Other than both of them being flying cities, Fornia was the inverse of Ember City.
Formerly remnants of cities and towns from California under threat from Prophet Ameen's earthquakes, the blocks were all stuffed into four massive platforms made up of amalgamated cargo ships, cruises, and schooner parts sailing on the clouds. Ember City's platforms had this uncanny architectural plausibility of staying afloat in the air, but a physicist that did not know about the perfect spheres inside the core of these gargantuan sky islands would be left aghast at them not sinking into the clouds. Notwithstanding how busy the surrounding skyscrapers were with fall fashion hologram ads and the occasional magnetic car whizzing by, the gothic yet ultramodern Hospital of Usher stood out like a light-siphoning pearl in the shimmering steel and glass seashell of the Gladness platform.
Directly across from the hospital was known as the entertainment area, but the entirety of the Gladness platform was hailed as the entertain platform of Fornia. Consequently it made the night hours of the Hospital of Usher the most intense hours, and fortunately fourteen-year-old Iker woke up during the morning hours. Without knowing why, Iker expected people to barge into his room, but nobody came. After adjusting his hospital gown, he redirected his gaze back to the view of the Gladness platform. It was not easy to see the nightclubs and bars below with the room being so high, but Angels Park was perfectly in view at the center of the window. Lush, tall, and impressively green, the park looked as if it was torn from the earth and brought up rather than being terraformed in midair. Occasionally bikers and joggers were on the winding concrete paths and within the cracks of the canopy close to the artificial pond. Then, Iker remembered that Camilo had been shot by Dominic 'Titan' Serapis.
Only after blood streamed down his right arm did Iker remember that he had brought his IV to the window earlier. When he opened his door to leave he also noticed his left arm had been replaced with a wooden prosthetic, raising it to cover where the catheter had been. Then an intrusive memory of him painting over the prosthetic made up of Prunus Tantalum bark came to his mind's eye before returning his focus to finding Camilo's dorm.
Was I in a coma? I can't remember anything...
An image of where Camilo was recovering had conjured itself into Iker's mind, but when and where Iker had received that information was unknown. Time and space were out of order, but is that not what a coma does to a mind? Those fading and blurry dreams, around forty of them, they were all eternities within themselves. Autopilot had taken over, because when Iker stopped observing his own stream of consciousness he found himself entering another room.
"Did... did we wake up at the same time?"
Accompanying the easy-one-the-eyes view of vivid pinks and browns returning to Camilo's face was a mental image of him having bled and shrank into pale skin in the backseat. It had happened at a midair shootout in Colorado Springs Iker only now remembered. After that Dominic, looking more like a cyborg than his usual self, had stripped of Iker of his consciousness by obliterating his left arm from a rooftop. And randomly the information of Camilo being an earthplexus celebrity returned to Iker, whereas in other realities the now-conscious teenager was not. Iker's intuition told him it had been what made it easy for Dominic to find them.
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Iker could not help but smile rather than answer Camilo's question. "You're... you're... alive."
"Why are you smiling at me like that?" Camilo asked.
"You looked like... you might have died. It was scary," Iker replied.
The boys stayed quiet.
"Are you going to sit or not?" Camilo asked.
"I didn't think you wanted to share a bed with m—"
"Shut up and sit," Camilo interrupted, his tired demeanor faltering. He scooted towards his window and remained facing it. Before following his order, Iker observed him and smiled. He waited a few seconds before sitting, noticing he did not bother turning around.
"Are you allowed to be here?" Camilo asked when Iker sat down.
"I don't care," Iker replied.
"Okay."
On top of the confusing stream of consciousness Iker was already dealing with, since he woke up he could not subside this pervading urgency that plagued him. It was almost as if the fate of the cosmos were up to him and his allies inside his dreams, but it had to be an emotional artifact from a coma-induced dream.
"Was there a lion cub with us?" Iker asked.
Camilo turned his head while blushing. "No... were you knocked out too?"
"Yea?" Iker rhetorically asked.
"Did they check you for a concussion?" Camilo asked.
"I sure hope so," Iker replied, stretching both of his arms behind his back and onto the bed to shrug.
"Well... no doofus. There was no lion in the car."
The conflicting recollection of events was not the most disturbing part, as Iker no longer had a crush on Camilo.
As if Iker's mind was now one of an adult's, Camilo now looked like an utter child to him.
Iker pulled away his prosthetic hand before Camilo could put his own hand over it.
The edge of Gladness looked like a pier made up of cargo crates rather than concrete. Even with the day coming to an end, the perfectly cut scraps made up of mostly primary colors instead had mellow and pastel hues under the residual sunlight that reached them between skyscraper shadows. Tides of clouds pouring over the boardwalk made up of shiny wood looked more like fading cotton candy rather than fog, and Iker sat on the edge past it. Much of the difficulty of recalling all of his drones came to an end, and he celebrated with dangling his sneakers over pink and undulating clouds. Que Va, the skinniest drone he had that he only ever used once, Hughmungus, and the spherical and medical drone named RNGesus were all stationed to his left. What made all of his drones respond to his thoughts came to clarity when the drones 420 to 429, ten drones in total, ascended over an orange cloud further away, revealing Prunus Tantalum branches attached to them all, explaining both their monikers and their purpose. At first Iker would have expected that they would have all risen facing towards him, but they all rose in a particular formation with all of them facing different directions, having the task of creating and projecting an earthplexus vein of their own.
Even though a whole day had passed, Iker's sense of urgency did not go away, but it did subside slightly, for an unknown reason, when he finally got all of his drones together. However, now he realized that was not the reason he felt uncomfortable the whole time he was at the edge of Gladness. There was a presence with him the whole time. Upon the back of his neck recoiling, Iker threw his feet back onto the platform and jumped onto his feet, turning his head to face a darker and human-shape shadow within a skyscraper shadow. Between a tall microgrid generator and a large crate, Camilo stood still while staring at him.
"You... you followed me all the way here?" Iker asked him.
