At day the outer ring of Babylon didn't seem like a bad place at all. It still was a dirty and poor place but during the day time it was as busy as every other part of the city.
People exchanged and bought and sold goods, visited friends and helped each other repairing what needed to be repaired. Despite everything the people in the outer ring seemed to be quite happy, something the people in the inner rings couldn't understand.

The people liked to exchange their goods rather than buying them in the outer rings because the currency worldwide was not some paper money anymore but soulenergy.
Soulenergy simply was what its name said – it was the energy of the soul.

Any kind of energy was valuable and after the oil resources had nearly disappeared, scientists and governments had tried to find some other source of energy. There had been quite a few solutions but none had been so effective as the soulenergy. Many humans liked to neglect though that the discovery of the soulenergy only had been possible because of the demons.

The truth was that the soulenergy was the essence of life for demons. They needed it to survive and they had to a pack with the queen for constant soulenergy supply.
It was in every human being, sometimes even in some other life form and it was never ending and regenerated itself. A true miracle for the current world but everything had its price of course.
If the soulenergy got taken away from a human, said human would feel tired and exhausted but of course the grade of those side effects were in correlation with the amount of the extracted soulpower.

“This makes 15 SP,” the man said to the girl as he handed her over the bag with the three sandwiches. Her green eyes widened in surprise but she put her hand on the SP extracting machine. It extracted exactly 15 SP from her soul and she quickly took her hand away. “It got more expensive than two months before.”
A sorry smile appeared on the man's face and he nodded. “I know, I know. Everything got more expensive. The queen again,” he sighed and it seemed like it said all.

Humming a silent melody, the girl headed towards to the busiest part of the outer ring, the market place. Her dark brown, very long hair swayed from one side to the other with each step. Some of the streaks were bright gold, which shimmered visibly in the sunlight.
Two large hands suddenly grabbed her by her shoulder and pulled her into a smaller street. “Rina! What the heck are you doing here?”

A male voice hissed. “We told you not to walk around without any of us!” Another male voice growled and Rina immediately lowered her gaze. “Sorry guys,” she muttered, half sorry, half not sorry.
“It's not like I can't defend myself!” she explained but her two friends didn't even listen to her. “Geez, we told you so many times to be careful. You are like an exotic bird despite this hair. By the way, I bought some new hair dye for your freaking hair.”

Rina's two guardians were twins. They both had the same tall height but the older had a way more masculine face, which got enhanced by his side cut. The shade of a stubble beard grazed his cheeks and chin and only the faint scar besides his mouth interrupted the small hairs.
“Thalim, don't give me that gaze. I am not a little child,” Rina sighed at the older twin, who only raised his brow. He seemed to doubt her words and snorted.

“You can't even listen to the simplest advices and you stop laughing Narin. You are not any better.”

Narin was the younger brother and he looked a little bit different than Thalim. He had a less rough l