A light rain started pouring. Not that it would be an issue, given where he was headed today. The Enigma, dressed in inconspicuous clothes provided by his informer - some washed-out jeans and a sweater - walked through the front entrance of District 14’s GHH station. Like in all of the stations, except for D5’s, its ground level was open to the public and even equipped with a vending machine, in the corner next to the nearly-dead plants. It had a front desk, though it was empty at the moment. The room as a whole wasn’t too busy - no one but him, a janitor and a panicked sight-seeing tourist who ran in to take cover from the rain. He enforced himself to replay the conversation he had with his informer in his head. Honestly, he usually indulged her, but insisting he think of them exclusively as ‘his informer’ to watch out for noisy espers seemed excessively paranoid. Ah well - this wasn’t his plan. He headed to a door in the corner, labelled as ‘private’, and headed in. Beyond laid the employee stairway. They’d been right about this much, then. He hurried down two floors.
For as infamous as District 14’s station was, it was rather well kept in comparison to most others he’d seen. Not that cleanliness could make up for its reputation. For one, District 14 was one of the two districts - along with D3, its neighbour - under which was born The First District, from which had grown and developed the current Underground. Second, and most importantly, the captain in charge of the station was quite the character.
Robin Kelly, once calling himself The Clockworker, and later nicknamed ‘The Mole’ by much of the press, started his career as a run of the mill abilitied criminal - born underground, joined a gang in his youth, left it once it began to fall apart. He then worked as a mercenary for others of his calibre, inevitably stabbing them in the back. To his credit, he was fairly good at all of it - much better than most would give him credit for. His ability was an odd one; Twenty-four times a day - namely, whenever it was “any hour ‘o clock” - his senses and muscles became superhuman for an entire minute, allowing him to resolve whichever situation he was in with godlike ease. Over the years, he’d learnt to plan around the time, stall and drag things out, bluff and distract to get his way, refined it to such an extent he made a game of it. He kept smooth sailing for quite a few years, remaining obscure enough that he wasn’t immediately suspicious to his potential employers. Nonetheless, the wind eventually turned south.
It wasn’t uncommon for the GHH to hire ex-supervillains who’d served their sentence - not any less common than it was for regular police investigators to do the same with non-abilitied criminals, mind you. What was unusual, was for a villain who was still up and kicking - and had only recently started to have serious issues - to give themselves in and propose that very deal. The offer was fishy, but Robin was quite the catch - though ranks didn’t exist back then, he would’ve been an easy A - and he was easy to monitor and restrain, so they gambled it wasn’t too big a risk. Thus, the Clockworker began working for the GHH.
He worked both as a double agent spy and as a field operator, and didn’t fail his missions once. Kelly was a golden asset to heroism - simply unfortunate that he sold the GHH’s info to criminals just the same as he did the reverse. He played each side like fiddles without a care in the world for anyone but himself. ‘The Mole’ was a rather pleasant nickname, considering the many other names he could’ve inspired. He’d been cunning enough to retain trust throughout and eventually become district hero captain, after all. By then, his position within the GHH became common knowledge, and it was harder for the Clockworker to get involved with the Underground’s affairs without raising suspicion ; however, he never truly left it behind. In the lower floors of District 14’s station, he hid a secret entrance to the Underground.
Or so had the Enigma heard from his informer. He still had to verify it for himself, but they’d never lied to him before, so he was confident. Whenever he questioned the shady nature of their information, they looked at him with such sad and tired eyes - by their standards, nonetheless - and gave him some vague and flimsy excuse : in this instance, they claimed they knew because they ‘used to work in District 14’ : the Enigma couldn’t find any trace of such a background, but he hadn’t cared enough to look into it all too deeply. Not that he was in any position to blame someone for being overtly mysterious ; he was lucky to remember his own name.
His informer also revealed that they’d never actually been to the Underground themselves - mostly, because they were afraid to. Hence why they needed him to go down there, scope things out, write down a few notes, and report back to them. Experience had proven that, for some reason, he was pretty good at that kind of thing.
