Momo Side Story – Black and White 1 – Find her own story (Patreon)

Momo remembered the buzzing of her phone quite well. As the wind of the air streamed around her, she also remembered the last time it had buzzed in her hand and how she had subsequently dropped it. That last fight she had over the phone still echoed in her mind.

“Can you come back please? I could use your help with this!” Ria had stated in a tone between begging and demanding. In the background, the rattling of tools had been heard.

“You’re working again, right?” Momo asked, immediately annoyed. “You remember that this is exactly the reason why I am NOT where you are right now?”

“Yeah but…”

“No, no buts,” the artificial support had made clear. “You like your work more than me, that’s fine, but don’t expect me to come at your call when you need an extra brain and some mana.”

The workaholic nature of the steampunk princess had driven a wrench between them ever so slowly. Momo had been aware that Ria loved to tinker, how could she not have? That didn’t make the near total lack of interaction outside of the workshop acceptable in any way.

At first it all had been nice and sexy. They challenged each other with ideas about what to build next. Momo learned a lot about mechanics while also keeping the worst excesses of bureaucracy off her newfound lover. Between that, whenever the two felt their very fleshly desires rise up, there were a bunch of things in Ria’s workshops that could be repurposed. It was a time of equal parts intellectual and physical stimulation.

After a few weeks, Momo had wanted more from them, however. As intellectually pleasing as it was and as much as she liked supporting the princess, it lay in her nature after all, doing ANYTHING outside of the workshop was basically impossible. Whenever she managed to drag Ria out of there, the tinker was just looking at her phone and the blueprints she had saved on it. Sure, when they were where Ria wanted to be, they were all happy, but that just wasn’t how the monochrome girl wanted to spend her life, much less her love life.

It all had culminated in a series of fights that were infuriating in how little Ria seemed to care about them even happening. If the tinkering princess had shouted back, then at least Momo would have felt like she was worth something when she threatened to leave. Only when she finally cut herself off did the princess shower her with calls. If she couldn’t help with this or that. Infatuated idiot she was, she had agreed more than once.

One day, when stumbling over some interesting information, Momo had finally snapped out of it. She realized two things. One, that she was once again just playing second fiddle to someone else’s life story, and two, that Ria would never love anything more than her work. No matter how much Momo tried, there was no changing that. With that on her mind, feeling lonelier than ever, rather than just leave the court, she left Austria entirely.

It was time to find more independence out there.

“I REALLY need you though,” Ria had insisted. “I promise that we will do something you want us to do once we get this baby powered up. The gears sound so cute when they are turning, you should hear them!”

Momo had taken a deep breath, said, “There is no us anymore,” and hung up. It gave her an annoying mixture of guilt and liberation. Then the phone had started buzzing in her hand again. After staring at it for a minute, wondering if this time it would be different if she picked up, she finally opened her hand and let the phone drop hundreds of metres onto the roofs of Constantinople.

That way she cut herself off not only from Ria but also everyone else she knew. Maybe that was exactly what she needed. Momo would have lied if she said she went onto that decision with her usual logic.

At that moment, she really missed John and everyone around him. There was a lot of things she could have said about her perverted creator. For example, that he was prone to making decisions that stroked his ego. That he was trying way too hard to be a nice guy. That he was over theorizing most things. That he was hogging Aclysia’s devotion. That he wasn’t paying attention to the people he knew and his harem in particular even when he shouldn’t have had the time wasn’t one of those.

“Let’s just keep going; dwelling on that isn’t going to get you anywhere, you dumb, white-haired… something,” she sighed, scolding herself like she would have anyone else and putting the memory aside. A good adventure would hopefully push all of this out of her mind.

She was hovering over a bit of a special barrier. A type three city, the second largest in the Greek Ten Gates guild Prometheus. The real counterpart had been in Turkish hand for about 500 years and the way this barrier was structured, with Fateweavers making sure people could only get in on designated points, made it more difficult to get into than a lot of much smaller Protected Spaces. A measure to defend against the other great power just one strait away, the Great Sultanate.

