Chapter I Part I

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The city is as it always had been in her memory.

Big!

Not just big like a hover-pickup compared to her scooter, but big like a Leviathan compared to a Personal Transport. So big that she only ever felt like a tiny speck, like the smallest organism in a massive ocean, not that she had ever seen the ocean, but she had an idea how big it would be. So what better way to avoid the size of everything other than …

“Anjali, come and get your dinner will you!”

… other than to lose yourself in something not quite so big.

“For goodness sake, leave that infernal engine alone, get washed, and come and eat will you girl!”

Engines. Anjali loved engines, something she inherited from her father, who was still in the workshop tinkering with something or other, much to her mothers annoyance.

“The thing with engines … “, her father used to say,
“ … is that you know exactly where you are with them. If something goes wrong, you pull it apart, fix the broken bit, and put it back together again, and everything's just fine. But then, you can tinker with them, make them better, make them more than they were, and that is just so exciting and rewarding!”

Yanaka does tend to get a bit carried away by engines, much to Anjalis’ mothers annoyance. Engines and tales of old, that just about summed up her father.
He always painted such pictures of the olden days, of when his Grandad was alive, tales that were full of mystery and intregue, tales that the Makarium would call heritical today.
Most of the time Anjali took the stories to be just that, stories that her father used to make up to send her off to sleep with when she was little, although she did sometimes wonder if they were really made up or not. These days her mothers voice of reason held more sway with her, and her fathers tales were just that, tales, and he usually only told them now after a few glasses of Lahjee too many, usually with much gusto and performance, and with Anjali’s mother telling him to be quiet and forget about old tales, there were more important things to worry about.