“Liberty City is a stupid name, I would have called this place Fortress City.” I said between bites.
Billy Bob laughs, “Well mister if you ever become mayor, you can call this dump whatever you want. But fat chance of that though, the powers that be are very entrenched. Naming rights of this city were bought and paid for by Liberty University, a religious diploma mill run by a guy who also does not know how to wear pants.”
Gandalf, why are pants so important to humans?
Gandalf.exe search running…
Did you mean Jeans?..
Try searching for genes.
Cancel search. That was weird, the query was changed to something completely different. Maybe that stack overflow error happening again. Lets try asking broader questions to the locals. I look at Quartz and ask, “So what do you Kiddos do for fun around here?”
“Like I said homes, mostly we hang out at the alleyway entrance from the main street we sing and panhandle, keeping it real you know?”
“Sometimes we gota fight off the mimes, clowns, homeless, and the freaks that want our prime real estate. Turf wars yo. We keep our streets safe.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Marry Ann points a spare rib at me, “When we get really bored or hungry we try our luck in the Under City to hunt for lost culture.”
Quartz crossing his arms. “Girl you crazy, we lost Tyrone down there last month, he was our lead singer. Band almost broke up when we lost him. I don’t want to go back down there for nuthin. Ain't worth our lives fool.”
“How dangerous is it down there and what kind of cultural treasures can you find? Why is it called the Under City?” I asked.
Quartz sighed, “Your funeral fool. Listen up, after the Culture Wars of 2024, this place was a wreck. Instead of bulldozing everything to start over, they decided it would be cheaper to just build over the top and pretend like nothing happened.”
“But crazy shit happened during Weird Winter. Illegal biohacker labs, cults, rogue intelligences, all the monsters of the old world. They were all buried, built over, and forgotten. But that's not the worst of it.”
“In the deepest levels lurks the Orange King, we dare not utter his true name, an abomination you can smell from a mile away. If you start smelling the stink of armpits, ketchup, and buttholes RUN! None who have laid eyes on it have survived to tell the tale. To see the orange one is to look into the pits of madness. It is rumored that you instantly lose your sanity and all human decency, and start chanting MAGA.”
I raised my hand to interrupt, “Okay, how about the treasure? There has to be stuff worth risking your life for down there.”
Quartz shrugs, “It’s mostly scrap metal, useless old tech that got fried when the EMP bombs started going off back in Weird Winter. Our biggest find was a vinyl record, we made enough money off that LP to eat for a week.”
“We had to take a big pay cut bargaining with the Retro Techies to get them to let us borrow one of their rebuilt lost tech phonographs for the first listen through. But it was totally worth it, the That Way song put us on the map and peeps started calling us the Backstreet Boyz in honor of our find.”
“But like I said, it’s a maze down there, tunnels that twist and turn without rhyme or reason, monsters of all kinds, dead ends and death traps.”
I like mazes though. Looks like I found my next hunting ground.