He reached floor -3 : this was his stop. He headed into the hallway, counted the doors, then back-tracked after realising he’d counted wrong. Eventually, he made it into an unlocked janitor’s closet. A long, dark, crowded closet. He pulled out his clean and orderly notes, straining his eyes to read them. ‘Go to the very back wall, find a 2-meter tall cupboard, remove the wood panel at the back to reveal the passageway.’ And there it was. The pimp took in a deep breath, stepped out, and began walking along the gloomy tunnel that stood before him.
It was a short one. He soon exited into a large cave, lit up by LEDs. Turning around, he found himself stepping out of a square building with walls stretching up to the ‘ceiling’, with simply the words “STATION” engraved into the wall, above the hole of a door he’d exited through. The surrounding area was… surprisingly empty - though it made sense in hindsight. Based on the station’s location in the capital, this entrance led right in the middle of the First District - understand, a construction site for an underground parking lot, fated never to be finished, as the First District had made it its home by force nearly a hundred years ago - which had been relatively abandoned over the years, as a result of the Underground’s expansion. It remained very faithful to how it looked back in its debut, or at least to the few pictures the media had snatched. This was the only part of the Underground that was officially documented, which was another reason for its desertion ; these days, the authorities wouldn’t even think to try and ‘dismantle’ the Underground - it was much too large and powerful. (That, and there were… deals involved.) Occasionally, they’d single out a problematic gang that they had enough evidence against, and arrest that. But back in the days, before Maylis’ government, there had been countless attempts to repress the First District - even some partially successful ones. That, too, explained why it seemed like such a no man’s land. The station entrance was clearly new, though - newer than the rest, anyway.
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Sadly, his informer held little interest in the picturesque historical value of this ditch, and had instead specifically asked him to describe the heart current of the underground. Real high-strung, that one - he worried for them. Ah well! Swift on his feet, the Enigma hurried further west.
The underground district was akin to a long, worm-like tunnel, stretching under the capital from west to east in a curvy zigzag, even beyond the capital’s borders at its extremities, merging with the abandoned mines that lay south-east of the capital. It was thinner in its middle - under Districts 1 and 2, west of which was the First District that he’d entered through, under Districts 14 and 3. The entire underground had spread out from it, over decades of digging tunnels, carefully expanding existing underground areas and linking cellars together, creating a gigantic manmade cave.
The streets were surprisingly large and open. The ceiling wasn’t too low either; he easily had a floor and half’s worth of space above his head. Even then, he felt a sense of claustrophobia as he advanced further into the Underground. For one, every building, without exception, stretched all the way up to the ceiling (understandable, since many of them were just the lower floors of aboveground structures, and the ground-ceiling needed all the support it could get.) As a result, the streets felt like the halls of a gigantic maze - you couldn’t see anything besides the street you were in, and even within that street, much of your surroundings were hidden in shadows. This only contributed to the larger issue at hand.
The Underground’s entire layout was chaotic, with bridges and tunnels at every other turn, walls of concrete in the middle of the road, the ceiling itself becoming lower and higher depending on where you stood, so on and so forth. The entire district had been built clandestinely, in small, sparse increments, by a wide variety of people, and was overall much younger than the rest of the capital - its pioneers had to work with, around and in spite of existing infrastructure, underground railways, parking lots, abandoned tunnels, caves, sewers, mines, water tables… it wasn’t hard to figure why it had ended up organised like swiss cheese.
The last thing that set it apart from a normal street was actually somewhat of a detail, but one that stood out to the Enigma. Mattresses, sheets of foam and the like lined many of the walls - for soundproofing purposes, he quickly figured. To filter out noise and stop unwanted ears from getting wind of the underground’s daily cacophony. Many of the ‘buildings’ - private cellars - were just that : lowers floors of civilian homes, playing no part in the district at all. Even some buildings that did have a door leading into the street appeared to be insulated, however ; the Underground population was no stranger to caution.
