The Donchaka are dispersed to explore the ship, picking up loose change, partially eaten food and discarded trinkets like pins and stickers. Mistaking them for rodents, some of the janitorial staff sweep them up into dustpans.
Sandra receives large stuffed dog."I'm not sure what exactly the Artifact is, but it's going to be big in fighting the Trespassers. At the very least, it's a way to track them down and find out where they are heading and what their movements are, or it could even be some sort of weapon that repeles or even hurts them."Outside, the metropolis of Seattle begins to fade into the distance and is replaced with the less crowded and busy suburbs. Populated by a mixture of neighborhoods with one and two story buildings to office structures and recreational/shopping districts. For anyone from any world that could be considered "modern", this suburban landscape would be much more familiar to them and look your typical upper-middle class area with its normal, conforming structures and lack of glamorous futuristic technology; there might be a flying car here or a hologram there, but it was much more subtle. Like metropolitan Seattle, it is still painted blue, green and teal though not to same extent; just about every building has these colors but they are less prominent and are mixed with various other colors as well in contrast with letting that three-color palette dominate everything. As day turns to twilight the train stops in a rural area with big wide fields of crops being grown and future tech, or even tech really at all, being absent among the abundance of vegetation. (The crops are not blue.) The train station itself is a modest affair for such a hefty and powerful bullet train, as someone would expect of a small town train station. It was likely that this area was now on the outskirts of Seattle, if not outside of the city limits altogether.
"We're getting there guys. Soon we'll pass through where I grew up, and you'll see that it's a little different than what Seattle is like!" Aesford laughs though it is obviously pained and somewhat worrying.