With a clank and a clatter, Joshua pulled the rusted steel cover off the manhole and shoved it aside across the pavement into the semi-darkness. Maintenance calls in the middle of the night were a pain in the neck. Thankfully though, the streets tended to be less busy at this hour, which is precisely why these kinds of calls tended to be scheduled at such ungodly hours.
There was a pungent sort of odor coming up from the blackness of the hole at his feet. The sad thing was that it was hardly any worse than the odors that lurked above ground. Better, in fact. Joshua glanced around him at the sea of flickering neon lights, almost painful to his darkness adjusted eyes, as they cast freakish shifting shadows amidst the heaps of refuse which were piled high in the street. Joshua felt a wave of disgust sweep over him. There were times when he found the human race to be truly revolting.
Right, time to finish up. With a sigh, he gathered up his equipment, stuffing the assortment of stone hammers and bone awls into the leather pouches strapped to the scales around his waist. Then, turning around and orienting himself tail first he slithered into the manhole, grabbing the steel cover as he went. As the cover slipped into place with a clank, Joshua slipped in turn back into the darkness of the city sewers.
It was time to go home.
——–
Every now and then I take time to write little snippets like this for practice. They’re not particularly refined, but they’re fun and they keep me in form. Rather than create whole pages for them, I’ve decided to share them (or at least the better ones) via my blog and facebook page. I hope you enjoy them!
-Jack
Somewhere further on, sometime not too much later than before, Joshua stumbles upon an elusive inner child preoccupied with repairing fantastic looking clockworks embedded in the sewer walls and floors. Somehow the machinery of the fantasy engineering had ended up twisted and completely rearranged. Nothing was broken or damaged, it seemed, everything was in the wrong place. There were levers where there should have been buttons and gauges spun in aimless circles with no indication as to why or for what purpose. And the pipes. The hallways were lined with them, some fat, many skinny, a few along the floors and ceilings were as big around as sheeple barrels lined side by side, snarled together beneath and above the two inch thick steel catwalks that serviced these inner workings of the Jet•Black•3113. Equidistantly placed service lights provided a dim bluish luminescence to the constant explosions of warm steam that permeated the air in these close quarters, somewhere underneath the Trinity Park area of the star crashed mothership. Kit Key squatted into the alcove wrench in one hand, a sonic screwdriver in the other as he jimmied the strange digital innards of something no normal kid should remotely comprehend. The Key Kid straddled the open workings of a particularly tricky piece of social programming, thick wires with disconnected plug endings sprouted out of the open casing between Kitt’s knees like some improbable plastic and metal plant. Getting the casing off had been a snap but the piping was full of these unplugged coaxial cables where there shouldn’t have been coaxial cables. Confusing…
“Jeez, this is a mess.” Kitt quipped. He placed the tip of the screwdriver into the fork of the wrench and pressed the two halves of his motherball together with a single hard crushing motion then stuck the tool in the bib pocket of his service overalls. Tapping open a com line, he leaned in for a closer look at the disconnected snarl of male and female plug endings. “They’re all unplugged. Looks like there’s 3 main leads though. Should I plug them in, leave them unplugged or plug one or two in?”
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