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A lot of the other corporate types go years without setting foot in the undercity, some never do even once. When they're moved to pay a visit, most of them try to be in and out as hastily as possible. They don't like the smell. They don't like the locals. They don't like the dark. They don't like the relatively low level of ambient stimulation.
You aren't like that. While you don't venture down below as often as you used to, it's unusual for you to not make the most of a trip. You appreciate the clarity of darkness. You enjoy the liberty of discretion. You don't mind getting your hands dirty, or your loafers. Of the two areas Syd mentioned, you've been to one before - the plastic beach on the Southwest waterfront. It used to be a popular place for young people to get high and break things, and then for a time it was avoided by the locals after a couple of those delinquents were found half-eaten in the shallows. Folks blamed alligators, there was even an urban legend about a bloodthirsty shark. That was a couple of decades ago, though, and in recent nights it's gone back to being a secluded place for hoodlums to spray paint broken appliances or put needles in their arms.
You start in that direction, moving by an old office building that's collapsed on one side, with a winding trail up to the exposed fourth floor carved out of the rubble and built-in with planks of rusty corrugated steel on old wood and gravel. There are lights inside and people moving around between tents, another vertical shanty town full of lost souls. You smell cooking rodent and oily fried rice wafting across the stale air, it's oddly nostalgic.
You keep strolling, and start to approach the trail that winds down to the plastic beach - one of many places where plastics dissolved by pollutants and salt water, along with sturdier trash, have washed together and calcified into stiff, fetid shorelines. You think about how it used to be here back in the day, and some of your other memories of the undercity...
<span class="mu-s">Say, what exactly is your history with Old Charlie, anyways?</span>
>I was born and raised here until my Keeper took me. When I got back, my parents were dead and so was the Fetch left to replace me, so I left it all behind and moved up in the world, literally.
>I'm from the surface originally, modest middle class family, but when I was taken to Arcadia, the Fetch that was left to replace me got addicted to drugs and disappeared down here. Took a couple of years to track him down, a couple more to get him off drugs. I still check on him from time to time.
>I was born here, but grew up in an orphanage for a few years before being adopted by a wealthy couple of top-siders. When I got back from Arcadia, I needed to find pieces of who I was, and tracked down my biological father, the only remaining member of my family. He still lives here, and his mind is starting to go, but I still check in on him and make sure he is taken care of.
>Write-in
