First of all, Becky had come to a halt on the precipice of a steep, commanding hill.
Thomas had no memory of the climb; the bone-rattling speed of the journey had blurred his senses so thoroughly that they could have ascended a mountain without him noticing. He didn't want to imagine how Becky's irregular, oval wheels had tackled the incline.
The hill offered a panoramic vantage point of the massive town Oliver called a settlement, which lay less than a kilometre away. As Thomas looked down, his detective's mind—the one part of him that felt truly familiar—began to dissect the scene with clinical precision.
The first thing he noted was the staggering level of organisation. This wasn't a haphazard collection of dwellings thrown together by refugees. It was a masterpiece of urban planning.
The town was laid out in a series of rigid, geometric blocks. Each cluster contained between six to twelve buildings, built side-by-side with no wasted space.
The structures themselves were formidable; none appeared to be less than three stories high, and many reached five or six, their stone and timber frames looming over the streets.
Wide, straight boulevards cut through the blocks like surgical incisions, stretching toward the horizon until the perspective lines merged. Thomas estimated the settlement's size to be at least tens of square kilometres.
Surrounding the entire perimeter was a colossal, intimidating wall, punctuated by massive gates that served as the mouthpieces for the main thoroughfares.
From his elevated perch, he could see the lifeblood of the town: throngs of people moving through the streets and several bizarre-looking carts. These vehicles moved with the same strange, swaying cadence as Becky, indicating a shared, eccentric technology.
"What do you think? Impressive, isn't it? Hahaha!" Oliver was beaming, clearly feeding off the stunned expression on Thomas's face. "I built this entire place from scratch, with the support of the SA, of course. It really is your first time seeing a true settlement, isn't it, lad?"
"Indeed," Thomas managed to nod, his voice tight.
Before he could probe for more information, Becky let out a low, mechanical groan and began to move again. This time, however, the pace was sedate—a slow, dignified crawl as they descended the hill toward the gates.
Thomas watched the front of the vehicle with intense curiosity, noticing how Becky's chassis seemed to compensate for the slope. It appeared as though the axles could extend or retract independently.
Even as they moved down a grade of several dozen meters, Thomas didn't feel the tilt of the descent. It was as if Becky were simply gliding on a flat plane, swaying with that rhythmic, hypnotic motion that seemed to be the hallmark of this world's engineering.
"Interesting..." Thomas muttered. Fortunately, the engine's idle hum drowned out his voice, or Oliver surely would have launched into another boastful lecture.
As they reached the base of the hill and approached the settlement's outer limits, they passed through long, eerie groves of towering trees. Thomas's eyes narrowed as he took in the foliage.
There wasn't a single green leaf to be found. Instead, the trees boasted vibrant, impossible colours—shades ranging from deep, royal blues to fiery, blood-reds. It was a landscape painted with a palette that didn't belong on Earth.
Oliver guided Becky onto a well-paved road that led directly to one of the central gates. If Becky was a behemoth, the gate was a titan. It was wide enough to allow three vehicles of Becky's size to pass through simultaneously with room to spare.
Sitting beside the leader of the settlement acted as a universal key. They rolled through the checkpoint without a second glance from the guards.
Thomas took a moment to study the sentries; they wore heavy blue coats with deep hoods that cast their features into shadow, giving them an anonymous, almost spectral appearance.
Their attire was identical to the rough-spun, functional clothing Thomas now found himself wearing.
"Nothing tastes quite like home, does it?" Oliver took a deep, theatrical breath as Becky crossed the threshold into the town, as if the air within the walls was fundamentally sweeter than the air in the wilderness.
Thomas wasn't listening. He was too busy being a witness to a world that shouldn't exist. Now that Becky was travelling at a walking pace, the world came into high-definition focus.
The buildings possessed a rustic, old-world charm that reminded him of the countryside architecture of Europe, perhaps in the late 1800s. But it was the people who truly rattled his sense of reality.
The fashion was a jarring collision of eras. He saw men in tight-fitting leather jackets and long, hooded coats.
Beneath their outerwear, they wore vests identical to his own, bristling with pockets of every conceivable shape and size. Some sported elegant scarves and tall, antiquated hats, while many walked with heavy wooden canes that they used with a certain rhythmic authority.
Thomas searched the crowd for the one thing that would make sense of this scene: firearms. If he saw a pistol or a rifle, he could categorize this as a perfect, large-scale nineteenth-century reenactment. But there were no guns. No holsters. No barrels glinting in the orange sun.
The women added to the temporal confusion, wearing elaborate gowns with high collars and bustles that screamed Victorian England.
"I came back in time... damn it," Thomas whispered to himself, his heart sinking. "Is this dream set in the nineteenth century?"
The theory felt solid until he remembered the face in the mirror. He had never looked like that teenager. He had no memory of ever possessing that jawline or those eyes.
Every sensory input told him this was real—the smell of the dust, the chill of the breeze, the vibration of the seat—yet every logical thread told him it was impossible.
"But... there were no superheroes in the 1800s," he argued with himself silently, his mind a battlefield of conflicting evidence. "And the early internal combustion engines never produced something as massive and structurally unsound as Becky. The physics are wrong. The history is wrong."
He remained silent, his eyes darting between the gothic and steampunk-inspired residents.
He saw men who looked like they were ready to engage in a high-noon duel at any second, yet they carried only canes and curious, glowing trinkets. It was a world that had mastered the aesthetic of the past but had fueled it with a future he didn't understand.
As Becky rumbled deeper into the heart of the Dante Settlement, Thomas realised he wasn't just a detective on a case anymore. He was a ghost in a machine he didn't know how to operate, in a time that hadn't happened yet.
As they rumbled deeper into the heart of the settlement, it became clear that Becky was not a unique monstrosity. She was merely one predator in a pack.