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Nein. <span class="mu-i">Nein nein nein nein nein,</span> you want none of this. Null, keine, <span class="mu-i">nein.</span> Whatever he is putting down, you are not picking up; you are flipping the table over and walking away.
You rip off the gas mask and take off the headphones too. Taking deep breaths and shaking your head, you wipe your face from sweat and let the cool stormdrain air rush against it.
The sound of rain smashing and flushing through the stormdrain systems are drowned out by the sounds of drills digging into concrete behind you. This alone would make for poor ambiance, but there is one saving grace. Here, the smell isn’t too bad. Petrichor is better up above, but the water rushing along the ground is filtered a dozen times over. Its scent is clean. There are times where you hate how clean this city can be. This, this you will permit. For this moment.
In this moment, you’re glad it’s not filthy.
… You don’t have an answer to what he said.
You don’t plan to have one, either. Such bold proclamations of if you could do something or could not fall apart when it comes time to put it to practice.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy, after all.
At least, for something like this, you would say that. For something that’s much easier to be proud of, you could gladly say you are up for the challenge, to take on the odds. This isn’t something you could brag about. Something you shouldn't be confident about.
It’d explain why everyone keeps so quiet about it. Shame stops them from bragging, but they always compel you.
Maybe there will be a situation where it could be easy. But there just as might not. It could take years. It could happen today.
And did he just say there were one hundred eighty thousand people living underground?! How!? That’s ridiculous! How can they possibly manage to upkeep a population like that? That’s, that’s about 20% of the entirety of Helsinki! One in six people who live in Helsinki would be living down here if that was anywhere near accurate. That’s absurd. Completely, wildly absurd. There's no way…
