Forward and Back
“Oooo, look!” Sakura cooed. “Thees design ees just like the technology from Giant Robot! And thees one ees a direct copy of the train from Steam Investigators!”
“Aren’t those anime series?” Golf asked.
“Oh, yes. Two of my very favorites. The game designers must like theem, too.”
“Sakura, this isn’t a-- Oh, never mind.”
Golf and Sakura were standing over a table in the makeshift shack, examining blueprints they’d found in the bottom of a filing cabinet. The interior of the shack was just as shabby as the outside. There were two filing cabinets, one chair, and the table they stood over in the single room. The floor was dirt, and everything sitting on it was covered with a layer of grime. Sakura daintily picked a discarded rag up off the floor and attempted to clean the chair. Only partially successful, she sat down, a look of mild distaste on her face, and peered more intently at the train design.
“Thees train ees not an exact replica of the Steam Investigators one after all,” she said after a moment. “See, here and here the steam is directed in an entirely different manner. Technological constraints, I would guess. But someone must be quite the fan to have copied the design so closely.”
Golf raised an eyebrow. “That photo-graphic memory of yours is pretty handy sometimes, Sakura. If all this advanced technology wasn’t clue enough, this anime train design clinches it: there’s somebody else here from our world...
Somebody with a scientific background, and a means of gaining power. Maybe even somebody who’s been given extraordinary abilities like ours. I’m starting to think that maybe we didn’t wind up here by accident.”
Outside, Tank labored with a broken shovel he’d found near the shack. Three open graves lay to his left on the blasted plain, with space for three more to his right. He paused to wipe a slight sheen of sweat from his brow and looked at the lifeless bodies of the Steam Wolves. As soon as they’d disabled the boxes on their backs, the wolves had dropped dead on the spot.
Harvey jogged down to Tank from over a hill behind the shack. “Whassup, big man?”
“I’m just diggin’ graves for the Steam Wolves,” Tank replied sadly. “The poor things. Golf says they were probably dead before the steam systems were attached to them, but I still feel bad for them. I can’t leave them out here for the vultures to pick apart.”
“Guess I’d better help you with that,” Harvey said. “Me and Shiba found something over the hill, and I think we’ll be moving out soon. Shiba’s going to tell the big brains about it now.” Harvey thrust a thumb toward the shack, and Tank looked up in time to see Shiba step inside.
“Heads up,” Shiba said as he entered the shack. “Me and Harvey found something interesting over the next hill. Come check this out.”
Golf and Sakura followed their friend behind the shack and over a rise. There, at the bottom of the hill, was another shack, this one with a loading platform attached. Empty wagons were lined up on one side of the shack, and a primitive crane sat on the other side. And beside the platform, running off to the west for as far as the eye could follow, was a set of railroad tracks.
“Harvey took a sprint down the line,” Shiba said. “He tells me that the tracks just keep going west until they hit a wall about 20 miles up. Then they enter a tunnel, and he couldn’t follow them anymore without attracting attention. If we follow them, though, I bet we’ll find whoever’s behind this operation.”
“I’ll bet you’re right,” Golf agreed. “But first, I think we need to gather some intelligence on exactly who and what we’ll be finding at the other end. We need to head back to King Algernon’s castle and ask him about his neighbors to the west.”
Shiba gave Golf a sharp look. “Couldn’t we just go west and find that out?”
“Sakura and I have discovered something back at the shack. This situation is more complicated than it seems, and I want to make sure we have all the information we can get before we go in. If I’m right, those tracks could lead us home.”
