I changed the cover! Do you like it? I wanted to draw Miku. :3

Update? PAST CHAPTER TWO?

Chapter two seems to be the place that I tend to lose inspiration for continuing my stories… for a while at least.

Be thankful.

There should be very few typos. I went over this three times, as usual. So if there are, I'm going to flip a table.

Also. I decided that bold print would be easier to remember as being the spoken foreign language instead of italics. That and I like using italics in speech. So remember that. Bold isn't Engrish. Very important.

TSgoFETSgoFE

The Sky Goes On Forever

Chapter 3: The City in the Sky

I woke up to the feeling of a touch on my lips. I slowly opened my eyes to see the face of the girl from the night before withdrawing her hand. The start of a grin played on her lips, and I could see how strongly she had to restrain herself from reaching out to touch me again.

I sat up and rubbed my temple. I had a headache and I felt like I couldn't breathe right. I was in a room made from white stone. There was a faded wooden door decorated with peeling blue paint just a few feet away from the cot I was sitting on. My neck was a little stiff and I noticed that my clothes had been changed while I was unconscious.

"Where…" I started to say, before I remembered that English was not this girl's first language, and I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what was.

"You have such real dreams," the girl said, tilting her head and finishing her smile. Her accent was still odd and unnatural, but understandable nonetheless. "I am called Miku. And you are Len. It is nice to finally meet you, officially."

I nodded slowly at her, my thoughts still jumbled with sleep. I rubbed my palm, which was now bandaged but still sore, and the action reminded me of my missing artifact.

"The ring. Where is the ring?" As soon as I started talking about it, my words started slipping back into that familiar language that I knew not what to call yet.

"So you remembered after all… The ring is being returned to its rightful place. The better question to ask is how on Earth you know this language," Miku said. The accent sounded much more natural in the words of this twisted tongue.

Her statement had me taken for a moment. "I don't know," I admitted. "It just came to me, when I started talking."

Miku set a finger on the edge of her mouth, playing with her lip as she thought. "You know our tongue, yet know not how," she said. "You are a peculiar case, indeed, Len."

I began trying to stand up from the cot. I felt a bit lighter than usual. "Mind telling me where we are?"

Miku stood up, too, and got a look of eagerness on her face. She gestured for me to follow as she opened the door. "Let me show you," she said, letting the wind inside. Cold.

I stepped outside and my heart stopped. I was in the middle of a huge city. Boxy houses stacked on top of one another in a sort of uneven staircase up toward what looked like an altar or a shrine. Most of the houses had one or two dirty windows visible and a faded green or blue door. The air chilled my skin. I looked out to the left notice swirling white clouds, all of which were below us.

I almost fell over, my first thoughts being that we were upside-down or something, but upon further investigation, my most unrealistic hypothesis was confirmed.

We were, like, legitimately in the sky.

This realization made me weak in the knees, and I actually did find myself swooning.

Miku caught my arm and hoisted me back up. "Are you okay, Len? This must be quite a lot to take in for you."

"Sky people…" I mumbled, continuing to take in the pale stone structures everywhere around me. "There's actually Sky People."

"Oh, no, you haven't forgotten Tessgofei again, have you?" Miku said. Oh. So that was what the language was called, right?

"No, I haven't," I replied distantly. We were closer to the base of the city than the top. Below us was an area that looked almost like a sea port, except with no huge ships, and it was, you now, in the sky. There were these levitating boards everywhere that I couldn't manage to make heads of tails of, and I couldn't really think of the words to describe them, so I just sort of ignored them for the time being. The culture shock was bad enough already.

I touched my stinging face, as the wind was blistering cold outside, but I noticed that the rest of me was somehow mostly insulated.

"What are these clothes made out of?" I asked, picking at the gray, tight-fitting fabric stretched over my skin.

Miku smiled a bit mischievously at me. "Magic," she said.

I couldn't decide if she was being serious or not.

"Come with me," Miku said, taking my wrist, carefully avoiding contact with my skin, it seemed. Or maybe she was just avoiding the bandage. "I must show you our city."

Well, if she insisted.

TSgoFETSgoFE

"Why is everyone staring at me?" I panted as we climbed stairs and uphill roads. They never seemed to end. We had been walking for maybe an hour and a half because of how often I had to stop to catch my breath. There was almost no oxygen here at this altitude. Earlier, we'd passed by the marketplace and government offices. We were just then coming up to another neighborhood area just before the temples. The whole time, I'd noticed pale skinned, translucent haired, blue eyed stares on my back. Sometimes on my front, too.