It had made entering a bit annoying, but the security measures made a large degree of sense. There was more than a bit of contention between the two guilds over the ownership of this place. Limiting the amount of entrance points made large scale invasions easier to defend against, since actual fortifications could be built with that limited access in mind.

As such, there were large spires spread all throughout the city. Round things with onion shaped tips and pillars keeping their many stories standing upright, covered in layers of runes. Each one was its own military base, with at least 100 people manning each and supported with golems as the military bureaucrats kept tabs on every person that entered.

Getting through that had taken Momo a bit longer than the average person. Although she had become independent of John, she was still associated with him and rather high profile, both in power and recognizability. Chances were, every major guild on earth had a file on her, as thin as it was. Ultimately, they had let her go through when they had believed her that she was only there to do some exploring.

Now in the sky she was pretty happy that she was without a phone she had to check every few moments. The city was quite beautiful, clearly ancient, with dominantly Greek architecture out of the era of their most renowned philosophers. It was lacking the orthodox Christian and Islamic flare of the real-world counterpart, instead it was dedicated to a cult of reason. Although it looked somewhat similar to Abyssal Rome in architecture, it was naturally grown and thus had the corresponding chaos of big cities to it that were modernized numerous times. A massive statue of Socrates in the famous thinker pose was brooding over the heart of the city.

It was easily fifty metres tall and his beard was hammered with such detail that Momo wanted to fly up to it and try to count the hairs. She had the feeling that there was a security apparatus out only to protect that statue, however, and didn’t feel like getting in trouble with the officials. She was also impressed with how muscular the guy looked.

‘They do say he was a wrestler… still thought he would be fat for some reason,’ Momo thought as she turned north and flew towards her actual target. She had an appointment with someone in the local library.

If you want information about new facts, visit Paris; if you want information about the truths in ancient myths, visit Constantinople. That was a saying the artificial support had stumbled over in her research. The reason for this were the similar natures of Prometheus and the Illuminati. Both found the search for knowledge to be the highest good in their magical societies. However, the French much preferred a centralized focus on useful knowledge while the Greek had a love for the search of esoteric things.

It was no wonder that the Illuminati were rising in power more steadily than Prometheus, but it was said that the latter had the happier people. How true that was, was up for debate and just some knowledge Momo had gained at the side.

What helped Constantinople with making its side of the saying factual was the fact that Prometheus had been around much longer and its libraries were filled with texts people had forgotten were even lying somewhere in there. Perfect conditions for the thing Momo was after.

She landed on the steps of the large building. Although the front had the typical triangular shaped roof upheld by numerous pillars, the main body of the building reminded Momo of a fluorite crystal. Not the colour, that was pretty boring, everything being covered in a white plaster. The shape of the library was dominated by squares and rectangles attached to one another, with the odd tower here or there.

‘I guess they kept running out of room and just slapped some more on every time?’ Momo wondered, now annoyed that she had thrown away her phone. With it, she could have just… well, no, she couldn’t have done anything. Even that information would have cost something in the Abyss and she had no money whatsoever right now. Fortunate for her that she didn’t need to eat. ‘This is what happens if you pay your girlfriend’s bills,’ she went inside, wings retracted back into her body, hoping that the lack of funds wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

The inside was very sparingly lit and had the typical smell of old books. There was an odd mixture of magical lights and modern lamps hanging around. There was a complete lack of torch holders or anything of the like; even if they were outdated now, back in the day those should have found some use. Why they wouldn’t be anywhere close to a building where a ludicrous amount of knowledge was hoarded on paper was pretty obvious.

From the reception, Momo was quickly given a number for a room and was left alone to navigate this labyrinth. For almost two hours, she made her way through the completely nonsensical layout of the archives. Of course, she didn’t see a single bookshelf throughout, those were hidden away from visitors, which made this whole thing even worse.

