Tro'Leera nods at the others. "Alright then. Let me get together some cure for you and I will see you off- err, but be warned. The city is extensive and built on ruins, built on ruins, built on ruins. You erm.... May find too that some paths are one-way, so getting back could be difficult."
With that warning, the party heads away, Alejandro in the lead. Within minutes, they begin heading down the staircase to the murky undercity. The smell of off garbage and sewage steamed and baked in a solar powered giant sandstone oven fill the parties nostrils.
Mina in particular can't even believe such an aroma could even exist. For the first time, she can see just how poor the poor in this city get. Perched above the sea of filth atop large rusted steel sewage pipes and drains, people have made themselves a...life here out of nothing more than scaffolding. She sees mothers feeding babies, blind, deaf, limbless leppers with not but a shirt and a pile of rags to their name and thugs and gangs holding up every 60 or so feet in their own 'territories', eyeing the wealthy, but well armed adventures as they walk past...
The ramshackle suburb is made from hundreds of years of scrap timber and old steel scrap. Once or twice, you notice old broken rooftops that look like they once belonged to the noble district. Old rope and chain holds together different platforms and one can't help but wonder if the primary thing holding the scaffolding together is the scaffolding that surrounds it? Like a sideways house of cards, you wonder if removal of one piece could cause the whole thing to collapse.
Down below as the party descends further are more and more shacks holding people who appear to be intellectually disabled along with people who rock two and fro as they sit, jitter or behave strangely in other ways, a capital letter I branded on their forehead. Some of them look up and smile at the party absent mindedly as they pass. One disabled boy does so, but quickly looks down as a man in studded leather walks by carrying a heavy jangling sack. The boy appears to be sorting garbage as do many of the people here.
A sudden rumble sounds in the parties ears as the pipes begin to vibrate. The man raises a whistle to his lips and blows once "SUUUURGE!" He yells out, getting the attention of several disabled teenagers down at the shoreline who climb into rowboats in teams of two and begin rowing out to the areas where fresh refuse has fallen. Then to the parties horror, one child dives in head first whilst the other holds onto a rope. All but one re-emerges. Instead the rope he was attached to slowly begins to move downstream. The boy tugs the rope tentatively a couple of times. "Dannney? Dannn-ney?" The boy looks visibly distressed. The man turns around sharp. "Boy! Problem?" A little more upset, the boy begins to sob. "Mistah Samuel, dan-nie hasn't, he's, he's stuck". The man glances momentarily at the boat and then turns away. He yells out "Time to pull him in boy".
The young boy begins to cry, his face developing a look of horror "N-no! Danny will di-" The man yells "I said PULL!" The man does not move. His face blank as he stares at the ground in fromt of him. Momentarily he turns his head and looks up to a platform high above. An onlooker watches as the scene unfolds. Crying and whimpering for his friend, the young boy pulls, looks back at the man and sobs again and pulls harder. Suddenly the rope goes lose and He starts wailing at full volume. He drags danny up to the suface, who is apparrently missing the lower half of his body, severed by the unseen obstacles underneath. The boy brings the body to the shore as the party stands horrified at what had just transpired. [sblock] Just so you guys know, intellectually disabled people in the past have been known to be used for cleaning out sewage etc in the past and even today, are used to sort garbage at below minimum wage, so it's not that I have a disturbing imagination as much as i like to take real world behaviours that are messed up and then make them worse.... So the next question is, what do you do?
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