Lewa honestly hadn't thought much about what Metru Nui would be like. He and the other toa had been far too busy with the preparations for the trip for wool gathering or the long tales that asking the turaga would entail. And so Metru Nui remained a looming mystery on the horizon. It hadn't bothered any of the toa much- they would find out soon enough anyways.
When they reached the island city the toa of air wanted nothing more than to turn the boat around and head back to Mata Nui, bohrok be damned. They'd fought them off once, they could do it again. Never mind that that matoran were never supposed to have been on Mata Nui in the first place. It was home, and a karzahni of a lot better than this wreck.
His first thought was that there was a serious lack of trees. And rahi. And anything organic for that matter.
His second thought was that this was Ga-Metru, and there had better be a lot more trees in Le-Metru.
His heartlight had speed up when he'd heard Matua refer to Le-Metru as 'the jungle.' Then he'd actually seen the Metru.
This was not a jungle. This was a mess of wires, twisted metal and collapsed chutes.
Jungles were supposed to have vines, trees and bird calls. They were supposed to have stirring leaves, ripe berries and dappled sunlight.
The few rahi calls he heard were quickly silenced by the onu-matoran was they rounded up the creatures for the archives- whatever those were.
Sunlight cutting harshly through holes in roofs did not dapple, and nothing moved until matoran come to repair hundreds of years of damage.
Damage that had occurred to a 'home' they had no memory of. Damage to an island that was different from their real home- Mata Nui- in every possible way.
The air was just as bad. As a toa of air Lewa was more sensitive to these things than the others, but he knew they could feel it too.
The air on Mata Nui was clean and pure, untainted by factories and industry. Factories that Lewa knew where being fixed up to working order to make the parts needed to repair their broken city. A city that Lewa wanted no part in.
Apprently Le-Metru was the transportation hub of the city. The le-matoran were in charge of the chutes and the testing of new vehicles. He supposed driving some of those machines with reckless abandon could be fun, but nothing could compare to the feeling of riding a gukko bird. Rider and mount working in tandem to an end, not simply twisting a wheel or pushing a botton. It was a complex beautiful thing.
And the vahki. Lewa heoped to Mata Nui that the turaga wouldn't want the law enforces back up and operational. The matoran of Mata Nui were not nearly as incompetent as those of Metru Nui –they could take care of themselves without some robotic guardians breathing down their necks all the time. They had the Ta-koro Guard, the Le-koro Gukko Force and the Onu-koro Ussalry. They were far from helpless and certainly didn't need a bunch of mechanical malfunctions watching out for them.
Everything was different. This was not Mata Nui, and it would never be home.