For the second time in the week that followed, Alicia went to the market again, dressed in a thin jacket with inner pockets and a simple blouse underneath it and a long skirt covering her long legs all the way to her boots.
This time though, accompanying her was Theron, with his little pants, adorable small shoes and a sweater atop his shirt.
At first, when little Teri asked her to bring him together, she refused, thinking it would be too dangerous for her young child in the busy market; the possibility of losing him in the crowd was great. But his big watery eyes soon melted her heart and will enough to concede on bringing him along.
She steeled herself to pay extra attention to him when they got out and to not leave him out of her sight.
Theron on the other hand, after employing his sure-fire weapons of watery innocence, he was on cloud nine as they walked out of their house. The crystal energy system he saw one week ago inside the cuboven's compartment was still fresh in his mind.
The anticipation of what his first outing in this world was going to reveal to him was overflowing his very being and a silly smile couldn't help but escape his control because of the excitement. He didn't even mind the tight grip with which his mother was gasping his left palm as they walked.
Although he had his speculations and imagined many different images of what the outside world would look like, the first image he saw as he walked out of the house was not part of them.
In front of him a long row of similar looking buildings was blocking his view. They were all made of simple materials. Stones and bricks were mostly used for their walls while their windows were glass with wooden frames. The only metal that could be seen was in their doors' frame.
Their roofs were either made of sloping wooden planks or - and there they were - tiles! That joke to himself the first day he came into this world proved not to be a joke after all. Little ceramic tiles layered atop each other to form red scaly roofs which covered the top of many of the buildings.
Their imposing height of five floors at the minimum cast a dark shadow over their house's door while the orange setting sun was beginning his dive behind their wooden and ceramic roofs. The shadows were getting darker, replacing the golden hue draping over all things.
Looking left and right, the building they were in was also one among others which were packed together side by side just like the buildings across.
On the way to the stairs, they passed two more doors just like their own but with different numbers on them; namely 302 and 301. They climbed down the stairs and passed another two identical floors before they reached the ground level.
Calculating the three apartments for each floor, the building had twelve apartments in total, making it a rather small one compared to the others around it.
Once they had reached the ground floor and moved to the cobbled street, Theron looked back. Looking at the four-story building they descended from, it wasn't hard finding his home. His house was the right one of three on the top floor; the one with the number 303 on its door.
As they proceeded to walk west and passed that first street they entered through an alley between the tall buildings, turned a few corners and passed a couple of other residential streets, until a main road appeared in front of them.
Metallic poles of about four meters high resembling the historic electric road lights of his past life were placed on either side of it, covering its whole length with a few meters of distance between each other. A cubic frame, encased with yellow murky glass that was obstructing its contents, was situated at their tips.
Whatever energy they used for power he couldn't tell, although he had a theory, a mekron crystal theory. Maybe on the way back, when it is dark, he would have the chance to make sure.
The road, cobbled as well but with its stones smoother and its width double that of the other streets they passed, was large enough for the weird vehicles that were using it to have two traffic lanes for each direction.
The moment Theron saw the first one moving past him, he had a feeling of deja vu but also one of novelty.
There were two kinds; one with at least two seats that came in many sizes and another holding only one rider. The vehicles sported characteristics found in the old car and motorcycle models of his previous life, just before they changed them to hold miniature fusion engines. The seamless bullet-like bodies was one of them.
On the other hand, the green glowing lines running across the length at the top or sides of their metallic bodies and the glowing luminescence underneath them as they zoomed past reminded him again that these vehicles were entirely different machines from his previous life ones.
Except the ones traveling onboard these novel vehicles, the rest of the people could be seen walking along the sidewalks, the same as them.
Their clothing and assortments, like dresses, hats, purses and canes, seemed out of a cultural museum, while the whole scene with the surrounding buildings and cobbled streets - if you ignored the high-tech vehicles of course - was as if it was cut out from an archaic pre-fusion Era.
The contrast between the old-fashioned clothing style and buildings of simple materials with the highly advanced technology of the vehicles was great and confusing. From the vehicles' and, from the crystal-based technology in general that could be found in this world, one would have expected the infrastructure technology and people's lives to have been influenced and improved by it.
Instead, a disparity between them existed, as if they were parts of two separate worlds and not two of the same one.