Unlike what one might assume, few buildings actually linked the Underground to the surface; most either didn’t have any doors or windows that opened into the district, or they didn’t actually lead to the aboveground and had been built exclusively on the underground level. In total, there were about 12 ‘main’ entrances into the underground district, of which three had existed since the First District, and three others were situated outside the capital’s borders. Some buildings (mainly shops) also had passageways to and from the surface, but those 12 were the ‘official’ and most frequently used entrances. Although, only a small amount of people, who’d lived and worked in the underground their whole life knew all of their locations. For most intent and purposes, knowing two or three was enough ; secrecy may be needless when the GHH wasn’t even willing to put up a fight, but vigilantes could prove to be pests if they found a way to the district. Therefore, it was harder than you’d think to learn your way into the Underground : a local showing you an entrance was amongst the only means of entry.
Even then, people born underground were a minority. A considerable proportion of the Underground’s inhabitants weren’t criminals at all : the very extremes of the district - situated beneath Districts 16, 17, 10, 9, 8 and the eastern woods - were almost entirely residential. They were loaned to people in unstable situations, or with poor income, whose desperation had pushed them that low. Since the underground didn’t abide by any legal regulations and had its own market, it offered the cheapest rent in town. Most of the people who lived in these underground lots didn’t spend any more time down there than they needed to. They never cared to go any further into the cave, and it was just fine for both parties involved. Still, living underground was bound to be a gateway into crime for some, and kidnappings weren’t uncommon either. Worryingly, those were the parts of the underground that had grown and developed the most in recent years.
The closer to the heart of the district The Enigma got, the more the underground started to look like the mental image he had of it. Crowded, spray-painted, lit up by colourful neons, unruly and filled with dubious looking shops - a modern city with its skyscrapers sawed short and crammed into a cave haphazardly. He slowed down his pace : he didn’t like this place at all. He didn’t have any real reason to feel scared, but that had never stopped him from being overly squirrelly in most situations. He only ever followed his instincts and his informer ; only one of the two thought rationally - and that was the one who had sent him right into the dragon’s den. He stopped and sat on a bench. He was sort of surprised there was such a thing down here at all. He figured taking out a notepad and looking around would make him look just a tad too suspicious, so he abstained and tried his best to engrave everything into his memory.
The central part of the district was a commercial strip, an immense crowded highway, surrounded by various signs, buildings, boxes, crates, bags… it had nothing in common with the very extremities of the underground. The buildings were stacked extremely close together, with only a few alleyways. Though the name ‘Underground District’ had stuck through the years, it was an entire town of its own ; so large that the locals separated it into the same districts as the capital was. Thus, the central strip he was in was referred to as ‘District 1 and 2’.
Most of the stores were surprisingly mundane - anything could be trafficked, after all - but the casual inclusion of drugs and arms amongst everyday groceries stood out all the more. Overall, it wasn’t too bad, for a black market - in his experience, which was null. The sketchier merchandise was surely sold in darker corners, away from the relatively accessible central strip. Even down here, social hierarchy was everywhere. Nozhnitsy and MSW - being the only two entities that qualified as ‘large crime syndicates’ - owned almost everything, and flexed their influence with iron fists. On a smaller scale, plenty of other gangs competed with each other - often themselves belonging to one of the two major players. The entire place was in a cold war with itself, yet this commercial strip seemed to be thriving and lively. Maybe some sort of ‘neutral’ zone. The thought reassured the pimp. This wasn’t so bad, in the end : it was kind of cool finally seeing this place in person, after living in the capital for years. Maybe his informer had been right to send him down here !
Sounds of explosion suddenly rang in his ears. He instinctively ducked under the bench. The crowd split, but stayed relatively calm. On the other end of the street, gunfire boomed, as a lithe, grey-haired figure broke through the upper floor window of a shop, gliding to the building in front of them, then wall-jumping back and forth between the countless buildings of the strip, pursued by shotguns, thrown rocks and insults. Never mind, this place was awful. The Enigma fled, falling belly-first into a portal he summoned in the ground below him.