"Oh, it's because you're a boy," Miku said.

Well, that explained just about absolutely nothing.

"I'll tell you more once we get to the temples," she added. "It'll be easier to explain there."

I was extremely lightheaded when we made it to the city's peak. Miku was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't pay attention to whatever she was saying. But, the temples; they were totally captivating. They were huge, reminding me of large Shinto shrines crossed with a Grecian temples, if that was even possible. All around them were stone gardens, but no green. The same white rock found all over the city made up the loose gravel on the ground, while the actual buildings seemed to be made from something much harder. There were shallows where years and years of footsteps had worn away the stone of the stairs. Meiko would have absolutely eaten this up.

I followed Miku inside the largest building. Incense managed to burn away what little oxygen was left in the air. At least it smelled nice. The room was empty with the exception of a slim pedestal in the middle of the room. That was where the incense burned. The walls were wide and blank other than a string of tiny black carvings that circled the area. It was too small for me to see from where I stood, but I was sure it was the same as the language that Miku spoke. Tessgofei? Was that its name?

Miku stepped forward, walking carefully on the small tiles so that she moved in a straight line. Seemingly out of nowhere, she pulled out the marble ring. She examined it carefully, whispering something too soft for me to hear. She slipped the ring onto the middle finger of her right hand and pushed it into the floor. There was a loud pop! but it didn't seem to come from her.

Gradually, the words on the walls began to glow. The room was filled with filmy blue light given off by lined images slowly illuminating the white. It looked to be a story, much like a legend of creation.

I realized that my jaw was gaping open, but I didn't care.

Miku noticed, too, and smiled. "Would you like to hear about your past?" She asked, taking my wrist again and leading me to the first of the words; the beginning of the story. Her voice seemed to melt into the air of burning incense.

"A long, very long time ago, our ancestors were at peace. They lived above the earth in a city known as T'inaph, high in the sky where no human could ever reach them. Humans were seen as dirty, unclean creatures, unworthy of the presence of the proud people of the sky.

"One day, the city was passing dangerously close to a mountain inhabited by the humans. L'uki, a powerful nobleman admiring the view that day, caught sight of a human woman, whose beauty surpassed that of all of the skies. He was instantly infatuated. In a moment of madness, he came down to the earth and pretended to be a lost traveler in order to meet this woman. She was even more beautiful up close, and by the end of the day, L'uki and the woman had fallen in love

"Unfortunately, L'uki's absence did not go unnoticed in T'inaph, and the very next morning, he was snatched away back into the city to be tried as a traitor. He was sentence to a life in prison, but little did the people of the city know that the human woman was with child.

"Many years passed, and all that L'uki could do was stare wistfully out from his window, closed off by iron bars, hoping that one day he could see his beloved again. It was on a cold day in winter when he finally did.

"At the very sight of the mountain, L'uki attempted an escape. He cunningly fooled the guard into letting him outside, and then returned to the place where his lover and child lived. The human woman was ecstatic to see him, but her excitement was short-lived. Once again, he had been followed. This time, however, he came to expect it. He took his lover and child deep into the mountains in hiding. There, they lived happily, and over time, more and more families began to join them in the mountains, as other supposed traitors of T'inaph. The village of refuge became known as Tessfei."

Miku turned back to me. "And it is still the name of our city today."

I let my gaze wander around the room. We'd come full circle. As Miku reached the end of her phrase, the light on the walls began to fade, and finally, die out.

Miku returned to the ring in the room's center and pulled it out from the pedestal. She faced me again and took my hand, slipping the ring onto my finger.

"This ring is very valuable, you know. It comes to people for a reason. You should take special care of it," she said.

"Yes. I will," I replied.

"Good. Now, you mentioned earlier that people seemed to be staring at you, yes?"

"Ah… Yes, I did."

"I suppose I still have a lot more to tell you about your heritage, then, do I not?"

"Yes, I guess you do."

"The come with me. We will sit in the rock gardens, and I'll tell you a bit about yourself."

