Olympus sample 13

Babbel

  "Thank you." - Alice said with a warm smile, making her attendant want to smile back even though it was a machine. She turned her back and got out of the coffee shop. Her breathing, laborious because of the cold and her figure slightly curved, Alice walked in the direction of the cable car, which led to the palace city. Just an island with a huge palace and a nice... grove? Park?

  The sky still dark and cloudy, she looks around, where she sees only a few guards, and few people going to work nearby. It was very early in the morning, most weren't even awake yet, which makes this coffee shop that doesn't have any employees but the manager, who does nothing but stare at her back when she's getting out, be her first choice.

  Stepping into the cable car is hard because they don't stop, they only go slower, enough for people to make their way in. It works the same at all hours, a car comes with intervals of seconds of each other and everyone gets in. She rides this one with another woman, one who looks at her with contempt for not wearing an APS, the All-Purpose Suit.

  Alice smiles and sips her coffee while holding the other in a disposable 3D-printed tray. Recycling became very much feasible when trash bins for printing filament started being taken out by drone directly to the repurposing factory. Her thoughts lay in these systems developed during the last century while she gets on her feet, adjusts her necklace, her scarf and her belt. She almost envied the woman by her side for being as warm as in a sunny day.

  Walking down directly towards the palace, her faint colored hair with silvery waves was gently caressing her shoulders, the place was busier than up at the up side, lot more guards, the difference being the royal colours in their armour. She strolled past the cable station, sipping her coffee, watching the castle and the tower in the citadel. By the time she got past the river, the sun, with a yellow-ish colour shone on the horizon, unimpeded. The walls already covered the view of the tower she was heading to and the guards already recognized her, waiting for her identification before opening the force field for her.

  "Thanks, boys, see you two in the party tonight?" - She asks with a wink at the mirror, as if she knew they were in the inside even though it was the secret hideout. She resumes her walk with a sound between a chuckle and a giggle while the guards just look at each other wondering how did she do it and who she was, though when they brought it up they were shunned by their superiors.

  Alice took every twist and turn absentmindedly, greeting every acquaintance on her way to the tower, in the kiosks she even got some snacks, the first of the day. She used her power to eat her portion without using hands. It was a perfect sphere, with a golden appearance and feels like a kind of cheese. Each one floated to her mouth and back at each bite.

  She strolled through the mostly empty streets and got to an area where no more buildings got in the way. The most beautiful site of the city, at one side a field of blue grass, colorful flowers and trees, none too high and distributed in patches between the paths, concentric semicircles about the tower with strokes connecting them in a bafflingly seamless pattern. The red colour of the asphalt contrasting softly with the flora around it.

  The other side is the other side of the circle, all made in red with concentric and very regular radial strokes of blue. These are demarcations that divide the red area with specific perimeters, they are used for sports or exercise, it's also the side turned to the entrance of the citadel and the one Alice gazes upon the pristine white pillar that seems to connect the heavens to the ground with it's brilliance, called Babbel, the tower of records, of knowledge, of the written word, also known as the royal library.

  Alice traversed the sea of red with floating objects around her while she folded a very big piece of paper with increasing precision and finished as she passed the gardener, too focused on his work to pay any mind to the extraordinary things happening around him.