Your vacation is going well. You are well acquainted to the grandeur of the Great Terradome, and now plan on visiting another site: St. Catherine’s Cathedral.

As you walk from the entrance of the station to the Crescent Line platforms, you can’t help but feel the same sense of awe you felt when you first laid eyes on the station. When you exit the grand concourse and make your way down the beige and brown tunnels, you feel at peace, at home. A joy fills your heart. A joy to explore.

You make one last turn and enter the platform area. You see the same bunch of shops you saw earlier, each fitted with their own strange wares. You board the old-looking train through a set of gates, unlike anything you’ve seen before on a modern metro system. You open a door to enter the main part of the carriage and feel welcomed by the atmosphere. The people are all talking to one another, and you start making conversation with a local. You tell him that you’re going to St. Catherine’s Cathedral, and in response, he almost yelps “you should go to Franckerton as well!”

You mutter back, “Franckerton?”

“Yeah!” He enthusiastically said back. “I can be your guide!”

Your new friend advises you to change trains at Grand Plaza for a Dalcombe line train to Franckerton High Street. You have read some guides, admittedly outdated they are, and each one says that Grand Plaza is old, stuffy, and crowded. Your guide says that it hasn’t been like that for years, and to your luck, he’s right. The Grand Plaza you see is nothing like the one in the guides you’ve read. It is proper, smart, brick-built, and has a homely feel. The guides show it as dingy, dusty, and worn-down. Your guide tells you that the station, along with the rest of the network, underwent a huge refurbishment, replacing old things with new ones. Your conversation is riveting, but you aught to get up to the Sub-Surface platforms to change lines. Fortunately, there is a spiral escalator to get you to these platforms. The station is essentially a huge cube with 2 cylinders on one end, where these spiral escalators are. You let the escalator do all the work as you look at the plants the station is growing, and you are at the Sub-Surface platforms in no time. You board your Dalcombe line train with your guide and off you go.

When you arrive at Franckerton High Street, you notice something: there’s flowers everywhere! They contrast with the regular, somewhat dull brickwork. The round roof , which is made of said bricks is reminiscent of the Great Terradome, but smaller. Your guide tells you the flowers are for a project called “Roseport in Bloom” or something along those lines. As you surface, you walk through the iconic oxidized copper “circus tent” and onto the high street, which surprises you.

It is so quaint and only moderately full, even on such a beautiful day with gorgeous weather (it’s the opening days of the dry season). The street is lined with shops of all kind, restaurants, schools, and each part is coated in flowers for the event. The street, however, is full of music-related buildings: music stores, repair shops, and jazz clubs, they all line the high street. In the background of the street you see St. Catherine’s Cathedral, towering far above the seemingly endless sea of townhouses, but still far shorter than the enormous mountains the other way.