Miku took me outside to a flat stone in a sandy garden. Somehow the wind did not touch this place, and the still air was warmer here. Miku sat and gestured for me to take a place next to her. She took my hand and examined it, like Rin would as a palm reader. She traced the lines of my hand thoughtfully, tilting her head and again illuminating the white tattoos on her cheeks.

She looked up suddenly. "You are a fourth-breed," she said, Englishing a bit as if I would understand better. Which I didn't.

"… A fourth-breed?"

"A fourth-breed."

"And… What exactly does that entail?" I said.

"It means that your mother was a half-breed. She was half T'inaph." Wow, well it wasn't like that was already implied or anything.

But that name, T'inaph, made me feel something inside. When Miku just… said it like that. It gave me that same uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. "So that city. It was real."

"Yes, it is. One of your grandparents is a purebred. You mother was only half human. You are three-fourths."

"How do you know this…?" I whispered.

"Because I have a gift. You have a gift, too. We all have gifts." I apparently didn't respond to her enough so she grabbed me by the shoulders and stared at me. "You have a gift."

She let go of me and knelt down to the sand to draw a picture of… what looked to be some sort of diagram.

"What are you doing?" I asked her.

"You are a scientist, yes?" she started. "So maybe this will help me get my point across easier." She finished her little diagram and stood up. "This," she went on, "is a picture of human chromosomes." She gestured to the block of oddly shaped sticks drawn in the sand. "Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. But we…" She knelt down to draw another pair. "We have twenty-four. That's because when the pureblood DNA combines with human DNA, instead of the zygote dying at conception from imbalance, both extra chromosomes are passed on. The results are hybrids like you and like me." She paused for a moment. "I am three-fourths, by the way."

"So…" I couldn't really think of what to say.

"So what?"

"What do genetics have anything to do with this 'gift' that I don't have?"

Miku suppressed a giggle. "How could you say that, Len, when you are speaking to me in a language you'd not heard before yesterday?"

Didn't think of that. "I… thought you did that to me. For some reason." It was a pretty stupid assumption, when I thought about it, considering she was just as confused about it as I was just this morning.

She shook her head and smiled, "No," she said. "That is not my gift."

"What is your gift, then?"

"I have a gift of touch," she said. "Like, when I touch someone, I can see their thoughts and memories. And, the closer to their lips that I touch…" She found herself grazing her fingers along my jaw, only to take them back as though she hadn't even realized what she was doing. "… the more I see."

"I… see."

"I-it works with other people, too! See, if you just touch my face…" She brought my hand to her cheek and an image of flying through the sky popped into my head, as if it were a vague memory. Her eyes were searching mine for some sort of reaction. I blinked slowly at her. "You can see what I'm thinking of, too."

I let my hand fall back into my lap. "That's amazing," I said.

"Everyone with blood like mine has some sort of touch-related gift. Some see people's futures. Others their feelings. Sometimes their secrets." She paused for a moment then went on in more hushed tones. "These gifts… the purebloods don't have them. There must be some human DNA for them to appear." She stopped again to stare at me. The color of blue-stained sugar. "I think that is part of the reason why the purebloods want us dead," she said.

"I don't understand."

"It is because we are different. We are a threat. Some of us have gifts that are very dangerous to them, that could be used as weapons."

"Oh," I said. Not much to add to that.

"And… the gifts seem to become more powerful as the pure blood is diluted." Look at all of the sense that that totally didn't make.

"How so?"

"No one is really sure why. But, for example, I require physical contact for my gift to activate. That trait lessens and the blood is diluted; then by the time one becomes a half-blood, the gift is activated solely through sight. Eye contact. Seeing a significant place where a disaster occurred. That's all that it takes."

"And what happens after that?"

"As it goes down… well, after half-bloods, the gift becomes more and more unstable. By the time it gets to the fourth-bloods, like you, anything could trigger it. Be it a sight, touch sound, sometimes even any of them. Then other times, it just appears without warning. Absolutely no trigger. No stimulus. Those are… not the best cases to come across."

So like me. "Is that so."

Who the hell was I kidding? That sort of scared the Jesus out of me. And… It made me angry. I didn't choose to be plagued by random visions. Falling unconscious, words taking over my body, coming back to reality with that ring in my hand.

That ring that unlocked the story of the history of these people. That ring that fell out of the sky and happened to find its way underfoot.

That ring that had still been in my left jacket pocket when I left it in the middle of the ocean.

