Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-27830834-20180707190947/@comment-27830834-20180717183141

(OOC: Apologies for the delay)

You're all eventually ushered by the minders down a long stretch of corridor and into a small hangar bay, in which sits a Silphid-Class flyer, an ugly flying brick of a shuttle, its brown-black exterior pitted with burn-scaring and micrometeor impacts. Boarding the vehicle, the interior is similarly dingy, windowless and drab, but at the very least spacious enough to allow for a less-than-awkward seating arrangement. Slowly, with an audible squeak of badly-tuned hydraulics, the boarding aperture seals. The engines rumble to life, and you feel the subtle shift of artificial gravity take hold as you embark (presumably) into the void.

An hour passes. Possibly two. It's hard to tell.

The boarding aperture suddenly grinds open, ushering in a blast of light and hot, dusty air. You disembark, looking up to new skies expecting to see the smog-shrouded metroscape of yet another hive city. Instead, you're greeted by a brilliantly blue expanse lit by a burning orb of a sun so bright you quickly shield your aching eyes to prevent your retinas for searing.

Confusion takes you for a moment. Is this not Hive Zephyrus? Then you look down.

You're standing at the lip of a hexagonal landing platform, gazing into the depths of a wide fissure carved into the red-brown sandstone of some massive plateau, each side of the crevasse knotted with structures. The hive is inverted: the ramshackle shantytowns clinging to the upper face of the cliff nearest to the blazing sun, whereas the most ornate and elaborate bunker-villas reside in the cool shade of the canyon floor. Between them in suspended a hanging city, a tangle of bridges and catwalks, some small and rickety, made from repossessed scrap, others large enough to support entire blocks of hab-complexes. Adding to this urbanized chaos are mag-rail lines that snake out of bore-tunnels carved into the cliffsides, the ever-present whooshing of the industrial-sized gyre-fans attached seemingly to every surface, the banners, the shade-tarps, and the network of street-like screw-stairs and pulley-lifts that provide transport to each tier of what must surely be Hive Zephyrus.

Descending a bit further down into the metropolis, you obseve the people are almost as much of a menagerie as the city they inhabit. The native Korinthosi are easy to spot: dark-skinned and swarthy, the men wearing plasticized head-wrappings that cover the head and face, the women garbed in long veils of a variety of different colors and styles. Many other cultures throughout the Periphery seem to be represented here. You see a burly man in blood-red fatigues of stitched hide haggling with a street vendor, a figure in a sackcloth robe standing upon a makeshift pulpit preaching the word of the God-Emperor at passersby, a group of ape-faced guards in gold-and-brown carapace plate escorting an auto-palequin, an emaciated wretch with vestigial arms growing out from under each armpit as he begs for coins between hacking coughs of bloody spittle.

Given the surroundings, you blend in almost instantly.