The girl walked alone in the darkness.
The rain poured from the heavens, dousing everyone who was unfortunate enough to be caught outside with a frozen downpour. Scruffy men were huddled in small groups in the alley, clutching thin, ragged blankets, hugging them close to their bodies.
The girl wore dark clothes; a black zip up hoodie, black jeans, and black sneakers. The hood of her jacket was pulled over her face, her shoulders hunched over as she splashed through the frozen puddles, drenching her already soaked pant legs.
She looked no older than fourteen years old.
She stopped and looked around for the first time in hours. Unable to recognize her surroundings, she contemplated where she thought she might be. She suspected that she was in downtown Bricksburg, judging by the dilapidated buildings, stinking dumpsters, and general look of disrepair around her. Also known as the ghetto, the girl thought wryly. In her few years, she had never been able to accustom herself to this part of town.
She sat down heavily on the ground next to a sour-smelling man who paid her no mind, water splashing up around her and soaking her pants through to the skin. But she didn't care. This wasn't the time for temporal feelings. There was only time for the mental numbness of the past day.
Lucy Barnes was the second daughter in a very successful family. Her father was a big man in the monopolizing Octan Corporation, and her mother was a famous actress, so Lucy, her mother and father, and her younger brother Max and older sister Elizabeth were well off.
Out of her other two siblings, Lucy was by far the perkiest, the prettiest, and the sweetest.
"Your Lucy is such a darling little girl!" gushed her mother's other actress friends as a dark haired, bright eyed toddler would dance around the sitting room of the big house in a flouncy white tulle and black sequined dress, the satiny pink bow sash shimmering nearly as bright as the big green eyes and curly ebony hair, her mother smiling smugly, caring only about was the compliment.
Her parents weren't unkind, and they never truly neglected her, but she never knew them personally. They were always too busy with their own lives for those of their three children. And Lucy was unfortunate enough to not be on the best of terms with her two siblings. When she was eight years old, there was an incident (she would never tell the true story), and her brother and sister, both blonde with amber colored eyes and far more popular than her, were scared of her from then on. For the next five and a half years of her life, the only company Lucy had was that of Pisces, her black Labrador Retriever.
Up until that point, Lucy had been a straight "A" student. She had many friends, she wore bright clothing. She laughed all the time. But that all changed, almost literally overnight.
Her teachers and peers were all confused by the sudden change of Lucy Barnes. Only last week, she had been the perkiest girl in the world. Now, she was pale, the freckles on her cheeks strangely prominent, with dark shadows under her eyes, her usual cute outfit replaced with all black clothing. Her grades dropped significantly until she was barely passing her classes.
Slowly, gradually, little by little, the unfeeling deadness of the rest of that school year faded away, so she was no longer the shell of a person as she had been before, but she would never again be that other girl. Lucy felt that there were three lifetimes she had lived; the good, the awful, and now.
Her mind raced as she sat, freezing in that puddle next to the sour smelling hobo, in the rotten, freezing dark of that alleyway. It was earlier that day, or more accurately, late that previous night, that she had run away. It wasn't just because her brother and sister, who treated her like some sort of monster, were barely able to stay in the same room with her. No, it was more than that.
There was a faint memory in the back of her mind, almost too far to reach. A memory sparked by an exclusive visit to the famed Octan Tower as a school day trip, through her father. She had been about six years old and she remembered a time where there had been a great change. She vaguely remembered bright searchlights shining into her window lighting up the pink satin and lace curtains, a loud voice with a lilting accent shouting into a megaphone, red and blue police lights, and the fact that she never again saw her caretaker, an old woman with grey hair and an uncanny knack for fixing things, ever again.
During the visit, Lucy's father took her aside into a great crystalline elevator, which sped up, up, up, high above the ground, above the clouds. Up, to the Infinityeth floor. Lucy was unable to hide her excitement as her father opened the shiny metal doors of the elevator.
But that excitement had turned into sickening horror in mere seconds.
The ceiling was so high above then, she couldn't see the top of it. The room was obviously from exterior wall to exterior wall since it was so huge. But the worst part of it, even worse than the sickly green lights and the silver Skeletron robots, was the noises, and what was all over across the walls.
Or who.
Hundreds of people, all in small boxes suspended from the ceiling, strapped around the middle, upper arms, thighs, lower legs, feet, forearms strapped to raised platforms, and crackling headpieces. Some looked simply awful. A few looked seriously ill. The rest wailed to Lucy seconds after the doors opened.
"Saaave uuuusssss…" the voices wailed. Her father told her that all of these were prisoners.
The young teen could feel her heart both falter and break. Her stomach flopped and she nearly threw up her lunch.
Returning to school, she had discovered a new assignment; what intrigued you most about the trip to the Octan Tower? Write a five paragraph essay about it.
She researched. She was actually quite resourceful; able to hack into a computer or other equipment with little or no effort. Most people did not expect this. To most, she was just the flighty daughter of an actress and business man. But she wasn't.
She broke into highly confidential files. She discovered that those prisoners were called Master Builders. She discovered that they were just like her.
That was the spark. She turned in the assignment, which was returned without a grade and a note telling her parents about what she had done. An argument had broken out that same night, and the dam of all the pain and sorrow of the past years came spilling out of her soul, along with her absolute disgust at her parents that they approved and enforced everything in this awful dystopia.
Then… She ran away. The awful realization of the world she lived in simply incomprehensible to her. Her actions, her everyday life, were doing this to people who had done no wrong.
People just like her.
This brought her to her current situation; sitting in the smelly alley next to the smelly man, still unable escape her thoughts. To escape this city which she so hated. And to escape those stupid, smelly thoughts of hers, to change her wet clothes… To… To…
A flash of color broke the tedious monotony of the dark and rainy alley. Lucy looked up in surprise to see a tall, though hunched man in a white bathrobe and long staff topped with a green crystal, turning the corner and into the street where she'd come in through.
Though she suspected that this was just yet another bum in the streets, the old man intrigued Lucy. Perhaps it was the tie-dye shirt, or the faded jeans, or the neon orange Crocs on his feet. Maybe it was the long white hair and long braided beard, or the dark skin, or maybe the old orange circlet around his head.
Or maybe it was his eyes. Eyes that were huge, blank white, and unseeing, lacking irises and pupils altogether, but seemed to stare intensely into her soul.
She stood slowly, dripping wet. The sour man grumbled a little bit, but didn't acknowledge her in any way otherwise. Walking quickly, she followed the same path as the old man, coming to a stop near the street, leaning up against a brick wall. There was the old man, his eyes nearly closed until they were thin slits. He might have fallen asleep.
Unable to think of anything else, Lucy leaned up against the wall next to him.
And they stayed there in a considerable silence.
"Why do you want to become a Master Builder?" asked the man suddenly, quietly, his eyes still closed. Lucy looked down and closed her own eyes, her hands in her wet jacket pockets.
"I've got nothing," she whispered after a while. "My parents have never noticed me. My brother and sister are scared of me. It's like I don't exist here. I want to do something that will make them notice me. I need something… To live up to. There's nothing to stay here for…"