Miku saw the look of discomfort in my face and reached out to touch me. I flinched away. She looked hurt. But I didn't want her to know what was going through my mind; she didn't have my permission.

I realized that I was starting to hyperventilate, which sucked, so I tried to calm myself. Think about pleasant things. Like the fact that I was still alive. And my sister.

"Where is she?" I hissed. "Rin, I mean," I said a little more civilly.

"She should be back at the house, with Aoki." Whoever that was.

"Take me there."

"Yes, of course."

TSgoFETSgoFE

As we neared the end of our descent, I was starting to calm down, and I remembered the question I'd asked earlier.

"You never did tell me why all these women stare at me," I said, switching tongues so that the passers-by would be less likely to understand our conversation.

"Tired of Tessgofei already?" Miku teased. She appeared happy that I wasn't on edge anymore. "Well, it's because partial breeds like us can only pass on an X-gene. Like you. If you were ever to have children… they would all be female. So if a woman here wants to have… a romance with a man, there aren't exactly a whole lot of partial-bred men to choose from. So we have to seek out either human or purebred… partners. So to speak. Even then, for some reason, it's still more likely that our children would be girls."

"Ah," I said. Miku sounded so awkward on the subject. I couldn't tell if it was her lack of practice in English or if it was just a touchy subject.

"This is our home," she said, quickening her pace as she pointedly switching topics. She went to the corner house on the stone street we walked on. I had forgotten where we'd come from earlier, so the direction was appreciated.

She opened the blue door of the very small, box-shaped house. I recognized the room from earlier, though the cot was stowed away somewhere out of sight. We appeared to be in a living room of sorts. It was much warmer on the inside, regardless the lack of any visible heating unit. I saw Miku strip off the sleeves of her gray suit and took mental note that the sleeves were, in fact, detachable.

It took me another second to wonder who had dressed me while I was unconscious.

And yet another to wonder how in the world I even fell unconscious at all.

"Aoki! We have returned!" Miku called.

A young woman emerged from behind a wall, holding my sister's hand. Rin looked tired, but at least seemed to notice my presence.

"Rin and I were just talking about you," the woman, Aoki, said. Her English was much clearer than Miku's, but still had a hint of that Tessfei accent. "She just woke up a few minutes ago. She reminds me much of the tale of the sleeping princess," she giggled, more to Miku.

Miku smiled and walked to stand next to Aoki. They were near the same height, though Aoki was somewhat shorter. They had the same semi-translucent hair and almost too-big eyes. The same color, too. Sweet candy blue.

"Len, this is my half-sister, Aoki. She's a three-fourths blood like I am," Miku explained.

"It's nice to meet you," I said, with a nod at Aoki.

"Sorry that my baby sister's English isn't better," Aoki laughed, ruffling Miku's bangs. "She's never lived in a real city before."

Miku glared at her sister. "You know, Aoki, he speaks our tongue, so you don't have to go insulting my accent so much."

Aoki hugged Miku around her shoulders. "But you're my baby sister. It's my job to pick on you whenever I can," she insisted.

"I'm not a baby; I am eighteen!" Miku snapped.

"And yet, you will always be three years younger than me."

Miku growled at her.

"I'm hungry," Rin stated, interrupting the family feud. Miku and Aoki separated themselves and straightened up, remembering their company. "What do you have to eat here?"

"I-I can start cooking you something, if you'd like," Miku stumbled, recovering.

"Can I help?" I chimed in. "I did a lot of cooking at home, so…"

"Of course you can!" Aoki bubbled. "You two get started on that and I'll get Miss Rin caught up."

I nodded in agreement then followed Miku to wherever the hell the kitchen was. I think I had gone into shock sometime in the past hour or so, anyway. So that was cool.

TSgoFETSgoFE

A/N: YAY. IT'S NOT REALLY A CLIFFHANGER THIS TIME.

Not as much Rin in this chapter, but I think she'll manage to squeeze in a little more screen time next chapter.

I don't know. I don't have anything pre-planned for this story. At all. I don't even know what it's about. Do any of you guys know what this is about? I don't.

So? Do you like the characters? Do you like the city? Does any of this even make the slightest amount of sense? Yes? No? Well. At least I tried.

I reeeaaally appreciate reviews, by tha way. They are inspiration. And you are all my beautiful readers… Iloveyou.

Thanks for reading!