, corresponding to the spell itself. I was surprised to see one of the three gates being inactive, especially considering there wasn’t supposed to be any spatial mage in the dos anymore.
Apart from that, the area was filled with many guards, all being rank 4 this ti. These won were the highest-ranked people I had co across in the inner world and I didn’t doubt they were 82’s elites. The room being so secure told
how critical this location was for the city, and probably for humanity in general.
As soon as I was in, I was imdiately stopped by the closest guards. They all wore serious expressions and it was clear the mood here wasn’t suited for joking around.
“Your ticket.”
I gave it again, and this ti the inspection was a lot more throughout. They passed a selnic tool over the piece of paper, which I guessed must have been the counterpart to the stamping tool from before. After a second, a light lit up in green and the guard who had the ticket in hand read its contents.
“Destination do 6… There’s no direct way to it.”
She took a small notebook from her waist and checked it.
“You’ll need to go through do 8, do 23, do 2, do 60, and finally get to do 6 from there.”
She wrote all of that on my ticket and showed it to the colleague next to her, who took out another stamping tool to officially approve it. She then gave
the ticket back.
“Do you know the procedure?”
“I don’t.”
“Fine, I’ll explain. This is your official route to your destination. You’re not allowed to go through any gate other than those. You’re not allowed to stay in any of the interdiary dos on your trip. And you’re not allowed to go out once you start your trip. You’ll need to show this at every step for security reasons.”
She turned around and looked at the gate, and then at her watch.
“The gate to do 8 is only allowing incoming travelers for the next twenty minutes. You can go after that.”
“Is it switching every thirty minutes?”
“That’s right.”
This was a common issue when using gates. In essence, gates were not different from devices that allowed anything to teleport to a specific destination, which ant it had so of the sa drawbacks as normal teleportation. Teleportation sickness was normally avoided because a gate was a lot stabler than a single spatial mage using the teleportation spell. However, there was still the issue of space, or more precisely, avoiding people from teleporting into each other and dying, sothing that a gate didn’t manage, unlike the teleportation spell.
As such, it was normal to set a schedule where people could only travel one way at a ti, and only one at a ti. This allowed the destination to stay clear of people and avoid tragic incidents. In my world, gate routes that had a lot of traffic usually were duplicated, allowing each gate to handle one direction. There were even so cases where four or eight gates handled a single destination for extrely popular and busy connections.
Just like the woman said, a few people ca out from the gate from ti to ti. Sotis, a group ca out together with so cargo, which they soon transported upstairs, and this explained why basent floors one to four were full of storage rooms. Most of them wore nice clothing and looked like important folks, proving that the price wasn’t sothing normal people could easily afford.
I decided to expand my knowledge while we were waiting.
“May I ask why the third gate is inactive?”
The guard looked a bit annoyed by my question but still answered . Her colleague watched the closed gate with sadness as she spoke.
“It isn’t inactive. It’s broken. Forever. No one can restart it.”
This was pretty much what I was expecting. One needed a spatial mage for anything related to gates. Since this world didn’t have any such affinity anymore, no one could fix it.
This was a very critical piece of information. It ant that, if the situation went on like this, it was only a matter of ti before dos beca isolated one by one. No matter how well-maintained a gate was, it was bound to malfunction or stop altogether after so ti. It was already a wonder they managed to get those to last for more than eight hundred years.
It was easy to imagine what would happen if the gates stopped functioning. Humanity would be divided into small groups, and the resources that they shared today would stop being traded. It was even worse considering so dos had specialized their industries over ti. There was no way to guess how long each do would last by itself but, eventually, it was even possible they would have no choice but to take the ultimate decision of lowering their protective dos and accepting to rge with the outside world again.
It was all in the future but that future was no different from a certainty. There was only one variable in this equation. .
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