Eggs Unsung v2.0 pt 1
A totally different picture, I swear.
I believe I mentioned a few weeks ago that Eggs Unsung would no long be supported, and would instead be replaced with the updated version Eggs Unsung v2.0. If you don’t remember that, it’s okay, since I think that was back in March or something. Anyway, that time has come to pass, and you will find below the first thousand (only thousand) words of EU2.0.
You should probably throw out most of what you remember from the first version, because, much like your favorite app, 2.0 is very little like 1.0. Mostly I changed the world-setting to something that worked a bit better. It’s still sci-fi, but the aether is…not outer space. It’s something weirder.
Cyrphon is not as whiny or arrogant in here as he should be, but hopefully that will come across in later sections. Ampherdien is probably about the same as he was…and Dr. Saige does not appear in this snippet, but believe me when I say he’s a totally different character (which is for the best, because he was hardly a character to begin with). I even changed his name.
But, all that being said, I think v2.0 will turn out to be a much better read. You can judge for yourself, though:
Eggs Unsung v2.0 pt 1
Cyrphon sighed in relief as he stepped off the aethertrain. Normally he loved travel, especially through the aether, but that was usually coupled with a private cabin and a clear window. The last leg of his travel to Sagia had been on a train old enough to have carried Cyrphon’s grandfather, stuffed full of families returning from vacation, and the windows were opaque with salt. “Tell me there’s some sort of private transport for the return journey,” he muttered to himself as he deftly swerved through the crowd in the land-side station.
Sagia was an older world, and the architecture of the aetherstation showed it. Oh, the station was in good repair, had probably been renovated to keep the spirit of the original alive, might even be a documented historical site, but the echoes off the salt and marble hall made the crowd sound twice as big as it was.
“Timothon! Get your tongue off that pillar!”
“But mommy, you said it was salt—”
Kids made the crowd sound larger than it was, too. Salt my womb, Cyrphon thought, even though he didn’t have a womb.
The emitter in his pocket hummed, quiet but invasive, and Cyrphon pulled it out.
“Have you arrived, Cyrphon?” Ampherdien’s voice was poorly transmitted, and the lower sounds of each word were dropped.
“Just getting off the train,” Cyrphon replied. “See if you can’t find me better transport when it’s time to go home.”
“Oh my darling spoiled egg-singer, was it really so horrible to travel the way the rest of us do?”
“Yes.”
Ampherdien laughed.
“This job had better be worth it.”
“You know I’d never land you a job that wasn’t.”
It was true, Ampherdien wouldn’t. He’d been Cryphon’s agent ever since Cyrphon needed an agent, and this would probably be the job that made Cyrphon’s career. The one that turned Cyrphon from an up-and-coming egg-singer into one of the top singers in the universe, and Ampherdien would rise with him. “Dr. Saige was supposed to send a man, wasn’t he?” Just as Cyrphon said it, his emitter interrupted him with a beep, and a quick glance at the screen showed the position of his ride in the morass of people. “Looks like he’s found me, I’d better go.”
“Call me when you get settled. I want to hear about his mansion and if it lives up to your standards.”
Cyrphon scoffed and ended the call. A few minutes later he was tucked inside a ground-car, of all things, his bags safely stowed in the back. The driver had said it would be a few hours travel, so Cyrphon settled back, and looked out the window.
It probably should have made Cyrphon happy, since now he was in a private cabin, with clear glass windows on every side, and a beautiful world to look out on. Yet where Cyrphon saw trees and mountains, and a bright yellow sun, he found only that he missed the endless glowing swirl of colored mist that was the aether. Oh, sure, these were some impressive trees, and the ability to see so far in the distance was breathtaking as the road wound along hillsides, but the vast mystery of the aether would always hold Cyrphon’s heart.
Pulling his eyes away from the view, Cyrphon opened the files about this job on his emitter. The client was Doctor Edgar Saige, whose family—or himself—had made a huge fortune in pharmaceuticals in the fairly recent past. He’d then bought a world, or just renamed it after himself, and from there set out to find an egg-singer to awaken an egg which he’d had appraised at a thousand years old.
A thousand years old. Cyrphon had never heard of an egg that old. No one had. The oldest known egg was about eight-hundred, and that was the Royal Egg of Nostinghan, which they were keeping unsung until their millennial anniversary—assuming Nostinghan was around for another two hundred years, which was highly debatable based on their current political situation.
The next oldest eggs anyone had ever heard of were in their six-hundreds. Cyrphon had seen one unsung that was five-hundred once, and he’d sung two that were over three hundred years, but a thousand years, that was something new. Or something old, technically.
And how did a beginning egg-singer get contracted to sing—let alone even look at—a thousand-year-old egg? Well, Dr. Saige had wanted discretion, talent and discretion, which were hard to come by together, at least with egg-singers, who were—if not discreet themselves—followed around by the paparazzi almost as much as regular media stars. If The Great Singer Emaltadien went to sing a thousand-year egg, you could bet even the quickest-toed publicist couldn’t keep it from being in the evening news.
But Cyrphon was almost a nobody, known mostly for being the one who sung the Egg of Ambient Crystal after it had been damaged and declared silenced by a dozen of the universe’s top eggologists. He had a few other named eggs on his resume, enough to prove the Egg of Ambient Crystal hadn’t been a flux, though most of the news sources handily ignored that, and despite declaring him a miracle worker, watched his career with skepticism.
So when Dr. Saige went looking for a talented unknown to sing his thousand-year-old egg in secret, he ended up with Cyrphon.
Cyrphon looked up from his emitter and back out the window, tapping the device against his palm. There were reasons no unsung egg had been found that was older than eight-hundred years, and even with the opinions of eggologists—well, look what they all said about the Egg of Ambient Crystal. There was no knowing exactly what Cyrphon would find on the other end of this car ride.
There had been mountains in the distance when the ground car pulled away from the station, but now they were much closer. The road twisted through them, giving glimpses of views that even Cyrphon had to admit were breathtaking. Finally the road turned back in among the foothills, then wound between two hills, which grew steadily closer together and sharper in slope until they were driving through a cliff-sided gully, a modest river running alongside the road.
The gulley narrowed for a short distance, then opened up again into what Cyrphon thought for a moment was a box canyon, until he realized that the far end of the ‘box’ was actually a mansion built right into the gap between the two cliffs, and rising until it towered over the hilltops as well.
The ground car slowed to a stop by the sweeping staircase that led to the front entrance.
Perhaps this planet isn’t as backwater as I thought.
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