The Man struck a chord.
"Told you like twenty times," the other waved his grimy hand side-to-side, "I don't know no guy who looks like that."
The Man stared into his eyes. He flinched and for a second he gripped the counter - his fingernails bent - then let go.
"An' I don't want no trouble."
A deep breath in, and a deep breath out.
"I'm just playin' with you."
In the black-shot room was silence, bar the battering rain leaking inside. Like some metal menagerie, caracasses of corroded artefacts and trinkets of some bygone period hung like bastards around and on the walls.
They were not for sale, but an easy assumption to make judging by their torn appearance.
The Man breezed his hand over the outside of his pocket. The Letter was still inside, and now he knew his destination was somewhere closer to the centre.
He turned and left the room through the door, which was more like a gaping hole in the wall.
A ceaseless storm. Random flashes of white mixed with kaleidoscopic reflections of hanging signs and panels - electric yellows, vicious greens and luminescent purples - and pockets of dust confused with raindrops that scattered with the bright haze. Breathing was sure to do you no good in the long run.
The blinding lights revealed no better conditions on the building walls - these sheets of metal. Permeating rust, filth, and muck covered them like some fungus or ruinous moss. Few of these walls were carved inwards with reverberating waves as makeshift galvanised metal, to which the rust held no mercy to seep in.
There was no free-space, and as he walked along, he made zig-zags and beelines. Whether that was due to having no straight paths or the twisted abundance of waste, both reasons were likely to be true wherever the Man would have liked to go.
I should've entered from the other side.
He let out another deep breath and slumped his shoulders, but looked up and forwards.
The moonlight seeped through to the alleway he was at now and combined with the bustling noise and lights at the end of it, when a peculiar sight caught his eye.
"Eh?"
A little girl - no older than 11. He stopped and stared.
Children were a rare sight in this place.
Raindrops caught in her white hair - ends split - slid down, and dropped down onto her rags. She sat upright, her hands crossed over her knees leaning slightly against a dumpster on her right-side. She was fully clothed - if you considered her dirty rags as clothes - and wore shoes that looked so worn-down they appeared war-torn.
I guess living in this place you would end up looking like that. Or maybe living is the wrong word…
She looked thin in these clothes, emaciated even. There was a lot of space between the material and her skin. Her face was the most curious part. Purple eyes weren't rare but they certainly weren't common either. But, little light reflected off of them, a dead gaze.
"Huh," he turned to continue walking. "Depressed at that young an age? Though it makes sense."
"Elec-lyte. Elec-lyte. Lyte–"
A robotic voice. A bit further to the girl's left, was a severed robot missing a lower half. Exposed wires and sparks bled savagely. A tree-chunk-sized wire, appearing to have been made up of smaller contorted wires, connected its back to a hexagonal socket in the wall. It twitched and seized, mumbling incoherencies.
This was a common sighting.
Amalgamations of metal; physically warped, distorted, some destroyed, and some perfectly intact, but all were abnormal in some manner, behaviour or appearance.
Further to the city's centre, metal would become even more twisted and even dangerous, but for now in the outskirts, they at least looked humanoid. At the absolute outskirts near the entrance, there existed barely any of this contemporary art - after all, he had only passed a few up to this point.
The girl got up.
She walked over to the robot and raised her hand. In one swing, she formed a hammer fist and whacked it over its head. She quickly turned around and sat down again. Her face didn't change once. Quite forcefully, the robot was made to rest.
Slightly entertained with the spectacle he just saw, the Man let out a soft chuckle. He took another good look at her face.
That's not a face of depression. Bored? No that's not it. She's waiting for something. For the rain to stop?
Perhaps dead wasn't the correct word. Her stare was simply forward-gazing, though not aggressive, as if her own next action was perfectly detailed in her head.
"Hah." Again, he resumed his walk. Towards the centre of the Megastructure. "Not all hope is lost!"
There was a hint of pride in what he said, albeit a little sarcasm as well. How could he be disappointed at a human acting like a robot? After all, he was a robot too.