Deathworld

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Nick stood in front of the gateway, and looked up and up at the pillars of it, there in the dark and the silence.

The polished basalt pillars were very tall. There was no seeing the top of them. They seemed to stretch forever up into the darkness. But in the empty black air between them, words hung burning in red. They read:

Nick stood there in the silence for a few more moments, and then walked through the gates.

The first thing to assault him was the music, but then that was what he had come for, what had brought him here in the first place. Nick was finding it difficult to believe that there had ever been a time when he hadn't known about that particular bass beat, pounding and insistent. It was such a contrast to the voice singing above it, starting out so calm and scaling over the course of almost every song into a completely abandoned shriek of cheerful rage. That was what had gotten Nick's attention the first time he'd seen a Joey Bane virteo: the cheerfulness. This man was angry, and enjoyed it, and didn't care who knew. The song that met you at the gateway was that first one he'd heard, the most famous of Bane's songs, and the one Nick liked the best: "Too Jagged Off to Care."

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