An unknown amount of time later, Ed was still lying there on the hanging pathway. His cheek was smooshed up against the floor, pushing through the other side and leaving red marks on his face. A breeze blew through, making him shiver, but the platform stayed steady.

Slowly waking up, he rubbed his head in confusion. Where am I? For a moment, he had forgotten all about the struggle he just went through. It all felt like a strange dream. He was half convinced that the entire day was a dream. It was too eventful.

From climbing a skyscraper for a delivery, to running into the same unknown woman twice in one day, and even meeting someone from the middle city. How could a street rat like him go through all of that in just one day? He felt that he must’ve been drunk and that he made all of that up.

Feeling the cold metal beneath him, he thought that he must’ve crawled into a scrapyard somewhere. Hopefully I can get out before someone shows up. I don’t feel like getting chased out today.

Opening his eyes, he went to get up, but stopped when he saw what was beneath the grates. A clear blue sky, just like what he saw in that dream. Or was it a dream? He wasn’t so sure anymore.

Looking around, he found himself on a familiar crisscrossing pathway of metal scaffolding that came down from the ceiling. Beyond that were familiar inverse hills and mountains, and the bright blue sky.

On the roof behind him were the bars he swung across in the dream. He started to feel the pain in his left leg, and with it came the realisation that it definitely wasn’t a dream.

Shooting to his feet, he winced and crashed back down onto his butt. Yeah, don’t do that again. Sitting up, he saw the police boot on his foot and hurriedly kicked it away. He didn’t want anyone to find him with that.

The boot flew off easily, having grown back to its original size when he was unconscious. The boot tumbled off the pathway, spinning through the air as it fell into the sky below. Shrinking and shrinking, it quickly disappeared from view.

He had no clue where he was, but he knew that anyone who had access to it would be an important person. He had never heard of this area. He had never seen the sky so clear and bright before. No one in the lower city had.

He felt that he had stumbled upon a closely guarded secret, and he didn’t want to know what the consequences would be if he got caught. But speaking of closely guarded secrets, he felt the handcuff on his wrist and looked down at the briefcase. What is hiding in here?

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Glancing around to make sure nobody else was here, he crossed his legs and placed the briefcase down in front of him. Fiddling around with it for a while, he tried to open it from all sides, but failed.

There’s got to be something going on here.

Pulling out the key from his inner pocket, he unlocked the handcuffs and threw them over the side with the key. Rubbing his wrist, he went back to trying to open the briefcase. He pushed, pulled, pressed, and twisted every part of the briefcase, but it still wouldn’t open.

Looking at it closer, the entire thing seemed to be one solid object. He couldn’t see any line indicating where it would open from, unlike most briefcases. From the outside, it looked almost exactly like a normal briefcase, but there was definitely something strange about it.

Flipping it around every which way, he accidentally found an area smaller than his pinkie that was jutting out ever so slightly. It was almost unnoticeable, only pushing out less than a millimetre. If it wasn’t for him messing around so much, he wouldn’t have been able to find it.

Unsure of what he needed to do, he tried twisting it to see if it would come out. Lefty loosey, righty tighty. Turning it counter-clockwise, he felt it moving under his finger. He held his breath. He was both excited and deathly nervous. He didn’t know what was going to happen. Would he die? This was something from the middle city after all, who knew what kind of technology they had.

He waited excitedly for several seconds, until he realised nothing was happening. It turns out he was just spinning it in place. Oh. Pushing it in, he felt the briefcase rumble and shake, as if it was coming to life.

Shocked, he flinched back and dropped the briefcase, He almost screamed out as it hit the ground and bounced around. It’s rumbling caused it to move towards the edge, and it almost fell into the bottomless abyss.

Jumping onto it, he pulled it back in and kept a hold of it as it continued shaking. Bits and pieces started jutting out, as a screen flipped out from the top.

“Hel-he-hello-o-o.” An animated face jittered to life on the screen. Fizzling and staticky, it struggled to say even a single word. As the briefcase shook more and more, bits of it started shooting out and falling off the pathway.

“Error-or. E-e-er-er... The face disappeared as the screen was overwhelmed with static. The briefcase had taken too much damage throughout the course of the night, having not been designed for this amount of activity.

Even though it was from the middle city, and they had designed it to keep the item safe, they couldn’t go too overboard with it, otherwise they would not have been able to keep it a secret. The size and style of the briefcase brought limitations to what they could achieve.

And as it turned out, Ed had somehow managed to break through what they had done by accidentally damaging the internal hardware of the briefcases locking mechanism.

Several more pieces shot out into the sky, and he had no idea what to do.