Step outside

You emerge onto the hard street. The direct sunlight warms your head and fills you with courage. From your position, you can see the totality of the settlement you call home. It encompasses a single corridor of road, a tiny fragment within a labyrinthine city of corridors. This settlement is on the southern tip of a peninsula. A few blocks south is the reviled river that carries brave traders out to sea. To the north is the increasingly dense tangle of the city proper, with its myriad alleyways and dark towers of adamant.

 

Your settlement is contained by walls erected from steel debris and palisades of wood that hem in the alleyways. The bulk of protection comes from the buildings themselves, which are mostly low complexes of sturdy brick and concrete like your own. If anyone seriously wanted to sneak into the settlement, you suppose they could. You come from a poor people, however, and there is nothing worth stealing here. You suppose that fact is your settlement’s true best defense.

 

Some older folk are washing clothes across the street. They pay you no mind. A group of men and women, cloaked as you are, are attempting to move a steel girder down the street. The main gates of the settlement are down the road to your left. To your right is the tinkerer’s workshop, the home of an old friend.