Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume14 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 9===

Kamijou heard something like the breathing of a monster.

Something white was being expelled from the pipes on the wall or the metal grate on the ground.

It was hot steam.

This was District 19.

“Hey, Kanzaki. Are you sure Coronzon is here?”

“Assuming the emergency exit sensor was triggered by her. She isn’t an embodiment of science, after all.”

Kamijou spent most of his time in District 7, so he didn’t know much about this one. It was crammed full of short multi-tenant buildings. Overall, the streets looked old and faded. Non-LCD signs had a variety of advertisements posted, but the advertised products were things like cathode-ray tubes, vacuum tubes, records, and steam engines…

“It feels like we’re surrounded by a collection of forgotten technology. Or like the flow of technology branched off and evolved in a unique direction here.”

Mourning clothes Mikoto seemed half taken aback by it all.

A device with several rotating cloth wings slowly passed by on the street. It wasn’t quite a helicopter or a drone. And it was larger than a small truck.

Kamijou looked like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“What is that? One of da Vinci’s models?”

“Uneducated fool, that is Cayley’s steam-powered flying machine.”

…Had designs for flying cars been around for centuries?

Whatever the case, technology was branching off in weird directions here.

(On any other day, I’d love to explore this place.)

Several giant round metal objects were visible in the distance.

In fact, several of the round things were clustered together.

“Looks like a pack of takoyaki.”

Index was right. That was the best comparison Kamijou could come up with too.

It looked a bit like a gas tank – no, a gas holder, but in District 19, that wouldn’t be what it was.

“The Central Boiler,” explained Takitsubo Rikou. “The fuel is burned in a single location to produce a large quantity of steam and then piped out across the district. There is infrastructure for the excess energy produced by a large factory’s boiler to be sent to smaller factories, but this is a larger scale version of that. So maybe like a steam version of the thermal power stations in the age of electricity?”

Of course, Academy City’s power generation was done with the many wind turbines distributed across the city. This produced steam instead of electricity, it was centralized instead of distributed, and it created energy using fossil fuel…

Othinus sighed in exasperation from Kamijou’s shoulder.

“The people of this district must really not want to follow the mainstream of Academy City.”