She held onto his arm and pumped it in a handshake. "I'm Taiya. I'm one of the first five, and the second witch ever cast out." Darien was lost looking at those storm-colored eyes. Taiya caught it and waved her hand in his face. "It's okay, those who have spent too long in one of the cities always take awhile to adjust to other genders."
Darien blushed and Jackie patted him on the shoulder. The nymph was smiling at his mistake, so his clumsiness must have brought him somewhat back into her good graces. She still was chilly disdain to the vampires whenever they looked her way as Taiya led them around the settlement, but it seemed Darien had committed a smaller crime in her book and was well on his way back to the shallow, yet comfortable, relationship they had previously shared.
The camp the Alchemists pulled them through was surprising. There were tarps and tapestry strung up on strong ropes to make a semblance of camping tents like they had back on Earth, but there was something different. Inside of the roughly-thrown-together tents were gorgeous buildings filled with ornately-carved furniture, plastered walls, and marble floors.
Their guide just shrugged when asked about it. "Well, we live on the road you know. That would be pretty miserable if we didn't have a nice place to come home to each day." Taiya grinned at them and a dimple popped up on her right cheek. "Besides, we have magic. What's the point of having magic if you aren't going to use it to have fun sometimes?" Taiya snapped her fingers and firecrackers whizzed around the group as a shower of iridescent bubbles brushed past them. Jackie rolled her eyes at the display of this whimsical form of magic. "All we have to do is set up a sturdy enough tent to keep out the worst of the elements so a house box can be safely stored inside of it, and then after setup, each time you walk in you are going in to a permanent structure set up somewhere in the space between spaces. Obviously, no one can live between dimensions, but you can fit a surprising amount of stuff in there. Basically, all we have to build to make camp is just a doorway to access our homes, and that grounds them so they now exist right here in this dimension. Then we're good to go, and camp is all set up," Taiya said. "It makes for really easy cleanup, too, which is great because we do our best to move around pretty darn often."
"What did you mean you were one of the first five?" Darien asked.
She sighed. "The first five are those of us who first started the Alchemists. Before us, any who were cast out of one of the cities either lived in isolation and shame on their own and basically set up hermitage, or they journeyed to the Original world and tried their luck to make a life there." She grimaced. "As you can guess, those who tried to live in the Original usually failed and ended up being discovered by the Mundanes and were killed for their magic."
Darien nodded. He'd heard about that; all of his peers in Domed City had. It was one of the lessons taught to the youngest trainees, to be sure to remind them why absolute loyalty and obedience were needed in everything they did, because the alternative meant being killed by the evil Mundanes. Of course, he'd spent years among Mundanes in the Original, and he'd soon found that they thought and acted the same way he did, so he hadn't really had any of the nightmares the child trainees were always plagued by as visions of pitchfork-wielding hordes hunting someone down merely for the sin of existing and having strengths they lacked. It made a great fairy tale, but obviously it was nothing more in today's world. He still remembered that in times past it had been real, all too real, and even the Mundane's history lessons backed that up, but it hadn't really been a concern in his time on the other side of the veil between worlds. The nymphs and vampires of the group were less familiar with the details of humanity's magical history, but then every race there remembered their people had run away to the Shadeworld to escape the witch hunts and persecutions that once happened in the Original. None of them needed any description of that time to understand the gist of the alchemist's story.
"Then the first five were cast out at about the same time, so we banded together to form a new way of doing things. We were thrown out for disapproving of the violent totalitarianism of the Elders, so we made a group to fight back against them." She smiled. "Actually, since we separated, more people who disliked the way things were run abandoned the city so they could join us. In the last few years, we've grown big enough to be a force of our own."
An old man with a rainbow patchwork vest came up beside them. "Not big enough that we feel safe making up our own stronghold, though. And we are still just humans in a world filled with other species that are physically much stronger than us, so we have to use our magic and take on the appearance of terrifying beasts
