Schutten tourism

The Quartermaster has a minivan license and so he pilots. The *Praxis*' "minivans" vary in size but this one's legitimately about the size of a large van; it bears all the signs and seals of its Inquisitorial service, and also has its name airbrushed onto the side: *Bloomin' Onion*. (No one is really sure how any of the vans got named, who named them, who first painted the names on them, etc. At this point the paint is lovingly maintained by the dockworking techpriests and the names are what they are.) The interior is plush velvet, a burnt-orange color - the vans are almost all velvet inside, of varying colors. Single front seat for the pilot, two rows that can seat three to five depending on how close of friends they are lining the side walls in the rear.

There's one of those Cadian pop-up space bases locked into orbit above the Duyval plains, and the *Bloomin' Onion* pulls into a public bay and puts its little feeties out and lands. The dock repressurizes and the *Onion*'s warning lights turn yellow instead of red. "You can get out or not," Thijs says as he himself pulls off all his requisite safety equipment and prepares to leave. "Hopefully ve ain't be here long."

## Orbital Base *Halve-Moon*

The base is military greige everywhere that isn't retouched with fresh and sharply-maintained black and white and silver. You gotta go through customs. No cheese smuggling

## this new part

The first view of Duyvel when Thijs brings you with him on a sword-fetch quest is the one with which Roj would be familiar, because the spaceport is the army base. It's out in the middle of the empty plains; the agricultural land is kept far away from it on purpose, over on the other side of a big river or two which cross the plains. The closest Duy is Killen, and it's only visible because it's huge; at night there's light on the horizon, reflected by the low dense cloud cover, and distantly one can see the tops of the crenelated towers just beyond the curvature of the planet. The base with the spaceport is low and sprawly and full of covered walkways between squat buildings hunkered down beneath the open sky. The field outside it is systematically dotted with tents occupied by one of the current sets of dudes in training, those who've progressed out of the baby barracks.

The train between the base and Schutten Duy has clerestory windows, so if you really want to see outside you can stand on your seat and look out them on purpose but you won't be too surprised by sky by accident if you keep your eyes piously lowered. There are no tourist trains, just the same trains the military uses, but making the shit pretty is a pious use of wealth and labor so the troop trains don't totally suck. (Tourists from one Duy to another are probably rich enough, on Duyvel, to just hire a private car which would be more sumptuous, but Thijs is taking the troop train like a real person, thank you.) The seats are wicker on iron frames and surprisingly comfortable, though sadly stained by the cheap black dye of countless uniformed asses. We'll blame the dye, anyway. Shush, you.

The grand lifts are absolutely massive and direly ornate, the lifts of the Praxis blown up to ludicrous scale, each cage a platform holding dozens, and dozens of cages moving past each other. The plaza on Vloer 1 is massive and ornate, too, relatively. The workers live here, the workers made the place, so its wrought steel and cast iron is as elegant and glorious as any other vloer's, just not so gilded as elsewhere. It's definitely nicer than the section where the sibling and the grandnibling reside, deeper in the bowels - but not even so very deep; it's maybe half an hour on the tram? His family are respectable for Vloer 1. They live pretty close to the lifts, relatively. But their hallways are smaller and closer and though they're brightly painted, the paint is chipped at the corners, the floors show geological layers of past paint jobs building up at the edges like an unintentional frieze. Out here it's kept polished if they can't afford gilding, because People Might See It.

The further the lifts carry you up the more golden everything is until you reach the spires and it's all the cool serene glitter of steel and relatively Art Moderne austere, and Thijs has to flash his inquisitorial rosette a lot to get any respect