R. D O R O T H Y (electricghost) wrote in silverage, @ 2011-09-08 03:53:00 |
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Dorothy had been prepared for many things. When the ruined city had been disappearing, block-by-block and the landscape became an unnatural flat plane, a glowing grid of lines. Her surroundings weren't that way anymore. No toppled buildings or mechanical titans. No lattice breaking the ground and sky into perfectly even blocks. And the sky...there was no dome overhead. A blue sky. A real one. Not the electric illusion of the outer domes. A real sky and real sunlight, like in the wastelands. But it wasn't a barren desert she'd found herself in. In fact, this city teemed with life and vigor. Just like Paradigm, but infinitely more. She'd counted as she waited on the steps of the Welcome Center building for Roger, attempting to calculate the population by kilometer based on her observations. The results had only reaffirmed what she had already discovered. This place was not Paradigm City, had never been Paradigm City. It wasn't just the population density or the open sky. This metropolis, New York it was called, had a corporeality that seemed starkly different from Paradigm's.
The term worried did not accurately capture Dorothy's mood, she was not exactly programmed to feel anxiety. Baffled was a better word. A more intense version of the bafflement she felt whenever she encountered a complex and formerly foreign human emotion. It was like that. This place was decided foreign in every sense of the word. Or the better thing to say was that she was, since by all accounts she was the intruder here.
But it was apparently hard to tell. Or at least she was assuming so by the fact that passerbyers on the street didn't give her the least bit of a notice. Well...there had been that one gentleman who had offered her a cigarette from a polished gold case. But he had tucked it away when she gave a polite refusal and had fled when she began to verbally explore the health risks that accompanied smoking. No one else had tried to approach her, though that was not entirely the fault of her intimidating idea of small talk. With her straight backed posture, feet together, hands folded against the front of her dress, gaze focused straight ahead, not moving so much as inch for the square of sidewalk just outside the building's entrance, it was glaringly obvious that she was waiting for someone.
She heard him before she saw him. Rather it was the sound of the Griffon engine that she recognized immediately. The familiar noise seemed to leap out at her above all the unfamiliar sounds of this New York City. The only thing she recognized in this extraneous metropolis. Well, one of the only two things. Dorothy moved finally, stepping to the curb and glancing down the street. Several sleek black cars raced along down the pavement, but she was only looking for one.