“It’s my first assignment with an Ordinal. A real Spark with sinful power,” Navi thought as the task force continued to track the renegade Lux faction hiding in the Third Ring. The search party had surrounded a ramshackle dwelling in the Circuits. The perimeter was cleared.
It was go time.
Ordinal #512 kicks down the door in one swift motion and three Ordinals storm the abode — weapons drawn as training mandates. In the kitchen corner, a mother shivers as a few more of us enter. But our search team is too late or mistaken or just following wrong leads. No Lux are here. We move on, exiting through the back to a mess of dilapidated shacks and rusting fences.
“Whoever is subjected to live here has obviously been forsaken,” Navi concludes as the party marches onward.
The search has been so new for Navi — a child of the Citadel — it’s been hard to focus on anything. He’s in his home city yet it feels like a foreign planet with thousands of exotic stimuli disorienting his senses. The people, the buildings, the clothes, the scents of the street food, even the air tastes new. This is Navi’s first time outside of the City’s inner rings and it’s against his parents’ wishes. A child of a Councilmember shall never disagree with their parents, yet here Navi was… at the front line, chasing down renegade Lux.
“Out in the Third Ring nothing is certain and death is routine, like squashing a mosquito on your neck. No one will know you’re one of us,” Councilmember Ripple, Navi’s father, declared upon hearing the news that Navi had volunteered for the Lux hunt.
“Your position handling the Fyat hound dogs was to learn responsibility, dignity, and how to hold yourself confidently when it was your time to lead, Navi. Not to join a dangerous mission to chase down and murder Lux amongst the peasant populace,” warns Navi’s mother, her face wrinkled in a funny expression somewhere between anger and disbelief.
But Navi never cared to dress in formal wear, smile and greet citizens, or be addressed as Councilmember Ripple. To deliver Fyat scripture to the people, to debate countless budgeting proposals, to obsess about the proper diet. None of this excited him. The prospect of him as a Councilmember (or worse a Cardinal) was a vision fading in his parents’ dreams.
To hunt fugitives under the metallic night sky in some desolate, forlorn City enclave with a team of Ordinals, weaving in and out of abandoned buildings and slums — that was exciting. That was Navi’s calling!
So Navi crept through yet another crumbling home, another shivering mother, another half-opened oven — its warmth escaping and creeping up his arm. It was here he would witness a cornered Lux crushed Ordinal #512’s ribcage and then set its sights on him, as artillery fire began to ring out in the fragile night. Navi was stunned, almost paralyzed… yet he had never felt more alive.