‘Room 247,’ Momo thought, repeating that number in her head every few minutes to remind herself that she was not going crazy. Her fireflies were hanging around her like a cloud of lights, illuminating everything further than the layout originally allowed. The feeling of narrowness that beset her vision whenever she stepped through the darkness between one cone of light and the next was absolutely something she wanted to offset. ‘In any sane system, that would mean second story, room 47, right? Right.’

Which is where she went first to find room 1047.

She then thought it had to be building two room 47. Question was which one was building two? The answer turned out to be completely unimportant, since that assumption was wrong as well. Instead, the second building was counted as the first extension and had room numbers that began with the sign for alpha, followed by floor number, then room count.

In other words, there were at least three different systems by which rooms were organized within this cluster of archives. ‘No wonder they lose things all the time,’ she thought when she finally found the right room, having just wandered around randomly until some sort of system seemed to resemble what she was searching for. That was, terribly enough, the best strategy.

She knocked on the door and was greeted with Greek words inviting her inside. Thankfully, she had learned that language before going on this adventure. Ever since she first had found that hint in the Habsburg’s private library, she had made her preparations for this endeavour. She had just hoped to be on it to go back to Ria instead of using it to get away from her.

“This library is maybe the worst thing I have ever encountered,” Momo stated truthfully the second she entered the office. It was so flooded with light that she almost felt her retina fall out despite not even having one. “And I have fought a Lorylim infected elemental, the goddess of genocide and a golem the size of a skyscraper.”

“It’s not that bad!” the librarian immediately went on the defensive, as if Momo had offended him personally. “Once you get used to all 47 systems, you can find your way around quite easily!”

Just staring judgmentally and trying her best not to fall into a preaching that would maybe get her thrown out of the building entirely, Momo took a seat after being offered one. “Anyway, sorry for the delay. Just to make sure, you are Glykos?”

“My wife likes to say that,” the same smiled, and Momo repressed a groan. The young man had to be a father since he had just made a terrible pun. Glykos happened to mean ‘sweet’ in Greek. “Anyway, you would be Momo Newman, yes?”

“Just Momo,” the artificial support insisted.

“Well… normally finished artificial spirits take on the last name of their creator… ah, well, if you insist,” the man turned to his computer, not even addressing the fact that she was hours too late. The odds were rather high he had expected for her to arrive late due to the building. “I will need some name though, if I am going to give you a library pass.”

“Just like that?” Momo asked, having thought she would have to go through a bunch of trials to be given access.

“My higher ups have told me to not give you too much of a hassle, given who you are associated with,” Glykos went ahead and explained. “Also, we here at Prometheus are happy about any potentially re-discovered artefact. The sudden end of the middle eastern Abyss following the end of Babylon has left quite a few barriers and secrets lost to chaos. There could be entire cities out there that are maintained by just a few monsters crawling around inside them. And this… Tialoyst thing sounds rather important.”

Momo had sent the entire excerpt she had found over to this man, so he was as far informed as she was. The Tialoyst was supposed to be a staff forged by Enki, god of stars and magic, from Astrotium. Momo wasn’t unhappy with her current weapon, it was a good channel for magic, but it was a handout by the Gamer and she wanted something to call her own, earned with her own work. Something that also was an upgrade.

A long lost staff made by a son of Tiamat sounded like just the thing.

“Well, give me a surname you like and then you can go fight against the library.” That comment made Momo realize that the inside of the archives was probably infested with even MORE systems than the layout was.

‘Well, at least getting angry over that will be a good distraction,’ Momo thought about what she wanted to be called instead of Newman. What was a name she could give herself that described what she wanted to be in life or what she already was? ‘Pretty hard to find something that doesn’t sound terribly cringey…’ she realized, going through numerous solutions. Her face became hotter and hotter from each thing she even thought about saying out loud. Finally, she surrendered and just got this thing over with.

“Firefly.”