A City of Starlight

We’d gotten a drawn-out glimpse of the ever-expanding Angel City as the train curved inward from the coast, around the northern mountains, and finally circled into the eastern valleys after an hour-long detour. When it slowed, we were in the oldest depths of Calis’ largest metropolitan area. The streets outside the station were alleys sitting between adobe buildings erected four centuries ago. A flea market sat between two half-dead lawns. There, people crowded along displays of clothes, food, and carpets draped over plastic tables.

“Let me show you around a real city,” Fire stressed. He made a point of dragging Chii’s bag behind him. When Zane asked if he could take his as well, Fire scoffed, “Carry your own.” Nyandeux easily could have moved everyone’s luggage without a second thought, a detail that Fire had remembered well enough before, but now seemed to forget.

“Funny, it’s just Chii’s things…” I walked alongside him.

“Hey, Bianca. Come back over here,” Zane waved his hand. I ignored him, “Really…”

“We’re having a conversation, you know?” Fire shot back.

“I can’t make heads or tails of it… I thought I was starting to understand Capmon speech, too…”

Chii played with her pigtails in her hands, “Well, you can’t be that good at it. Only masters and champions really get it.”

“That’s not true,” Fire tsked, “some Capmon are harder to understand than others. Some trainers are also more in tune with their Capmon's feelings than others. She… Bianca is so expressive that only a total novice wouldn’t completely understand her.”

“I’m not a novice!” Zane held up the badge Bartholomew gave him.

“Fine. You’re not a novice. You must be a very, very special trainer for your Capmon to want to train with you,” Fire snorted, “you know, I’ve heard of Capmon that think of weak trainers as cute. Such as a big Drachenleer taking a little kid under its wing because it has a savior complex.”

“You know that’s an old wives’ tale,” I snorted.

“He doesn’t,” Fire stood on the corner of the street. He held his hand up over his head, “Taxi! Taxi!” The first of the bright, yellow cars blazed past us, slamming its horn at another car that pulled halfway into its lane before swerving randomly to the side.

Chii threw up an obscene gesture with her hands, “What kind of a horrid driver is that? He won’t even stop for a champion!”

“He probably had a passenger already,” Fire shrugged, “a couple of champions? It’s his loss, right?”

She scratched the toes of her boots against the pavement. “Well, now we have to wait for the next one.”

“See that building over there?” Fire pointed at a tall, white adobe construction with wide archways where there should have been doors, and a dull, red roof, “That used to be a temple to Deiiarch. Now, it’s a school for Capmon Nurses. I hear they learn to resurrect dead Capmon there.”

“I already know that, Dummy.” I held my paw in front of my mouth as if I was about to yawn.

“And when’s the last time you’ve looked in a mirror, huh?” Fire glanced at Zane, “Of course, you also knew all this stuff, right?”

“Yeah, they talked about this stuff in second-grade history. I remember that.”

Fire waved to another taxi, “Hah? You think I took some class like that? I was too busy studying Capmon, you know. I wanted to be a champion from the day I was born.”

“Ya didn’t go to second grade?” Chii tilted her head to the side.

“I did. Of course I did, my Mom must have thought I was some kind of nerd because she made me go. I was practicing Capmon battling under my desk.”

“You were smacking plush toys together and calling it battling,” I reminded him.

“You were cheering them on.”

“Huh?” Chii blinked, “What do you mean by that?”

Fire snapped his fingers, “I was just changing the subject. I got bored of talking about school. That’s why I walked across Calis for a year, and became a champion in the process.” he watched as the taxi pulled up. He held open the door for Chii, but quickly slipped in, shutting it before Zane could get inside.

Zane yanked it back open. “I’m coming, too.”

“Oh, I forgot,” Fire looked out the opposite window, “I’ve been a bit scatterbrained these past few weeks, not sure why. Driver, take us to Fifteen-Nineteen Hazel Lane. Find a scenic route.”

“You gots it,” the driver’s eyebrow lifted up as he looked in the rearview mirror, “gosh, you look just like that kid on the television. Some Capmon battler.”

“He is!” Chii bounced up and down in her seat, “We all are. There’s Champion Fire there, and I beat Champion Cyan to win the Jubilee Cup!”

“No, you didn’t,” Fire scoffed, “she had something come up.”

The driver nodded, “I don’t much follow battlin’ and allat. I’mma fan of them contests. Could I get a picture with you lot, anyway? My nephew’s a big fan.”

Fire gave a cheesy thumbs up, “Of course. I’m showing my friends the city first, so we’ll take it when we get out. The sun will be setting then.”

Our car crawled behind the next, drifting through a sea of horns. The stoplights may well have meant nothing. Nobody was going fast anyway. Angel City was known for this. Most of the city was much newer than where we’d been before. Instead, near-identical concrete facades pressed against each other. There were blemishes in their already bland paint. Stains and black mold. A buzzing neon sign hung lazily from the front of a shop, RENT COPPEES.

“Coppees?” Zane pressed his face against the window.

Fire leaned back in his seat, “It’s a type of Capmon. Don’t you know that? They look like a floating cup of coffee with a pair of large eyes, but they can turn themself into anything else. Well, not perfectly, they always keep the same dumb, tired face.”

“Why would someone want to rent one? Why not just train their own?” Zane shrugged.

“One, they’re prohibitively rare. Two, people don’t rent them for battling.”

“What?”

The driver cackled, “Eh, kids… When they say those things can turn into anything, they mean anything. Best ten coins of my life!”

Chii looked down and stuck her tongue out. She pretended to gag, “Surely, you’re joking!”

“Not in the slightest,” the driver huffed. His shoulders rolled back behind him.

“There’s Seraph Studios,” Fire pointed out the window. A long gray, concrete wall extended for several city blocks. Decorative, metal fencing curled over the top of the wall, and behind it were the blank exteriors of numbered soundstages.

The driver hummed, “Used to work there. Not all it’s cut out to be.”

“You used to work there?”

“When SolveCorp bought out the studio, they let a lot of people go. I was sacked a couple of months later for… other reasons. Like this better anyway.” It can’t have been much different.

Fire cracked his knuckles, “Even the Capmon stadium here is called the Solve Center.” Long ago, Angel City had earned the epithet, The City of Starlight. Now, that name was truer than ever.