4
There was a distinct lack of people here. Even after wandering around for nearly half an hour, I couldn't find anybody.
I found plenty of buildings, though. Building after building after building after building. And they were huge, too. Each one seemed like a sky scraper, stretching on and on into the air.
If I didn't know better, I'd say that I was in The World That Never Was.
Except The World That Never Was didn't have pipes that ran through buildings. It didn't look quite so... chaotic as this place.
Honestly, it seemed like every single building had a pipe somewhere on it. There were some pipes that ran from building to building, several that extended from the very bottom to the tip, more pipes that branched into other pipes and connected seemingly everything together.
That's not to say that pipes and ducts were the only thing here, however. In the upper layers of the city, out of reach to any normal person in the streets below, there were a great deal of cables that stretched from building to building throughout the city. I'm pretty sure that they were actually power cables, given that they lead to signs and lights.
Lights that weren't on, for some reason. A power outage, perhaps? I'm not sure.
The city was industrialized as hell, or at least it seemed to be.
So, where was everyone? Do I have to go look inside the buildings to find them? Unless this world was like The World That Never Was, someone had to build all of this.
I paused, taking another look at all the buildings.
And whoever that person was, they must have been pretty boring. There was so little color, with nearly everything being a dull gunmetal gray, the only variety being signs, billboards and slightly off-color sheets of metal, which were barely visible from the ground anyway.
Plenty of variety in the design of buildings, though. It must have been an architectural nightmare, attempting to design this place, the crisscrossing pipes, incredibly large buildings, cables that stretched throughout the buildings would have damn near made sure of that. I can only imagine the hell that would have been actually building this place.
It was only the ground that seemingly managed to escape having pipes placed everywhere. The only pipes around where the ones that ran down from the buildings, leaving the ground clear and clean, with barely any obstructions anywhere. It looked like a fairly normal street, actually, baring a lack of roads for cars.
The city was annoying me. It looked familiar, and I know that I've seen it before, but for the life of me, I just couldn't remember where.
The rain ceased. And when I say that, I don't mean that it lightened up before stopping, I mean that it just stopped. The dark and stormy clouds remained, a layer of thick fog was still hovering around, but for no apparent reason, it had just stopped raining.
That probably wasn't a good thing, so I shou-
A dull splash from behind me interrupted that thought. Different from the rain drops, it was heavier and louder.
I spun around, seeking out whatever had caused that.
Normal eyes would have seen nothing but fog, but my eyes were anything but normal.
There, hiding in the fog, a figure wearing a black cloak approached. Not slow, but not fast either, just a casual confident walk.
As it came closer, my eyes zoomed in on another feature that had become visible.
The cloak was not entirely black, as my first glance had told me.
Nope, it was a black cloak with red clouds.