Finally!
Rom turned around to look at the towering Arc Building.
Designed and constructed at the start of the century, The Arc, as it was called by it’s inhabitants, still showed a magnificent sight. That was even more so when you stood at the 55 steps of the entrance and looked up along the towers that were The Arc’s different hearts.
The highest tower had 222 floors, reaching a height of 777 meters. Of course that was no coincidence. All of The Arc’s sizes were intentional, from the highest height down to the size of the smallest room.
The Arc was part of the Skyground. It was a remnant of the New Renaissance, the time after the big collapse of the human inhabited ecosphere, when things were starting to look better again.
Designed to house and completely provide everything needed for 555’555 people, the building’s ground was a tremendous, pentagram shaped 33 floor high white block with each side being 555 meters. Out of that base rose 11 towers, similarly pentagram shaped and with different heights.
At those sizes half a million people may not sound like much. Today even less people lived in there, only a quarter million, but those lived in greater comfort, some would even say luxury, then their forefathers could have dreamed of.
But The Arc also housed all the facilities needed for those people, including in-house farming, swimming pools and sport areas and a 100% complete recycling function.
Nothing physical got into The Arc and nothing got out of it, with a few exceptions.
He, Rom, was now one of them.
Since the day his parents and girlfriend were killed in a terrorist attack – Rom would never call it accident, just because the explosion was not intended by the intruder on The Arc’s network – he was determined to not only find out who the attacker was, but also to bring judgment to this person.
His supervisors were not happy about his wishes, but in the end they could not change his will. The hierarchy was strong in The Arc, that was part of what made it so powerful, but they could not force him to not leave.
It took Rom three years to save up some Arcdollar, secure his citizenship in the Arc (he would go back after he found the culprit after all) and made all the necessary arrangements to be able to start the hunt.
And now it was the great day.
Rom’s neck hurt from looking up, so he lowered his eyes down to the steps he stood on.
Slowly he began to step them down again. Then he stopped at the last. One step more and he would be down on the common soil, build by agreement between the Megacorps who sometimes were smaller, sometimes bigger then the Arc Future Society (or short AFS) that had cared for him since his birth.
If Rom did that last step he would no longer be considered a protected citizen of the AFS. If he got attacked, or attacked someone himself, he would no longer have the powerful Peacekeeper Force of The Arc in his back, getting him out of trouble if at all possible. That was even more true if he ventured down, through the Midcity, onto the Ground Zero.
Real soil, the outer shell of the earth.
More dead then a plate of steel and home to a strange mix of existences without proper home or income from one of the Megacorps.
He would basically be alone. Alone in an often frighteningly harsh world that most people that grew up in The Arc knew nothing about.
But he had to do it. He was determined.
With a deep breath, smelling the strange aromas of a new day, Rom jumped down the last step onto the common soil.
The hunt had started.
(This is a possible introductory/starting text for the male Aristocrat. Find the raodmap of the game development here)
